From the Washington Independent:
Obama DOJ Defies Federal Judge
“A heated confrontation is brewing between the Obama administration and the federal judiciary.
Late on Friday, the Justice Department’s lawyers filed a brief with a federal district court in California challenging the court’s power to carry out its own order. The government lawyers insisted that the court has no right to make available to the opposing lawyers in the case a classified document regarding the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, even though the document is critical to the lawsuit, the lawyers can obtain the necessary top-secret security clearances, and the document would not be released publicly.
As TWI reported on Friday, the case of Al-Haramain v. Obama presents one of the first direct challenges by a victim of the Bush National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program against government officials. But the government has argued vigorously to have the case dismissed, invoking the so-called “state secrets privilege” to refuse to turn over information about the program, and has refused to provide the organization’s lawyers use of a document that reportedly reveals that Al Haramain was one of the program’s victims. Although U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker has repeatedly rejected the Justice Department’s argument, DOJ lawyers filed an emergency appeal; on Friday afternoon, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected it.”
(snip)
“In other words, the government lawyers threatened to physically remove the document from the court files if the Judge insists that he has the right — as he already ruled he has — to allow Al-Haramain’s lawyers to see it.
“It’s a not-so-thinly veiled threat to send executive branch authorities (the FBI? the Army?) to Judge Walker’s chambers to seize the classified material from his files!” wrote Jon Eisenberg, Al-Haramain’s lawyer, in an e-mail on Saturday. “In my view, that would be an unprecedented violation of the constitutional separation of powers. I doubt anything like it has happened in the history of this country.”
The stand-off centers on who has the power to decide whether classified information must be made available to someone outside of the government. The Justice Department insists that only the director of the relevant executive agency has that power; and in this case, the Director of the National Security Agency has decided that Al-Haramain and its lawyers should not be allowed to see the classified document, because they don’t have a “need to know” the information it contains.
In fact, it’s clear that in order for Al-Haramain to pursue its case against the government, its lawyers need at the very least the sealed document that indicates they were wiretapped. Indeed, it’s the only known evidence that indicates that the Islamic charity was wiretapped without a warrant; without it, the organization and its lawyers don’t have standing to sue the government.”
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I must resist making the sarcastic joke about campaign promises of “Change!” because I think this continuation of Bush-totalitarianism-government-tactics is just the beginning.
Posted by Vixen as News at 7:00 PM CDT