Trump Turns to John Yoo for Legal Strategy, Embracing Hardline Tactics
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A right-wing former Justice Department attorney with a penchant for revenge and torture is reportedly former President Donald Trump’s shiny, new “guiding light.” According to Rolling Stone, John Yoo — author of several 2002 memos that authorized the CIA to torture prisoners — has caught Trump’s eye for his vigorous defenses of the convicted felon, who faces criminal charges in four states for trying to overturn his 2020 election loss.
Yoo has been increasingly talked about and influential in Trump’s circle, the news outlet reported, citing two lawyers close to Trump and a third person with knowledge of the situation. Additionally, Trump has reportedly been directly briefed on Yoo’s legal ideas, with his past work frequently discussed and his ideas incorporated into Trump’s plans.
Yoo has signaled he’s open to authoritarianism, according to the report, welcomes “brutal violence as an instrument of policy,” and has a “lust for swift revenge” against political rivals. Indeed, the law professor has called for Republicans under Trump to resort to “banana republic means” to exact revenge on everyone who investigated them. He has also proclaimed that the Founding Fathers would have opposed Trump’s impeachment because, at the time, it was an election year.
“You have to retaliate against them in exactly the same way until you get some deterrence,” Yoo stated at NatCon 4. “If we’re not going to become a banana republic, unfortunately, we’re going to have to use banana republic means.”
Christopher Anders, a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who has headed anti-torture efforts, told Rolling Stone that Yoo has a “long record of disregard for the law” and a history of signing off on “illegal and criminal activity including torture.”
“John Yoo seems to now be publicly pushing a continuation of the kinds of lawless views of the law, and suspension of the rule of law, that he pushed through during the Bush administration that caused great damage to the country and put American soldiers in danger,” Anders said. “And if that advice is followed now, it would certainly cause immense damage to any potential future Trump administration.”
A 2010 paper by David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center slammed Yoo at the time and noted he was “not in the least embarrassed by the condemnation of his peers.”
Cole’s paper came after the Justice Department that year released secret reports “excoriating Yoo’s legal work – but stopped short of referring him for professional discipline” — a fact that led Yoo to celebrate with a public victory lap in the following days in editorials for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Wall Street Journal.
“The one thing practically everyone interviewed by the OPR agreed about was that Yoo’s legal work on the torture memos was atrocious,” wrote Cole. That included Michael Mukasey, Bush’s attorney general, who called it a “slovenly mistake,” and Jack Goldsmith, a Republican who previously headed the Office of Legal Counsel, who said Yoo’s torture memo was “riddled with error” and a “one-sided effort to eliminate any hurdles posed by the torture law.”
