Yesterday on CBS’s Face the Nation, former Vice President Richard Cheney continued to reiterate the effectiveness of torture and criticized the Obama adminstration for witholding memos that supposedly prove that torture was effective.  But he also made some news when Bob Schieffer upped the ante:

SCHIEFFER: Would you go back and talk to the Congress?

CHENEY: Certainly. I’ve made it very clear that I feel very strongly that what we did here was exactly the right thing to do. And if I don’t speak out, then where do we find ourselves, Bob? Then the critics have free run, and there isn’t anybody there on the other side to tell the truth. So it’s important — it’s important that we…

Schieffer then interrupted and added some nuance to his original question:

SCHIEFFER: Senator Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was on this broadcast recently. And I said, do you intend to ask the former vice president to come up? And he said if he will testify under oath. Would you be willing to testify under oath?

CHENEY: I’d have to see what the circumstances are and what kind of precedent we were setting. But certainly I wouldn’t be out here today if I didn’t feel comfortable talking about what we’re doing publicly.

Full transcript here.

Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Ron Weich wrote to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) on May 4 about the status of the long-delayed Office of Professional Responsibility report on Bush DOJ lawyers John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury, authors of the controversial legal opinions authorizing brutal interrogation tactics. Read the letter here.

Weich also the Justice Deparment historically has released only summaries — if that — of OPR reports, but given the intent public interest  the department is “reviewing some of these procedures” for the report on the memo authors.

Weich also said the department was unable “at this time” to answer congressional questions about an OPR investigation of allegations of selective prosecution against Alabama Governor Donald Siegelman, Georgia Thompson, Dr. Cyril Wecht, Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz and Mississippi attorney Paul Minor.

Laura Rozen at Foreign Policy’s blog has the scoop. The irrepressible Davis, a partner at the Orrick law firm, made his name as media adviser to President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The hiring of Davis signals that Harman intends to hit back hard on the story, in which she reportedly was caught on a government wiretap offering  to help two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of spying. It’s been a PR disaster for her.

Rozen also draws our attention to a discrepancy in the reported record about whether it was an NSA or FBI wiretap that picked up Harman’s conversation with the Israeli agent. CQ broke the story, saying it was an NSA wiretap, but The Washington Post reported April 22nd that it was the FBI monitoring the conversation.

The House’s ethics and lobbying rules have forced Alan Baron to leave Holland & Knight in order to continue working for the House in its impeachment investigation of U.S. District Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr., Legal Times reports.  The Eastern District of Louisiana judge is alleged to have taken bribes and committed perjury; he would be the first federal judge to be impeached in 20 years. Porteous denies the allegations. Holland & Knight concluced that Baron’s continued involvement in the case would have dented their lobbying practice by forcing them to stop contacting House Judiciary Committee members or their staffs.

Hmmm. Not sure I agree with this opinion from The Washington Post’s veteran political columnist, David Broder, who sees “populist anger” behind the push to investigate what he calls a “policy disagreement” over torture.

Writes Broder:

But now Obama is being lobbied by politicians and voters who want something more — the humiliation and/or punishment of those responsible for the policies of the past. They are looking for individual scalps — or, at least, careers and reputations.

Their argument is that without identifying and punishing the perpetrators, there can be no accountability — and therefore no deterrent lesson for future administrations. It is a plausible-sounding rationale, but it cloaks an unworthy desire for vengeance.

By labeling those who advocate some kind of accounting as simple pitchfork-waving populists,  Broder dismisses out of hand the many thoughtful arguments, grounded in a long history –  from the American Revolution to the Nuremberg Trials and the Vietnam War — for why the U.S., as a matter of law and policy, does not practice torture.

Congressional Democrats skittishly backed away from calls to impeach George W. Bush and Dick Cheney back when liberals like Reps. Dennis Kucinich, Bob Wexler and John Conyers were pushing it. They had absorbed the lesson of Newt Gingrich,who took the GOP off a political cliff in 1998 leading an impeachment of President Clinton for lying under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. The Democrats wanted to win elections.

