Two additional U.S. Supreme Court briefs have come to light that Attorney General Eric Holder did not disclose during his confirmation process in late 2008 and early 2009, as required by a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, according to The Blog of Legal Times.

On Wednesday, a story in The National Review blasted Holder for not disclosing two amicus briefs to the Supreme Court in the high-profile terrorism case of Jose Padilla that he had joined in signing.

The undisclosed briefs reported Friday, one of which related to allegations of racial bias by prosecutors in jury selection, and the other involving the timing of Miranda warnings, bring the total number of undisclosed briefs to four.

In The National Review Online story, former Deputy White House Counsel Bill Burck and Press Secretary Dana Perino criticized the Attorney General both for not listing the briefs on his Senate questionnaire, and for the content of one of the briefs, which argued that the danger of a too-powerful executive branch outweighs the risk of losing intelligence in terrorism cases prosecuted in civilian courts.

When Holder submitted his questionnaire to the Senate Judiciary Committee in December 2008, Republicans said it was incomplete. In response, Holder supplied additional materials to the committee before his confirmation hearing in January 2009, but the four amicus briefs were not among the new materials.

Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller told Politico that “the [Padilla] brief should have been disclosed,� but had been “ unfortunately and inadvertently� left out in the documents submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee before Holder’s confirmation hearings.

At a meeting of the Judiciary Committee on Thursday Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said that it’s hard to believe the Holder simply forgot to disclose the Padilla briefs.

“Are we expected to believe that then-nominee Holder, with only a handful of Supreme Court briefs to his name, forgot about his role in one of this country’s most-publicized terrorism cases?� asked Kyl. “To me, that strains credulity, and I’m someone who voted for Attorney General Holder.�

Holder’s defenders argued that omissions are simply unavoidable when preparing the questionnaires. Former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig said that Holder should not be blamed.

“I’m sure it wasn’t Eric’s job to gather all the briefs,� Craig, now a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, told the BLT. “The notion that this was an intentional oversight is preposterous.�

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have said that they will question Holder about the omissions when he appears before them during a previously scheduled Justice Department oversight hearing on March 23.

When the Justice Department issued new FOIA guidelines in March, they were largely heralded as proof of the president’s commitment to government transparency. But FOIA experts expressed some concerns about the guidelines’ language regarding pending cases — and apparently, their concerns were well-founded, according to this report by Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff.

While the guidelines instructed agencies to operate on the “presumption” of disclosure — in contrast to the Bush-era policy of holding out unless no “sound legal basis” could be found for doing so — they gave Justice Department lawyers wiggle room in pending cases.

Holder said the new guidelines should be applied “if practicable when, in the judgment of the Department of Justice lawyers handling the matter and the relevant agency defendants, there is a substantial likelihood that application of the guidance would result in a material disclosure of additional information.” Er, yeah.

While the guidelines were generally tailored after Reno-era policy, Dan Metcalfe, the former longtime chief of FOIA policy at Justice, told Isikoff that “lawyerly hedges” make the Holder memo “astonishingly weaker” than Reno’s.

For instance:

As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding “secret energy meetings” with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama’s “clean coal” policies.

The request is covered by the “pending” clause because it ties in with the subject of a Bush-era lawsuit for visitor-log records. Justice lawyers drafted the new guidelines in consultation with the White House Counsel Gregory Craig. The department defended the pending-litigation language.

The separate standard for “pending” lawsuits was inserted because of the “burden” it would impose on officials to go “backward” and reprocess hundreds of old cases, says Melanie Ann Pustay, who now heads the FOIA office.

Attorney General Eric Holder held an unannounced meeting at the Justice Department today with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other senior administration officials to discuss plans to shutter the Guantanamo Bay military prison by next January.

The meeting of the Guantanamo Bay Detainee Review Task Force also included FBI Director Robert Mueller, CIA Director Leon Panetta, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, White House Counsel Gregory Craig, Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Randy Beers and Justice Department national security division veteran Matthew Olsen, the executive director of the task force.

The officials also talked about the “standards for detainee reviews, factors that will be considered in prioritizing detainee reviews, and progress that has been achieved thus far,� according to a statement from the Justice Department.

The Associated Press elaborates:

According to an official familiar with the process, detainees are being grouped into categories, and government officials from multiple agencies are being grouped into teams assigned to examine particular categories of detainees.

The review teams would then make recommendations to the Guantanamo task force. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the deliberations are private.

If a review team cannot reach a consensus on a particular detainee, the case will go to the Cabinet-level officials to reach a decision, the official said.

Holder, who visited Guantanamo Bay last month, told the Associated Press that he vowed to close the facility and handle the 240 people imprisoned there “in a way that ensures that people are treated fairly and that the American people are kept safe.”