The Political Chase

Dean: Administration violated third court order

Earlier today, it was revealed that two federal judges on separate occasions had ordered the Bush administration to preserve information regarding the treatment of detainees. Both judges issued their orders almost six months before the CIA destroyed the interrogation videotapes. But there’s more.

John Dean, former White House Counsel during the Nixon administration, was on Countdown tonight and said, “There’s a third court order that I think is much more troubling for the administration in many ways.”

Watch it:

Dean refers to a third federal judge ordering the Bush administration to preserve all interrogation evidence for all detainees. The judge issued the order in June 2005 and the administration destroyed the evidence in November 2005.

Partial Transcript:

There’s actually a third court order that I think is much more troubling for the administration in many ways because a judge in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by the ACLU, looking at all the treatment of all the detainees, asked that they preserve the records. And this happened again in June of 2005, well before the destruction.

So, there actually is a third court order out there and you have a judge who has a record, of indeed — he’s the one that disclosed the Abu Ghraib photos and had no hesitation to go eyeball-to-eyeball with this government.