Chris Christie

It was “well known” that Chris Christie met with state party leaders while he was U.S. Attorney, and if he discussed a run for governor with Karl Rove “he certainly discussed it with local leaders,” according to state Sen. Ray Lesniak (D). This morning, the state senator posted on NJ.com that “[f]or over a year while he was still U.S. Attorney, Christie met on dozens of occasions with Republican Party leaders to plan his campaign.”

State Sen. Ray Lesniak

But what leaders was he referring to? When Main Justice spoke with Lesniak, he said he was referring to state party leaders, not federal party leaders (with the exception of Rove).

He added he believes Christie’s behavior will ultimately be his downfall. “One thing the public will not stand for is hypocrisy,” Lesniak said, referring to Christie’s ethics platform. While the revelation of Christie’s conversations have had an impact on the campaign, Lesniak believes there is more to come.

Once the U.S. Attorney’s offices releases call logs between Christie and state party leaders, which Lesniak believes will include conversations about a run for office, it will be a “fatal blow” to his campaign, the state senator told us. The logs and other information have been requested by Gov. Jon Corzine’s (D) campaign via the Freedom of Information Act. The U.S. Attorney’s office has yet to release the documents, which Lesniak attributes to the “the politicalization of the office.”

According to Lesniak, the “U.S. Attorney’s office tried to stonewall” the process by delaying the release of the documents.

Lesniak is the latest in a chorus of Democratic party surrogates, led by Corzine’s running mate, state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, to criticize Christie for his ethics.

Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has strongly defended waterboarding as an interrogation tactic, was informed of and condoned its repeated use on a suspected terrorists, according to a report released Monday.

John Ashcroft

The 2004 report, by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General, found that CIA officers “used the waterboard on [Khalid Shaikh Mohammed] in a manner inconsistent” with special training endured by military personnel and a Justice Department legal memorandum blessing its application in detainee interrogations. The latter use of the technique evolved from the former, a survival training program known as SERE.

According the report (as well as a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum declassified in April), KSM, the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003. Ashcroft ”was informed the waterboard had been used 119 times on a single individual,” according to the report.

CIA investigators said waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than permitted by a 2002 Justice Department legal memorandum. It was previously known that Ashcroft and other high-ranking Bush administration officials were briefed on the enhanced interrogation techniques, some as early as 2002, but the report describes in fuller detail what CIA officials disclosed and what Ashcroft consented to.

The report goes on:

According to the General Counsel, the Attorney General acknowledged he is fully aware of the repetitive use of the waterboard and that the CIA is well within the scope of the DOJ opinion and the authority given to CIA by that opinion.

The report returns to Ashcroft in near the end (pg. 100). In July 2003, George Tenet, then director of Central Intelligence, and the general counsel of the CIA briefed senior administration officials on the expanded use of enhanced interrogation techniques.

“At the time, the Attorney General affirmed that the Agency’s conduct remained well within the scope of the 1 August 2002 DOJ legal opinion,” the report says.

After the Justice Department reviewed the report in 2004, Jack Goldsmith, then-assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, wrote a letter to the CIA inspector general, taking issue with some of the language used to characterize Ashcroft’s positions. The letter and the report were released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU.

To clarify, Goldsmith suggested, the report’s authors should state:

The Attorney General expressed the view that the legal principles reflected in DOJ’s specific original advice could appropriately be extended to allow use of the same approved techniques (under the same conditions and subject to the same safeguards) to other individuals besides the subject of DOJ’s specific original advice. The Attorney General also expressed the view that, while appropriate caution should be exercised in the number of times the waterboard was administered, the repetitions described did not contravene the principles underlying DOJ’s August 2002 opinion.

The CIA IG never adopted the language.

This post has been updated.

A Kansas man is accused of sending an envelope containing white powder and a threatening note to a prosecutor who’d helped put him in prison.

John Phillip Barker was charged Friday with mailing what he claimed was anthrax to Assistant U.S. Attorney David C. Smith at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kansas City, Kan. Barker is serving a prison sentence for mailing a similar letter to the Internal Revenue Service. Smith prosecuted Barker in the 2008 IRS case, according to court records.

Part of the evidence against Barker: He allegedly can’t spell. The note to Smith referred to the white substance as “antrax.” That spelling “was consistent with the spelling of ‘antrax’ that was employed by defendant Barker in the last case where he mailed threats to the IRS,” the complaint says.

The note to Smith read, ”YOU HAVE BEEN EXPOSED TO ANTRAX DIE.” Read the criminal complaint here and the affidavit in support of the complaint here.

The FBI wasted time and money determining that the powder was harmless, the complaint says. A Kansas U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesperson declined to comment.

Attorney General Eric Holder will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate cases in which CIA members and contractors may have broken anti-torture laws during the interrogations of suspected terrorists, the Justice Department announced this afternoon.

