Chickens come home to roost as employers shun toxic Bush lawyers

Noting that Alberto Gonzales hasn’t been able to find a job since his 2007 resignation, Charlie Savage and Scott Shane reported on March 8, 2009, that David Addington has joined the pool of unemployable Bush administration attorneys. From their article Terror-War Fallout Lingers Over Bush Lawyers:

For some of Mr. Bush’s lawyers, the most likely consequence may be wariness from potential employers. The former White House counsel and attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, for example, has not found a job since resigning in 2007 amid accusations that he misled Congress about surveillance without warrants and the firing of United States attorneys.

He recently told The Wall Street Journal that the controversy surrounding him had made law firms “skittish” about hiring him, calling himself “one of the many casualties of the war on terror.” Mr. Gonzales’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, said in a statement that “Judge Gonzales looks forward to the day when reason prevails over partisan politics and he can get on with his professional life.”

David S. Addington, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who was a forceful voice in internal legal debates, is also said to still be looking for work. The former Pentagon general counsel William Haynes II had been nominated by Mr. Bush for an appeals court judgeship, but was blocked because of his role in detention policies.

He then searched for a job for about a year, according to Pentagon officials, before landing a position at Chevron in 2008. [Emphasis supplied.]

h/t Zachary Roth, Report: Addington, Like Gonzo, Said To Still Be Looking For Work, March 9, 2009

Back on December 3, 2008, Carrie Johnson provided this update on D. Kyle Sampson:

D. Kyle Sampson, [broken link] who served as the chief of staff to Gonzales until his March 2007 resignation, recently took a leave from his job as a partner at the law firm Hunton & Williams while the investigation [by prosecutor Nora R. Dannehy who is investigating the dismissals of nine U.S. attorneys] proceeds. A spokeswoman for the law firm said he is on leave “pending admission to the D.C. bar.” [Ed. note – As of this date, Mr. Sampson has not been admitted to the D.C. bar. Updated March 17, 2009 to add the word ‘not’ to the previous sentence in this Ed. note]

The report by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine singled out Sampson for offering testimony that was “not credible” and “unpersuasive.” The authorities also concluded that Sampson had committed “misconduct.”

An attorney for Sampson previously said that Sampson had gone out of his way to help investigators and that he had offered “his best, most honest and complete recollection of these events.”

It’s shameful that these men are still licensed to practice law but, for whatever the reason and however temporary, they’re not practicing law. This doesn’t take the place of proper investigation by their respective bar associations and imposition of appropriate sanctions, but Messrs. Gonzales, Addington and Sampson are being judged quite harshly by their peers. For now.

* * * * * * * * * *

I sent the following email to Hunton & Williams requesting a response to some questions I had regarding the firm’s employment of Mr. Sampson:

Eleanor Kerlow
Senior Public Relations Manager, Hunton & Williams
(202) 955-1883
ekerlow@hunton.com

Ms. Kerlow,

I write The Grievance Project at which I have been following the career of D. Kyle Sampson. I am writing requesting Hunton & Williams’ response to the following questions related to Mr. D. Kyle Sampson.

• Was the leave taken at the firm’s request?
• Has the firm been contacted by Nora R. Dannehy regarding Mr. Sampson?
• Has any other attorney at Hunton & Williams taken a leave from the firm due to Ms. Dannehy’s investigation?
• Was a press release issued relating to Mr. Sampson’s leave? If so, please forward a copy to my attention.
• Is it typical or policy for partners in Hunton’s D.C. office to take a leave from the firm while applying for admission to the D.C. bar?
• Is Mr. Sampson welcome back to Hunton upon his admission to the D.C. bar?

Thank you for your attention to these questions.

I will update this post with any reply I receive.

Updated on March 11, 2009: Emptywheel and Scott Horton provide much more analysis on this issue here and here, respectively.

Updated on March 17, 2009: I haven’t received a reply from Ms. Kerlow or other official response from Hunton & Williams, so I resent the above email to Ms. Kerlow again asking for a response to my questions.   I also asked Ms. Kerlow whether she or someone else from Hunton & Williams stopped by TGP the other day:

From Statcounter :

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Cross-posted at the Oxdown Gazette, Firedoglake‘s diary blog.

Tags: Alberto Gonzales, Carrie Johnson, Charlie Savage, David Addingtin, Dick Cheney, Eleanor Kerlow, George J. Terwilliger III, George W. Bush, Glenn Fine, Hunton & Williams, Kyle Sampson, Nora Dannehy, Scott Shane, William Haynes II, Zachary Roth

It’s not paranoia if they ARE out to get you, No. 7

In Episode No. 5 of the Paranoia, I highlighted the story of Jesselyn Radack as told by Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, in her July 14, 2008 interview, Six Questions for Jane Mayer, Author of The Dark Side, with Scott Horton at No Comment. Ms. Radack wrote about her experience in The Canary in the Coal Mine.

In this interview with Bill Moyers about her book, Ms. Mayer continues to provide material for this series:

BILL MOYERS: Who were some of the other conservative heroes, as you call them, in your book?

JANE MAYER: A lot of them are lawyers. And they were people inside the Justice Department who, one of whom, and I can’t name this one in particular, said when he looked around at some of the White House meetings – he was in where they were authorizing the President, literally, to torture people – if he thought that was necessary, he said, “I can’t, I could not believe these lunatics had taken over the country.” And I am not talking about someone who is a liberal Democrat. I’m talking about a very conservative member of this Administration. And there was a-

BILL MOYERS: Your source?

