This afternoon on MSNBC’s Hardball, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) endorsed House Judiciary Committee Chariman John Conyers’ pledge to hold hearings into the torture techniques authorized by the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel. Asked by host Chris Matthews if she believed Judge Jay Bybee “should go” because of his role in authoring the OLC torture memos, Wasserman Shultz said that she believed the government needed to take a “first things first approach,” but said “it doesn’t look very good”:

MATTHEWS: Should we ask Jay Bybee to retire form the court out at the 9th circuit? He’s one of the ones who approved it and sits on the federal bench. Should he go?

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Well, I think we need to take a first things first approach, taking a look at who exactly was responsible for these memos. Where was it initiated. We need to go through the process. And you’re still innocent until proven guilty in America, but it doesn’t look very good.

Wasserman Schultz also said she would not rule out prosecuting former President Bush or Vice President Cheney. Watch it:

Please join our campaign calling on Congress to begin impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee.

In a letter to President Obama today, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) asked him to resist prosecuting Bush administration officials who wrote legal memos authorizing torture. “Pursuing such prosecutions would, we believe, have serious negative effects,” wrote the three senators.

Acknowledging that the Office of Legal Counsel memos were “deeply flawed,” the three senators claim that they have always been “strongly opposed” to torturous interrogation tactics like waterboarding:

We disagree, however, with Administration statements suggesting that the lawyers who provided such counsel may now be open to prosecution. Some of the legal analysis included in the OLC memos released last week was, we believe, deeply flawed. We have also strongly opposed the overly coercive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that these memos deemed legal. We do not believe, however, that legal analysis should be criminalized, as proposals to prosecute government lawyers suggest.

The idea that Lieberman would sign his name to a letter claiming that he has always been “strongly opposed” to waterboarding is surprising. In fact, just two days ago, he told Fox News that in some situations “we ought to be able to use something like waterboarding“:

Q: First of all, is waterboarding torture?

LIEBERMAN: Well, I take a minority position on this. Most people think it’s definitely torture. The truth is, it has mostly a psychological impact on people. It’s a terrible thing to do. … I want the president of the United States in a given circumstance where we believe somebody we’ve got in our control may have information that could help us stop an attack, an imminent attack on the United States like 9/11 or, god forbid, worse, we ought to be able to use something like waterboarding.

Watch it:

In the past, Lieberman has defended the use of waterboarding in select situations. “You want to be able to use emergency tech to try to get the information out of that person,” said Lieberman, adding that “it is not like putting burning coals on people’s bodies. The person is in no real danger. The impact is psychological.”

Yesterday, President Obama said he would support a “bipartisan” congressional commission examining the Bush administration’s torture program. The Washington Post’s Dan Balz reports that this development followed weeks of “vigorous” debate inside the White House. Obama reportedly rejected a 9/11-style national commission because he thought it would “ratchet the whole thing up”:

There was, according to a senior official, considerable support among Obama’s advisers for the creation of a 9-11 Commission-style investigation as an alternative to releasing the Justice Department memos. But Obama quashed it. “His concern was that would ratchet the whole thing up,” the official said. “His whole thing is, I banned all this. This chapter is over. What we don’t need now is to become a sort of feeding frenzy where we go back and re-litigate all this.”

According to Balz, Obama was “reluctant to give a presidential imprimatur to a national commission that would keep the controversy alive for months and months and months.” Instead, Obama chose to release the OLC torture memos. Multiple members of Congress have signaled they will try to move forward on a commission.

On Monday, the New York Times confirmed that in December 2005, its Washington bureau chief, Philip Taubman, “met with a group of Congressional leaders familiar with the eavesdropping program, including Ms. Harman. They all argued that The Times should not publish” its story on the National Security Agency’s wiretapping. So who are those other “Congressional leaders”? CQ’s David Nather tries to narrow down the possibilities:

But during the period before the NSA program became public, the members of the Gang of Eight would have included House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.; Nancy Pelosi, initially the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, and later the House minority leader; Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.; Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and later Harry Reid, D-Nev., the Senate minority leaders at the time; Senate Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan.; John D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., the ranking Democrat on Senate Intelligence; House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich.; and Harman, who replaced Pelosi as the ranking Democrat on House Intelligence after Pelosi became minority leader.

A “Democratic aide” told CQ that Pelosi wasn’t at the NYT meeting. Nather adds that GOP members of the Gang of Eight “would have had more incentive to try to kill the story, since most GOP lawmakers later said the Times jeopardized national security by running the story.”