Jane Mayer, who did such crucial work showing how the Bush Administration chose torture in preference to a more effective, legal interrogation approach, now does similar work explaining that a similar choice of an illegal and ineffective approach over a legal one lies behind the Thomas Drake leak. As she describes–relying largely on interviews with [...]

According to Josh Gerstein, DOJ decided not to charge anyone in the illegal wiretap leak probe. The Justice Department has dropped its long-running criminal investigation of a lawyer who publicly admitted leaking information about President George W. Bush’s top-secret warrantless wiretapping program to The New York Times – disclosures that Bush vehemently denounced as a [...]

I’m as fascinated by the timing of Thomas Tamm’s story about his role in breaking the illegal domestic spying story as by any of the details in the story. It will sure make it harder for Vaughn Walker to accept the Administration’s representations that the Attorney General has found this program legal when Tamm quotes two DOJ lawyers who told him it was illegal.