There certainly were a lot of disturbing questions raised by Colorado U.S. attorney Troy Eid's refusal to prosecute three white-supremacist tweakers caught conspiring to assassinate Barack Obama before this year's Democratic National Convention in Denver. (Brad Jacobson and Nicole also reported on this.)

Now, as Jacobson reports at Raw Story, those questions are taking on a serious cast:

Interviews with numerous legal experts suggest that Colorado US Attorney Troy Eid misled reporters and diverged from state law when declining to prosecute any of the three men arrested in Denver for threatening to assassinate Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Eid, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2006, declined to prosecute the three men on charges of threatening to assassinate Barack Obama during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, saying that the suspects were "just a bunch of meth heads" and their words failed to meet the legal standard for "true threat."

... But multiple legal experts interviewed by RAW STORY -- including criminal and constitutional law scholars, former Assistant US Attorneys and Denver-area defense lawyers also familiar with Colorado state law -- agreed that voluntary intoxication is not exculpatory and that such a claim, especially for a prosecutor, is unorthodox. While it may be presented in an effort to reduce a sentence after a conviction, experts say it is normally the domain of defense counsel.

"It's very unusual," says Scott Horton, a Columbia Law School professor who also writes for Harper's Magazine. "Basically, you have a US Attorney trotting out the sort of arguments that defense counsel makes on a plea for reduced sentencing."

Legal experts say that Eid's definition of true threat directly conflicts with the statue covering threats to presidential candidates, 18 U.S.C. 879, which defines the threat as "whoever knowingly and willfully threatens to kill, kidnap, or inflict bodily harm upon a major candidate for the office of President or Vice President, or a member of the immediate family of such candidate."

Be sure to read the whole thing.

There should be a congressional investigation of Eid's misfeasance in this case, because it sends a chilling message: If you're a white supremacist who wants to target Obama for assassination -- as a number of them appear to be doing -- Bush's Justice Department will give you a slap on the wrist and look the other way should you get caught.

I doubt that was what they intended, but that has been the end result.

Even in its last throes, the Bush administration continues its uninterrupted lawlessness. As two recent stories by Charlie Savage of the New York Times revealed, President Bush ignored Congressional statutes requiring privacy disclosures by his Department of Homeland Security and non-discrimination in hiring by faith-based groups receiving federal funds. In twice turning his back on the rule of law, Bush again resorted to his favorite executive power-grabbing tools, the signing statement and "interpretation" by the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel.

Savage, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 expose of Bush's unprecedented use of signing statements, revealed last Friday that the President is at again. The White House informed Congress that it is bypassing a law passed as part of the package of recommendation from the 9/11 Commission. Designed to prevent political interference with the Department of Homeland Security:

The August 2007 law requires the agency’s chief privacy officer to report each year about Homeland Security activities that affect privacy, and requires that the reports be submitted directly to Congress “without any prior comment or amendment” by superiors at the department or the White House.

But in a move ranking the Republican on Senate Judiciary Committee Arlen Specter (R-PA) deemed "unconstitutional" and "dictatorial," DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff told Congress the administration would not "apply this provision strictly" because it infringed on the president’s powers. And as Savage detailed, President Bush used a signing statement to thwart the will of Congress - and the law of the land:

The Bush administration defended the decision not to obey the statute. Erik Ablin, a Justice Department spokesman, said its legal view was consistent with what presidents of both parties had long maintained.

Mr. Ablin also said the administration had told Congress that the provision would be unconstitutional, but Congress passed the legislation - which enacted recommendations of the 9/11 Commission - without making the requested change. So the administration decided to sign the bill and fix what Mr. Ablin called its "defects" later.

In condoning illegal discrimination in hiring by religious charities receiving funds from American taxpayers, President Bush turned to his Office of Legal Counsel.

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  For some strange reason, prosecutors in the corruption case against Ted Stevens (R - VECO) don't want to mention a letter Dick Cheney sent at Stevens' behest, shilling for corporate wheeler-dealer Bill Allen's pet pipeline project.

