We’ve known for years that when Jane Harman asked Scott Muller in 2003 whether the President had authorized torture, he basically blew her off. But we now know that Muller consulted with the White House åbout how to respond to her.

I’ve been promising to return to the way that the CIA IG Report discusses the Congressional and Executive Branch approval for the torture program.

Siobhan Gorman reports that the satellite domestic surveillance program has–finally–been killed.

Folks are worried about Jane Harman opposing satellite surveillance of Americans. They shouldn’t be.

Jason Leopold reported on and posted a late update to the ongoing torture tape FOIA exchange. If I read the latest exchange correctly, Special Prosecutor John Durham is at least identifying–and potentially making available through FOIA–a number of recent documents on the torture tape destruction.

Today’s letter does two things. First, it withdraws John Durham’s objection to Judge Hellerstein’s order that:

The government shall produce documents relating to the destruction of the

Fox gets into the irresponsible reporting act now, presenting clear evidence of legal wrong-doing as yet another gotcha of Nancy Pelosi.

Lindsey Graham says that if the Bush Administration were trying to commit a crime, then they wouldn’t brief Democrats on what they were doing. And, as it turns out, that’s precisely what the Administration did–not brief Democrats.

I can’t tell whether this WaPo piece is a thinly sourced Jane Harman hit on Pelosi. Or an incredibly crappy article asserting facts for which it has no proof.

Porter Goss and Crazy Pete Hoekstra want to claim (and some commentators are buying that claim) that Democrats are complicit in torture and that’s why Obama isn’t supporting a truth commission. But a review of the known briefing shows that they’re not as complicit as Republicans.

If the torture program began–as Michael Hayden has said–as a covert op, then it would require Bush to have notified Congress of the plan to torture before it happened. That did not happen. In fact, even according to reports from the CIA, it appears the CIA did not have its presidential finding until a year after the torture started.