All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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What do you get when you take a good idea, a well-meaning law, a group of long-suffering people and a stubborn and heartless bureaucracy? You get The American Council for the Blind v. Paulsen, an important, if not necessarily decisive, federal appeals court decision Tuesday that seems to bring us all closer to the day when visually-impaired people can tell without major effort or charity from strangers the difference between denominations of U.S. paper currency.

The decision is not a terrible shock – it’s one of those instances, in fact, where the law happily syncs up with common sense. The law is on the side of blind people here. So are the facts. And you don’t need to be a legal expert to understand that the defenses offered up by the Treasury Department are hollow indeed. The feds argue that they don’t need to change our currency because there are “portable currency readers” readily available.

But have you ever seen one of those? Me neither.

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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On a day that presaged future lawsuits against big corporations, the story of a past meltdown was back in the news. Citing a prejudicial ruling by a controversial trial judge, the 10th U.S. Circuit of Appeals Monday threw out all 19 insider-trading convictions against Joe Nacchio, the former head of Qwest Communications.

The federal appeals court panel also is going to allow prosecutors to re-try Nacchio if it so chooses, but there is no guarantee that is going to happen, much less happen anytime soon. The Justice Department immediately declared that the ruling was a “setback, not a defeat” but where I come from when you get “set back” to nearly zero after years and years of litigation you call that good old-fashioned butt-whupin’.

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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Remember how the world was going to end depending upon which side in the same-sex marriage debate prevailed in court? Remember all the television coverage – all the shouting and whining – that surrounded the 2003 ruling in Massachusetts that legalized same-sex marriage? Remember the hullabaloo in 2004 caused by San Francisco’s mayor authorizing the issuance of thousands of same-sex marriage licenses until the city was forced to stop?

Well, guess what. The issue and the debate and the story haven’t gone away. All that is missing is the nation’s attention span.

While you were focusing earlier this week upon whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama were successfully wooing super-delegates, or whether Mike Huckabee was finally going to come in from the cold on the Republican side, the California Supreme Court Tuesday heard oral argument for three hours in separate cases designed to flesh out the contours of the same-sex marriage debate.

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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When you saw this weekend’s headline from 60 Minutes: “GOP Operative: Rove Tried to Smear Dem” your first reaction is to say: Surely this is not news. [editor's note: Link to full story is now Did Ex-Alabama Governor Get A Raw Deal?] Former White House advisor Karl Rove has made a career out of “smearing” his political opponents. Just ask Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. Indeed, a litany of Rove’s targets would fill up the rest of the column. So why is this smear different from all other smears?

It is different – and perhaps significant – because Rove’s target, Alabama Democrat Don Siegelman, also was a target of the Justice Department during Alberto R. Gonzales’ reign of error there. A bribery case against Siegelman, dismissed in 2004, suddenly came alive again in 2005 thanks to the same political miscreants who later begat the U.S. Attorney scandal. And guess with whom the Congress wants to talk about that scandal? That’s right, Karl Rove.

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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Thanks to today’s extraordinary hearing on Capitol Hill, Americans now know more about Roger Clemens’ butt than they ever wanted to know. The Congressional hearing into Clemens’ alleged steroid and Human Growth Hormone use fairly quickly morphed into a primer on how buttocks could react when injected with certain kinds of drugs. If there has been a more surreal hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, I am not aware of it.

What did we learn? That Brian McNamee, Clemens' former trainer, is sorry for lying before, but swears he isn’t lying now. That McNamee injected Clemens' wife, Debbie, with HGH in the bedroom of Clemens’ house without Clemens being there to supervise the procedure. That McNamee’s recollections are not always perfect. That Clemens' BFF Andy Petitte, the Yankees pitcher, seems to be making it through this scandal with his reputation for candor and honesty intact. Also that, in the end, all Clemens can say is: I’m right and the rest of them are wrong.

Clemens may not have ruined his cause Wednesday, but the hearing clearly did not help his case. And I think Clemens is beginning to appreciate the height of the mountain he will have to climb if he ever wants to regain his reputation and guarantee his liberty.

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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The next time you whine about having to take your laptop out of your travel bag when you go through airport security, consider this alternative: Taking your laptop out and either handing it over to the security screeners – or giving those strangers your computer password so they can go through and copy your files and emails.

