When President Bush returns from this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Sydney, Australia, he is expected to announce his choice to replace disgraced former attorney general Alberto Gonzales. Many media accounts describe Acting Attorney General Paul Clement as a leading candidate, and several experts believe that, in fact, “the president plans to leave in Clement indefinitely.”

Clement is a former member of the far right-wing Federalist Society, and is “a movement conservative across the board…[a] true believer on the issues that drive the Bush administration.” Moreover, Clement lied to the Supreme Court about the Bush administration’s torture policies mere hours before the exposure of abuse at Abu Ghraib:

When Clement appeared before the Supreme Court on behalf of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the Jose Padilla case on April 28, 2004, skeptical justices asked him about the risk that a detainee like Padilla might be abused while in custody. Clement’s response: “Where the government is on a war footing … you have to trust the executive to make the kind of quintessential military judgments that are involved in things like that.” When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that some governments engage in “mild torture” to obtain information from detainees, Clement shot back: “Well, our executive doesn’t.”

Eight hours later, CBS News aired the first photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib.

Yet, most major media outlets have ignored Clement’s record, instead touting him as “completely a straight shooter” who is a “just-the-facts, just-the-law kind of guy.” Even pundits that typically are more progressive refer to Clement as the “last honest, well-respected guy inside the Justice Department,” and describe his arguments before the Supreme Court as “a thing of geeky beauty.”

Clement, like Chief Justice John Roberts, is using his “skill at relationships” to convince progressives that he “has not defined his life driven by his politics or driven by his ideology.” As Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice notes, “[W]hen you have a John Roberts, a Paul Clement, who is at least willing to engage in a conversation and is respectful of both sides of an argument, lawyers tend to be taken in.”

Roberts “has made the [Supreme Court] an arm of the Republican Party.” Under Clement, the Department of Justice will be more of the same.

This entry was is filed under Lies From the Right. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.