Assistant U.S. Attorney John H. Durham, a 20-year veteran of the Connecticut U.S. Attorney’s Office, was tapped for the job. Read a Washington Post profile of Durham here. Durham is already investigating the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes that allegedly showed the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods. He was tapped by then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey to oversee that probe.

In a statement, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said:

The President has said repeatedly that he wants to look forward, not back, and the President agrees with the Attorney General that those who acted in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance should not be prosecuted.  Ultimately, determinations about whether someone broke the law are made independently by the Attorney General.

Durham will determine whether there is enough evidence to warrant a full investigation into CIA officials who may have violated the law in their handling of suspected terrorists, according to the news release.

The Attorney General’s decision comes on the heels of the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility recommendation released today that urged Holder to reopen nearly a dozen CIA prisoner-abuse cases.

“There are those who will use my decision to open a preliminary review as a means of broadly criticizing the work of our nation’s intelligence community,” Holder said in the news release. “I could not disagree more with that view.”

He added, “That is why I have made it clear in the past that the Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees.”

Congressional Democrats including Senate Judiciary  Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers (D-Mich.) and House Judiciary constitution, civil rights and civil liberties subcommittee Chair Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) applauded Holder’s decision. Leahy said he hopes this investigation will hold responsible the people who “undermined our values and our laws.”

“I recognize how difficult this decision has been for Attorney General Holder, and I am grateful that the Justice Department is finally being led by an independent Attorney General who is willing to begin investigating this dark chapter in our country’s history,” Leahy said in a statement. “I had no doubt that he would put the interests of the law ahead of politics, and he has demonstrated that.”

But they said that more must be done. Nadler said Holder’s decision was the “first step.”

“As I have said for many months, it is vital that this special counsel be given a broad mandate to investigate these abuses, to follow the evidence where it leads, and to prosecute where warranted,” Nadler said in a statement. “This must be a robust mission to gather any and all evidence without predetermination of where it may lead.  Seeking out only the low-level actors in a conspiracy to torture detainees will bring neither justice nor restored standing to our nation.â€�

CIA Director Leon Panetta got into a ”profanity-laced screaming match” with a White House staffer last month after learning of Department of Justice plans to investigate brutal interrogations, ABC News reported. Read the story here.

Leon Panetta

The report didn’t identify the White House staffer who was on the receiving end of Panetta’s rage, which ABC News said also included a threat by Panetta to quit. Panetta was reportedly angry about plans by Attorney General Eric Holder to open criminal investigations of CIA officers who may have carried out interrogation methods that both Holder and President Obama have characterized as torture.

Holder also won out over Panetta in April, when President Obama sided with the attorney general and released largely unredacted versions of DOJ Office of Legal Counsel memos authorizing the brutal techniques. Click here for our previous report. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that White House counsel Greg Craig’s job may be at stake, in part because of Holder’s decision to release the OLC memos. Craig was an ally of Holder in pushing to release the memos, which kicked up a political controversy that reportedly displeased the president.

The Justice Department and senior administration officials today fleshed out news reports of a terrorism interrogation team to be housed at the FBI. The unit, named the  High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, was proposed by an inter-agency task force studying interrogation detention practices. President Obama has approved the task force’s recommendations.

From the Justice Department:

After extensively consulting with representatives of the Armed Forces, the relevant agencies in the Intelligence Community, and some of the nation’s most experienced and skilled interrogators, the Task Force concluded that the Army Field Manual provides appropriate guidance on interrogation for military interrogators and that no additional or different guidance was necessary for other agencies.  These conclusions rested on the Task Force’s unanimous assessment, including that of the Intelligence Community, that the practices and techniques identified by the Army Field Manual or currently used by law enforcement provide adequate and effective means of conducting interrogations.

The Task Force concluded, however, that the United States could improve its ability to interrogate the most dangerous terrorists by forming a specialized interrogation group, or High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), that would bring together the most effective and experienced interrogators and support personnel from across the Intelligence Community, the Department of Defense and law enforcement.  The creation of the HIG would build upon a proposal developed by the Intelligence Science Board.

To accomplish that goal, the Task Force recommended that the HIG should coordinate the deployment of mobile teams of experienced interrogators, analysts, subject matter experts and linguists to conduct interrogations of high-value terrorists if the United States obtains the ability to interrogate them.  The primary goal of this elite interrogation group would be gathering intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks and otherwise to protect national security.  Advance planning and interagency coordination prior to interrogations would also allow the United States, where appropriate, to preserve the option of gathering information to be used in potential criminal investigations and prosecutions.

The Task Force recommended that the specialized interrogation group be administratively housed within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with its principal function being intelligence gathering, rather than law enforcement.  Moreover, the Task Force recommended that the group be subject to policy guidance and oversight coordinated by the National Security Council.

