And the beat goes on:

A federal judge said Thursday that he wants to look at notes from the FBI’s interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney during the investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA operative.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan‘s decision to review the documents followed arguments by Obama administration lawyers that sounded much like the reasons the Bush administration provided for keeping Cheney’s interview from the public.

Obama may as well sign a presidential proclamation which all the networks and news channels are required to air every hour on the hour, saying that everything the Bush administration wanted to hide or keep secret will indeed be kept secret.

Hats off, though, to Judge Sullivan. Here are the lemons that the Obama Justice Department presented him with:

Justice Department lawyers told the judge that future presidents and vice presidents may not cooperate with criminal investigations if they know what they say could become available to their political opponents and late-night comics who would ridicule them.

“If we become a fact-finder for political enemies, they aren’t going to cooperate,” Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Smith said during a 90-minute hearing. “I don’t want a future vice president to say, ‘I’m not going to cooperate with you because I don’t want to be fodder for ‘The Daily Show.’”

Instead of turning Jeffrey Smith into something resembling lemonade, Judge Sullivan just drily told the Justice Department they “must give him more precise reasons for keeping the information confidential”.

I would love to see this go all the way to the Supreme Court. They decided yesterday — in a 5-4 ruling that may as well be called “Let The Bastards Fry” — that “prisoners do not have a constitutional right to demand DNA testing of evidence that remains in police files.” But maybe they would find a constitutional right for vice-presidents not to be ridiculed by late-night comics?