Political Quotes

“There has been considerable discussion on the floor about the nominee to the First Circuit, David Barron, that has hinged around his tenure in the Office of Legal Counsel and an opinion he wrote specifying the outer bounds of Presidential authority in the area of defending our national security against Americans who have signed up with organizations that do us harm. I wish briefly to bring to the attention of this Chamber that it is not the only issue with respect to David Barron and the Office of Legal Counsel. The Office of Legal Counsel has indeed had a scandal, and it is indeed related to David Barron, but it is related to David Barron in the best possible way, in that he is the one who cleaned up the scandal. The scandal in question--the Presiding Officer is a former attorney general of her State and she will understand this very clearly--the scandal in question related to the shabby opinions that were written by the Office of Legal Counsel to justify the torture program that was run by the Bush administration. When I say shabby, these were awful opinions. They were hidden from most peer scrutiny because they would not have stood up to peer scrutiny. They made errors as basic as failing to cite Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decisions right on point. There actually had been an incident in which the Department of Justice, where the Office of Legal Counsel is located, prosecuted a Texas sheriff for waterboarding victims in order to get confessions out of them.…”