February 6, 2003 and After: Ashcroft Refuses to Promote Yoo to Head of OLC; Goldsmith Nominated

Jay Bybee, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), is stepping down to become a federal judge (see February 5, 2003). White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Vice President Cheney’s lawyer, David Addington, want OLC lawyer John Yoo to take Bybee’s place. But Attorney General John Ashcroft, miffed at Yoo’s bureaucratic maneuvers to give the White House a direct connection into the department and cut Ashcroft out of the loop, refuses. Yoo resigns in the summer of 2003 and resumes his position as a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Instead, Ashcroft and the White House will choose Jack Goldsmith to head the OLC (see October 6, 2003). Goldsmith seems a perfect replacement for Yoo—the two had coauthored one Wall Street Journal op-ed that claimed treaties were not binding on the US, and another Journal op-ed claiming that President Bush had the right to unilaterally withdraw the US from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (see May 26, 1972). Goldsmith was also a supporter of the administration’s military commissions program, noting that the need for “swift justice” was transcendant. [Savage, 2007, pp. 182]