What do we want? Subpoenas. When do we want them? Now.
By Mona
Newsweek uncovers in an extraordinary piece that in March of 2004 up to 30 arch-conservative Bush loyalists in the Dept. of Justice — including director of the FBI, Robert Mueller — were poised to resign, en masse, over Bush’s lawlessness and attempts to secure a signature endorsing the Administration’s illegalities from a deathly ill John Ashcroft, the then-Attorney General who was in a sedated daze in his hospital bed. (Ashcroft, sick as he was, apparently told Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card to go to hell.)
These were anything but civil libertarians or closet Democrats. They are not officials who were standing on ceremony. They were officials zealously devoted to the prosecution of the war against Al Qaeda, and willing to stretch the law quite considerably to give the President the tools he thought he needed: “This was not ideological,” recalled a former Ashcroft aide. “This was about the difference between pushing the limits to the edge of the line and crossing the line.”.Hot tip for the mainstream press (not to mention Congress):
This is not your everyday occurrence. As I’ve been trying to emphasize, this internal DOJ showdown — and, more broadly, the role of the Vice President’s office in pushing a constitutional vision so extreme that the entire upper echelon of the Ashcroft Justice Department was ready to resign over it — is a very big deal, what you might fairly call a huge story.
Comment by turkey turkey turkey —
May 27, 2007 @ 5:03 pm
Screw the subpoenas. Where are the indictments?
Why haven’t Rove’s crooked USAs been replaced?
Why haven’t the voters on Rove’s ‘caging lists’ had their voting rights restored?
Why isn’t Rove behind bars?
Why hasn’t the origin of the fake Niger yellowcake documents been investigated?
Why has no one been called to account for the refusal to engage in meaningful post-invasion planning in Iraq?
Why haven’t Cheney and Idiot Boy been impeached and indicted for crimes against humanity?
Why? Because the US does not have an opposition party. The excuse for an opposition it does have is no less of a sham than the New York Nationals that pretends to object to letting the Christianists, militarists and nationalists do whatever they want.
Trackback by Unpartisan.com Political News and Blog Aggregator —
May 27, 2007 @ 5:36 pm
Attorney general’s aide says she ‘crossed the lines’…
A former senior aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told lawmakers Wednesday that his attempt …
Comment by Thoreau —
May 27, 2007 @ 6:00 pm
My hunch is that when the truth comes out it will turn out to be rather underwhelming. It will probably be more about procedure than the scope of the program: They wanted a rule that wiretaps could only be done if a TPS report was signed in triplicate by authorities from 3 different offices and then submitted (with the new cover sheet…did you get the memo?) to the Director of Blah Blah for review.
They probably persuaded themselves that these internal “checks and balances” would be sufficient, even though it’s all from the same branch of the government, i.e. no judicial review, everything done by people who ultimately answer to the same leaders at the top of the food chain.
But that’s just my guess.
Comment by Mona —
May 27, 2007 @ 7:26 pm
Thoreau, you are almost certainly wrong on this one. Marty Lederman was in Clinton’s OLC and knows his way around the DoJ and how things work there. Threats of mass resignations are as startling and unusual as he says, and indicate something truly serious in terms of lawbreaking was going on.
Comment by Thoreau —
May 27, 2007 @ 7:59 pm
Mona-
But we know that they ultimately signed off on an illegal program. My guess is that they persuaded themselves that violating FISA is OK “If it’s done for the right reasons”, and probably persuaded themselves that “the right reasons” include going after foreign terrorists. They probably persuaded themselves that this is OK because the terrorists are combatants violating the rules of war, or some rationale along those lines.
They must have persuaded themselves of these things, because they ultimately signed off an illegal program.
But in persuading themselves that “It’s OK _if_…”, they laid down the idea that thereshould be a _limit_ on these activities, and a way to enforce that limit.
So what was the fight over? Two possibilities:
1) Somebody high up wanted to openly cross that line and violate FISA for things other than spying on foreign terrorists operating on US soil.
2) Somebody high up wanted a weak or non-existent procedure for determining when that line is crossed.
The second possibility is basically equivalent to the first, but it’s less blatant. I doubt that anybody high up said openly “Yeah, we’ll use this program to spy on whoever we damn well please.” More likely they insisted on a weak or non-existent procedure, and DOJ people insisted on having an internal procedure in place to determine when it’s OK to violate FISA.
Prior to this controversy, I thought that the FISA Court was a pretty awful thing. A secret court that can give them permission to spy on you? That just creeped me out. But if wannabe tyrants are scared of the FISA Court, and insist on sneaking around it, they must be doing something right.