U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (file photo by Ryan J. Reilly / Main Justice).

A standout new New York Times Magazine story on President Barack Obama’s handling of terrorist threats includes details about the political pressure on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder as he made the decision to try self-declared Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court.

According to the 8,800-word article by the Times’s Peter Baker, some in the White House, including Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, raised concerns about the “collateral cost” of Holder’s decision, announced in November.

Those concerns were relayed to the Justice Department, Baker wrote. Ultimately Obama declined to intervene and let Holder make the call.

Holder also had disagreements with John Brennan, the president’s counter-terrorism adviser, who initially sided with Holder and then-White House Counsel Greg Craig in an internal battle over whether to release Justice Department memos about C.I.A. interrogation methods.

But Brennan later came to support the C.I.A.’s view, which said that those memos would give terrorists too much information about the agency’s tactics, writes Baker.

Craig was eventually ousted from the White House after months of internal criticism about his handling of national security policies.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has led a chorus of GOP criticism against the administration’s national security policies, including Holder’s decision to try Mohammed in federal court.

Baker’s story is scheduled to be published in the Jan. 17 print edition of the newspaper. It was updated, edited and posted online early because of relevant news events, including the attempted terrorist attack on a U.S.-bound jetliner on Christmas day, according to Politico’s Michael Calderone.

Sen. George LeMieux (R-Fla.) met with a White House official earlier this month to discuss the U.S. Attorney recommendations for the Middle and Southern districts of Florida, the St. Petersburg Times’ Buzz blog reported yesterday.

George LeMieux (Gov)

LeMieux, who was appointed by Gov. Charlie Crist (R) after Sen. Mel Martinez (R) resigned in September, had a meeting with White House Counsel Greg Craig on Nov. 9, according to the blog. The senator’s office declined to comment to the Buzz about the meeting.

People close to Crist, who will run for Senate next year, are expressing concerns about Jacksonville, Fla., lawyer Harry Shorstein, who, according to the blog, is a finalist for the Middle District of Florida job.

We reported in September that the State Attorney for the state’s 4th Judicial Circuit, Republican Angela Corey, wrote to Martinez and Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) to ask them not to recommend Shorstein, who was her former boss at the office. Two years ago, Shorstein fired Corey and later spoke out against her bid for election to the state prosecuting job. But last year, Corey easily beat Shorstein’s former chief of staff in the bitterly contested election.

The current U.S. Attorney in the Middle District is Bush-administration holdover A. Brian Albritton.

Some of the finalists for the Southern District of Florida are also receiving additional scrutiny in Florida. We reported this week that Daryl E. Trawick, a judge in Dade County, once helped put phony court documents in the public docket at the request of state prosecutors, which could be a violation of state law. In addition, former Assistant U.S. Attorney David M. Buckner, another finalist for the U.S. Attorney post, played a role in a controversial terrorism case.

Jeffrey H. Sloman is the Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District.

Here are the finalists for the Middle and Southern district U.S. Attorney posts:

Middle District:

– Harry Shorstein, who is a partner at the Jacksonville law firm of Shorstein & Lasnetski where he works on white-collar crimes cases. He previously served as a Florida state attorney. He has also worked as a general counsel for Jacksonville and as a Naval judge advocate. Read his full bio here.

– Robert O’Neill, who was interim U.S. Attorney for the Middle District in 2008 and currently leads the office’s criminal division.

– Roger Handberg, who is an Assistant U.S. Attorney, in charge of the Middle District’s Orlando office.

Southern District:

– Wifredo Ferrer, who is an assistant Dade County, Fla., attorney.

– David M. Buckner, who is a partner at Miami’s Kozyak Tropin Throckmorton and a former Assistant U.S. Attorney.

— Daryl E. Trawick, who is a Dade County Circuit Court judge.

The Washington Post reports today that Perkins Coie partner Bob Bauer will replace Greg Craig as White House counsel. Evan Perez in the Wall Street Journal broke the story back in August that Craig was on his way out, having stumbled in his handling of the Guantanamo Bay military facility closing. The Post says there was also displeasure about Craig’s office’s vetting of administration nominees.

Bauer is an expert on election law and ethics. An early supporter of President Barack Obama, he is married to outgoing White House communications director Anita Dunn.

