I was going by the reaction to Schumer’s recommendation of Mukasey when his name first came up – which tended to be positive – and James Comey’s assessment that M wouldn’t put up for a minute with what Gonzo had allowed. The best positive precis on Mukasey, tho – and I grant that it was in the beginning before the torture subject reared its ugly head – came from Glenn Greenwald back in Sept. Greenwald’s a Constitutional lawyer, and the post concerns what Greenwald called Mukasey’s “impressive independence” over the Padilla case. Here’s a taste (tho you should really read the whole thing).

I want to highlight one extremely relevant consideration concerning Judge Mukasey — the impressive role he played in presiding over the Jose Padilla case in its earliest stages. After Padilla was first detained in April 2002 and declared an “enemy combatant,” he was held incommunicado, denied all access to the outside the world, including counsel, and the Bush administration refused to charge him with any crimes. A lawsuit was filed on Padilla’s behalf by a New York criminal defense lawyer, Donna Newman, demanding that Padilla be accorded the right to petition for habeas corpus and that, first, he be allowed access to a lawyer. That lawsuit was assigned to Judge Mukasey, which almost certainly made the Bush DOJ happy.

But any such happiness proved to be unwarranted. Judge Mukasey repeatedly defied the demands of the Bush administration, ruled against them, excoriated them on multiple occasions for failing to comply with his legally issued orders, and ruled that Padilla was entitled to contest the factual claims of the government and to have access to lawyers. He issued these rulings in 2002 and 2003, when virtually nobody was defying the Bush administration on anything, let alone on assertions of executive power to combat the Terrorists. And he made these rulings in the face of what was became the standard Bush claim that unless there was complete acquiescence to all claimed powers by the President, a Terrorist attack would occur and the blood would be on the hands of those who impeded the President.

Tends to suggest Schumer’s praise is accurate.