apparently the whole gonzales firing thing has opened a can-o-worms of criminal practices in the administration.
apparently, there was some internal dissent concerning the legality of the domestic spying program.
for anyone not wishing to sit through this testimony, there was more internal strongarming than what was stated by this administration.
In other words, the legal experts in the administration knew this was illegal, as did the administration.
I mean, jesus, if John Ashcroft could find no legal ground for this program to stand on and was outspoken against it, there goes Bush's case that he did nothing wrong as he met with Comey concerning this in march of 2003.
Bring a man in to talk about firings, and this comes up. what next? falsifying documents to make a case for war? Richard Nixon was a pimp compared to these guys.
MrSquirrel
The barely contained smirk of glee on Gonzales's face yesterday when he was blaming McNulty for everything was just pathetic. If he knew all this stuff about McNulty being at fault why did he not say anything to congress before the deputy AG resigned? Hell, it was after all only a few days ago, this is not a case of the Dude telling the big lebowski that new has come to light.
And I will admit, it really saddens me to say that I wish for the "good old days" when Ashcroft was AG. At least Ashcroft had a modicum of respect for the idea of justice.
MrS
MisterOpus1
What's also interesting is how Bush had squashed a DOJ investigation into this program:
For no explanable reason, Bush refused to grant security clearances to DOJ investigators in the Office of Professional Responsibility, thus killing the probe entirely.
The real problem with this Administration is not just how they sent their two thugs (Gonzales being one of them) to get Ashcroft's signature and sign off on their illegal program, which Ashcroft himself had given his power over to Comey while in the hospital so them going to Ashcroft was fruitless regardless. It's not just a matter of Gonzales blocking Comey's testimony for over a year and refusing to let him testify:
The real problem is that, according to Comey's testimony, Comey "would not certify the legality" of the program. Furthermore, this exchange is revealing:
quote:
COMEY: Mrs. Ashcroft reported that a call had come through, and that as a result of that call Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales were on their way to the hospital to see Mr. Ashcroft.
SCHUMER: Do you have any idea who that call was from?
COMEY: I have some recollection that the call was from the president himself.
So Bush was personally involved in getting Comey/Ashcroft to sign off on this illegal program, to which neither did. Bush's own lawyers were sent to recertify a program that the Justice Dept's own Office of Legal Counsel stated that the program "DID NOT COMPLY WITHIN THE LAW":
Yet despite all this, according to Comey's testimony, Bush ignored the advice that Ashcroft/Comey, and his lynch dog lawyers gave him about the illegality of the program and signed off on it anyway. This went forward for the next two weeks until Ashcroft and Comey came to Bush and threatened a major DOJ resignation revolt. Only then did Bush back off and decertify his program, compromising and willing to work with DOJ to supposedly make it "legal" (which really didn't happen afterwards anyway - all they did was come up with the AUMF excuse that the courts struck down). Think about that - John Ashcroft threatening to resign. We're not talking about a librul terrorist here that the rest of the Democratic Party (:rolleyes:), we're talking about a hardcore Bush supporter laying it down on the line in dissent with Bush's illegal procedures.
And with all that being said, the real obvious problem with this story is that Bush had clearly been doing illegal spying not just for the two weeks after that whole incident with Comey and Ashcroft in the hospital, but for over 2 years since 2001 when the Office of Legal Council sent in Jack Goldsmith to examine the legality of a number of Bush's policies (concocted by John Yoo and David Addington, primarily).
This is about as clear cut as you're going to get it - Bush was violating FISA law, knew damn well that he was violating it, Ashcroft and Comey knew and tried to stop him, Bush told them to Off and signed off on it anyway, they threatened revolt and only then did Bush back down two weeks later. Bush was breaking the law, period. It's irrelevant as to what changes have been made to this day. That does not erase the fact that Bush clearly violated the law in the past.
