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holder: obama does not decide who will be prosecuted

By American Girl in Italy on April 22, 2009 at 1:25 AM in Barack Obama, Current Affairs, Torture

(bumped up from Wednesday afternoon)

According to the Daily Beast, the Justice Department is “incensed” over comments made by Gibbs, Emanuel and Obama that there would be no prosecutions surrounding the so called torture memos. The issue was discussed on Morning Joe today, including the comments from the Obama administration and the Justice Department.

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Here is the scoop from the Daily Beast:

On Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, appearing on ABC’s This Week, underscored that President Obama had promised that CIA agents who acted in reliance on Bush-era Justice Department memoranda approving since-repudiated torture techniques would not face criminal investigation or prosecution. Then he went one step further, stating “those who devised the policy, he believes that they were—should not be prosecuted either.” A few hours later, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs reiterated Emanuel’s remarks as official policy. But during the course of the day on Tuesday the White House appeared suddenly to shift gears. President Obama, responding to a reporter’s question, declared that he was not prejudging a possible criminal investigation or prosecution of “those who formulated those legal decisions” behind the interrogation methods. What happened?

Members of the White House press corps struggled to explain the shift, many of them suggesting that Obama was pandering to his political base. But the winds of change blew in from an address just down Pennsylvania Avenue. The Daily Beast has learned that senior Justice Department lawyers were “incensed” at the Emanuel and Gibbs statements, as one put it—not because they disagreed with Obama’s apparent opposition to an investigation and prosecution, but because the statements violated well-established rules separating political figures in the White House from decisions about active criminal cases. The statements were viewed as a frontal assault on the autonomy and independence of the criminal-justice system. “Emanuel got far ahead of the process and described it in a way that clearly suggested that political judgment was driving the entire process,” one senior Justice official told me. “It was depressing and amateurish.”

The article goes on to detail the tangled web they have created, and what the next steps might be. The final paragraph closes with this:

Obama’s initial statement that CIA agents involved in the Bush “enhanced interrogation techniques” program would not be investigated or prosecuted was taken at the Justice Department as pushing the boundaries of political involvement in criminal law. But the statement by Emanuel, seen as a distinctly political figure, was perceived at Justice as going beyond those boundaries, according to high Justice officials. Within Justice, if Holder follows the now well-articulated views of the president and his chief of staff, the fear is that the attorney general would be viewed as a political subordinate in the mold of Alberto Gonzales. Ironically, the White House pronouncements have contributed to the momentum for a special prosecutor. That development coincides with the congressional voices now being raised for such an appointment.

If it’s true that Eric Holder is indeed incensed at the Obama administration, that would certainly explain the obvious and rapid flip flop, as seen in this video from Finkelblog:

It appears Obama opened a whole can of worms with the release of these memos. Not only does he lack the authority to decide whether there will be prosecutions or not, I assume he also put members of his own party at risk. (Feinstein and Pelosi, members of the Intel Committee…)

I would also assume that with his use of illegal wiretapping, and the continued policy of rendition, he has now opened himself up to prosecution in four years.