Charlie Savage reports that Acting OLC head David Barron is returning to spend more time with his law students at Harvard, to be replaced by Jonathan Cedarbaum. Unlike several of the legal jobs that have turned over under this Administration, this one doesn’t appear to be tied to a fight over counter-terrorism policy.
David J. Barron, the acting head of the Justice Department’s powerful Office of Legal Counsel, will step down next month and be replaced by one of his current deputies, Jonathan G. Cedarbaum, the department said Thursday.
Mr. Barron has run the office, which advises the president and executive branch whether proposed actions would be lawful, since January 2009. He is returning to Harvard Law School, which limits tenured professors to two years of leave, and he said in an interview that wants to move back to Massachusetts before the start of the school year because he has three young children.
And so we move on to yet another Acting head of the OLC that has been in place since the last Senate-confirmed head of the OLC–Jack Goldsmith–left six years ago.
Savage notes that Cedarbaum is one of the lawyers Liz “BabyDick” Cheney targeted in a witch hunt of all the Obama Administration lawyers who had ever represented a Gitmo detainee.
Mr. Barron’s replacement, Mr. Cedarbaum, came to public attention earlier this year after Fox News named him as one of several Justice Department lawyers who had previously advocated for detainees.[snip]
At a partner at the WilmerHale law firm, he was one of several lawyers whose name appeared on a Supreme Court brief in a case involving six Algerian detainees who had been arrested in Bosnia, and who were seeking a right to a habeas-corpus hearing.
Which means both the Acting Solicitor General, Neal Katyal, and the Acting Assistant Attorney General for OLC are among those who defended our legal system by representing detainees. (Of course, Eric Holder himself represented some terrorist supporters, but the board of Chiquita are a bunch of rich white Republican terrorist supporters who don’t offend BabyDick in the least.)