As I and others noted over the weekend, the final report by the Justice Department on John Yoo and Jay Bybee leaves one wondering how this kangaroo proceeding lasted as long as it did. How did the Office of Professional Responsibility get so far offtrack, and why was the advice of respected attorneys, including that of outgoing Attorney General Michael Mukasey, not heeded well over a year ago? Incompetence collided with bias, it seems.

As to the incompetence, Bill Burck and Dana Perino explain:

We don’t mean to be insulting, but the plain fact is that OPR is not, and has never been, equipped to second-guess OLC. The office’s role is a limited one focused on ethical violations; it is not staffed with experts on constitutional law or national security. It would be preposterous to rely on OPR’s judgment about hard questions of constitutional and statutory law over that of OLC or the Solicitor General’s Office. As Andy McCarthy has said, “having OPR grade the scholarship of OLC is like having the Double-A batting coach critique Derek Jeter’s swing.”

Quoting Yoo’s attorney Miguel Estrada, Burck and Perino get at the root of the problem: “It is probably a three-way tie between stupidity, rank incompetence, and partisan malignancy.” And given the malicious leaking of OPR’s work during the investigation, it is hard to escape the conclusion that is was only innocent incompetence at work.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors name some names responsible for this travesty:

The rotten quality of the OPR efforts—and Mr. Margolis’s repudiation of them—raises real questions about the lawyers who produced this work. H. Marshall Jarrett, who supervised the first OPR draft, is a protégé of Mr. Holder who managed not to produce his draft report until the Bush Administration was preparing to leave office. After Mr. Mukasey “memorialized” his concerns, as his letter put it, the Jarrett draft was leaked without the Mukasey response. Mr. Holder reassigned Mr. Jarrett in April 2009 to lead the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, an arguably more powerful post. His OPR effort makes him unfit for such a job.

Mr. Holder replaced Mr. Jarrett at OPR with Mary Patrice Brown, who tried to salvage OPR’s original conclusions with a new but equally deficient argument. After abandoning OPR’s earlier specific allegations that Messrs. Yoo and Bybee had violated D.C. Rule of Professional Conduct 1.1 to provide competent representation and rule 2.1 to exercise independent legal judgment, Mr. Margolis writes, Ms. Brown’s final report “did not specify the rule or rules of professional conduct that were violated.”

Instead, she added consideration of a “best practices” memo and guiding principles. Mr. Margolis writes that these documents raise several concerns, not least that “neither of them existed at the time Yoo and Bybee worked at OLC.”

As the editors remind us, Brown is up for a federal judgeship. Or was, until this travesty of incompetence came to light.

The editors rightly note that Margolis seemed compelled at the very end of the report to throw in some gratuitous jabs at Yoo. (“This is a matter of opinion—akin to writing an op-ed piece—unrelated to the question of whether they behaved unethically, and it is precisely the kind of judgment that Mr. Margolis says earlier in the report that he will not render.”) But as inappropriate as those swipes may have been, let’s give some credit where credit is due. Margolis prevented a grave miscarriage of justice and in the process revealed how biased and incompetent his colleagues are. That is no easy task. The question remains as to what Eric Holder is going to do about those whose work has now been revealed to be so lacking in merit and so bereft of careful analysis. A bar referral? Well, at least a housecleaning seems to be in order.