During the President’s press conference last night, Michael Scherer of Time asked an excellent question:

During the campaign, you criticized President Bush‘s use of the state secrets privilege, but U.S. attorneys have continued to argue the Bush position in three cases in court. How exactly does your view of state secrets differ from President Bush’s? And do you believe presidents should be able to derail entire lawsuits about warrantless wiretapping or rendition if classified information is involved?

The great communicator didn’t produce anything resembling an honest answer:

Obama: I actually think that the state secret doctrine should be modified. I think right now it’s overbroad.

But keep in mind what happens, is we come in to office. We’re in for a week, and suddenly we’ve got a court filing that’s coming up. And so we don’t have the time to effectively think through, what exactly should an overarching reform of that doctrine take? We’ve got to respond to the immediate case in front of us.

There — I think it is appropriate to say that there are going to be cases in which national security interests are genuinely at stake and that you can’t litigate without revealing covert activities or classified information that would genuinely compromise our safety.

But searching for ways to redact, to carve out certain cases, to see what can be done so that a judge in chambers can review information without it being in open court, you know, there should be some additional tools so that it’s not such a blunt instrument.

And we’re interested in pursuing that. I know that Eric Holder and Greg Craig, my White House counsel, and others are working on that as we speak.

Barack Obama is being disingenuous. Extremely disingenuous.

For example, in Jewel v. NSA, the Obama Justice Department didn’t just repeat “essentially the same (state secrets privilege) arguments made by the Bush administration three years ago”, it actually exceeded the Bush administration’s claims:

But the Obama DOJ demanded dismissal of the entire lawsuit based on (1) its Bush-mimicking claim that the “state secrets” privilege bars any lawsuits against the Bush administration for illegal spying, and (2) a brand new “sovereign immunity” claim of breathtaking scope — never before advanced even by the Bush administration — that the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance unless there is “willful disclosure” of the illegally intercepted communications.

And this didn’t happen one week into the Obama presidency, it happened about two-and-a-half months after he took office.

Ten days before that, the Obama Justice Department was out-stepping the Bush Justice Department in an entirely different case:

In the al-Haramain case, Obama has not only maintained the Bush administration approach, but the dispute has intensified, with the Justice Department warning that if the judge does not change his mind, authorities could spirit away the top-secret documents.

And it was three weeks before that that I wrote a post with the title Out-Bushing Bush’s Department Of Justice, which described previous shenanigans in the al-Haramain case.

Seems to be a pattern here, right? Well into the Obama presidency, well after his Justice department had time to undertake a comprehensive review and decide what stance they wanted to adopt vis-à-vis the state secrets privilege, the Obama Justice Department was repeatedly out-Bushing the previous regime.