John Yoo, the author of the infamous Bush Administration memos providing a bogus legal justification for torture, left the Department of Justice nearly ten years ago. Since then, he’s retained his prestigious position on Berkeley’s law school faculty. He has not been disbarred for providing some of the most incompetent legal advice in the Justice Department’s history. A 2006 law largely immunizes him from legal accountability for his work authorizing torture. And he uses the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion page as if it were his own personal blog.

In other words, when Yoo entered the Bush Administration in 2001, he was a little-known law professor writing pieces that were mostly read by other law professors. Today, he is one of the most well-known and visible legal commentators in the country — despite the fact that he is best known for what was, at best, professional incompetence.

Beyond the sheer injustice that Yoo gets to live an affluent and comfortable life despite being complicit in torture, Yoo’s lack of accountability is also providing Russia with an opportunity to chip away at America’s moral high ground as we try to pressure that nation to quit some of its human rights abuses:

Russia on Saturday banned 18 Americans from entering the country in response to Washington imposing sanctions on 18 Russians for alleged human rights violations.

The list released by the Foreign Ministry includes John Yoo, a former U.S. Justice Department official who wrote legal memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques; David Addington, the chief of staff for former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney; and two former commanders of the Guantanamo Bay detention center: retired Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and Adm. Jeffrey Harbeson.

The move came a day after the U.S. announced its sanctions under the Magnitsky Law, named for Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was arrested in 2008 for tax evasion after accusing Russian police officials of stealing $230 million in tax rebates. He died in prison the next year, allegedly after being beaten and denied medical treatment.

Now, let’s be absolutely clear, Russia’s record on human rights is atrocious and cannot be brushed away by loose comparisons to John Yoo’s actions or Dick Cheney’s. But a strong record on human rights is critical to convincing the the world that United States is serious when it calls for action against human rights abuses around the world. It is tough to offer such leadership so long as men like John Yoo go about their lives in the United States with impunity.

On July 4, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) into law. 46 years later, FOIA has been instrumental in investigations (after a few tweaks; the original bill was full of roadblocks like a copying cost of $1 per page and $7 per searching hour). Here are just a few of the things learned through FOIA:

• J. Edgar Hoover The Los Angeles Times gained access to a four-year investigation by J. Edgar Hoover into feminist groups across the country, which used informers to create dossiers of prominent women’s rights activists (which included cracks about their appearances and sexual orientation).
• The exploding Ford Pinto. In 1978, The Department of Transportation recalled the exploding Pinto, now an infamous example of cost-benefit analysis in business school textbooks, after a lawsuit compelled the DOT to release information on the faulty safety standards of the Pinto’s gas tank.
• Spiro Agnew pays up. Law students at the George Washington University forced the release of 2500 state and federal documents in a tax evasion case against disgraced former Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1981. Agnew paid back $268,482 to the state of Maryland in kickbacks. According to the students’ professor, they picked the case because ”it looked like Agnew was going to step down as vice president and suffer virtually no penalties and get to keep all his money.”
• John Yoo’s torture memos. In 2008, the ACLU successfully sued for the secret memos written by John Yoo in 2003 providing legal justification to torture prisoners to extract information. Yoo outlined presidential powers that found torture under “the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.”
• The FBI spies on peaceful Muslims.The ACLU obtained documents revealing the FBI illegally spied on peaceful Muslim organizations. From 2004 to 2008, the FBI tracked everything from mosque locations to conversations about airline travel to the sale of dates after services.

But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for FOIA. Even when Johnson signed it, he had to be “dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony,” according to then press secretary Bill Moyers. “He hated…the thought of journalists rummaging in government closets.” Over the years, officials have resisted and restricted the act by citing national security concerns. True to the tradition, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) introduced a new version of his Strengthening and Enhancing Cybersecurity by Using Research, Education, Information, and Technology Act (SECURE IT) which would create a new exemption in FOIA that allows the government to withhold any and all communication with cybersecurity centers. Considering the recent FOIA-provoked disclosure of secret surveillance letters routinely sent to tech companies by the FBI, Congress might want to rethink a blanket protection for all cybersecurity documents.