Here is the statement issued by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy this morning:

Comment Of Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.),
Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee,
On White House Counsel Gregory Craig
November 13, 2009

“Greg Craig is an exceptional public servant, as well as a gifted lawyer.  Together with President Obama, he helped to bolster the integrity of the Presidency, and restore integrity to the White House Counsel’s Office.  I have appreciated his approach to working with Congress, and his willingness to take on great challenges in the first months of this young presidency.  Vermonters value public service, and as a Vermonter himself, Greg Craig has heeded that call.”

White House counsel Greg Craig, who has caught blame for mishandling the politics of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility closing, says he’s not resigning.

“I have no plans to leave whatsoever,” Craig tells the National Law Journal in an interview for this week’s edition. “The rumors that I’m about to leave are false. The reports that I’m about to leave are wrong. I have no plans to leave.”

The Wall Street Journal first reported in August that Craig’s job was at stake over his handling of Gitmo, which the president vowed to shutter by January. But the administration had no plan for transferring the detainees, sparking an outcry in Congress. 

Craig also said the Obama administration would not withdraw the names of long-stalled Department of Justice nominees. Thought the NLJ article doesn’t elaborate, Craig appears to be referring to Mary L. Smith, nominated to head the DOJ’s Tax Division; and Dawn Johnsen, the Office of Legal Counsel nominee.

At Smith’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in May, ranking Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.) objected to her lack of tax experience. Johnsen’s nomination has been pending since February. Republicans have objected to her past advocacy of abortion rights and her outspoken criticism of the Bush-era legal authorizations of harsh interrogation tactics.

Also, Christopher Schroeder’s nomination for the Office of Legal Policy has been pending since June, but the delay appears due more to scheduling issues than any controversy. The Senate last week confirmed Tom Perez as the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, after months of delay.

In the NLJ interview, Craig also said a new special counsel to the president – former O’Melveny & Myers partner Michael Camunez — has been running the nominee vetting process since February to avoid a repeat of messes like the Tom Daschle or Bill Richardson withdrawals.

“I think we do more vetting and more background checks than previous White House counsel have done,” Craig told the NLJ. Read the full story here.

The Wall Street Journal fleshes out an earlier Atlanta Journal-Constitution report about the mysterious disappearance of acting U.S. Attorney Sally Yates’s name from the list of candidates for the Northern District of Georgia.

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.)

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) called the White House earlier this year trying to block Yates’s appointment as the district’s top federal prosecutor, the Journal reported. Lewis withdrew his objections last month in a call to White House counsel Greg Craig after news media queries, the Journal reported, citing “two government officials with knowledge of the matter.”

Both the WSJ and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted that Yates had prosecuted more than a dozen public officials in Atlanta in pay-to-play schemes, including a Lewis friend and political ally, Bill Campbell, who served as Atlanta’s mayor from 1994 to 2002.

According to the Journal:

[T]he story of Ms. Yates, 49 years old, illustrates that even after three years of controversy over allegations of partisan meddling in the work of U.S. attorneys during the Bush administration, politics remains part of the selection process.

The Justice Department is still trying to repair damage from the scandal that erupted after Bush administration officials ousted nine U.S. attorney appointees in 2006 to make way for new political favorites.

The Atlanta newspaper reported Sept. 5 that Yates “apparently was on the short list, then off, then on again.”

Lewis’s chief of staff, Michael Collins, denied in an interview with the Journal that Lewis had tried to scuttle Yates’s nomination. Collins told the newspaper that Georgia’s House members collectively had decided to remove Yates’s name from a list of three favored candidates.

An advisory panel appointed by Georgia’s six Democratic House members forwarded three recommended finalists in April, including Yates; Atlanta lawyer Jeffrey Berhold, a former antitrust lawyer at the Justice Department; and Christopher Twyman, a partner at the Cox Byington law firm in northwest Georgia.

“We wanted to dispel any notion, based on your questions, that we were blocking Sally Yates’s nomination,” Collins told the WSJ.

President Obama on Thursday announced his nominees for Georgia’s other two prosecuting districts. They are Michael Moore (Middle District of Georgia), a former Georgia state senator and lawyer in Houston County, Ga.; and Ed Tarver (Southern District of Georgia), a Georgia state senator and partner at Augusta, Ga. law firm Hull, Towill, Norman, Barrett & Salley.

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.