“Daisy” is back, but now the little girl from the infamous Lyndon Johnson attack ad asks, “To close it? To close it not?”

The Republican National Committee is upping the ante on closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison with its recently-released version of the commercial. Although there isn’t a nuclear explosion in this spot, Johnson can still be heard saying, “These are the stakes!” before a clip of President Obama saying that closing Guantanamo is “easy.” The ad also includes Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) saying that detainees should not be transferred to the United States.

As Talking Points Memo points out:

“The message of original Daisy spot, by the way, was that Goldwater would recklessly get us all killed. So it would logically follow that the message of this ad, of course, is that Obama will recklessly get us all killed.”

Assistant Attorney General Tony West will bring in some new faces to Main Justice to help him lead the Civil Division, he said in a statement today.

The recently added members to his team include Ann Ravel, new head of the Torts Branch and the Office of Consumer Litigation, and Juan Osuna to be the Office of Immigration Litigation Deputy Assistant Attorney General. Two of West’s colleagues from his old law firm, Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco, have followed him East. They are litigation associates Brian Martinez, West’s chief of staff; and Geoffrey Graber, West’s counsel.

(Santa Clara County Office of the County Counsel)

“We are fortunate to have these talented and committed individuals joining the Justice Department’s Civil Division,� West said in the statement. “I am confident that their service will meet the highest standards of the Division.�

Ravel is counsel for Santa Clara County, Calif., where she met mixed reviews. She had a good track record in Santa Clara County aggressively pursuing civil rights and sexual harassment cases, The San Jose Mercury News reported.

But she hasn’t won everyone over. “Ravel has her detractors, who admire her ambition but say she has valued loyalty over professional competence in some cases,” The Mercury News said.

The Mercury News also pointed out that the 60-year-old Ravel is quite a health nut. She is “an avid runner whose diet is limited to fruit, fish and vegetables,” the newspaper said.

Osuna is the only one of the four that has worked for Main Justice. He was the chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the highest administrative body for interpreting and applying U.S. immigration laws.

The new additions will join Appellate Branch Deputy Assistant Attorney General Beth Brinkmann, Federal Programs Branch Deputy Assistant Attorney General Ian Gershengorn and Commercial Litigation Branch Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael Hertz, who are already in place in the Civil Division.

House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) refused to make any further comments on the ongoing interrogation briefings saga today at her weekly press conference.

Pelosi said she continued to stand behind her comments last week when she said she was misled by the CIA on the harsh interrogation methods used against suspected terrorists.

“I don’t have anything more to say,” Pelosi said.

The speaker said at a heated press conference last week that CIA briefers in September 2002 did not inform her that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002. She said adviser Michael Sheehy was at a February 2003 briefing where he learned about the actual use of waterboarding on detainees. Pelosi also divulged at the press conference last week that she was informed of the February 2003 letter sent from Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) to the CIA general counsel that questioned the interrogation methods.

Since her comments last week, CIA Director Leon Panetta rejected Pelosi’s accusation, and House Republicans pushed Pelosi to prove or retract her claims. The House also tried to pass a resolution yesterday that would have established a bipartisan panel to investigate Pelosi’s claims.

“What we are doing is staying on our course and not be distracted from it,” Pelosi said.

In a Gallup poll released yesterday, more Americans disapproved than approved of Pelosi’s handling of the interrogation matter.

The White House has confirmed that President Obama will nominate Duke University law professor Christopher Schroeder to be Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice, which is responsible for shepherding judicial nominees through the confirmation process.

Christopher Schroeder

Schroeder, who’s been rumored for the job for weeks, was not the administration’s first choice.  As we reported earlier, Mayer Brown partner Mark Gitenstein, a former staffer on the Judiciary Committee for then-Sen. Joe Biden, was up for the job to head the Office of Legal Policy, but liberal groups opposed his nomination because of his work on tort reform for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Schroeder, who served on Obama’s presidential transition team, teaches classes on Constitutional law, environmental aw, and Congress at Duke.  He has served as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee under Biden and worked in the Department as acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton administration.

Schroeder is of counsel to O’Melveny & Myers.  While at Berkeley law school, he was a year ahead of now Democratic staff director and chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee Bruce Cohen, who ended up succeeding him as head of the law review.