Okay, now they’ve won. Bush and Cheney are out of office. But an obvious target remains: 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jay Bybee, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2002. Bybee was the author of one of four formerly top secret legal memos released by the Obama administration last Thursday that authorized, in graphic detail, specific interrogation techniques the CIA could use against terrorism suspects.

Bruce Ackerman, writing for Slate, called for Bybee’s impeachment back in January, before release of the most recent batch of memos. Then on Sunday, the New York Times in an editorial also called for Bybee’s removal from the federal bench and said of the recently released memos:

In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.

Now a chorus of liberal commentators are calling for Bybee’s impeachment: The Nation, Joan Walsh in Salon and Matthew Yglesias. Clinton was impeached for the “high crime” of lying before a politically driven grand jury investigation about getting a blow job from a White House intern. Um … can that really compare to U.S. officials, in apparent violation of international treaties and U.S. law, reverting to the tools of the Spanish Inquisition? And yet, there has been no sanction – none at all – for the people like Bybee who helped set these policies. Even Clinton lost his law license in Arkansas for five years. (For background: the Las Vegas Sun covered Bybee’s answers to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) during his 2003 Senate confirmation process.)

Yes, Islamic religious fanatacism threatens our personal and national security. Yes, we absolutely must mount strong and imaginative covert and overt actions against al-Qaeda, because they want to kill us. And yes, President Obama said in a statement the memos’ release should prompt “reflection, not retribution,” and he later pledged not to prosecute CIA operatives who relied on the memo’s legal authority.

But does that mean Congress shouldn’t exercise its Constitutional authority to weigh whether Jay Bybee has committed the kinds of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that might disqualify him from being a federal judge? Not go to jail, mind you. Just not be a judge.  Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) on Fox News Sunday was reluctant to call for sanctions against Bush officials. But when pressed about whether Bybee should be impeached, she said: ”I think we have to look at it.” The politics being what they are at this point in time, there’s probably a better than 50-50 chance Congress will.

UPDATE: Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights and civil liberties, told the Huffington Post he’s in favor of impeaching Bybee. Nadler doesn’t rule out prosecution, either.

Earlier this evening, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley came on the Rachel Maddow Show to talk about today’s release of four OLC memos outlining and authorizing the use of specific interrogation techniques.  You can read our coverage of the memos here.  One of the authors Jay Bybee, Rachel reminds us, is now serving a life-tenure on the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

You can watch Maddow’s summary of the memos and the Turley interview below:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) gave a 26 minute interview on the Rachel Maddow Show tonight. She she covered a myriad number of issues, including her reluctance to grant immunity to ex-Bush administration officials who may have violated the law and Constitution. Excerpts from the transcript are below:

On warrantless wiretapping:

MADDOW:  You’ve been outspoken about contempt of Congress charges related to the politicization of the Justice Department and that investigation.  You have been less specific about how Congress should proceed on warrantless wiretapping and torture.

Why is that?

PELOSI:  Well, I haven’t been less specific, because we’re waiting what we had in the bill — which I did not like the bill, part of the bill that was positive, the FISA bill, was an inspector general.  We will have an inspector general’s report in July about the conduct of the government in the collection in our country.

On a proposed Truth Commission:

PELOSI:  Senator Leahy has a proposal, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is a good idea.  What I have some concern about there is it has immunity.  And I think that some of the issues involved here, like politicizing of the Justice Department, and the rest, may have criminal ramifications, and I don’t think we should be giving them immunity.

But we’ll find a way to go forward — because American people want us to go forward — but also making sure that the Constitution’s respected — and that’s what our issue is, whether you’re talking about separation of power, whether you’re talking about Karl Rove, Josh Bolten, and the others at the White House, not responding to subpoenas by the Congress on the subject of the Justice Department politicizing.  And so those issues are still alive.

