WASHINGTON — Two former high-level Bush administration officials who provided legal justification for harsh interrogations of overseas terror suspects are likely to escape any formal punishment now that the Justice Department has concluded they should not be held legally responsible.

In a long-awaited report released early Friday evening, Deputy Associate Attorney General David Margolis said that former department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee should not have their law licenses revoked as a consequence of their legal advice to the Bush administration signing off on the controversial interrogation methods.

In a 69-page legal memo, Margolis concluded "that these memos contained significant flaws. But as all that glitters is not gold, all flaws do not constitute professional misconduct…. I conclude that Yoo and Bybee exercised poor judgment by overstating the certainty of their conclusions and underexposing countervailing arguments.”

Democrats and civil liberties and human rights advocates had demanded that the lawyers face some legal sanction because their memos were used to justify the use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, widely condemned as a form of torture. The CIA has confirmed it waterboarded three captives. All three of them are now held at Guantánamo Bay

The Justice Department’s assessment reverses the recommendations of ethics officials within the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which had earlier concluded that state bar committees should determine whether Yoo’s and Bybee’s law licenses should be revoked.

After reviewing that recommendation, Margolis concluded that Yoo, currently a University of California, Berkeley law professor, and Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge, had demonstrated poor judgment rather than committed ethics violations.

Some Democrats in Congress pounced.

“The materials released today make plain that those memos were legally flawed and fundamentally unsound,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.). “While the Department ultimately concluded that the lawyers did not breach their minimum professional obligations, I certainly hold top lawyers at (the Justice Department) to a higher standard than that, as all Americans should.”

Republicans hailed the results as only fair for officials whom they say were just doing their jobs.

“In the wake of 9-11, attorneys at the Justice Department were faced with unprecedented challenges, not knowing whether other attacks were imminent,” said House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-Texas). “They did their best to follow the law.”

Ethics investigators had completed a draft of the report during the Bush administration. But it was kept secret and became the subject of criticism by Democratic senators because Attorney General Eric Holder's predecessor, Michael Mukasey, delayed the report after reading it.

In a break with tradition, the subjects of the investigation were permitted to read a draft of the results and comment on it. Margolis, who’s a career attorney of three decades, did not respond to a request for comment. Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said the department “followed the longstanding review process.”