Warren Richey, writing in Friday’s The Christian Science Monitor, reports on the Supreme Court asking for more input on the secret case pending before it. I posted about this on Wednesday.
Richey’s article doesn’t provide any additional facts, but does contains this analysis:
It is unclear to what extent this brief will break the government's public silence about the case.The Justice Department may seek to designate its entire brief as a classified document, legal analysts say. Or government lawyers may follow the lead of the petitioner in the Miami case and file one set of documents for the court, under seal, and another set of redacted documents for members of the press and public, they say.
However the Justice Department responds, the case poses a Catch-22 for government lawyers, given their insistence that disclosure of even relatively minor bits of information - indeed just confirmation that a case exists at all - could harm US national security.
Analysts say it is not clear whether the request for a brief from the solicitor general is an indication of concern within the more liberal wing of the court about excessive government secrecy or an attempt by more conservative justices to obtain solid grounds to deny review.
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