We’re in the courts on those, we’re in negotiations with the administrations, both the Bush administration and the Obama administration, about how the executive branch responds to the legislative branch honoring our Constitution.  I don’t — I’m not — I don’t want to look back, I want to go forward, but as we try to have reconciliation, I’m a little hesitant to have immunity.

MADDOW:  And if that inspector general…

PELOSI: More than a little bit hesitant, let me say.  I don’t think we should have immunity for some of those issues.

MADDOW:  Then in terms of moving forward, if the inspector general report that comes out this summer suggests that there has been criminal activity at the official level on issues like torture, or warrant less wireless wiretapping, or rendition, or any of these other issues…

PELOSI:  No one is above the law. The president has said that.

MADDOW:  … you would support a referral for a criminal investigation, potential prosecution.

PELOSI:  Absolutely.  No one is above the law, but we have to go through 
– we have to have the facts

I mean, we are unhappy about certain things, we anecdotally know about certain things.  We will have the documentation of it, and we can go forward.

I don’t know what other criminal investigations are going on concurrently, because they are not usually publicly disclosed.  But I’m hopeful that as we go forward, the American people will have more confidence in their government and how we protect them.  Get liberty and security, they’re very compatible.  You don’t have to choose one or the other.

On what she knew about “enhanced interrogation techniques”:

MADDOW:  Let me ask you about one sort of thorny issue in this area, and I say it’s thorny because it has been invoked by the Bush administration and its supporters as a way to try to deflect calls for this accountability.

In October, 2001, you were briefed as a member of the House Intelligence Committee issues.  September, 2002, you were briefed on CIA, detention issues and enhanced interrogation issues.

Because of those briefings — and I know that you expressed concern for the NSA after that October, 2001 briefing.  You released that publicly in 2006.  But you didn’t express public concerns at the time after those briefings.

Does that raise a complication?

PELOSI:  No.  No, — the fact is, they did not brief…well, first of all, we’re not allowed to talk about what happens there but I can say they did not brief us with these enhanced interrogations that were taking place.  They did not brief us.  They were talking about an array of interrogations that they might have at their disposal.

MADDOW:  Techniques in the abstract, as if they were not being used?

PELOSI:  We were never told they were being used.

MADDOW:  You were told they weren’t being used?

PELOSI:  Well, they just talked about them, but — the inference to be drawn from what they told us was that these are things that we think could be legal.  And we have a difference of opinion on that.  But they never told us that they were being be used, because that would be a different story altogether.

We had many disagreements with them all along the way on how they collect information in our country and what they think might be acceptable.  They have never gotten any comfort from me on any of those issues, no matter what they want to say publicly.  And they know that I cannot speak specifically to the classified briefing of that kind.   
But I can say flat out, they never told us that these enhancement interrogations were being used.

MADDOW:  And they have said publicly — they have cited those briefings as essentially congressional consent for what they did. And , A – you say the consent was not given, and B – you say you can not explain the extent to which consent was not given because you’re not allowed to discuss the briefing. 

PELOSI:  What I’m saying to you is they never told us that those techniques were being used.

MADDOW:  But did they tell you that they think water boarding is legal now?

PELOSI:  They may have given the inference that there were some debate that, that water boarding could be of course I disagree with that.  But the issue is, are you going to use such a thing?  And they had not ever briefed us that.  That was the case.

But let me say this.  There is a whole series of meetings that relate to a collection of information in terms of FISA…

MADDOW:  Yes.

PELOSI:  … where they know that they had very strong resistance from me in my capacity as intelligence — the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.  They’ve never had, we’ve never had in the leadership of the Congress, certainly a speaker of the House, a person with as much intelligence background as I have.  So I have some discernment about it, and that’s why, one of the reasons why I had such sorrow over the war in Iraq is that so many people voted for it when the intelligence wasn’t there to support that claim.

…

PELOSI:  And there is no justification on anything that — any excuse, justification, or anything, on any briefing that they have given.

On the irony of how she could not raise her objections in public because the programs were classified:

MADDOW:  Well, let me just ask you one last detailed question on that, though.  And I’ll ask you about Iraq as well.

