A day after the Justice Department released several controversial Bush-era legal opinions, the lawyer who authored many of them sat down with the Orange County Register for a Q & A. Apparently, John Yoo, a visiting professor at Chapman University School of Law, is a fan of Top 40 music, ancient literature, Southern Californian cuisine, and a gaping interpretation of the president’s wartime powers.
Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, reasoned in one opinion that the AUMF overrode statutory restrictions on the use of the military for domestic law enforcement purposes and that First Amendment speech and press rights “would potentially be subordinated to overriding military necessities."
Yoo told the Register that some of his opinions lacked a certain "polish" but that he would not have "made the basic decisions differently."
Here are a few excerpts from the Register piece:
Q. Have you done anything interesting since moving to Southern California? A. I'm getting in shape, which everyone here seems to be in. I went and joined this L.A. Sports Club down in Irvine, and Kobe Bryant works out there. I also go to Garden Grove and Westminster a lot. My wife is half-Vietnamese and I'm Korean and the ethnic diversity here is incredible. The whole food here is way better, because it's made authentically.
Q. Is there anything you would have done differently? A. These memos I wrote were not for public consumption. They lack a certain polish, I think – would have been better to explain government policy rather than try to give unvarnished, straight-talk legal advice. I certainly would have done that differently, but I don't think I would have made the basic decisions differently.
Q. Is it normal practice to give just the straight opinion? A. I think the job of a lawyer is to give a straight answer to a client. One thing I sometimes worry about is that lawyers in the future in the government are going to start worrying about, "What are people going to think of me?" Your client the president, or your client the justice on the Supreme Court, or your client this senator, needs to know what's legal and not legal. And sometimes, what's legal and not legal is not the same thing as what you can do or what you should do.
Q. Do you worry about your legacy? A. No, I don't, so much. I do have the luxury of being a scholar, so I have the time to write books. People will make their judgments about someone years or decades later. The best I can do is explain what I think and why I do what I do.
Q. The Department of Justice is looking into the legality of some of the memos you wrote. Is this a possible cost? A. I wish they weren't doing it, but I understand why they are. It is something one would expect. You have to make these kinds of decisions in an unprecedented kind of war with legal questions we've never had to think about before. We didn't seek out those questions. 9/11 kind of thrust them on us. No matter what you do, there's going to be a lot of people who are upset with your decision. If Bush had done nothing, there would be a lot of people upset with his decision, too. I understood that while we were doing it, there were going to be people who were critical. I can't go farther into it, because it's still going on right now. I'm not trying to escape responsibility for my decisions. I have to wait and see what they say.
Q. What's in your future? A. I'm writing this book that I'm still working on, just a few lines here and there, about the history of presidential powers. I'm working on another book, and I'm travelling around doing speeches and conferences. If I never serve in government again, that would be fine with me. I'm happy with my job as a professor.
Q. What's on your iPhone? A. I can't get the thing to work right now, so I don't have any music. I have a lot of books. There's an enormous amount of ancient literature that you can download for free, so that's what's on there. In terms of music, what I tend to listen to is classical music and then Top 40. Basically, there's a 400-year gap in my knowledge of music.
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