I know a lot of people pushed their Representatives and Senators very hard not to vote to confirm Samuel Alito. I thought you might like to see the first fruits of our new Supreme Court justice.
Yesterday the WaPo published an article on page A12:
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has hired one of the architects of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft’s policies to serve as his law clerk at the Supreme Court for the rest of the current term, the court announced yesterday.
Adam G. Ciongoli, 37, a senior vice president at Time Warner Inc., served as counselor to Ashcroft from 2001 to 2003. He attended Georgetown University Law Center, clerked for Alito at the Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit from 1995 to 1996, and helped prepare the justice for his recent confirmation hearings.
Ciongoli was an aide to Ashcroft during Ashcroft’s years as a senator and then came to the Justice Department, where he advised Ashcroft on terrorism issues in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Among the issues he worked on were the detention of thousands of terrorism suspects in the United States and the use of military tribunals to try them
Ciongoli’s appointment, which will last about five months, is unusual: Though there has been a slight trend at the court toward hiring law clerks with a few years of work experience, the vast majority of clerks are recent law school graduates.
Unusual but about par for the course with this bunch. The WaPo makes it seem like Ciongoli was some kind of functionary or aide to Ashcroft. The truth of who this man is runs much, much deeper.
Ciongoli wasn’t just one of Ashcroft’s many aides. From Legal Times, October 18, 2002:
Counseling Ashcroft
The attorney general rarely makes a decision without first turning to Adam Ciongoli
Since joining John Ashcroft’s Senate staff in 1999 as counsel to the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Ciongoli has drifted with the current of Ashcroft’s political career.
Now, at just 34 years old, the Georgetown law school graduate is one of the attorney general’s most influential advisers. As legal counsel to the attorney general, Ciongoli holds a place in Ashcroft’s inner circle, helping develop the Justice Department’s most critical and controversial initiatives.
“There are very few decisions made by the attorney general that do not involve Adam,” says Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh, who heads the DOJ policy shop.
[W]hen Ashcroft was sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas, Ciongoli was among the intimate group of supporters there to witness it.
Ciongoli’s dealings with the attorney general also extend beyond politics.
The two men frequently eat lunch together — so frequently that Ciongoli can rattle off their regular order at the Full Kee Restaurant in Chinatown. (Shrimp dumpling soup for himself and — fittingly — General Tso’s chicken for the general.)
After graduating law school in 1995, Ciongoli began building his conservative Republican résumé — first clerking for Judge Samuel Alito Jr. on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and then joining the appellate practice, headed by Kenneth Starr, in the D.C. office of Kirkland & Ellis.
As an associate at Kirkland, Ciongoli worked closely with several rising stars in the conservative bar, including Jay Lefkowitz, now a domestic policy adviser to President Bush, and Paul Clement, now principal deputy solicitor general.
In the following weeks [after September 11] Ciongoli worked with legal policy chief Dinh and others to put together the legislative package that would become the USA Patriot Act — one of the most sweeping pieces of criminal justice legislation in a generation. Hastily written and negotiated through Congress in a matter of weeks, the Patriot Act grants unprecedented power to law enforcement, drawing criticism that it infringes on constitutional rights.
Ciongoli also began looking at a series of legal questions, ranging from the executive authority to close airports to the treatment of Taliban and al-Qaida detainees under the Geneva Convention.
He was one of four DOJ attorneys principally involved in drafting the administration’s order authorizing military commissions to try suspected terrorists and writing the subsequent regulations.
“It was nonstop basically until the beginning of November. In that time and since, I’ve gotten to work on a number of fascinating legal questions and problems,” says Ciongoli, who refuses to discuss in detail his projects related to terrorism. “To the extent that the White House asks the attorney general for legal advice, I get to participate in helping to craft it.”
So here we have one of the principle architects of the PATRIOT Act. Ashcroft depended on him so much that almost all major decisions were run past Ciongoli first. And Ciongoli formerly worked not only for Alito but also for Kenneth Starr.
Notice also that Ciongoli worked with the White House in drafting that legislation. At the time, Alberto Gonzales was Bush’s legal counsel and while not mentioned by name, it’s clear that he and Ciongoli coordinated much of the legislation and policies this administration has come up with in its endless “war on terror”.
Ciongoli not only prepared Ashcroft for his confirmation hearings, he also helped Alito prepare for them as well in a process known as a “murder board”.