The Task Force also recommended that this specialized interrogation group develop a set of best practices and disseminate these for training purposes among agencies that conduct interrogations.  In addition, the Task Force recommended that a scientific research program for interrogation be established to study the comparative effectiveness of interrogation approaches and techniques, with the goal of identifying the existing techniques that are most effective and developing new lawful techniques to improve intelligence interrogations.

Senior administration officials said it was too early to say whether the scientific research program would yield new techniques to be used in interrogations. One official emphasized the program’s goal was not only to identify new methods but to stay abreast of ways of enhancing exisiting ones.

The interrogation groups, the official said, will have a small administrative component, based at the FBI, but it’s unclear how many smaller teams of linguists, subject-matter experts and interrogators will grow from the proposal.

While the effort will be housed at the FBI, the CIA will play a major role, the officials said. The deputy of the team will be drawn from the intelligence community, and it’s presumed the adminstrative head will come from the ranks of the FBI.

Administration officials downplayed the White House’s role in the program, saying that all of the operational details will be handled by the HIG, but the National Security Council will have an oversight function and provide policy guidance.

The Justice Department also released the findings of the task force’s working group on transfer policy. See below:

The Task Force also made policy recommendations with respect to scenarios in which the United States moves or facilitates the movement of a person from one country to another or from U.S. custody to the custody of another country to ensure that U.S. practices in such transfers comply with U.S. law, policy and international obligations and do not result in the transfer of individuals to face torture.  In keeping with the broad language of the Executive Order, the Task Force considered seven types of transfers conducted by the U.S. government: extradition, transfers pursuant to immigration proceedings, transfers pursuant to the Geneva Conventions, transfers from Guantanamo Bay, military transfers within or from Afghanistan, military transfers within or from Iraq, and transfers pursuant to intelligence authorities.

When the United States transfers individuals to other countries, it may rely on assurances from the receiving country.  The Task Force made several recommendations aimed at clarifying and strengthening U.S. procedures for obtaining and evaluating those assurances.  These included a recommendation that the State Department be involved in evaluating assurances in all cases and a recommendation that the Inspector Generals of the Departments of State, Defense and Homeland Security prepare annually a coordinated report on transfers conducted by each of their agencies in reliance on assurances.

The Task Force also made several recommendations aimed at improving the United States’ ability to monitor the treatment of individuals transferred to other countries.  These include a recommendation that agencies obtaining assurances from foreign countries insist on a monitoring mechanism, or otherwise establish a monitoring mechanism, to ensure consistent, private access to the individual who has been transferred, with minimal advance notice to the detaining government.

The Task Force also made a series of recommendations that are specific to immigration proceedings and military transfer scenarios.  In addition, the Task Force made classified recommendations that are designed to ensure that, should the Intelligence Community participate in or otherwise support a transfer, any affected individuals are subjected to proper treatment.

D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, received an unusual waiver from the D.C. Court of Appeals that allows him to practice law, while the Justice Department criminal probe into the politicized hiring and firing in the Bush DOJ continues, The National Law Journal reported today.

D. Kyle Sampson (Hunton & Williams)

The D.C. Committee on Admissions has not approved Sampson’s bar application because DOJ investigators said he broke federal laws and misled government officials, according to the NLJ. He appealed the panel’s decision to the D.C. Court of Appeals, which ruled that he could practice law in Washington until a final decision was reached on his bar application, the NLJ said.

Sampson resigned from his Bush administration post in March 2007 after public outcry over the firing of nine U.S. Attorneys. Connecticut Acting U.S. Attorney Nora Dannehy is currently investigating whether politics improperly influenced the U.S. Attorney firings.

The former Bush official was set to join the D.C. Bar in summer 2008 but the probe into the Bush DOJ gave the D.C. Committee on Admissions second thoughts, according to the NLJ. Sampson, a member of the Utah Bar, was then forced to go on leave from his partnership at Richmond, Va.-based law firm Hunton & Williams in 2008 because there is a limited amount of time a lawyer can practice in Washington without a membership to the D.C. Bar, according to the NLJ.

Sampson returned to Hunton & Williams earlier this summer. He specializes in Food and Drug Administration regulatory and enforcement issues at the firm.

It’s official. Attorney General Eric Holder has appointed B. Todd Jones, the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, to chair the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys (AGAC).

We first reported Holder’s intent to tap Jones for the post here. Jones, who served as Minnesota’s U.S. attorney from 1998 to 2001 during the Clinton administration, previously served as member, vice chairman, and chairman of the committee. The AGAC is an influential policy-making and advisory body that serves as the voice of the U.S. Attorneys at Main Justice.