Forget Iraq. Forget any other issue for one moment and realize that there's no other issue that depicts the most clear and obvious lawbreaking activity by this President than this domestic spying case. None. I don't like the talk of impeachment. I never did. And I doubt this Congress would likely find their backbones and pursue this case a whole lot further (although I'd be pleasantly surprised). But if there was ever a case for impeachment, there is no stronger case that could be made than this issue alone.
MisterOpus1
Marty Lederman has a pretty astute analysis (whom I've shamefully lifted some info off from time to time). I think his entire post is worth a read, so I'm posting it in full:
quote:
I want to put yesterday's incredible Comey testimony in some context, to demonstrate just how otherworldly this story is -- and what an extraordinary tale it tells about the nature of the officials who are running our government.
In March 2004, the NSA surveillance program had been operational for two-and-a-half years. According to the President and NSA, it had produced extraordinarily valuable intelligence against potential terrorist actions. (At the very least, it's fair to assume that the folks in DOJ understood this to be the case.) The NSA and the phone companies had been going full-steam ahead on the program, even though on its face it would be a crime to do so under FISA. See 18 U.S.C. 1809. Presumably they did so only because OLC had written one or more legal opinions concluding that the President had Article II authority to disregard the statute in wartime -- a legal theory not only critical to the operation of the program, but also at the very heart of the Vice President's passionately held philosophy of Executive prerogatives.
Jack Goldsmith was confirmed to be head of OLC in October 2003. He was a loyal Republican and supporter of the President. And yet almost as soon as he took office, he began reviewing much of John Yoo's handiwork, and found it lacking. Barely two months into his new job, for instance, Goldsmith called the Pentagon and told them that they must immediately cease relying on the critical Yoo Opinion that formed the basis for the Department of Defense's absuive interrogation policies in Iraq and elsewhere. (I've reviewed this fascinating story in detail here.)
According to Comey, "there were a number of issues that [Goldsmith] was looking at" as part of his "reevaluation" of past OLC advice, and the NSA program "was among those issues" under OLC review. "Demanding that the White House stop using what they saw as farfetched rationales for riding rough-shod over the law and the Constitution, Goldsmith and the others fought to bring government spying and interrogation methods within the law. They did so at their peril." (The quotation from the best account yet of this basic story -- the article in Newsweek in February 2006 by Daniel Klaidman, Stuart Taylor and Evan Thomas. That article obviously owes a great deal of debt to partial accounts published earlier by, e.g., the New York Times and this blog. Nevertheless, it is a taut, comprehensive and compelling account of what might be the most revealing aspect of the legal crisis within the Executive branch during the past six years. It is well worth reading.)
By early March 2004, OLC apparently concluded that the NSA electronic surveillance program could not be defended on the basis of OLC's prior legal opinions, and had convinced the Attorney General and DAG that DOJ had to refuse to sign off on the program -- i.e., they were compelled to inform the President that the program violated FISA and could not legally be continued in its present form. Ashcroft and Comey agreed -- or at the very least, they deferred to Goldsmith's legal judgment, which is what happens in 99% of all cases once OLC speaks.
It is extremely rare for OLC to reverse its own opinions within an Administration. And that unusual course would be especially disfavored in this case, because all the relevant DOJ officials -- e.g., Ashcroft, Comey, and Goldsmith -- undoubtedly understood that repudiation of this particular OLC advice would mean shutting down the very program that the President had described as the most important intelligence program in the war on terror. Moreover, the theory that OLC was repudiating appears to have been one to which the Vice President and his counsel were deeply committed, and one that appears to have formed the basis for the Administration's decision to disobey other important statutory constraints. Obviously, then, there were profound disincentives to such repudiation.