Normally, we would not let more than 48 hours pass between a major speech by the Attorney General of the United States defending targeted killings of U.S. citizens and our first discussion of this event. The speech Eric Holder gave on this topic Monday, however, does not exactly lend itself to rapid response. It presents one of the most difficult questions in national security policy — how to balance the need to react to threats quickly with the fact that quick action prevents intensive review or preemptive oversight of a commander’s decision to order a strike. And it concerns one of the most ambiguous passages in our Constitution.

Holder’s strongest point is his statement that there are ample precedents for military strikes that “target specific senior operational leaders” of hostile forces. He cites Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese commander U.S. forces killed in a targeted strike during World War II, and Osama bin Laden as two examples. Ultimately, however, Holder has to confront a more challenging legal question, what if bin Laden had been born in California, and thus was an United States citizen?

In Holder’s analysis, this question turns upon the meaning of the notoriously ambiguous Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which ensures that no person is deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Constitution’s text, however, offers little guidance on just what kind of process is “due” in a particular case. Must a court approve a targeted strike? Or Congress? Should a board of generals be convened? And just what would a review board or judge have to determine before authorizing a strike to move forward?

Holder proposes several questions that could guide this determination. The government would conduct a review to determine that the “individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States.” It would determine that “capture is not feasible” and that “the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.” Holder places the responsibility for determining whether or not these limits have been adequately addressed at the feet of the Executive Branch — and ultimately, the President himself.

As a constitutional matter, this is probably correct. Courts have historically stayed far away from tactical military decisions, and for good reason — judges are neither expert in military affairs nor equipped to review an order to execute a strike before the window of opportunity for an attack passes. Moreover, there’s nothing in the Constitution suggesting that, once Congress has given the president a broad grant to use military force against a particular enemy, that the president must go back to Congress to get new authorization to take actions that fit within the scope of that grant.

At the same time, however, any Post-Bush evaluation of the president’s wartime powers must take account of the problem of John Yoo. If President Obama has the power to authorize targeted strikes without first seeking outside approval, than so too would a less responsible president. Similarly, Yoo himself defended many of the Bush Administration’s most egregious human rights violations on the theory that the power to kill an enemy combatant must also include the power to do what you wish with them. In Yoo’s words, “death is worse than torture, but everyone except pacifists thinks there are circumstances in which war is justified. War means killing people. If we are entitled to kill people, we must be entitled to injure them.” So if the president can kill citizen combatants, why can’t he torture them?

As it turns out, there is a simple answer to this question, and you can find it right in the United States Code:

Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.

One of the most well established principles in American law — stretching at least as far back as the Supreme Court’s 1804 decision in Little v. Barreme — is that Congress has the power to forbid the president from waging war in certain ways. John Yoo was wrong in no small part because Congress said he was wrong — the president cannot ignore the law, and thus cannot authorize torture.

Ultimately, this may be the only answer for Americans who do not want their president to have the power to target other Americans. Congress may forbid the practice, or require additional review before such attacks may occur. Until they do, however, Holder’s analysis is likely a correct statement of the law.

Ninth Circuit Judge Jay Bybee, who signed an infamous memo approving the Bush Administration’s use of torture while he led the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, received $3.4 million in free legal and consulting services to help him avoid accountability for his legally and morally indefensible memo. The lion’s share of this massive gift came from Latham & Watkins, a massive corporate law firm whose clients include Koch Industries, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil, and Phillip Morris:

Latham & Watkins’ Maureen Mahon­ey took on a major assignment when she agreed to represent Jay Bybee, a federal appellate judge who was accused of violating ethics rules for his work at the U.S. Department of Justice on so-called “torture memos.” Newly released records show just how big the assignment was. . . . Nearly all the assistance, $3,251,893, came from Los Angeles-based Latham, whose lawyers used to appear before Bybee in the courtrooms of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

Its worth noting that Mahoney isn’t just any big corporate law firm attorney, she is a former law clerk to then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist and is widely considered one of the top appellate litigators in the country. Although it is common — and indeed admirable — for attorneys of this caliber to provide pro bono services, those services are typically offered to the genuinely needy and not to powerful government officials who could resign their judgeship and immediately receive a job in private practice earning a high six or seven figure salary.

