*** Special to The BRAD BLOG
*** by Libby/CIA Leak Trial Correspondent Margie Burns

On November 29, 2005, the Boston Globe ran a nice Letter to the Editor by Mr. Ralph West of Philly, under the headline “REMOVE CANCER IN ADMINISTRATION”:

Mr. West’s concerns may now have come to fruition, The BRAD BLOG has learned, as “a Robert Bork” has emerged — in fact, Robert Bork himself — along with eleven other law professors from some of the nation’s most highly regarded law schools, and Pepperdine, to file an amici brief in the Scooter Libby perjury and obstruction of justice case in order to argue that the Special Prosecutor’s assignment to the case was unconstitutional…

Bork was the Nixon official found willing to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox during the height of the Watergate investigation, after Attorney General Elliott Richardson and DAG William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than do so. Having attained fame as the Acting Attorney General who carried out the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Bork — who had never served as a judge — was subsequently placed on the DC federal appeals court by Ronald Reagan, who then nominated him to the Supreme Court, with some ensuing unpleasantness. The noise machine has turned Bork into a symbol of constitutional ‘conservatism’ martyred — ‘borked’ — by liberals.

While Bork and friends can’t fire the Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald in the CIA leak matter, their brief argues to Judge Reggie Walton that they believe “the constitutionality of Special Counsel Fitzgerald’s appointment presents a close question.”

Quick note: a “close question” apparently means one that has a chance of winning on appeal. For the bail hearing for Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby — Thursday June 14 — Libby’s attorneys must argue that the issues for appeal are substantive and not just a way to postpone imprisonment. This “friends of the court” brief is offered to help the defendant.

— The brief brief may be downloaded here [PDF]

The profs filing this amici curiae brief are Vikram Amar of the U of California, prominent West Coast go-to interviewee for media inquiries about high-profile legal cases; Alan M. Dershowitz and a Harvard Law colleague, Richard D. Parker; Viet D. Dinh and fellow Georgetowner Randy E. Barnett; Douglas W. Kmiec and Robert J. Pushaw of Pepperdine; Gary Lawson of Boston U; Earl M. Maltz of Rutgers; Thomas Merrill of Columbia; and Robert F. Nagel of Colorado. Rounding out the apostolic twelve is Robert H. Bork.

Counsel for the group is attorney Christopher J. Wright of the DC law firm Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis.

Bork, now living in Arlington, Virginia, is retired from Yale Law; seven of the others have endowed chairs, including Dershowitz; and one is a Distinguished Professor.

The group is not narrowly partisan — Dershowitz, for example, has donated to Dems running for office — but it does have a pronounced leaning toward the barking pro-war, military-and-security-complex range of the political spectrum. Professor Viet Dinh, of Georgetown, was among chief framers of the USA PATRIOT Act and then went to ChoicePoint as an advisor on the company’s federal homeland security contracts. Among other affiliations, he sits on the board of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and was on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Transition Committee. In 2006, with Whitewater prosecutor Ken Starr, he challenged the constitutionality of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requiring corporations to provide fuller accounting of executive compensation via stock options; he also wrote in favor of dismissing espionage charges against two AIPAC lobbyists in another leak case. During the out-of-power Nineties Dinh was an attorney for the Senate Whitewater investigation of the Clintons and was Special Counsel to Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) in Clinton’s impeachment.

On October 27, 2005 ““ the day before the grand jury indicted Lewis Libby ““ Dinh co-authored a commentary in the Wall Street Journal against appointing special prosecutors.

Some members of the group would seem to lean toward an authoritarian model of First Among Equals. Professor Douglas Kmiec, holder of an endowed chair at Pepperdine, was Reagan’s head of the Office of Legal Counsel and helped develop Reagan’s use of ‘signing statements,’ now used with unprecedented frequency by Bush.

One could not accuse the profs of paper-churning or time-wasting. At a scant five pages, this must be one of the shortest briefs on record, especially for twelve law professors. The U.S. Attorney’s office, through spokesman Randall Samborn, says it has no comment on the brief at this time.

I am not an attorney, and have no credentials whatever in law ““ having taken one course in Constitutional Law, in a university rather than a law school, and only for personal interest.

So I am limiting myself to the eminent professors’ shortest and simplest statements, below, each set forth by the profs merely as fact, not argued:

This kind of thing is difficult for a non-lawyer to understand. If they mean that the Special Counsel appointment did not come from Congress or from the Justice Department but sprang up somehow outside the basket, and hopped in — on December 30, 2003 [PDF] , when the GOP controlled both houses of Congress as well as the White House, with Bush enjoying a 57% approval rating following the capture of Saddam Hussein and looking pretty solid for reelection — you’d think people like Tom DeLay, Dennis Hastert and Orrin Hatch would have noticed.

Maybe not that day, maybe not the next day, but soon, and for the rest of their lives.

Or at least some time before the 2007 trial.

In fact, in September of 2003 Senator Hatch (R-UT) had already stopped a ‘Sense of the Senate’ amendment proposed by Chuck Schumer of New York: “Purpose: To express the sense of Congress concerning the appointment of a special counsel to conduct a fair, thorough, and independent investigation into a national security breach.”

If a GOP Congress objected even to expressing a wish for a Special Counsel, why couldn’t the Majority pull the purse strings and prevent the appointment? Why did it create the office, two months later, and find ways to keep on funding it?

The existence of the position is regularized by law, and the law came from Congress. Why doesn’t that count as “created by Congress” “with guidance” etc from Congress?

Deputy AG James Comey, in his appointment letter [PDF], cited 28 U.S.C. 509, which reads in part:

The statement that no (“such”) statement binds Special Counsel to comply with DOJ policy is also puzzling, but the brief does not go on to argue it, so maybe it doesn’t matter much.

Then there’s the statement about “28 C.F.R. Part 600.” This one seems to have been canvassed for Congress by the Government Accountability Office (GAO):

But then the amici writers seem to hold a rather pessimistic view that even the power to fire someone is insufficient control:

The gist of this argument seems to be that the new office is intrinsically uncontrolled, because a new “Saturday Night Massacre” would be politically unfeasible. You can tell where they’re headed with this — oh, for the good old days of Meese and Agnew on a balcony, soaking up the smell of tear gas from the streets below — although, with only 5 pages invested, they don’t seem too dug in about it.

Admittedly that kind of nostalgia can also be found on the other side of the aisle. As our Boston Globe letter-to-the-editor writer, Mr. West, who we began this piece with, continued…

Judge Walton permitted the filing of the amici brief, as is typical. He also inserted an atypical comment noting a hope that these interested luminaries might find a similar interest in future cases involving defendants too poor to afford the same fine counsel as Mr. Libby:

Perhaps the woman (unfortunately named Butts) who AP reports may now be facing a three-year sentence for stealing three rolls of toilet paper, would appreciate the attention of these twelve concerned and distinguished law professors.