January 6, 2009 9:40 a.m. EST
Washington, D.C. (AHN) - President-elect Barack Obama announced his choice for senior posts, including the number two spot, at the Justice Department on Monday. The appointments, according to pundits, signal a break from the Bush administration's anti-terror policies.
David Ogden, who heads the presidential transition team's agency review of the Justice Department, was named deputy attorney general. He served as assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's civil division under the Clinton administration, and is currently a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr.
Elena Kagan, dean of Harvard Law School, has been tapped to be the first woman solicitor general. She was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School the same time Obama also taught constitutional law at the university. The 48-year-old Kagan, who served in the White House as associate counsel to the president and then as deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council under the Clinton administration, will have as her main task as solicitor general arguing for the government before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The President-elect also appointed Dawn Johnsen, a critic of the Bush administration's interrogation policies, as assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, the very office that has come under controversy for issuing what have been dubbed as "torture memos."
Johnsen, who is currently a professor at Indiana University School of Law-Bloomington, recently published two articles entitled,
"Faithfully Executing the Laws: Internal Legal Constraints on Executive Power" and
"What's a President to Do? Interpreting the Constitution in the Wake of the Bush Administration's Abuses." She also served under the Clinton administration as acting head of the office of legal counsel.
Tom Perrelli, who served as counsel to former Attorney General Janet Reno, was chosen as associate attorney general. A managing partner of Jenner & Block's Washington, D.C. office, Perrelli is a recognized as one of the nation's leading media and entertainment lawyers. He graduated from Harvard Law School, magna cum laude, in 1991, where he was managing editor of the Harvard Law Review.
read:
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7013613995Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen (an outspoken critic of President George W. Bush over terrorist interrogations) was nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel, a once-anonymous corner of the department that was thrust into the spotlight after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. It issued legal opinions that approved of harsh interrogation methods on terror detainees and a classified surveillance program operated by the National Security Agency without court oversight.
Ms. Johnsen, who served in the office during the Clinton administration, has said she was "appalled" by memorandums that allowed what critics call torture of terror detainees. In comments in 2007 at a legal conference, she said: "The president of course is not above the law. Clearly what we need to do is restore OLC's tradition of independence and integrity."
Ms. Johnsen, as a professor outside the administration, worked with several former Office of Legal Counsel lawyers to promulgate a series of principles to overhaul the office. One of them was a strong preference in favor of publishing legal opinions. In recent years, the Bush administration has refused to release some of the office's opinions, calling them private advice to the president.
"These individuals bring the integrity, depth of experience and tenacity that the Department of Justice demands in these uncertain times," Obama said in a statement. "I have the fullest confidence that they will ensure that the Department of Justice once again fulfills its highest purpose: to uphold the Constitution and protect the American people. I look forward to working with them in the months and years ahead."
read:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123120462483255989.htmlfrom MoJo, Dawn Johnsen as the 'Anti-Yoo':
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2009/01/11590_obama_nominates_dawn_johnsen.htmlJohn Yoo, who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the Bush administration's Justice Department, became famous for his memos in defense of torture and his theory that the Constitution grants the president almost unlimited power during times of war. (The OLC is the part of the Justice Department responsible for providing legal advice to the executive.) Dawn Johnsen, the woman whom Barack Obama selected on Monday to run Yoo's old office*, published an article in 2007 entitled "Faithfully Executing the Laws: Internal Legal Constraints on Executive Power." That's quite the contrast. In a 2008 paper, "What's a President to Do? Interpreting the Constitution in the Wake of the Bush Administration's Abuses," (PDF) she writes that the Bush administration's disregard for the law should be the exception, not the rule, going forward:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2009/01/www.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/bulr/documents/JOHNSEN.pdf The lesson we should draw from the Bush administration is not that we should dramatically alter our understanding of longstanding presidential authorities. Rather, it is the urgent need for more effective safeguards and checks from both within and without the executive branch to preclude any future recurrence of the Bush administration’s appalling abuses.If you delve further into Johnsen's work, the contrast with Yoo gets even sharper; she directly criticizes his legal theories. In the 2007 paper, she wrote:
http://www.uclalawreview.org/articles/content/54/ext/pdf/6.1-3.pdf Yoo remains almost alone in continuing to assert that the Torture Opinion was “entirely accurate” and not outcome driven.
One way to test Yoo’s claim is to consider whether OLC would have written the opinion in the same manner if the President had preferred to receive an OLC opinion that concluded the federal anti-torture statute actually did tie his hands. What if the question had come, for example, from an administration that was truly committed to treating all detainees lawfully and humanely but was under pressure from members of Congress who believed the President was not tough enough—who insisted that having the legal authority to cross the line into torture when questioning suspected al Qaeda leaders was in the United States’ national security interests? It is inconceivable that, in those counterfactual circumstances, OLC would have written the opinion as it did, interpreting the meaning of “torture” so narrowly or crafting the implausible defenses of necessity and self-defense. Even if written by the same lawyers—lawyers committed to an aggressively expansive theory of presidential authority—and even if it had reached the same ultimate conclusion, the reasoning and the issues addressed undoubtedly would have differed substantially.Johnsen was essentially calling Yoo out and politely accusing him of not telling the truth. Later in her analysis of Yoo's torture opinion, Johnsen writes that it "only makes sense as an advocacy piece, tailored to an administration that, as Yoo described it, 'wanted the maximum flexibility for the president to win the war,' including the flexibility to act counter to statutory constraints." That's a nice way of saying that Yoo tailored his legal opinion to allow the president to break the law.
But it's not just Yoo whom Johnsen disagrees with. There's also some evidence that she may not see eye to eye with her future boss on one policy matter . . .
read more:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2009/01/11590_obama_nominates_dawn_johnsen.html"Outrage at the Latest OLC Torture Memo," by Johnsen:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/convictions/archive/2008/04/03/outrage-at-the-latest-olc-torture-memo.aspx 
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