Jennifer Hardy: Torture Princess
The young woman pictured above is Jennifer Hardy, or as i’m calling her, “the Torture Princess”:
The Torture Memos will forever be known as the work of John Yoo, the former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer who took the lead in preparing them. But the internal Justice Department report on the memos, released Friday, reveals that a less experienced OLC attorney, working under Yoo, played a key role in the process — in some cases writing initial drafts of the opinions before getting feedback from Yoo and others.
The name of that lawyer is redacted throughout the report. But in what appears to be an oversight in the redaction process, a footnote identifies her as Jennifer Koester.
Talking Points Memo has much more on this pretty, but nasty, piece of work.
She appears to have had no authority to approve the final versions of the memos that went out from the department, and was tasked with working with Yoo on them in part because having just joined OLC, she “had some time available,” according to the report. But she did take the lead in developing the first drafts of the memos, and briefed the White House on their contents. And it’s perhaps surprising — given the intense level of scrutiny that Yoo has rightly received for his role in producing the memos — that Koester has until now remained almost entirely under the radar.
Today, the Torture Princess is a partner at Kirkland and Ellis (the page is having some trouble opening, leading me to wonder if her employers are taking it down to prevent more embarrassment). here’s her bio:
Professional Profile
Jennifer Hardy is a litigation partner in Kirkland’s Washington office. She concentrates her practice principally in appellate litigation.
Other Distinctions
Office of the Secretary of Defense, Exceptional Civilian Service Award for support to the Secretary of Defense in the War on Terror, October 2002
John C. Yoo and Jennifer L. Koester, Judicial Safeguards of Federalism and the Environment: Yucca Mountain from a Constitutional Perspective, 75 U. Colo. L. Rev. 1317 (2004)
That “Exceptional Civilian Service Award” is from Don Rumsfeld’s tenure, so it’s probably not worth the folded tin foil it’s made of. She’s also a member of the super-wingnutty Federalist Society, “which famously aims to get ideologically conservative lawyers appointed to high-level posts in government and the judicial system.” Indeed: what better way to do an end run around the country’s longstanding legal obligations than by seeding the justice system with lawyers who believe in anything but?
Here she is at a party, sponsored by the same
You have to wonder about people like Ms. Hardy: what kind of sick fuck rationalizes participating in an illegal torture scheme?
