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Goldsmith vs. Lichtblau: It's payback time

By Mark Obbie

In his book last year, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration, former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith recounts a "friendly" introductory chat over coffee he had with The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau. The meeting, requested by Lichtblau, ends with Goldsmith lying to Lichtblau to avoid spilling national security secrets that the reporter asked about -- and then his anger over being subpoenaed to testify in the Justice Department's leak investigation over the Lichtblau-Risen stories. Goldsmith never comes out and says it, but his message is clear: He was sandbagged by that old reporter trick of suckering in a potential source with small talk, and then sneakily coming to the real point of the conversation. Nearly four years after that uncomfortable face-to-face encounter, Goldsmith has now paid Lichtblau back with a savage review of Lichtblau's book Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice. More precisely, the savagery is directed comprehensively at Lichtblau's body of work at the Times in breaking stories that the administration didn't want told. Oddly, the review is in the new issue of The New Republic, appearing nearly four months after Lichtblau's book was published. Perhaps Goldsmith, who burned some bridges with the administration with his own revelations, was playing it safe and clearing what he would write, as he implies that he is walking up to the line that prevents him from disclosing what he learned with a high-level security clearance.If Lichtblau harbored the same ill will toward Goldsmith all these years, it didn't show in his book, where he calls Goldsmith "widely admired" and portrays him as a principled player facing off against overly secretive, rule-bending terror warriors in the post-9/11 scramble to tailor American intelligence operations to a new kind of war. The two books seemed of a piece to me when I mentioned them in the context of yet another related book, Ben Wittes' Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror. And yet Goldsmith now unloads on Lichtblau for probably committing a crime for his reporting, for endangering American lives -- and, perhaps worst of all in Beltway terms, for displaying "a surprisingly thin-skinned and even self-pitying attitude toward criticism of his work." Personalities, payback, and politics aside, Goldsmith's bottom line comes out nearly identical to Lichtblau's: criticizing the administration for "genuinely excessive" secrecy and defensiveness. Goldsmith remains true to the themes and principles displayed in his valuable book, but uses the TNR review to explain more about his discomfort with transparent government and an activist press. In the process, he's reminding his admirers on the left and in the press that Bush administration critics come in more than one flavor.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on July 31, 2008 (boomark / email).