Vanity Fair wrote a piece back in February 2004 that described the creation of the PATRIOT Act. The link isn’t available but a blogger re-posted it on his site:
Then, according to Carrie Griffin, a young Justice Department intern who was at the prayer meeting, the attorney general [Ashcroft] turned to another matter. He wanted to make clear that forgiveness, while perfectly fine in religion, had no place in the Justice Department. “The law is not about forgiveness,” he said. “It is oftentimes about vengeance, oftentimes about revenge.”
That was before 9/11.
Two months later, in the wake of the attacks, a similar message was conveyed to 18 of Ashcroft’s top people, gathered at 9:00 pm around a long wooden table at the Justice Department’s command center. It is a secure facility, heavily insulated against electronic eavesdropping, and nearby is a vault-like room with classified material. “Things are different now,” Ashcroft told the group. The role of the Justice Department had been altered, its goal now not simply to investigate crimes but to prevent them before they occur. “And if you are not ready or up for this, you should leave now,” said Ashcroft. No one left, Adam Ciongoli, who was Ashcroft’s counselor, tells me.
Indeed, over a period of 48 hours, Ciongoli adds, FBI agents, criminal-division chiefs, privacy-review people, even tax lawyers, eagerly trooped before the attorney general. “These are the areas where historically we’ve been held back” by statute, they told him. Thus was born a major congressional act — as well as other, more ambitious administrative actions desired by Ashcroft and his men. Now government was permitted to listen in on attorney-client conversations without a court order, sanction secret searches in the name of national security, impose a gag on those who were searched, jail Americans indefinitely without counsel, and detain immigrants on secret charges, while withholding their names and even their numbers from the public. Government agents have been dispatched to houses of worship. With minimal oversight, they are now allowed to monitor e-mail traffic, discover which Web sites are being visited, track some online purchases, and more easily access medical histories, credit files, and even library selections. Hundreds of surveillance and bugging operations have been launched since 9/11; 113 emergency authorizations for secret warrants were issued in the first year alone — more than twice the number granted in the previous 23 years, the most extensive investigation in the history of the United States, as the Justice Department has noted.
How’s that for scary? And Ciongoli was right in the midst of all of that, essentially doing the heavy lifting for Ashcroft. Here’s more:
In those early days, the attorney general himself seemed already worn out at least he made it clear that the long briefing papers that had been Janet Reno’s reading matter had to be reduced to what one former staffer describes as “a paragraph of background and a paragraph of talking points” per issue. But such abridgments were found onerous as well. “Do I get extra credit for reading all this?” mused Ashcroft, looking at 12 pages.
After 9/11, however, the pace stepped up. “There were a series of teams that came in to talk about changes in immigration law, FBI-related changes,” recalls Adam Ciongoli, and Ashcroft spent hours probing their desires for the legal revolution in fighting terrorism with his usual analytic skill. “Why do we need this? What does it do? Are there any constitutional concerns?” he would ask. And then, most significant: “Are we allowed to do this in other areas of law enforcement?”
The author of this piece couldn’t have known it then but what you just read was the birth of the warrantless Domestic Spying Program that was revealed in December 2005. And it was Ashcroft who kept signing off on the program until he got sick and James Comey refused to do it.
But we already know about Ashcroft. What about Ciongoli?
More alarming to civil libertarians than the Patriot Act (“In truth, the Patriot Act is simply a metaphor for all these civil liberties violations,” Laura W Murphy, the ACLU’s chief lobbyist, tells me) are subsequent government decisions. Americans on American soil learned that they could be jailed indefinitely as “enemy combatants,” a status that has its origins in World War II. Foreigners guilty of mild infractions of immigration law (including Pakistani editor Ejaz Haider, who had been invited to the United States by the State Department but who was detained after failing to check in with immigration authorities within 40 days of his arrival) can be picked up on the streets by armed men. Or detained and deported, often without benefit of counsel. Or worse.
The Justice Department’s own inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, reported last year that in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center some guards slammed inmates against walls, dragged them by their arms, stepped on the chains between their ankle cuffs, and promised prisoners, “You’re going to die here.”
In fact, of the estimated thousands of detainees rounded up and subjected to preventive detention (“We don’t know how many,” Senator Leahy acknowledges), few were prosecuted and only two found guilty. Not a real fine haul, I suggest to Ciongoli, who is very tall, with piercing dark eyes. Ciongoli is one of many who recently left the Justice Department. (He now works at Time Warner.) He is an Ashcroft friend, a former Senate staffer who lobbied hard to prevent Ronnie White from becoming a federal judge. These days he doesn’t understand the fuss made about the anonymity of detainees, whose names and numbers, were they known, might help al Qaeda, he says. Besides, “no one was stopping them from identifying themselves,” he points out solemnly.
