The Office of Professional Responsibility is going to be releasing a report next week on whether or not authorizing torture was illegal. The conclusion of the report was leaked today, along with a very interesting fact:
To sum up, the Office of Professional Responsibility (which is the watchdog dept for the DOJ) made a report that said Yoo and Bybee authorizing torture was illegal and would have led to them facing impeachment, disbarment, or even eventual criminal charges. Then it was reviewed by a senior DOJ official who removed that part that called it illegal and instead called it "poor judgment", which doesn't lead to disbarment or impeachment.While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.
In other words the DOJ watchdog dept concluded authorizing torture was illegal, and the DOJ covered it up.