Yesterday, Sens. Whitehouse and Durbin sent a response letter back to acting Assistant Attorney General M. Faith Burton regarding some unusual maneuvering between former AG Mukasey, OPR and OLC.

So unusual that Whitehouse and Durbin spell it out exactly why this is outside the norms of usual DOJ procedure in black and white in their letter.

Within the Beltway, that’s what I like to call stating the obvious. 

Because the oblivious Villagers don’t always understand why it ought to be obvious to them that it might be either illegal, wrong, a cover-up or worse.

Ethics and rule of law are a lost art, I fear.

Marcy hit this a bit yesterday, but I wanted to focus on a single paragraph from the Whitehouse/Durbin letter, because it smells so much like CYA (PDF) that it needs magnification:

Your letter does not indicate whether Stephen Bradbury was recused from reviewing and providing comments on the draft report. Mr. Bradbury, who was then Principle Deputy Assistant Attorney General of OLC, is reportedly a subject of the OPR investigation. As such, it would appear to be a conflict of interest for Mr. Bradbury to review and comment on the OPR memorandum on the OLC’s behalf. We note that on January 15, 2009, Mr. Bradbury issued a "Memorandum for the Files" criticizing OLC opinions issued in 2001-2003. He wrote that the January 15th memorandum and a previous memorandum were not "intended to suggest in any way that the attorneys involved in the preparation of the opinions in question did not satisfy all applicable standards of professional responsibility." If Mr. Bradbury did review the OPR report, this could have improperly influenced the opinions he expressed on OLC’s behalf in the January 15th memorandum, particularly his decision to emphasize that the authors of discredited OLC opinions on detainee issues had not necessarily violated their professional responsibilities.

Smells like CYA to me. Of course, it has for a while. You?

(btw, I thought this mock-up of the Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit” lyrics was hilarious. The misheard lyrics crack me up. But it may just be my cold drugs…so caveat emptor on the YouTube.)