{"id":2704,"date":"2024-11-20T18:48:33","date_gmt":"2024-11-20T18:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/gaetz-recess-appointment-could-be-unconstitutional-former-doj-official-who-wrote-torture-memos-warns\/"},"modified":"2024-11-20T18:48:33","modified_gmt":"2024-11-20T18:48:33","slug":"gaetz-recess-appointment-could-be-unconstitutional-former-doj-official-who-wrote-torture-memos-warns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/gaetz-recess-appointment-could-be-unconstitutional-former-doj-official-who-wrote-torture-memos-warns\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaetz recess appointment could be unconstitutional, former DOJ official who wrote torture memos warns"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The former Justice Department official who authored the post-9\/11 \u201ctorture memos\u201d cautioned that President-elect Donald Trump\u2019s nomination of former Rep. Matt Gaetz to serve as attorney general \u201cwould plunge the DOJ into a political and legal quagmire\u201d \u2014 and that a recess appointment could even be \u201cunconstitutional.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGaetz would serve the returning president better by withdrawing,\u201d wrote John Yoo, who has served in all three branches of government, in an op-ed published Wednesday<\/a> and co-written with the legal scholar Robert J. Delahunty.<\/p>\n

Yoo served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice under President George W. Bush and penned the legal memos that justified torture methods like waterboarding for prisoners detained outside the U.S.<\/p>\n

Gaetz, a Trump loyalist with few allies in Congress<\/a> and a trail of ethics probes, will face a difficult Senate confirmation for the country\u2019s top law enforcement role. The House Ethics Committee is meeting today amid pressure to release its report into him, which Democratic senators and at least one Republican have signaled an interest in seeing before the confirmation.<\/p>\n

But Trump has made clear he wants to be able to go around the Senate to appoint his Cabinet officials through a process called recess appointment, which would allow Trump, when he becomes president, to name his nominees to their roles when the Senate is out of session.<\/p>\n

That could be unconstitutional, Yoo and Delahunty argued, under the rationale of a 2014 Supreme Court case. \u201cSuch an attempt would probably be far more damaging to the administration than merely letting the Senate reject Gaetz \u2019s nomination,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The former Justice Department official who authored the post-9\/11 \u201ctorture memos\u201d cautioned that President-elect Donald Trump\u2019s nomination of former Rep. Matt Gaetz to serve as attorney general \u201cwould plunge the DOJ into a political and legal quagmire\u201d \u2014 and that a recess appointment could even be \u201cunconstitutional.\u201d \u201cGaetz would serve the returning president better by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}