As for the minuscule number of convictions, the question is, says Ciongoli, “Are we making the country safer?” The answer? “Categorically yes! I mean, if you look at 9/11 hijackers, most of them we couldn’t have charged with anything …. So it’s entirely possible that the people we rounded up, based on suspicion that they were linked to others, were trying to do the same thing! They looked a lot like the 9/11 hijackers. They appeared to be otherwise largely law-abiding. They were in violation of their immigration status, and we had varying levels of information about their affiliations with groups that caused us concern.”
How does that satisfy the Constitution? I wonder.
The dark brows lower. “We are entitled to arrest, detain, and deport them! You’re characterizing it as a tiny haul!” He is distinctly annoyed. “Uh, I’m finding some of your questions interesting in their characterization in what appears to be, candidly, sort of a hostile bias.”
That’s right. Alito’s new law clerk was actively cheering on the indefinite detainment of thousands of people in what used to be the sole domain of police states – preventative detention.
Oddly for a lawyer, Ciongoli is ignorant of the legal status of the 9/11 hijackers. Nearly all of them were in the United States on expired visas or had committed other infractions which would’ve subjected them to deportion. And that was under the laws and rules from before September 11.
And yet despite the fact that unknown thousands of people were rounded up after 9/11, not a single, solitary one has ever been charged with or convicted of any kind of crime relating to terrorism or Al-Qaeda. Not one.
After that Vanity Fair article came out, a reader posted a comment on another site:
Funny, I was just reading that Vanity Fair article today, and now I want to finish it. I was in Adam Ciongoli’s first year class at Georgetown U. Law Center. As for the quotes and description, that totally sounds like him. I remember that he was extremely bright and ambitious and the MOST outspoken ultra-conservative person I have ever met. When Clinton got elected President, Adam was visibly upset and said that the country was “going to hell in a handbasket.” Woe to anyone who would debate Adam, ’cause he always had a persuasive answer, and he believed so strongly in his side that you might as well stop trying to convince him otherwise.
Ciongoli has also bragged about how it wasn’t just his lawyer smarts but his membership in conservative organizations like the Federalist Society that helped him get his jobs.
Ciongoli also played a major role in the 9/11 Commission and the administration’s cooperation with it.
At the prodding of commission chair Thomas H. Kean, NEWSWEEK has learned, White House chief of staff Andrew Card recently sent a memo to the CIA, the Defense Department and other key agencies directing them to cooperate with the panel.
“The president has stated a clear policy of support for the commission’s work,” Card wrote the heads of the agencies in the internal memo. Card designated Adam Ciongoli, a senior counselor to Attorney General John Ashcroft, to serve as the administration’s chief liaison to the commission, charged with making sure that documents and key witnesses requested by the commission get turned over.
But we all know how that turned out, don’t we?
At the White House’s insistence, an adviser to Attorney General John Ashcroft has been reviewing all of the commission’s requests for documents and interviews sent to federal agencies. While the law establishing the commission requires it to build on a classified, nearly 900-page report of a Congressional inquiry into intelligence agencies, the White House blocked the commission’s access to that report until two months ago.
“While I don’t want to believe such a basic lack of cooperation was intentional, it nonetheless creates the appearance of bureaucratic stonewalling,” said Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, at a commission hearing in May. “Excessive administration secrecy on issues related to the Sept. 11 attacks feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public’s confidence in government,” added Mr. McCain, a main sponsor of the bill that created the commission.
The administration also decided that the commission would have to channel its requests to obtain documents and interview personnel from the executive branch through the Justice Department. Adam G. Ciongoli, counselor to the attorney general who was assigned to take on this role, says he has merely acted as a “facilitator.”
But Commissioner Max Cleland, a former Democratic senator from Georgia, says that Mr. Ciongoli is acting as a political gatekeeper, “cherry picking” the documents the White House wants to withhold. “It’s obvious that they’re sifting the information to the 9/11 commission now,” he says. “We’re way, way late here. The picture is not encouraging.”
Ciongoli left the government soon after that to become a corporate lawyer over at Time Warner.
Besides his past, I should note that Ciongoli is very close personal friends with none other than Paul D. Clement, now the Solicitor General. That’s the lawyer the government uses to argue cases in front of the Supreme Court.
Aren’t you glad those 12 Democratic Senators voted against filibustering Alito’s confirmation vote and those 4 Democratic Senators voted to confirm him now?
This is cross-posted from Flogging the Simian
Peace
