Saturday Bolitics: Obama Hires Bush’s Legal Enemies as His Legal Team

Posted by Bossip Staff

President Obama is hiring a whole new team for legality purposes, and they just happen to be all of Bush’s old foes:

President Barack Obama is staffing his Justice Department with some of his predecessor’s fiercest critics, among them lawyers who were fired by President Bush or who quit jobs working for his administration. Now, the opposition is in charge, and lawyers who spent years defining the limits of executive power will be helping wield it. The change may be most dramatic at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — which defended some of Bush’s most controversial policies — where a small cadre of lawyers who had an outsized influence on legal criticism of Bush are taking the top three jobs. Those three — Dawn Johnsen, Martin Lederman, and David Barron — and others made the case that Bush’s interrogation policy was justified by flawed legal reasoning. Their arguments precipitated one of Obama’s most dramatic early acts: flatly repudiating all government legal advice on interrogation issued between September 11, 2001, and January 20, 2009.

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