Michael Isikoff

A nonprofit group that John Edwards set up to fight poverty paid $124,000 for Web videos and photos to the former Democratic presidential candidate's mistress, say four lawyers familiar with the payments.

When the Republican Jewish Coalition hosted its annual winter conference at Las Vegas's splashy Palazzo hotel earlier this month, party luminaries such as Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham showed up to hobnob with some of the GOP's most generous donors.

Liz Cheney is truly Dick's daughter, galvanizing the Republican base with her right-wing views and blistering critiques of Obama. Did somebody say 2012?

In his fat and highly skewed new memoir out today, Karl Rove portrays himself as an improbable Jean Valjean—an innocent man who, like the persecuted hero of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, is relentlessly hounded by an obsessed lawman determined to put him behind bars.

Nine former Bush administration officials who played major roles in shaping counterterrorism policies today released a statement condemning as "shameful" recent attacks by Liz Cheney's advocacy group on Justice Department lawyers who had previously represented Guantánamo detainees.

A chart released by the Dubai police shows the travel ports of entry and exit of suspects in the murder of Hamas officer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.The assassins who killed Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh at a five-star Dubai hotel in January made one mistake: their work was too perfect.

In recent days the Justice Department has been getting angry phone calls about the "Qaeda" lawyers supposedly hired by Attorney General Eric Holder. The reason?

Some of the alleged assassins of a Hamas leader in Dubai obtained debit cards through two U.S. financial companies—one of them headed by a former member of the Israeli special forces—according to a statement by one of the companies released Tuesday.    The company, MetaBank of Storm Lake, Iowa, confirmed that it had provided "prepaid" debit cards to a number of the suspects being sought by Dubai police for the alleged asphyxiation of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

When President Bush two years ago failed to name members to a federal board to monitor the protection of civil liberties, Democrats and activist groups were duly outraged, seeing it as one more example of his administration's indifference to the subject.

The international mystery over the murder of a senior Hamas leader deepened Monday when U.S. law-enforcement officials said they were unable to find any records to corroborate assertions by Dubai police that two suspected hit-squad members fled to the U.S. following the slaying.

  U.S. Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, recently unleashed an extraordinary attack on Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, accusing the onetime darling of U.S. neoconservatives of attempting to "hijack" the country's March 7 parliamentary elections in an effort to promote the interests of Iran.

How big is the Justice Department's missing e-mail problem? That may be the key question arising from the disclosure—in last week's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report—that the e-mails of Justice Department lawyers who crafted memos on torture and other controversial issues had mysteriously disappeared.

The National Archives is pressing the Justice Department to investigate the "possible unauthorized destruction of e-mail and other records" within the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel during a crucial time period, when the office's lawyers wrote hotly disputed memos about torture, Guantánamo, and warrantless wiretapping.  Paul M.

Today's guilty plea by Najuibullah Zazi to terrorism charges in federal court provides fresh ammunition for Obama administration officials to argue that traditional law enforcement methods can be just as effective, if not more, in questioning terror suspects than subjecting them to "enhanced interrogation techniques." By pleading guilty to plotting what he called a "martyrdom operation" and agreeing to cooperate about his Al Qaeda contacts in Pakistan, Zazi becomes the fourth major terror...

Today's guilty plea by Najibullah Zazi to terrorism charges in federal court provides fresh ammunition for Obama administration officials to argue that traditional law-enforcement methods can be just as effective, if not more, in questioning terror suspects than subjecting them to "enhanced interrogation techniques." By pleading guilty to plotting what he called a "martyrdom operation" and agreeing to cooperate about his Al Qaeda contacts in Pakistan, Zazi becomes the fourth major terror...

The long-awaited Justice Department report on the lawyers who wrote the so-called torture memos provides gruesome new details about the CIA's harsh interrogations of high-level Qaeda suspects, highlighting issues that could ultimately complicate the Obama administration's efforts to try the detainees in federal court or even before military commissions.

A crucial CIA memo that has been cited by former Vice President Dick Cheney and other former Bush administration officials as justifying the effectiveness of waterboarding contained "plainly inaccurate information" that undermined its conclusions, according to Justice Department investigators.

The chief author of the Bush administration's "torture memo" told Justice Department investigators that the president's war-making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be "massacred," according to a report released Friday night by the Office of Professional Responsibility.

Law enforcement is tracking Americans' cell phones in real time—without the benefit of a warrant.

Just after the 2008 election, the Pentagon quietly escorted Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former chauffeur, out of his cell at Guantánamo and flew him back to his homeland in Yemen to serve out the last weeks of his five-and-a-half-year sentence for providing material support to terrorism.

The Justice Department is poised this week to publicly defend a little-known law-enforcement practice that critics say may be the "sleeper" privacy issue of the 21st century: the collection of cell-phone "tracking" records that identify the physical locations where the phones have been.

Michael Isikoff reports on the Declassified blog: White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan played an unusual role Sunday when he swiped at congressional Republicans for bashing the administration's handling of the Christmas Day bombing suspect.

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan played an unusual role Sunday when he swiped at congressional Republicans for bashing the administration's handling of the Christmas Day bombing suspect.

As the Obama administration struggles with the politically explosive question of where to hold the 9/11 terror trial, its options appear to be dwindling by the day.

For weeks, the right has heckled Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for his plans to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in New York City and his handling of the Christmas bombing plot suspect.

The Obama White House is pushing back against a federal panel's "report card" giving it an F for failing to prepare the country's defenses against a bioterror attack. "We think it's absurd," said a White House official, who didn't want to be publicly identified criticizing the commission in public. "We think we've done a lot." And while the official says the timing is purely a coincidence, Obama plans to address the issue in the State of the Union tomorrow night.

The Obama administration and Congress get an F for failing to prepare for a biological terrorist attack—a "national security" risk that is getting greater "by the day," according to the director of a blue-ribbon federal panel set up to study the issue.

New details about the events surrounding the Christmas Day interrogation of the bombing suspect aboard Northwest Flight 253 raise questions about the accuracy of testimony provided Wednesday by senior U.S. intelligence and Homeland Security officials.

Obama administration officials were flabbergasted Wednesday when Director of National Intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair testified that an alleged Qaeda operative who tried to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day should have been questioned by a special interrogation unit that doesn't exist, rather than the FBI.

The news has been filled of late with dramatic accounts of a stepped up Yemeni campaign—backed by the U.S. military—that, one by one, is supposedly killing (or capturing) the leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP.) But, to a striking degree, these reports are turning out to be bogus.