Andrew McCarthy pioneered the smear campaign against Justice Department lawyers who represented Guantanamo Bay detainees as terrorist sympathizers. He now revives his smears, based on the decision of law firm King and Spaulding to drop its defense of DOMA, leading former Solicitor General Paul Clement to resign.
Which brings us to the Obama DOJ’s al-Qaeda Seven. Can we finally agree that they really are the “al-Qaeda Seven,” just like lawyers who choose to represent mobsters are commonly called “mob lawyers”? Caterwauls cascaded down upon Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, and Debra Burlingame several months back when their organization, Keep America Safe, had the temerity to apply the “al-Qaeda Seven” label to seven DOJ lawyers who volunteered their professional services to our enemies, gratis, to help them file lawsuits against the American people, challenging their detention as enemy combatants in their war against the United States.
How dare anyone suggest that volunteering to help the enemy during wartime might somehow intimate a teeny bit of sympathy for the enemy, carped Mr. Holder — having himself voluntarily filed an amicus brief on behalf of Jose Padilla, the “dirty bomber” sent to America by al-Qaeda to attempt a second wave of post-9/11 attacks. The case of Padilla (who has since been convicted in yet another terrorist plot) was just one of the many matters Holder’s firm, Covington & Burling, handled while devoting hundreds of pro bono hours to at least 17 terrorist enemy combatants.
Conor Friedersdorf dismantles this argument on the merits, but I want to focus on something else. McCarthy, who clearly admires Clement, makes a mockery here of the very reason Clement gave for resigning. In his letter, Clement wrote that he did so "out of the firmly held belief that a representation should not be abandoned because the client's legal position is extremely unpopular in certain quarters."
McCarthy's argument is has no logic--just tribalism. Because gay rights advocates pressured King and Spaulding, that means the left's defense of due process is less than heartfelt. While McCarthy makes no bones about leveling a similar accusation at Holder himself, it was of course Holder who offered a strong defense of Clement, saying "he is doing that which lawyers do when we're at our best." McCarthy omits this statement from his column, even though it was made the day before he wrote it. In order to make this accusation of hypocrisy stick, he has to ignore that some of the very people he's accusing of not being genuine in their support for due process are actually defending Clement.
This is inconvenient to McCarthy's argument, but not to his ultimate purpose, which is undermining the very principle Clement was upholding by refusing to be cowed by controversy. The absurdity of this is clear when one looks at the tasks the so-called "Gitmo bar" have taken on since joining the administration, from defending targeted killing to preventing habeas from being extended to Bagram. Have their sympathies changed? How did these terrorist sympathizers suddenly become so associated with policy positions McCarthy supports?
At base, McCarthy's hostility towards the Justice Department has always been about taking revenge for what he regards as the unfair manner in which Bush attorneys were treated by the left. This dark goal has warped and twisted this former federal prosecutor to the point where there is no argument against Obama too absurd to embrace--from the idea that Obama didn't write his own book to the belief that drone strikes are part of a stealth campaign to aid the Muslim Brotherhood. He offers no defense of Clement here, in rejecting the very principle he was attempting to preserve. At what point, one wonders, does McCarthy look in the mirror and recognize what he's become?
