She just wishes it wasn’t in this way, for this reason:
… the Obama administration — in the case brought by two American lawyers and their charity-client claiming that their conversations were illegally intercepted by the Bush administration — has announced that it intends to try to appeal, yet again, in order to prevent the court from hearing the lawsuit. On Friday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Obama’s request to stay the District Judge’s Order, which had held that it will review a classified document that the plaintiffs claim proves they were subjected to the illegal eavesdropping (thus conferring standing on the plaintiffs to challenge the legality of Bush’s NSA program), and also ordered the Obama administration to provide security clearances to the plaintiffs’ lawyers so that they could review the document as well. The Obama DOJ immediately announced they intend to try to appeal again — the third time, since Obama’s Inauguration, that the Obama DOJ will try to argue before a court that the case should not heard at all.
In the meantime, though, the Obama DOJ is now refusing to comply with the Judge’s order, actually arguing to the court that only the President can decide whether classified information can be used in a court proceeding, and that courts have no power to make such decisions. Here is the remarkable description of Obama’s actions by The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Bob Egelko:
Read the rest and sigh with me here … gotta hope like hell that Obama doesn’t win this one.
UPDATE: From Matt Browner Hamlin –
The similarities between the Obama administration’s response to the 9th Circuit Court’s ruling in the Al-Haramain case, requiring the government to turn over classified information and the legal views espoused under the Bush-Cheney administration by the likes of John Yoo and David Addington are simply stunning.
Read the whole thing here
mirabile dictu 