David Kris, who served as Associate Deputy Attorney General at DOJ from 2000 to 2003 and was one of DOJ’s top national security lawyers, has written a 23-page response to the 42-page DOJ memo on the NSA program. Kris, who is now in the private sector, is a terrific lawyer with a very deep knowledge of this area. His memo is (unsurprisingly) very strong. While Kris does not reach a definitive conclusion, the basic thrust of the memo is that the Administration’s legal arguments aren’t very good.
For more on this, see Marty Lederman’s post today at Balkinization.