If confirmed, he would be the chief policy adviser to Attorney General Eric Holder and Deputy Attorney General David Ogden.  Schroeder would oversee legislation related to law enforcement and the federal court system, and play a significant role in nominations for the judiciary. Although less of a prolific blogger than Office of Legal Counsel nominee Dawn Johnsen and OLC deputy Marty Lederman, Schroeder was part of their liberal group pushing for more accountability from the Bush DOJ legal advisers during the last few years. Read about them here. 

You can also read the bio from the White House press release below:

Christopher H. Schroeder is Charles S. Murphy Professor of Law and Professor of Public Policy Studies, and director of the Program in Public Law at Duke University.  His publications include a leading environmental law casebook, Environmental Regulation: Law, Science and Policy (6th Edition, 2008), Presidential Power Stories (with Curtis A. Bradley, 2008), A New Progressive Agenda for Public Health and the Environment (2005), a project of the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR), co-edited with Rena Steinzor.  He has served on National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine committees to evaluate the use of human intentional dosing studies by EPA and the adequacy of the U.S. drug safety system.   Schroeder has served as acting assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, where he was responsible for legal advice to the attorney general, the executive office of the president and other executive branch agencies on a broad range of issues, including separation of powers, other constitutional issues, and matters of statutory interpretation and administrative law.  He has also served as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.  He is of counsel to the firm of O’Melveny and Myers.  Schroeder received his B.A. degree from Princeton University in 1968, a M.Div. from Yale University in 1971, and his J.D. degree from University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall) in 1974, where he was editor-in-chief of the California Law Review.

It has become clear that enhanced interrogation techniques were used on Abu Zubaydah before the first legal memos authorizing their use had been written by the Office of Legal Counsel.  Zubaydah entered U.S. custody on March 28, 2002.  The Justice Department issued its first memo on torture on Aug. 1, over 4 months later.

In April and May, which fall between the capture of Zubaydah and the Bybee memo, “contractors had to keep requesting authorization to use harsher and harsher methods.”  That quote is from former FBI agent Ali Soufan’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary administrative oversight and the courts subcommittee last week.  Soufan testified that many of the techniques authorized by the Bybee memo were used during this period, including nudity, sleep deprivation, loud noise and extreme temperatures during interrogations.

Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff received an e-mail last month from a CIA spokesperson saying that:

The Aug. 1, 2002, memo from the Department of Justice wasn’t the first piece of legal guidance for the [interrogation] program.

So where was the CIA getting this legal guidance?

Well, Ari Shapiro at NPR reports that:

One source with knowledge of Zubaydah’s interrogations agreed to describe the legal guidance process, on the condition of anonymity.

The source says nearly every day, [psychologist James] Mitchell [the aforementioned CIA contractor] would sit at his computer and write a top-secret cable to the CIA’s counterterrorism center. Each day, Mitchell would request permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah. The source says the CIA would then forward the request to the White House, where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales would sign off on the technique. That would provide the administration’s legal blessing for Mitchell to increase the pressure on Zubaydah in the next interrogation.

A new document is consistent with the source’s account.

The CIA sent the ACLU a spreadsheet late Tuesday as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The log shows the number of top-secret cables that went from Zubaydah’s black site prison to CIA headquarters each day. Through the spring and summer of 2002, the log shows, someone sent headquarters several cables a day.

“At the very least, it’s clear that CIA headquarters was choreographing what was going on at the black site,” says Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU lawyer who sued to get the document. “But there’s still this question about the relationship between CIA headquarters and the White House and the Justice Department and the question of which senior officials were driving this process.”

Gonzales did not respond to a request for comment through his lawyer.

It’s important to note that Gonzales was not Attorney General at this time, he was White House counsel to President George W. Bush.

You can watch Shapiro’s interview on The Rachel Maddow Show last night below:

The Justice Department says that convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff should not be allowed to use his tax refund of over $500,000 to pay back his lawyers, accountants and others because he has yet to pay restitution for the millions of dollars he defrauded from Indian tribes he represented, reports The Washington Post.

In prison since 2006, Abramoff received a $520,189 refund from the Internal Revenue Service on May 4.  Once the Justice Department was notified of the refund, it asked a federal judge yesterday to stop Abramoff from spending the money and account for the money he has already spent.