In a conversation secretly tape-recorded by the FBI on June 25, 2006, Stevens discussed ways to get a pipeline bill through the Alaska Legislature with Bill Allen, an oil-services executive accused of providing the senator with about $250,000 in undisclosed financial benefits. According to a Justice motion, Stevens told Allen, "I'm gonna try to see if I can get some bigwigs from back here and say, 'Look … you gotta get this done'." Two days later, Cheney wrote a letter to the Alaska Legislature urging members to "promptly enact" a bill to build the pipeline. The letter was considered unusual because the White House rarely contacts state lawmakers about pending legislative matters. It also angered state Democrats, who accused Cheney of pushing oil-company interests. The former executive director of Cheney's energy task force had gone to work as a lobbyist for British Petroleum, one of three firms slated to build the pipeline.

Stevens confirmed to NEWSWEEK last week that he asked Cheney to write the letter. "We wanted the federal government to tell the state to act quickly on it," he said. (A spokesman for Alaska's other senator, Lisa Murkowski, said her office also had contacts with Cheney's office.) A Cheney spokeswoman said his office does not comment on pending legal matters.

Now why do you think Bush's Justice Department isn't too keen on using this important bit of evidence? Stevens is charged with offfenses under the Ethics in Government Act. Could it be that following all the leads would open up a big can of worms for the White House?

It’s been about two weeks since the Justice Department’s inspector general released a report on the unprecedented politicization of employment practices at the Justice Department. The IG report concluded that disgraced officials such as Monica Goodling and former chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson “routinely broke the law” by applying political litmus tests, even when hiring prosecutors and immigration judges.

Since then, no one in the Bush administration has wanted to talk about the scandal. The good news is, Attorney General Michael Mukasey addressed the subject this morning in a speech to the American Bar Association. The bad news is, what he had to say was far from encouraging.

Initially, it seemed like Mukasey was, at long last, prepared to be candid and forthcoming. The problem came when the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer addressed what he was prepared to do as a consequence of the DoJ’s rampant lawbreaking.

Mukasey said he will not prosecute the DoJ employees who repeatedly and flagrantly violated the law.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Tuesday that the Department of Justice would not pursue criminal charges against former employees implicated in an internal investigation on politicized hiring practices.

“Where there is evidence of criminal wrongdoing, we vigorously investigate it,” Mukasey said in a speech at the American Bar Association. “And where there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we vigorously prosecute. But not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime.”

Wait, not every violation of the law is a crime? Isn’t that the definition of a “crime”?

Thanks to a report from the Justice Department’s inspector general, we got a better sense this week about the extraordinary — and illegal — efforts to politicize Bush’s Justice Department.

But let’s not forget, the problem of basing employment decisions on politics went well beyond the Justice Department. Charlie Savage picks up on an email that went largely overlooked.

On May 17, 2005, the White House’s political affairs office sent an e-mail message to agencies throughout the executive branch directing them to find jobs for 108 people on a list of “priority candidates” who had “loyally served the president.”

“We simply want to place as many of our Bush loyalists as possible,” the White House emphasized in a follow-up message, according to a little-noticed passage of a Justice Department report released Monday about politicization in the department’s hiring of civil-service prosecutors and immigration officials.

The report, the subject of a Senate oversight hearing Wednesday, provided a window into how the administration sought to install politically like-minded officials in positions of government responsibility, and how the efforts at times crossed customary or legal limits.

To be sure, Bush didn’t invent political patronage, and practically all modern presidents have made at least some efforts to, as Savage put it, “impose greater political control over the federal bureaucracy.”

But none have gone as far as this gang. “The Bush administration is unprecedented in how systematic the politicization is and how it extends both across the wider organization chart and deep down within the bureaucracy,” Professor Rudalevige said. “They’ve been very consistent from Day 1 in learning the lessons of previous administrations and pushing those tactics to the limit.”

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White House attorneys are quite capable of coming up with creative legal arguments. The problem, though, is that judges aren’t willing to reward their creativity.

President Bush’s top advisers are not immune from congressional subpoenas, a federal judge ruled Thursday in an unprecedented dispute between the two political branches.

