Friday, April 24, 2009

REP. RAHM EMANUEL (D-IL): It is not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back, and in a sense of anger and retribution.

MS. IFILL: The controversy builds. At the Supreme Court, a pivotal moment in the race debate. When is it okay to take race into account? When is it discriminatory? And as the economy reels, how and why are the rules changing on credit? Who pays and who gets crunched? Covering the week: Mark Mazzetti of the “New York Times,” Dan Balz of the “Washington Post,” Joan Biskupic of USA Today, and Jeanne Cummings of Politico.

ANNOUNCER: Celebrating 40 years of journalistic excellence, live from our nation’s capital, this is “Washington Week” with Gwen Ifill, produced in association with “National Journal.”

MS. IFILL: Good evening. What started out as a curiosity a week ago morphed into a full-on Washington brouhaha this week. Any number of the questions are on the table when it comes to CIA interrogation tactics. How far did Bush administration interrogators go in grilling terrorist suspects and how far should Obama administration go to get to the bottom of it?

MS. IFILL: But liberal activists and several important Democrats see it differently. Past is prologue, they argue, and the rule of law should be paramount. Bottom line: should past actions be subject to review or retribution? Exactly how many investigations are already underway, Mark?

MR. MAZZETTI: Well, there’s the debate about having a full blown, what they call a truth condition, which would be a very public spectacle, either on the Hill or it’d be an independent commission that would first examine the CIA detention and interrogation program and bring some Bush administration and CIA officials up to testify, but could expand to the NSA warrantless wiretap program, all sorts of hot button issues in the Bush administration. And that is the concern of the Obama administration – that this thing kind of spirals out of control.

MS. IFILL: So why is it the Obama administration, Dan, the White House has seemed – they haven’t got their message very clear. It’s been kind of muddled on this this week.

MR. BALZ: Well, I think they would take issue with that. I think they would say that the president has been clear about a number of things: that it was in the public interest to release these memos, that the CIA officials who carried out the interrogation techniques should not be prosecuted. And third, that this is not a time for retribution, but a time to move on, to put this chapter behind us. But as you suggest, I think that they did get their signals cross. There were a couple of things that happened. One, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff was on TV last Sunday and he was asked about no prosecutions. He suggested that not simply the CIA officials, but also the Justice Department officials who were responsible for the legal justification should not be prosecuted. President Obama two days later took that back, and though it was where the administration seemed to have been the day the memos were released; it made it appear as though there had been a change of signals. The other thing that happened that same day that President Obama was talking about it, he was asked about some kind of commission or some kind of investigation on the Hill. And he basically said, well, if they’re going to do something, I think it would be better if they could find a way to do a bipartisan investigation –

MS. IFILL: Which seemed to open a door.

MS. CUMMINGS: Dan, as much as they weren’t able to control things for a week, how do they control their Left because the Left is pushing, it seems, very, very hard for the White House to go further than the president would like to go. So how do they manage their own political base?

MR. BALZ: It’s tougher than they thought, I think. I think that the president believed that by banning these techniques at the start of his administration that he had done something that the Left wanted done. This was a clear break from the Bush administration, a clear change of policy. But what he’s found this week is that while he would like to move on, there’re others who aren’t ready to move on and that they think a more vigorous debate and perhaps some legal jeopardy is due the people who were responsible for it. Look, he owes the Left to some extent for his winning the nomination if not the presidency. His opposition to the war in Iraq was an important part of the early appeal he had, particularly to liberal activists. They now expect some things from him. He’s trying to walk that fine line.

MR. MAZZETTI: And here’s why this is – was such a vigorous debate inside the administration last week over the release of these memos. Many people would say, we knew a lot of this stuff. It had been leaked to the press. And some of it it’d already been out. But the concern was, and this is what Dan is getting to also going forward, is once you release these and declassify these memos, you can no longer then declassify so much else about the program. So this is only the first domino that could fall in a release of new information. And that you cannot stop this from coming out. And that’s what’s going to feed it – feed into it.

MS. IFILL: In fact, the ACLU, which pushed their hand on this, is announcing tonight they’re releasing additional photo of what is considered to be torture at Guantanamo. And we saw Dick Cheney, the vice president, come out this week and say, well, if you can release the things that make us look bad, there’s other stuff that makes us look good.

MR. BALZ: Well, the former vice president, who’s been very outspoken and very critical of this administration on a number of decisions, had already sought some of these memos to explain for his own book that he’s working on. He made that clear this week that he thinks that there should be much more that would come out that would vindicate the Bush administration for approving these techniques. So you now have a situation where the Left is not happy if this stops and the Right is not happy if this stops. So you have both sides pushing against the White House. There were a lot of people, as you know, in the White House who liked the idea of a commission that they would create, which in essence would study this problem for – till 2017 maybe and – but keep it bottled up, rather than to release it, but it was the president who pushed and said, no, let’s get them out and let’s not do a commission.

MS. CUMMINGS: Could they bottle it up in the Justice Department because there is that part of the investigation going on? And if it takes criminal overtone – on criminal overtones, could they then like sink it into the Justice Department –

MR. MAZZETTI: Well, that would be – that’s – that is a real danger because right now John Durham, who’s the prosecutor investigating the tapes destruction, is looking at specific criminal activity. If you then give him a broader mandate, he then, as prosecutors do, will start digging deep into the possibility of criminal activity, doing exactly the thing that President Obama said we shouldn’t do. And who knows where that could lead. So –

MS. IFILL: We’ve never seen that happen in Washington. (Laughter.)

