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REUTERS
NEW YORK
PRESIDENT Barack Obama is again facing dissent from within his administration - this time from Attorney General Loretta Lynch - over his plans to shutter the Guantanamo Bay military prison, according to senior administration officials.
Lynch, a former federal prosecutor whom Obama appointed to head the Justice Department two years ago, is opposing a White House-backed proposal that would allow Guantanamo Bay prisoners to plead guilty to terrorism charges in federal court by videoconference, the officials said.
Over the past three months, Lynch has twice intervened to block administration proposals on the issue, objecting that they would violate longstanding rules of criminal-justice procedure.
In the first case, her last-minute opposition derailed a White House-initiated legislative proposal to allow video guilty pleas after nearly two months of interagency negotiations and law drafting. In the second case, Lynch blocked the administration from publicly supporting a Senate proposal to legalize video guilty pleas.
"It's been a fierce interagency tussle," said a senior Obama administration official, who supports the proposal and asked not to be identified.
White House officials confirmed that President Obama supports the proposal. But the president declined to overrule objections from Lynch, the administration's top law-enforcement official.
"There were some frustrations," said a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity."The top lawyer in the land has weighed in, and that was the DOJ's purview to do that."
If enacted into law, the Obama-backed plan would allow detained terrorism suspects who plead guilty to serve their sentences in a third-country prison, without setting foot on US soil. The plan would thus sidestep a Congressional ban on transferring detainees to the United States, which has left dozens of prisoners in long-term judicial limbo in Guantanamo, the American military enclave in Cuba.
Obama has vowed to close the prison on his watch. But while he has overseen the release of some 160 men from the prison, the facility still holds 80 detainees.
The video plea plan has broad backing within the administration, including from senior State Department and Pentagon officials. A Defense Department spokesman declined to comment.
The most enthusiastic backers of the plan have been defense lawyers representing up to a dozen Guantanamo Bay detainees who are eager to extricate their clients from seemingly indefinite detention.
Republicans in Congress have opposed the president's plans to empty the prison, on the grounds that many of the detainees are highly dangerous. But there is some bipartisan support for the proposal as well, a rarity in the Guantanamo debate.