House Democrats called the ruling a ringing endorsement of the principle that nobody is above the law.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge John Bates said there’s no legal basis for Bush’s argument and that his former legal counsel, Harriet Miers, must appear before Congress. If she wants to refuse to testify, he said, she must do so in person. The committee also has sought to force testimony from White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten.

“Harriet Miers is not immune from compelled congressional process; she is legally required to testify pursuant to a duly issued congressional subpoena,” Bates wrote. He said that both Bolten and Miers must give Congress all non-privileged documents related to the firings.

Because I know this is the first question on the minds of many political observers, I should note that Bates was appointed to the federal bench by none other than George W. Bush. Indeed, Bates has, in general, been a Bush administration ally (he threw out Valerie Plame’s suit against Karl Rove, for example).

But not today. Bates wrote that “the Executive’s current claim of absolute immunity from compelled congressional process for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it “very good news for anyone who believes in the Constitution of the United States and the separation of powers, and checks and balances.”

So, what happens now?

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The Department of Justice's inspector general has finally released its report (434 pg pdf) on the FBI's involvement in detainee interrogations in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Reuters reports that the "Bush administration's top security officials ignored FBI concerns" and that the "FBI, alarmed by interrogation techniques such as the use of snarling dogs and forced nudity, clashed with the Defense Department and CIA over their use." Please do dig into the document and let us know in the comments any parts that may merit more attention. Emptywheel noticed already that "this report does not and cannot discuss the issues that OLC, Condi Rice, and John Ashcroft apparently faced tells you what we need to know about torture." Hmmm?

Also, David Kurtz notes that:

The IG's report has been delayed in part because the Pentagon slow-rolled its review of the report for classified information.

FBI Director Robert Mueller testified to Congress last month that he had "reached out" to the Pentagon and the Department of Justice "in terms of activity that we were concerned might not be appropriate -- let me put it that way." But it was clear from his testimony that the Justice Department's essentially unilateral legalization of torture had prevented the FBI from investigating the abuses its agents witnessed.

For those interested, here is Chairman Conyers' response (via email, after the jump)

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John Yoo may no longer be in the Bush administration, but his arguments for letting administration officials break the law when they think they should have apparently lingered inside the Justice Department.

The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law.

The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees.

While the Geneva Conventions prohibit “outrages upon personal dignity,” a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgments.

Case-by-case judgments, of course, opens the door pretty wide. It creates a legal dynamic in which interrogators can utilize illegal methods on detainees, and the administration prefers that they have a certain “flexibility” (my word, not theirs).

“The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act,” said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public.

In other words, “Torture for bad reasons isn’t the same thing as torture for good reasons. On the prior, the law matters. On the latter, not so much.”

  About a week ago, Attorney General Michael Mukasey was talking up the Bush administration’s surveillance efforts, and raised a few eyebrows when he got choked up while discussing 9/11 and telecom immunity.

But as my friend Sarabeth explained to me yesterday, it was the comments right before Mukasey got emotional that are probably the most important.

Officials “shouldn’t need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that’s the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that’s the call that we didn’t know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went.”

At that point in his answer, Mr. Mukasey grimaced, swallowed hard, and seemed to tear up as he reflected on the weaknesses in America’s anti-terrorism strategy prior to the 2001 attacks. “We got three thousand. . . . We’ve got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn’t come home to show for that,” he said, struggling to maintain his composure.

The AG’s argument seemed pretty straightforward: a terrorist suspect called the United States shortly before 9/11. If we’d known about that call in time, we might have been able to prevent the attacks. Therefore, it’s dangerous — indeed, it could be deadly — to subject the Bush administration to safeguards and oversight when it comes to surveillance.

There are two main problems with this. First, the argument is completely incoherent. Second, it’s almost certainly premised on a transparent falsehood.

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They tried to "un-torture" the 9/11 terror detainees in an attempt to "ensure that the data would not be tainted by allegations of torture or illegal coercion" so they can seek the death penalty against them.

WaPo: ‘Cleansing’ the case

Prosecutors and top administration officials essentially wanted to cleanse the information so that it could be used in court, a process that federal prosecutors typically follow in U.S. criminal cases with investigative problems or botched interrogations. Officials wanted to go into court without any doubts about the viability of their evidence, and they had serious reservations about the reliability of what the CIA had obtained for intelligence purposes.