MR. MAZZETTI: So there is this question of could they – and I think the Left would like to see this – could they investigate things, activities, CIA interrogation methods that took place before the Justice Department approved them, therefore they would not had had legal cover and that possibly could be illegal.

MS. BISKUPIC: On that question, you’ve heard the Left talking a lot about prosecuting the lawyers who gave the advice. Have you found anybody who thinks that’s really a scenario that could unfold, when you have –

MS. IFILL: Especially when one of them is now a sitting U.S. federal judge.

MR. MAZZETTI: I think that even the people who would like to see this happen admit that it would be difficult to criminally go after people who were giving advice, even if you disagree with it, that was good faith advice to sitting president and sitting Justice Department officials. And it’d be difficult to go after them criminally. Now, as I said earlier, there’s a Justice Department review of their conduct that might have professional –

JOHN BRITTAIN, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law: This case today of the New Haven firefighters will define what the Supreme Court says about race and employment at the dawn of the new Obama administration.

KAREN TORRE, New Haven, CT Firefighters' Attorney: The government is not supposed to tell any citizen that he or she is either going to get something or be deprived of something because of the color of his skin.

MS. BISKUPIC: I think we are, Gwen, and I think that no matter what the Supreme Court does with these two big cases, we’re still really poised for something different for these two reasons. First of all, these are really good litmus test cases. You said that race comes up a lot at the court and it does, but this core civil rights issues: voting rights and employment. The other thing is you have this Roberts court that really through the years, since we’ve lost Justice O’Connor – stronger and stronger against taking race into account at all. And then meanwhile – so you have the Roberts court poised to move more to the right and then you have the new Obama administration, led by the nation’s first African-American attorney general for the Justice Department who on the day that this firefighters case was argued was formally presented to the Supreme Court as just – as I say, as a kind of a formality. But think of what he did last February. He issued this call to arms essentially saying that we’re essentially a nation of cowards, I think was his line, that we’re afraid to talk about race. So here he is. Here’s also our first African-American president and that sort of changes –

MS. BISKUPIC: He is now the swing vote on race. That’s for sure. And he is different from Justice Kennedy on this. You remember a few years ago, we had the Michigan academic admissions case for university diversity. And Justice O’Connor was the swing vote there to allow race to be considered in admissions for the law school at the University of Michigan. She leaves the court and Justice Kennedy becomes the swing vote in the opposite direction on a school case having to do with student assignments in Louisville and the Seattle areas. He is – everyone thinks of him as just a simple replacement for O’Connor in terms of this kind of swing vote, but he always has been more suspicious of government policies that took race into account for minorities as a group. This is – what we’re talking about here is not an individual who could say, I was the victim of discrimination. It’s more a group remedy. So I definitely see this court being much more tipping to the right, although Justice Kennedy is very much of a handwringer and I don’t think he likes this position of being the one who would change things –

MS. IFILL: We got time for a quick one.

MS. BISKUPIC: Okay, 1965 voting rights landmark law that enabled lots of people to go to the polls. It involves a section of the law where Congress allowed the Justice Department to prescreen voting rights changes in certain states that had a bad history of discrimination. It was approved almost unanimously by the Congress. President George W. Bush signed it into law. If this court would just strike down that provision, it would be a very big deal.

MS. IFILL: Okay, well, we’ll be watching for that. It’s going to be – things are about to pick up for you, it sounds like. So what’s in your wallet? If it’s a bunch of credit cards, you may want to start reading the fine print. As the nation’s economic crisis has deepened, the rules have been changing on credit. Yesterday the president invited industry executives to the White House to chide them for late fee traps and surprise rate hikes. But he’s not the only one in Washington focusing on this issue, is he Jeanne?

MS. CUMMINGS: Precisely. They also are able to – they move dates around for when a payment is due and that can be confusing to consumers. And they end up becoming more vulnerable to some of these late – these penalty fees. So those are just a few, but they come up with many ways of sort of squeezing more money out of their customers. Now, the biggest sign that this issue has come of age was when the Fed last year decided that it was going to step in and look into imposing some new regulations on the industry. And they put out a notice for a public comment period – standard operations in government, but let’s face it, this is the Fed. Who – whatever they – (Cross talk.)

MS. CUMMINGS: Well, what the Fed – and keep in mind, when the Fed did what it did last year, the industry thought it was appalling. They thought it was absolutely horrible. Now it is – it’s really fine with them. (Laughter.) What Congress and the White House would want to do would be to institute more consumer protections and take some of the Fed regulations and make them even harder on the industry. For instance, the Fed regulations don’t deal with giving credit cards to college students. This is something Congress cares very much about and the White House does too. So that would likely be in legislation. The Fed –

MS. IFILL: As a good thing or a bad thing?

MS. CUMMINGS: Right. (Laughs.) They might actually force the credit card companies to consider the students’ ability to pay off the debt before issuing the credit card. This might be.

MS. CUMMINGS: Most of them would be – take their standard course to go into effect. They have attached a few – in the House at least, they attached some early triggers on a few of the provisions, but as it is right now, the Fed’s new regulations would not take effect until next summer. And so Congress is trying to find a way to move the process along more quickly.

MR. MAZZETTI: Right. And so the question is, is this just sort of political theater. It’s always easy. Beat up the credit card companies like you could beat up the tobacco companies and there’s no political downside, or is there – is President Obama making this issue and is he going to use a lot of capital on this?