Some laudatory quotes from today’s Justice Department news release:

“U.S. Attorney Jones is a dynamic leader who will bring a wealth of expertise to the Committee as we work together to further the Department’s efforts to preserve our nation’s national security, reduce crime, preserve our environment, protect the rights of each and every one of us, and bring fairness back into the marketplace,� Attorney General Holder said.

H. Marshall Jarrett, Director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, added that, “Todd Jones is a seasoned prosecutor whose vision and guidance will be invaluable to the Committee in leading this distinguished group of United States Attorneys.

Jones was confirmed on Aug. 7. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School and previously served as a partner at Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi LLP in Minneapolis. Click here for more biographical information on Jones. The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald, had been serving as the interim chairman of the AGAC. Read our story about Fitzgerald here.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsiblity has recommended that Attorney General Eric Holder reopen nearly a dozen CIA prisoner-abuse cases, a person briefed on the matter told The New York Times. Read the NYT story here.

The revelation arrives at the confluence of several events that mark a further break with the Bush administration on the hot-button issue of interrogations.

The Washington Post reported in today’s paper that President Obama has approved a special terrorism interrogation team that would be housed at the FBI but report directly to the National Security Council, shifting oversight from the CIA to the White House. The special interrogation team, named the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG, will comprise experts from several intelligence and law enforcement agencies and likely be headed by an FBI official, a senior administration official told the Post.

Also, the Obama administration is set to release today a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report detailing prisoner abuse.

But it is the long-awaited OPR report that is likely to have the most consequences. According to the Times, it is now all but certain that Holder will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the alleged CIA abuses, despite Obama’s stated preference to move on.

The OPR report also examined the legal reasoning of the Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who authorized interrogation techniques that Holder himself has called torture. It has already been reported that OPR recommended referrals to local bar associations for possible discipline against the OLC lawyers, but further information on the report’s conclusions about the OLC lawyers isn’t known yet.

According to the Times, the part of the OPR report focusing on detainee abuse will be made public after classified information is deleted. The allegations center on incidents reported mainly in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Times said.

Said the Times:

“The cases represent about half of those that were initially investigated and referred to the Justice Department by the C.I.A.’s inspector general, but were later closed. It is not known which cases might be reopened.”

The news of the OPR recommendations follows reports of CIA abuses, including officers carrying out mock executions and threatening at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill.  Under anti-torture statutes, it’s a violation of federal law to threaten a prisoner with imminent death, the Times said.

New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine’s (D) running mate “continued to insinuate” an improper relationship between Republican challenger Chris Christie and members of the U.S. Attorney’s office Christie formerly headed, PolitickerNJ reported.

Specifically, prosecutor Michele Brown should be removed from any involvement fulfilling a Corzine Freedom of Information Act request about the office, the governor’s running mate, state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, has said, the politics blog reported Friday.

On Monday, Christie revealed that while he was U.S. Attorney he loaned Brown — the No. 4 person in the U.S. Attorney’s office and supervised by Christie — $46,000. In addition, he said he’d failed to disclose the loan on his tax returns and financial disclosure forms. He called the omissions an oversight.

Six months ago, the Corzine campaign filed FOIA requests related to Christie’s time in the office, a request which has yet to be fulfilled. Daily Kos reported that Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) on Thursday said that earlier this year, Christie bragged about “having” U.S. Attorneys in Newark, N.J. at his disposal. Pallone’s comment prompted the Corzine camp to file an administrative challenge seeking to enforce the office’s compliance with its FOIA obligations.

Corzine’s top adviser Tom Shea on Thursday filed the challenges with the Department of Justice, PolitickerNJ reported. Under the act, agencies must respond to FIOA requests within 20 days. However, requests do not need to be completed within this time.

PolitickerNJ reported that Weinberg on Friday said: “Based on what we already know and on today’s report by the Associated Press that Christie is refusing to answer who he’s still in contact with at the U.S. attorney’s office and how informed he is about day-to-day activities there, we are simply saying we need someone not caught up in this controversy to work on the FOIA requests.”

The Christie campaign on Thursday responded in a statement criticizing the Corzine campaign for “[n]ot only … accus[ing] the Obama administration’s Department of Justice of being ineffective and unresponsive,” but for “fail[ing] to see the irony of their righteous indignation over the timely release of internal personal communications.” The Newark Star-Leger reported that Corzine refused to release email communications between himself and former state workers union leader Carla Katz, his ex-girlfriend, as talks regarding a state workers’ contact began.

Earlier this week, acting U.S. Attorney Ralph Marra, who has been dealing with his own ethics issues, said Corzine’s request was delayed because it requires sorting through a lot of records. In addition, he said that “Michele [Brown] is not in charge of the process;” however, last week he said that Brown is playing a role in fulfilling the request, as some of the documents requested relate to her travel expenses and cases.