Also worth noting is the fact that Miguel Estrada, another top right-wing lawyer and former Bush judicial nominee, represented Bybee’s fellow torture apologist John Yoo. As a law professor, Yoo does not have the same obligation Bybee has to disclose gifts, but it is likely that Estrada’s legal services are no less expensive than Mahoney’s, and unlikely that Yoo’s salary as a law professor pays him enough to hire Estrada on his own unless Estrada’s firm made much or all of his services available for free.

To Bybee’s credit, he is currently recusing himself from cases that Latham & Watkins participates in — an example that Justice Clarence Thomas could learn something from. Nevertheless, Mahoney’s willingness to provide hours upon hours of free legal services in order to protect a key player in President Bush’s torture policy is a frightening sign of just how far conservatives are willing to go to protect their own.

In an essay published by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, torture memo author John Yoo brings his unsurpassed ability to pretend the Constitution says whatever conservatives wish that it said to the subject of whether President Obama can issue an executive order requiring government contractors to disclose their political donations:

The proposed executive order making disclosure of political giving history a condition to being awarded a federal contract makes some of the Nixon-era “dirty tricks” look almost quaint by comparison. [...] As the Supreme Court has made clear, anonymous political speech enjoys “an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent,” and anonymity serves as a shield “against the tyranny of the majority.” Any president who seeks to undo this centuries-old American constitutional right by the fiat of an executive order would be prudent to reflect on the ultimate outcome when Richard Nixon and John Dean tried, using their infamous enemies list, to accomplish that precise objective.

If there is anyone in the universe who should think twice before criticizing a government lawyer for enabling a president to break the law, it is John Yoo. And while Yoo certainly spares no adjective in arguing that preserving the integrity of American democracy is an impeachable offense, he might also want to consider actually reading what the Supreme Court has to say about disclosure laws before drafting articles of impeachment against President Obama.

In an obscure case called Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court held that “disclosure could be justified based on a governmental interest in ‘provid[ing] the electorate with information’ about the sources of election-related spending.” President Obama’s proposed executive order provides the electorate with information about the sources of election-related spending. So Yoo’s entire argument can be rebutted in exactly two sentences.

Elsewhere in his essay, Yoo comes to the defense of poor, innocent corporations that may lose their ability to deceive their customers and investors:

After disclosure of a contribution by the retailer Target to MN Forward, a conservative Minnesota political group that supported a gubernatorial candidate who was opposed to gay marriage, proponents demanded that Target also support pro-gay candidates. Target refused. MoveOn organized a widespread boycott and flash mobs appeared at Target stores; the retailer countered by suing protesters. In the seconds it took for a Facebook video of the boycott to go viral, Target’s established reputation as a gay-friendly company was shredded. After institutional investors protested the “misalignment” between Target’s Minnesota political spending and its professed corporate values, Target announced that future political contributions would require the approval of an internal policy committee.

In other words, Target misled the public by calling itself a gay-friendly corporation, when it actually was secretly funding an anti-gay effort. Yet, because of disclosure, it was no longer able to maintain this charade and forced to end its two-faced practices. In Yoo’s twisted understanding of the world, this is a great tragedy and not a compelling argument for why disclosure laws are necessary.

Given Yoo’s role in the Bush administration’s torture policy, asking him to express a legal opinion is a bit like asking Don Draper for advice on marital fidelity. Even so, Yoo’s defense of corporate America’s power to secretly buy elections is weak even by his own tragically incompetent standards.