By Jason Leopold

John Yoo, the former Justice Department attorney and author of several controversial legal opinions including the infamous “torture memo,” continues to live in a state of denial.

In an op-ed published Saturday in the Wall Street Journal, Yoo attempted to defend a handful of legal opinions he drafted in the aftermath of 9/11 that one colleague described as “either incorrect or highly questionable” and another colleague said was “sloppily reasoned.”

Yoo complained that his brief comments about waiving the First Amendment in a highly controversial Oct. 23, 2001 legal opinion released earlier this week were taken out of context by the news media.

“In portraying our answer [regarding Bush's right to ignore the Fourth Amendment], the media has quoted a single out-of-context sentence from our analysis: ‘First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.’”

Yoo said his point was simply to highlight a past judicial opinion about the inherent powers of the President at a time of war. However, the First Amendment line in the memo could have become the legal basis for the Bush administration to take action against or interfere with journalists investigating the government’s behavior or citizens protesting Bush’s war policies.

Yet in an Oct. 6, 2008, memo to the file, Stephen Bradbury, acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, called Yoo’s opinion about suspending First Amendment protections as “unnecessary” and “overbroad and general and not sufficiently grounded in the particular circumstance of a concrete scenario.”

Yoo, however, did not cite Bradbury’s criticism in his Wall Street Journal op-ed or the fact that the Bush administration late last year withdrew the legal opinions he drafted.

Instead, Yoo portrayed himself as a victim and in doing so he took aim at the Obama administration for publicly releasing the “confidential” memorandums claiming it was done to “appease” Obama’s “antiwar base.”

However, Yoo purposely failed to mention that the memos were released not to appease an antiwar base, but in response to a civil suit filed against Yoo by Jose Padilla, an American citizen identified as an enemy combatant and held in a military brig. Padilla sued Yoo claiming his memorandums led to his alleged torture by interrogators.

Yoo also failed to state that Obama’s Department of Justice is defending him in the civil lawsuit and on Friday a DOJ attorney appeared in a San Francisco federal courtroom to urge the judge presiding over the case to dismiss Padilla’s lawsuit against Yoo.

Even Jeffrey S. White, the federal judge presiding over the case, mentioned in open court Friday how Yoo’s Oct. 23, 2001 opinion that said Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures can be overridden by the president was “a pretty scary position,” the New York Times reported. 

But Yoo, who comes across as more of an advocate for Bush administration policy instead of an attorney who was supposed to provide the White House with unbiased legal advice, said he was forced to answer “unprecedented questions” during his tenure at the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that led him to draft the controversial legal opinions.

This was not reckless,” Yoo wrote in the Wall Street Journal about his work. “It was prudent and responsible.”

Not according to a still classified report by a Justice Department watchdog who reviewed Yoo’s work.

An investigation by H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, reached “damning” conclusions about numerous cases of “misconduct” in the advice from Yoo and other OLC lawyers in the Bush administration gave the White House, according to legal sources familiar with the report’s contents.

The report will likely recommend that state bar association further review Yoo’s legal work and decide whether to take disciplinary action against him, which could include disbarment, sources said.

Earlier this week, in an interview with the Orange County Register, Yoo said he doesn’t “think he would have made the basic decisions differently.” But he acknowledged that he would have polished the memos up a bit and spent more time on legal research had he known the memos would be released publicly.

“These memos I wrote were not for public consumption,” Yoo told the OC Register. “They lack a certain polish, I think – would have been better to explain government policy rather than try to give unvarnished, straight-talk legal advice. I certainly would have done that differently.”

In an apparent response to criticism of the quality of his legal opinions, which one former colleague said “appropriate caution should be exercised before relying in any respect on the memorandum as a precedent… and that the particular propositions identified should not be treated as authoritative” Yoo said:

“The thing I am really struck with is that when you are in the government, you have very little time to make very important decisions. … You don’t have the luxury to research every single thing and that’s accelerated in war time.

“You really have decisions to make, which you could spend years on. Sometimes what we forget as private citizens, or scholars, or students or journalists for sure [he laughs], is that in hindsight, it’s easier to say, ‘Here’s what I would have done.’ But when you’re in the government, at the time you make the decision, you don’t have that kind of luxury.”