What he did then: Assistant Attorney General; Chief, Office of Legal Counsel, 2003-2004

What he does now: Professor, Harvard Law School

Reported involvement: Goldsmith took over OLC after Bybee's departure with a reputation as one of the nation's leading scholars of international law. He wrote a March 2004 memorandum opining that the U.S. could transfer certain non-Iraqi detainees out of Iraq because they were not protected by the Geneva Conventions. Critics charge that this memo enabled the Defense Department and CIA to create "ghost detainees" by holding people without registering them or reporting them to the Red Cross. However, human rights lawyers have described the Goldsmith memo as "responsible and high quality scholarship" in contrast to the previous OLC memos by Bybee and Yoo, which have been roundly criticized as unsophisticated and intellectually dishonest. According to Newsweek, Goldsmith resigned his position in the Justice Department because he disagreed with the earlier Bybee memos.