"It was the product of a lot of debate at really high levels," one official familiar with the program said. "A lot of people were involved in concluding that it may not be the saving grace, but it would put us on the best footing we could possibly be in. You can't erase what happened in the past, but this was the best alternative." [...]

John D. Hutson, a retired Navy rear admiral and former judge advocate general. "Once you torture someone, it is hard to un-torture them. The general public is going to be concerned about the validity of the testimony." ...(read on)

Nicole has more on why here:

A quick trial under military rules, and a speedy execution, is the only long-shot hope for Bush and Cheney for making the worst of the torture nightmare that they’ve created go away.

  Attorney General Michael Mukasey has been kind enough to share some fascinating insights with the House Judiciary Committee on an administration that believes it can immunize itself from law breaking. Seriously.

Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) asked if Mukasey was prepared to prosecute admitted instances of administration-ordered torture. No, the AG said, because the Justice Department decided it was legal.

In the same hearing, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) pointed out that the president had authorized an unlawful warrantless wiretapping program, and inquired as to whether this was an example of the president breaking the law. Mukasey said it couldn't be against the law, because the Justice Department decided otherwise.

David Kurtz explains exactly what Mukasey argued before lawmakers today.

We have now the Attorney General of the United States telling Congress that it’s not against the law for the President to violate the law if his own Department of Justice says it’s not.

It is as brazen a defense of the unitary executive as anything put forward by the Administration in the last seven years, and it comes from an attorney general who was supposed to be not just a more professional, but a more moderate, version of Alberto Gonzales....

President Bush has now laid down his most aggressive challenge to the very constitutional authority of Congress. It is a naked assertion of executive power. The founders would have called it tyrannical. His cards are now all on the table. This is no bluff.

Quite right. I’d only add that this entirely accurate description of the administration’s breathtaking abuse of power is the natural conclusion of the Bush gang’s self-immunization philosophy.

I'm sure (well, not really) that it's just a coincidence that as the FISA/telecom immunity debate comes to a head, the journalist who helped bring Bush and Cheney's illegal domestic spy program to light has just been subpoenaed.

Jon Perr has a most excellent write-up about it:

That cheering sound you may have heard this morning was conservatives' applauding the news that New York Times reporter James Risen has been subpoenaed in an effort to force him to reveal his confidential sources. But while Republican rage may be temporarily muted over the inquiry into Risen's 2006 book, many on the right won't be satisfied until Risen goes to jail for his cardinal offense, revealing President Bush's illegal domestic surveillance program.

The subpoena James Risen received from a federal grand jury last week did not concern his 2005 reporting on the NSA domestic spying program. Instead, the Justice Department wants Risen to divulge his sources for a chapter on Iran's nuclear program in his 2006 book, State of War. In it, Risen describes CIAs unsuccessful efforts during the Clinton and Bush administrations to infiltrate the Iranian nuclear program. ... (do read on)

Lest anyone be confused, this is quite the opposite situation from when former NYT pseudo-reporter/White House shill, Judy Miller, was subpoenaed and went to jail for failing to reveal her sources in the CIA leak case. In her case she was refusing to name White House officials who were involved in government wrongdoing in which she had a role. In James Risen's case, he exposed government wrongdoing that had been shrouded in secrecy, which is quite simply the most meritorious and patriotic deed a journalist can do, and is exactly why the fourth estate deserves to have a federal shield law to prevent government retaliation for exposing their crimes.

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Dan Abrams offers this update to last week's Bush League Justice series. DoJ Voting Chief John Tanner resigned last last week after his unbelievably stupid comments about minority lifespans and how voting rights laws discriminated against whites made it too difficult for even the Bush adminstration to wave off. But fear now, like most loyal Bushies, Tanner is not gone so much as he is pushed further into the shadows of a lower profile position with the DOJ.

And where has Mr. "Minorities Die Sooner" Tanner been moved to? The Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices. Oh, I bet he'll just be great at that job.