WASHINGTON — Former Bush administration officials are launching a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign to urge Justice Department leaders to soften an ethics report criticizing lawyers who blessed harsh detainee interrogation tactics, according to two sources familiar with the efforts.
In recent days, attorneys for the subjects of the ethics probe have encouraged senior Bush administration appointees to write and phone Justice Department officials, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is not complete.
A draft report of more than 200 pages, prepared in January before Bush’s departure, recommends disciplinary action by state bar associations against two former department attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel who might have committed misconduct in preparing and signing the so-called torture memos.
State bar associations have the power to suspend a lawyer’s license to practice or impose other penalties.
The memos offered support for waterboarding, slamming prisoners against a wall and other techniques that critics have likened to torture. The documents were drafted between 2002 and 2005.
The sweeping investigation, now in its fifth year, could shed new light on the origins of the memos.
Investigators rely in part on e-mail exchanges between Justice Department lawyers and lawyers at the CIA who sought advice about the legality of interrogation practices that have since been abandoned by the Obama administration.
Two of the authors, Jay Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge in Nevada, and John Yoo, now a law professor in Southern California, faced a deadline of Monday to respond to investigators.
Attorneys for both men did not immediately return phone calls or e-mail messages.
The attorneys for the men, Maureen Mahoney and Miguel Estrada, had been trying to garner support for their clients by contacting former senior Justice Department officials to prevail upon their successors in the Obama administration, sources said.
Legal experts on both sides of the political aisle have cast doubt on the likelihood of wide-scale criminal probes, but neither President Barack Obama nor Attorney General Eric Holder has ruled out investigations of those who might have gone beyond the Justice Department’s legal advice.