And yet repudiate it they did. Can you imagine the reaction from the White House and the Vice President's office when that happened? After all, as one friend remarked today, it's not as if Nadine Strossen or Ramsey Clark was the Attorney General. This was John Ashcroft -- and he would not sign off on the prior OLC legal Opinion, even though:
1. It was the sole legal basis for a critically important intelligence program that was purported to have saved many lives. Newsweek:
The rebels were not whistle-blowers in the traditional sense. They did not want—indeed avoided—publicity. They were not downtrodden career civil servants. Rather, they were conservative political appointees who had been friends and close colleagues of some of the true believers they were fighting against. They did not see the struggle in terms of black and white but in shades of gray—as painfully close calls with unavoidable pitfalls. They worried deeply about whether their principles might put Americans at home and abroad at risk. . . . Goldsmith was not unmoved by Addington's arguments, say his friends and colleagues. He told colleagues he openly worried that he might be putting soldiers and CIA officers in legal jeopardy. He did not want to weaken America's defenses against another terrorist attack. But he also wanted to uphold the law.
2. Repudiation of the theory would mean that the NSA and phone companies had been committing crimes for more than two years.
3. It meant DOJ doing a remarkable about-face and acknowledging profound error.
4. It was a rejection of the principal constitutional theory at the heart of the Vice President's program for executive aggrandizement (and was presumably the basis for several other practices and policies as well) -- and so it could be expected to be met with the considerable wrath of Cheney/Addington, to the point where one of the messengers of the bad news, Associate DAG (and former OLC Deputy) Patrick Philbin, had an expected promotion blocked (according to Comey's testimony). Newsweek: "It is almost unheard-of for an administration to overturn its own OLC opinions. Addington was beside himself [when Goldsmith repudiated the Yoo DoD Torture memo in late 2003]. Later, in frequent face-to-face confrontations, he attacked Goldsmith for changing the rules in the middle of the game and putting brave men at risk, according to three former government officials, who declined to speak on the record given the sensitivity of the subject."
5. The President demonstrated his profound committment to the program by personally calling the Attorney General's wife and urging her to allow the White House Counsel and Chief of Staff to cajole the AG in intensive care, where she had not been allowing visitors.
and
6. The White House told the DOJ officials that it was going to go forward with the program anyway, even after DOJ had opined that it was unlawful.
And yet not only would Ashcroft, et al., not budge -- they were prepared to resign their offices if the President allowed this program of vital importance to go forward in the teeth of their legal objections.
In light of all these considerations, just try to imagine how legally dubious the Yoo justification must have been that John Ashcroft was so profoundly committed to its repudiation. It's staggering, really -- almost unimaginable that anything such as this could have happened, especially where the stakes were so high.
And recall this, as well: These are hardly officials who were unwilling to push the legal envelope, or who were disdainful of the objectives or need for the NSA program. Two or three weeks later, OLC did develop an alternative legal theory that permitted a narrower version of the surveillance program to go forward. By all accounts, that legal theory is some version of the argument that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force against Al Qaeda authorized this form of electronic surveillance, notwithstanding FISA. That is a theory that I and many others have harshly criticized (see, for example, the letters collected here). It is, to say the least, an extremely creative reading of the relevant statutes -- a reading that not a single member of Congress who voted for the AUMF could possibly have imagined, and one that (to my knowledge) not a single member of Congress has approved once reading of it in DOJ's "White Paper."
These DOJ officials were willing to sign off on that very tenuous legal theory. What does that tell us about the OLC theory that they inisted upon repudiating?
Moreover, the "revised" NSA program that OLC and DOJ approved some weeks after the March incident apparently was narrower in some fundamental respects than the program that had been authorized under the previous OLC advice. And yet, according to AG Gonzales, that new program still allowed electronic surveillance of communications as long as the NSA had a "reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda, or working in support of al Qaeda." Presumably this extremely generous guideline was required by the need to bring the program under the aegis of the AUMF, which authorized the President to use "necessary and appropriate" force against "those nations, organizations, or persons [the President] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons."
If that's the narrow version of the NSA program, just how broad and indiscriminate was the surveillance under the program that Ashcroft, et al. would not approve? [For more along these lines, see this terrific post by Orin Kerr. Here's one speculation just suggested to me by a fellow B'zation blogger: Perhaps under the Yoo-approved program, once a U.S. person received any phone calls or e-mails from a "covered" person overseas, the NSA was authorized to intercept all of that U.S. person's future phone calls. (After all, what the Administration was most interested in would not be overseas calls, but instead calls that might reveal activity of Al Qaeda cells here in the U.S.) Under the Goldsmith-approved, AUMF-based program, however, only international calls with actual persons covered by the AUMF could be intercepted. Who knows? -- this is only speculation.]