Don’t laugh – but feel free to cringe. It’s happening – reportedly almost always to people of Muslim, Middle Eastern or South American backgrounds. And on Thursday, two civil liberties groups (neither of which is the American Civil Liberties Union, by the way) filed a lawsuit against the government to require the disclosure, at the very least, of its computer confiscation protocols.

The Washington Post reports that the lawsuit stems from over two dozen incidents where people of color have had electronic equipment – computers, cell phones, digital cameras – seized by officers of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection service. One woman, the Post reports, was given the choice of turning over her laptop or not getting onto a flight. She was told she would get her laptop back in 10 to 15 days. That was more than a year ago.

She still hasn’t gotten her computer back.

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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Here is an example of precisely how Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey is making a tangible difference in the kabuki dance between the branches these days over Tapegate, the CIA's controversial destruction of terror interrogation videotapes.

When U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy decided yesterday to hold off on pursuing his own investigation into the legality of the destruction of the tapes (he had ordered tapes protected just a few months before they were destroyed), he did so by expressing confidence in the new criminal investigation initiated a few weeks ago by the Justice Department — the Mukasey Justice Department. One current federal judge (appointed by a Democrat) showing one former federal judge (appointed by a Republican) no small measure of respect and confidence — what a nice thing to see in the cynic-ridden canyons of power these days!

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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The morning’s big news — a New York Times story, which steers the CIA videotape scandal right into the heart of the White House and the Justice Department — is as important as it is unsurprising.

Naturally, when the touchy subject came up in 2005, the Administration’s top legal officials were called upon to discuss the pros and cons of destroying material evidence about the CIA’s interrogation tactics. Of course, at the center of these discussions were two presidential lackeys, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-White House counsel Harriet Miers. And what would a controversial (and ultimately disastrous) executive branch action meeting be without the dark and ruthless presence of David Addington, then counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney?

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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My favorite story of the week isn’t the American Bar Association’s idiotic decision to give disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales its 2007 Lawyer of the Year Award. It is not the looming announcement from Major League Baseball about its steroid investigation. And it is certainly not the story of misconduct by Central Intelligence Agency officials.

Nope. My favorite story of the week is the story of Vifill Atlason, a16-year-old Icelandic kid who was able to schedule a call with President George W. Bush by posing as Icelandic President Olafur Ragnur Grimsson. The story is getting big play in Europe and elsewhere around the world, probably because people there love to hear about instances where Americans get fooled.

Atlason told Reuters that his December 1st call “was transferred around a few times until I got hold of Bush's secretary and managed to book a call meeting with Bush the following Monday evening." He told the National Post in Canada that he answered questions about Grimsson by using Wikipedia (memo to White House security, ask better questions) and was “very polite” to all of the people who screened him along the way.

The prank ended, however, when the CIA asked Iceland authorities to confirm the location of the telephone number where Atlason made the call. See? Who says that warrantless domestic surveillance isn’t a good thing? Without it, President Bush last week might have found himself on the other end of a phone call with a kid who isn’t even of legal age to have a drink in Iceland...

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Lawyer Andrew Cohen analyzes legal affairs for CBS News and CBSNews.com.

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We quickly have the answer to at least one of the important questions swirling around Tapegate, the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction of interrogation videotapes that were at the time sought by a federal judge in the terror conspiracy trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. And in turn the answer we now have raises a whole new generation of questions about the reckless act.

The New York Times this morning reports that CIA lawyers gave “written approval in advance” to destroy hundreds of hours of videotaped interrogations. Specifically, citing its unnamed source, the Times reports:

The former intelligence official acknowledged that there had been nearly two years of debate among government agencies about what to do with the tapes, and that lawyers within the White House and the Justice Department had in 2003 advised against a plan to destroy them. But the official said that C.I.A. officials had continued to press the White House for a firm decision, and that the C.I.A. was never given a direct order not to destroy the tapes. “They never told us, ‘Hell, no,’” he said. “If somebody had said, ‘You cannot destroy them,’ we would not have destroyed them.”

If the paper’s information is accurate, we now know two things. We know that the CIA was unwilling to take a wishy-washy “no” for an answer when the White House and Justice Department “advised” against the destruction of the tapes. The Times says that even the Agency’s chief lawyer, John A. Rizzo, was not asked for final approval before the CIA destroyed the tapes. Based upon this evidence alone a cynic might conclude that the Agency did precisely what it wanted to do (eliminate evidence of the conduct of its agents) and then tried to paper over its intentions with some sort of legal justification...

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