JANE MAYER: My source.

BILL MOYERS: And, yet, when these conservatives – as you write in your book – when these conservatives spoke up, Cheney and company retaliated against their own men.

JANE MAYER: People told me, “You can’t imagine what it was like inside the White House during this period.” There was such an atmosphere of intimidation. And when the lawyers, some of these lawyers tried to stand up to this later, they felt so endangered in some ways that, at one point, two of the top lawyers from the Justice Department developed this system of talking in codes to each other because they thought they might be being wiretapped. And they even felt-

BILL MOYERS: By their own government.

JANE MAYER: By their own government. They felt like they might be kind of weirdly in physical danger. They were actually scared to stand up to Vice President Cheney.

Full transcript here.

These attorneys were right to be frightened of Vice President Cheney. Just ask Harry Whittington.

H/t ThinkProgress via WriteChicPress

Tags: Bill Moyers, Dick Cheney, Harry Whittington, Jane Mayer, Jesselyn, Radack, Jessica Radack, No Comment, Paranoia, Scott Horton, The Canary in the Coal Mine, The Dark Side

It’s not paranoia if they ARE out to get you, No. 5

In his July 14, 2008 No Comment post, Six Questions for Jane Mayer, Author of The Dark Side, Scott Horton introduces his interview with Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side:

In a series of gripping articles, Jane Mayer has chronicled the Bush Administration’s grim and furtive dealings with torture and has exposed both the individuals within the administration who “made it happen” (a group that starts with Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington), the team of psychologists who put together the palette of techniques, and the Fox television program “24,” which was developed to help sell it to the American public. In a new book, The Dark Side, Mayer puts together the major conclusions from her articles and fills in a number of important gaps. Most significantly, we learn the details on the torture techniques and the drama behind the fierce and lingering struggle within the administration over torture, and we learn that many within the administration recognized the potential criminal accountability they faced over these torture tactics and moved frantically to protect themselves from possible future prosecution. I put six questions to Jane Mayer on the subject of her book, The Dark Side. (italics in original)

In the interview, Ms. Mayer describes yet another instance in which the Bush administration has retaliated against someone who dared raise a voice in dissent:

[Horton:] You spend more time showing how the torture process compromised lawyers than how it compromised health care professionals. One of the more revealing cases involves Jessica (sic) Radack, a young career attorney in the Justice Department’s Honors Program, who dispensed ethics advice concerning plans for the interrogation of John Walker Lindh. It seems that her advice was contrary to the ethical views of senior Bush Administration lawyers, and you note that when a federal judge demanded to see the internal Department of Justice records relating to the matter, all of Radack’s emails, including the advice actually dispensed, had been deleted and the hard copies removed, and none of this was furnished to the court. Did the Justice Department ever undertake an internal probe into the obstruction?

[Mayer:] Radack was in some ways an early guinea pig showing how high the costs were for anyone—including administration lawyers—who dissented from the Bush Administration’s determination to rewrite the rules for the treatment of terrorists. Her job in the department was to give ethical advice. She was asked whether an FBI officer in Afghanistan could interrogate John Walker Lindh and use his statements against him in any future trial. By the time she was asked this, however, as she knew, Lindh’s father had already hired a lawyer to represent him. So she concluded that it would not be proper for the FBI to question him outside the presence of his counsel.

To her amazement, the FBI agent went ahead and did so anyway, and then the prosecutors in the Justice Department proceeded to use Lindh’s statements against him in their criminal prosecution. She told me, “It was like ethics were out the window. After 9/11, it was, like, ‘anything goes’ in the name of terrorism. It felt like they’d made up their minds to get him, regardless of the process.” Radack believed that the role of the ethics office was to “rein in the cowboys” whose zeal to stop criminals sometimes led them to overstep legal boundaries. “But after 9/11 we were bending ethics to fit our needs,” she said. “Something wrong was going on. It wasn’t just fishy—it stank.”

What happened next was truly scary. She tried to ensure that a judge overseeing the case, who asked for all information regarding the Department’s handling of Lindh, was given the full record, including her own contrary advice. But instead, she said she found that her superiors at Justice sent the judge only selective portions of the record, excluding her contrary opinion. Her case files, she said, were tampered with, and documents missing. Among the senior Justice Department officials who were sent her files, she said was Alice Fisher, a deputy to Michael Chertoff who followed him as head of the Department’s Criminal Division.

Radack complained about what she thought were serious omissions of the record being withheld from the judge. Within weeks of disagreeing with the top Justice Department officials, Radack went from having been singled out for praise, to being hounded out of the department. Radack got a job in private practice, but after her story appeared in Newsweek, with copies of some of her emails, the Justice Department opened a leak investigation. The U.S. Attorney then opened a criminal investigation. Radack has since become an advocate for whistle-blowers’ rights. But the episode served as a warning to anyone in the government who stood in the way of the so-called, “New Paradigm.” It is unclear to me what sort of investigation, if any, there has been of this case, including of the potential obstruction. (emphasis supplied)

Read the rest of the interview here.

Update: Prof. David Luban, who blogs at Balkinzation, notes by e-mail that Jesselyn Radack wrote about this experience in The Canary in the Coal Mine, which is available for purchase here.

Tags: Alice Fisher, David Addington, Department of Justice, Dick Cheney, Jane Mayer, Jesselyn Radack, John Walker Lindh, No Comment, Michael Chertoff, Scott Horton, The Dark Side