The Washington Post’s Carrie Johnson usually does an excellent job covering the myriad scandals at the Bush administration’s Justice Dept. But her profile yesterday of Attorney General Michael Mukasey is far too gentle. Understanding Government is flagging the piece, because it does provide a nice summary of Mukasey’s short but tumultuous tenure at Justice: the confirmation hearing where he didn’t call waterboarding torture, the refusal to hand over Dick Cheney’s FBI interview about Valerie Plame Wilson, the struggle to handle expected habeas corpus claims by Guantanamo Bay detainees, and the blithe refusal to delve into the maw of U.S. Attorney problems.

But Johnson was granted an interview by Mukasey and rarely delves beyond the setting of talking with this thoughtful, grandfatherly man. We learn Mukasey has a good sense of humor. And he gets up early. What we don’t learn is why he’s done nothing to distance himself from the scandal-plagued Justice Dept. he’s inherited. In asserting executive privilege over Cheney’s interview, categorically refusing to investigate Bush administration officials, not looking at the prosecution of Alabama governor Don Seigelman and doing as little as possible about torture, Mukasey has lost all claims of independence from the White House. But he sounds like he’s studious and gets along with his family.-MB

The Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Hughes looks at a Congressional report that says the Bush administration was for regulating greenhouse gases before they were against it. Stephen Johnson, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and fellow agency heads expressed support for curtailing the climate change-causing gases. But then Dick Cheney’s office stepped in — perhaps after the vice president met with Exxon Mobile and the American Petroleum Institute.

The Washington Post reported on much of this material Friday, when the EPA released the report of its staff scientists saying that global warming poses a dire threat. The common thread behind all these allegations is that they’re coming from Jason Burnett, a former EPA official. Burnett has gone to at least three different Congressional committees with stories about his time at EPA.

Burnett’s charges fall in line with suspicions about the Bush administration’s environmental policy. And no one, besides the White House press secretary, is questioning his credibility. Still, it would be nice if at least one more whistleblower could emerge.-MB

The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus reports that a pending CIA budget would give billions to something called the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative. Mike McConnell, director of the CIA, has previously noted that it’s not enough to respond to foreign and domestic cyber intruders after the fact— the government needs to prevent them from happening.

And how would the CIA do this? Through public-private partnerships and "consultation with the U.S. information technology industry" (hello, lucrative government contracts!). Both Obama and McCain have vaguely spoken about cybersecurity so perhaps this CIA plan, whatever it exactly is, has legs beyond the Bush administration.-MB

The Washington Post’s Spencer S. Hsu reports on the dramatic shift in U.S. immigration policy toward mass arrests of undocumented immigrant workers. Five years ago, the feds arrested 72 such workers. Already this year, though, the Dept. of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested 937 undocumented immigrants.

In making these arrests, ICE is conducting wiretapping and raids similar to those for drug lords and mafia leaders. Why doesn’t ICE instead channel its energy toward the employers that hire these illegal immigrants? Stewart Baker, asst. secretary for policy at DHS, says it’s because Congress hasn’t given them such law enforcement power.-MB