This is the real heart of the Comey story -- What happened between September 2001 and October 2003, before Comey and Goldmsith came aboard? Just how radical were the Administration's legal judgments? How extreme were the programs they implemented? How egregious was the lawbreaking?
It is imperative now that the Senate do all it can to obtain and investigate the entire paper trail that led up to the events described yesterday. There is no longer any excuse for the legislature to be denied the OLC opinions, at least pre-Goldsmith, that were the basis for the Executive branch's regime of extra-legal conduct. Not only the OLC Opinions and the Executive orders on the NSA program, but also the all-important Yoo Opinion signed on March 14, 2003, the day after Jay Bybee left OLC, which was the genesis for the terrible abuse that occurred in the Department of Defense during the remainder of 2003. (More on this in the last few paragraphs of this post.)
Of course, before the OLC opinions are made public, they should be redacted so as not to reveal important but secret NSA capabilities. But those redactions shouldn't be extensive, and should not obscure the basic legal analysis that is the critical basis for the conduct of the Executive branch in some of its most dubious activities. (OLC memos that say "no" -- that tell the President that he cannot do something, such as, presumably, Goldsmith's memo(s) in early 2004 -- are a much harder call. My basic view is that those are the sorts of OLC memos that presumptively remain confidential, at least until they are only of historical interest, for two basic reasons: (i) because they did not form the basis for any Executive branch conduct that occurred; and (ii) because those are the very most important memos that OLC issues, and nothing should be done to deter Executive officials from asking OLC about the legality of questionable proposals, or to deter OLC from feeling free to candidly tell the President "no." As my colleagues and I wrote here: "Ordinarily, OLC should honor a requestor’s desire to keep confidential any OLC advice that the proposed executive action would be unlawful, where the requestor then does not take the action. For OLC routinely to release the details of all contemplated action of dubious legality might deter executive branch actors from seeking OLC advice at sufficiently early stages in policy formation."
On the other hand, in this case the President went ahead with the conduct in the teeth of DOJ advice that it would be unlawful, and so this ordinary guideline is not quite on point. Moreover, here the Goldsmith Opinion rejecting OLC's prior advice (assuming it exists) is likely to be critical to a full understanding of the development of the Executive's programs and their legal justifications -- and therefore perhaps it, too, should be shared with Congress.
[DISCLOSURE: I worked at OLC, including for a time with Pat Philbin, until November 2002, and I have gotten to know Jack Goldsmith since he and I both left OLC (our tenures there did not overlap). Nothing in this or any of my other posts on these sensitive matters, however, reflects any information I learned while at OLC -- I was not aware of any of the programs discussed in these blogposts while I worked there -- and neither Pat nor Jack (nor anyone else) has ever revealed any classified or otherwise confidential information to me about these programs -- in the best OLC tradition, they have to my knowledge been scrupulous about preserving all confidences. All the information herein is taken or extrapolated from public sources.]
its a very confusing story and sexy, but actually nothing was done wrong by anybody. fundamentally, the NSA program had legal ground enough for Ashcroft to sign off on 20 times prior but inexplicably, for reasons of top secrecy, Comey and the OLC looked into a new aspect of program that they could not jive with seeing as how Comey was now going to be thew one to sign off on it's legality every 45 days. Card and Gonzalez got wind of this and when they found out Ashcroft could be gone they thought they were gonna be bamboozeled by the new AG.
After Bush told Comey and Mueller to "do what they think is right" and after he had authorized it pursuant to executive order (you really don't need DOJ's approval immediately) Comey actually says the program was revised to satisfy the new DOJ's concerns and the program continued to be reauthorized every 45 days.
i know all this sexy behind the scenes stuff gets you lefties in a tizzy but nothing wrong was done here.