Under the restitution order by U.S. District Judge Ellen S. Huvelle, Abramoff and his former associate Michael Scanlon still owe more than $23 million to the Indian tribes.  While he’s not expected to make payments while in prison, “Abramoff was required by statute to apply the value of that refund to his restitution obligation, notwithstanding that the money was received while he was in prison and before the payment schedule had taken effect,” the Justice Department filing said.

But more than half the money is already gone, according to the article:

Among those paid out of the tax refund were Abramoff’s lawyers, including Lowell’s firm McDermott, Will & Emery LLP , which received $75,000. Another firm, Zuckerman Spaeder LLP, received $25,000 from the tax refund, the government said in its filing tonight.

Others paid were: $104,000 to Abramoff’s accountants, Mendelson & Mendelson; $87,500 to repay loans from Abramoff’s father; $50,000 to pay back state taxes in Maryland; $47,000 toward a Bank of America credit card balance; $22,000 for property taxes; $5,000 to repay a personal loan; $5,000 toward tuition expenses at Hebrew Academy; and $1,500 to repay a loan from the Franco Foundation.

The government pointedly noted a large portion of the refund “was spent before informing the government of its receipt.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Marshals Service had to shut down parts of their computer networks yesterday because of a virus of unknown origin, reports The Associated Press.

The U.S. Marshals Service disconnected its computers from the Justice Department as a precautionary measure.  FBI spokesman Mike Kortan told the Associated Press that “We too are evaluating a network issue on our external, unclassified network that’s affecting several government agencies.”

I’m sure it’s strictly coincidence that the virus comes on the heels of the FBI’s new presence on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) was looking for a plug from President Obama in his speech earlier today and it looks like he got one.  Leahy is claiming that Obama endorsed his legislation restricting use of the state secrets privilege.  From the press release:

As President Obama pointed out today in his speech at the National Archives, “[w]e must not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrasses the government.� The President today raised his own concerns that the state secrets privilege has been “over-used.� He promised to embrace reform and to apply “a stricter legal test� to material before the government asserts the privilege and to report to Congress.

I am encouraged by this new President’s willingness to work with Congress, the refusal to do so is one of the reasons that the policies of the last administration were such a failure. I support the President’s vow to “deal with Congress and the courts as co-equal branches of government� and I stand ready and willing to work with him on this issue. I believe that the State Secrets Protection Act that I reintroduced this Congress is a good starting point. This legislation codifies the privilege in an effective way that balances the protection of national security with appropriate judicial review. I look forward to working with the administration and others in Congress on how best to move this important legislation forward.

Ex-U.S. District Judge U. W. Clemon urged Attorney General Eric Holder to look into the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegleman, The Associated Press reported this evening.

Clemon wrote in a letter to Holder that the case brought by Alabama U.S. Attorneys Leura Canary and Alice Martin was the “most unfounded criminal case” the former judge ever presided over, according to The AP. Siegelman was sentenced in June 2006 to seven years in federal prison on corruption charges, but is out on bond pending an appeal.

The ex-judge from Alabama said he did not have direct knowledge of the former governor’s conviction and prosecution in a corruption case, but has been critical of a failed effort to prosecute Siegelman for mail fraud, The AP said.

Martin told AP that Clemon’s letter was “inappropriate.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi received a rebuke  from the American people on her handling of the harsh interrogation matter, according to a Gallup poll released today.

The poll — which also questioned Americans about President Obama, the CIA, Congressional Democrats and Congressional Republicans — asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of how each …  has handled the matter of interrogations techniques used against terrorism suspects?” Only with Pelosi and Congressional Republicans did more Americans disapprove than approve of the handling of the interrogation matter.

(Gallup)

Last week, Pelosi said she was misled by the CIA about waterboarding used on suspected terrorists. Today, the House voted down a resolution that would have investigated her accusations.

“The May 19 poll finds Pelosi largely losing the public relations game, as she gets a significantly more negative review for her handling of the matter than do the other major players in the controversy, including the CIA,” Gallup’s Jeffrey M. Jones wrote. “Also, notably, Americans are much more critical of Pelosi’s handling of the matter than they are of the broader group of the Democrats in Congress she leads as speaker of the House.”