But on the NSA, just a couple of weeks after 9/11, the very start of October, 2001, you were briefed on the NSA’s spying program and you objected.  You wrote a letter to the NSA saying, I’m concerned about this warrant less spying.

PELOSI:  Right.

MADDOW:  The NSA responded to you with a letter, and I know…

PELOSI: It’s all redacted ,it’s all redacted.

MADDOW: And I printed it out, I actually have it because it’s funny. So much has been redacted. What they released is absolutely nothing. 

PELOSI: Like “Dear Congresswoman” Redact, redact, redact.

MADDOW: Sincerely yours,

PELOSI: Sincerely yours,

MADDOW:  Exactly.  But was there something in that letter that, and I know it’s redacted, so it can’t be released publicly. But was there something in that letter that made you feel like, you know what?  I objected privately.  I should not object publicly?  I should not…

PELOSI:  Well, you can’t.  You can’t.

MADDOW: You can’t speak out about the content of what you have been briefed on – but isn’t there a way that you can say, I’m a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee, I believe that we are doing something that we should not be doing?

PELOSI:  You cannot do that publicly, and that’s something that I think we have to change in terms of — because your hands are pretty much tied.  And we were relentless with them on this score in terms of questioning them on what they were doing and fighting them on it.  And this is a very nature of battle, and it’s one of the reasons I’m looking very closely at some of the appointments in the Obama administration, to make sure that nobody who had anything to do with this in the Bush administration has any cloak of authority and experience, and should be appointed at any level, advisory or at any level in the Bush Administration.

MADDOW:  But you think the rules should be changed in terms of what members…

PELOSI:  No — who can you go to?  Can you go to the chief justice of the Supreme Court?  Can you — these are issues, mind you, that you can’t even talk to your staff about.  I have a security adviser, but we can’t talk — you can’t talk to anybody about it.

And that just isn’t right, because it gives all the cards to the administration.  And then if you say anything about it, you have violated our national security.  And it shouldn’t be that way.

MADDOW: It neuters the oversight rule for voters.

PELOSI:  It does, and that’s what we’re going to change, because you can’t — even with a Democratic president — you don’t want any president, Democrat or Republican, to have that kind of authority.  And that will happen. 
I think with the cooperation of this administration that, again, some of this has come out in terms of the attorney general being in the hospital.  And, you know, some of these things have come out because of leaks and the rest.  It gives you some picture of the lengths that they would want to go, that even their attorney general did not want to sign a letter to give the authority to go forward.

You can watch the entire interview below; the full transcript can be found here.

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.2142873&w=425&h=350&fv=]

You knew it was too good to be true when we reported that former White House advisor Karl Rove had agreed to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee. Well, you were right. At the time, Rove’s attorney agreed that President George Bush’s invocation of executive privilege only applied to the U.S. Attorneys matter, and not the Siegelman affair (click here for more background on the privilege claim).  Now Rove’s lawyer Robert Luskin says that Rove will not appear to testify before House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) if Conyers is unwilling to allow Rove to set boundaries to his own testimony, reports Keith Perine at Congressional Quarterly.  The deadline for Rove to comply with Conyers’s most recent subpoena is Feb. 23.

This morning, David Weigel with The Washington Independent caught up with former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as he was leaving the Capitol Hill Club.  Weigel asked Gonzales if he would participate in a truth commission, as proposed by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt).  Gonzales responded:

“My view has always been to be as cooperative as possible, and that’s what I’ve been with respect to everything. As far as I’m concerned I’ve got nothing to hide and I’ll cooperate. Every time I’ve been asked to cooperate, I’ve cooperated. In terms of what happens in the future, I’m not going to comment on that, but that is what I’ve done in the past.”

“I think only a fool would be unconcerned about any kind of commission or investigation in this political town and in this political climate. Having said that, again, because I feel like I’ve got nothing to hide and I’ve done nothing wrong, I’m not worried about the truth, so long as what we’re talking about is the truth and things don’t become politicized.”