ResonantDrag
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
its a very confusing story and sexy, but actually nothing was done wrong by anybody. fundamentally, the NSA program had legal ground enough for Ashcroft to sign off on 20 times prior but inexplicably, for reasons of top secrecy, Comey and the OLC looked into a new aspect of program that they could not jive with seeing as how Comey was now going to be thew one to sign off on it's legality every 45 days. Card and Gonzalez got wind of this and when they found out Ashcroft could be gone they thought they were gonna be bamboozeled by the new AG.
enter the justification for crashing his "death" bed party
quote:
After Bush told Comey and Mueller to "do what they think is right" and after he had authorized it pursuant to executive order (you really don't need DOJ's approval immediately) Comey actually says the program was revised to satisfy the new DOJ's concerns and the program continued to be reauthorized every 45 days.
i know all this sexy behind the scenes stuff gets you lefties in a tizzy but nothing wrong was done here.
d00d, do you actually believe what you write, or is it some forced response that transcends rationalization? your pair of threes don't beat this full house, regardless how you try to define the rules.
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by ResonantDrag
d00d, do you actually believe what you write, or is it some forced response that transcends rationalization? your pair of threes don't beat this full house, regardless how you try to define the rules.
this isn't a card game. you can leave your pointless analogies at the door.
what i stated is all in the record. what you BDS people don't realize is that you get your stories as these fragmented scenarios that make it look like there has been some wrong doing when in reality it's just not the case. you've been led there by the media.
what you just witnessed was behind the scenes confusion and misunderstanding brought on by the sudden illness of Ashcroft and the attorney firings and possiblley the whole Wilson charade.
Comey didn't resign that following monday, did he? no. he stayed on long after this and after the Administration looked closely at his concerns and rightly so i presume because he continued to authorize the legality of the program.
again the story is sexy but it's just that.
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by ResonantDrag
enter the justification for crashing his "death" bed party
your just gullible thats all. a symptom of BDS.
from Ashcroft's resignation letter Nov 2, 2004:
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved."
now go play, little guy.
MrSquirrel
Using a resignation letter comment as your evidence is just as shoddy as the evidence you continually say is a case of "BDS".
Everyone who resigns from a high government post says flowery things about their former co-workers and the "goals achieved" while they were there. It is all about putting a good face on the situation. It is the same regardless of which party is in power. No one rocks the boat in a resignation letter.
MrS
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by MrSquirrel
Using a resignation letter comment as your evidence is just as shoddy as the evidence you continually say is a case of "BDS".
Everyone who resigns from a high government post says flowery things about their former co-workers and the "goals achieved" while they were there. It is all about putting a good face on the situation. It is the same regardless of which party is in power. No one rocks the boat in a resignation letter.
MrS
i see what you are saying, but lets put Ashcroft in some context here and give him a little more credit for what you guys hate him the most for.
his religious ideals aside, Ashcroft was one of the architects of what you guy see as the quintissential violation of civil liberties acts in post 9/11 America. that was his legacy among other things. i assume he is very aware of that and would make no qualms about addressing his legacy in his resignation letter to the President.
now in the context of this thread, he eventually got better after surgery in March and didn't resign immediatly. neither did Comey. Ashcroft fullfilled what he thought was right about the NSA program. not the other way around like what most lefties want us to believe.
PS. i kinda drunk so bear with me here.
quote:
Originally said by John Ashcroft
I take great personal satisfaction in the record which has been developed. The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved. The rule of law has been strengthened and upheld in the courts. Yet, I believe that the Department of Justice would be well served by new leadership and fresh inspiration.
shaolin_Z
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
PS. i kinda drunk so bear with me here.
I bet that helps with your bleeding ass****. Aren't you tired of that Neoby now?
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by shaolin_Z
I bet that helps with your bleeding ass****. Aren't you tired of that Neoby now?
please, just let me meet you in person. nothing would bring me more joy.
