The political world couldn’t help but laugh when comments Bush made in April 2004 started making the rounds yesterday in which the president said “a wiretap requires a court order” even when “we’re talking about chasing down terrorists,” because, as Bush described it, “we value the Constitution.” We may be in a post-9/11 era, the president said, but when it comes to wiretaps, “nothing has changed.”
Yesterday, some pesky member of the White House press corps confronted Scott McClellan with the quote and asked whether the president was “being completely forthcoming when he made that statement.” The press secretary essentially argued that those comments about wiretaps didn’t really count.
McClellan: I think he was talking about in the context of the Patriot Act.
Q: And in terms of the American people, though, when he says “nothing has changed” —
McClellan: I would have to look back at the remarks there, but you’re clearly talking about it in the context, as you pointed out, of the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act is another vital tool. That’s why the Senate needs to move forward and get that reauthorized now. We cannot let that expire — not for a single moment, because the terrorist threat is not going to expire. Those tools have helped us disrupt plots and prevent attacks and break up terrorist cells. We need those tools for our law enforcement and intelligence community. And we urge the Senate to stop the delaying tactics by the minority of senators, to stop their delaying tactics, to stop filibustering, stop blocking this legislation and get it passed.
Q: So you don’t see it as misleading in any way when the President says, “nothing has changed”?
McClellan: You’re asking me to look back at something that is in relation to the Patriot Act.
As defenses go, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. As Slate’s Tim Noah explained, referring to the April 2004 comments, “Bush was reassuring his fellow Americans that he wouldn’t impose warrantless wiretaps under the Patriot Act because he was already imposing warrantless wiretaps with no legal authority at all. He just forgot to say the second part.”
McClellan seems to have overlooked this detail.