After taking a beating last week for flip-flopping around on the issue of potential prosecutions for Bush officials who authorized torture, Obama Administration officials fanned out on Sunday talk shows to insist they’ve always been perfectly clear: The “rule of law” means the decision is up to the Justice Department.
On “Meet the Press,” David Gregory asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: “Why the shifting positions?”
“Well, David, I don’t think the president has shifted his position,” Gibbs said. “I think what the president said on the Thursday in which the memos were released, all the way through this, he’s been consistent and clear: those that followed the legal advice, the four corners of the legal advice in good faith, those people should not and will not be prosecuted. But the president, as you know, David, doesn’t determine who knowingly breaks the law or not. That’s set up and devised by the Justice Department and other lawyers and legal entities to decide those questions.”
GREGORY: Does the president believe or suspect that Bush administration lawyers conspired to violate the anti-torture law?
GIBBS: Well, I, I think that’s a determination that the lawyers are going to make, and they’re going to have to take a look at them.
More Gibbs: “This president campaigned very vehemently on the notion that the rule of law and that legal decisions should be made not by political figures, but by justice figures.”
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” White House adviser Valerie Jarrett repeated the talking point. “What he [the president] has said is that anyone who followed the advice of the Justice Department and did any kind of acts that were within the confines of that advice, he doesn’t think we should prosecute. … The rest of it, he leaves up to the U.S. attorney general. That is who is supposed to make decisions about prosecution.”
