Literally obstructing Justice

July 18, 2006

Back in May, the Department of Justice’s [tag]Office of Professional Responsibility[/tag] was prepared to launch an investigation into how and why the agency’s lawyers approved the president’s warrantless-search program. The probe came to a sudden halt, however, when the OPR discovered it had been “denied [tag]security[/tag] [tag]clearance[/tag]s for access to information about the N.S.A. program.” No clearance meant no investigation.

Even at the time, this didn’t make much sense. As Mark Kleiman explained, the DoJ officials involved in the investigation have all been subject to rigorous background checks, and even if specific individuals at the agency were deemed security risks, the NSA could exclude them instead of the entire Department of Justice.

So, how did all of this happen? We learned a key detail about the story today.

Attorney General [tag]Alberto Gonzales[/tag] said Tuesday that President [tag]Bush[/tag] personally [tag]blocked[/tag] [tag]Justice Department[/tag] [tag]lawyers[/tag] from pursuing an internal probe of the [tag]warrantless[/tag] [tag]eavesdropping[/tag] program that monitors Americans’ international calls and e-mails when terrorism is suspected. […]

Under sharp questioning from Senate Judiciary Committee chairman [tag]Arlen Specter[/tag], Gonzales said that the president would not grant the access needed to allow the probe to move forward.

“It was highly classified, very important and many other lawyers had access. Why not OPR?” asked Specter, R-Pa., referring to the Office of Professional Responsibility.

“The [tag]president[/tag] of the United States makes the decision,” Gonzales told the committee hearing.

Call me crazy, but isn’t it a little odd for the president to personally [tag]intervene[/tag] in blocking a Justice Department investigation? Especially one involving his own legally-dubious, warrantless-search program? When one talks about obstructing justice, isn’t this a rather literal example?

And of course the AP’s headline is pure propoganda:

“Bush blocked probe into anti-terror spying”

As if that’s what was being investigated.

If the AP was a real news organization, the headline of course would be:

“Bush blocked probe into domestic spying”

  • no, you’re not crazy, although whether this is “obstructing justice” in the criminal sense is beyond me. but what isn’t beyond me is that this is a characteristic bush response: my way or the highway. i’m the decider. there can be no limits to the commander-in-chief powers. don’t you know we’re at war.

    and so forth.

    once again, we are reminded that the animating spirit of the bush administration is the belief that nixon should never have turned over the tapes….

  • and the White Knight is talking backwards and the Red Queen’s on her head. Remember what the dormouse said!

  • If Specter still had any balls, we wouldn’t need the Justice department to investigate their own administration, Congress would do it. What’s he complaining about, the fact that the OPR didn’t do his job?

  • This is a good place to correct my typo from the other thread:

    RE: the psychopath known as “B”

    If you believe in the efficacy of prayer:
    Now is the time to pray for your country…

    I am starting to get an eerie feeling that in 2006
    this monster might not go easily into the good night…

    He is one sick bastard.

  • Karl Rove is now ordering kitchen sinks by the hundreds to throw at the Democrats for the November. Although Karl won’t get a discount, based on volume, for these sinks, you can be sure that this fall’s campaign will be the dirtiest ever!

    Why would Karl do that? Because blocking the OPR’s investigation is obstruction of justice and grounds for impeachment. If the Democrat gain control of the House, impeachment is a real possibility.

    When the first kitchen sink hits the ground, you’ll know that Republicans are scared.

  • Lance, having fed my head, I agree: Congress should do it. And Specter should either grow some balls or retire.

    “It was highly classified, very important ” — like Valerie Plame’s identity?

  • What the hell is the “Office of Professional Responsibility”? Did it exist pre-2000? It sounds like it comes straight out of “1984”. The name gives me the creeps…like the Director of Lessons Learned.

  • After the clearances were denied, a reporter asked Gonzales, “Did Mr. Jarrett come to you and ask you to assist him in getting those clearances?” Gonzales replied, “It would not be appropriate, and I would not get into internal discussions or the give and take that happened between the attorney general and other folks within the Department of Justice.”

    “You were aware of this personally?” the reporter asked.

    “Again, I’m not going to comment on anything,” Gonzales replied.
    From Dept of Justice’s own Office of Professional Responsibility denied SECRETS
    by Shane Harris & Murray Waas, National Journal Monday, May. 29, 2006

    Any chance Gonzales was under oath today?

  • Yahoo News has a picture of Gonzales taking the oath before his testimony today. See how effect the oath is. Too bad Specter didn’t previously think it was needed.

  • Some are suggesting that Specter was doing Bush’s bidding by changing the topic after Gonzales answered his question. If you see the video it is clear that Specter cut Gonzales short to keep him from spinning his answer.

  • “Some are suggesting” is not a strawman construct. There are comments on Think Progess to this effect.

  • I haven’t looked at the transcript, but based on the MSNBC article, are we sure from that single quote that that’s what Gonzales meant? The “President of the United States” is often used generically to refer to the executive branch in general– for example, many statutes say that the “President” will make some decision when it’s obvious that the president will not be personally involved and the decision will be delegated to some executive agency. I’m not saying that’s necessarily what was meant here, but it seems that the single quoted sentence could be read simply to mean that security clearance is a matter of executive discretion, not that Bush personally gave the order to exclude the DOJ.

  • (4) Interfering or endeavoring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force and congressional committees.

    Articles of Impeachment of Richard Nixon, Article 1, para 4

  • Cheney first, please!

    Don’t impeach Boy George II and put Cheney on the throne. And it would be a throne.

  • What the hell is the “Office of Professional Responsibility”? Did it exist pre-2000?

    I don’t know when the office was created, but it’s not as scary as it might sound. The OPR is basically just the Department of Justice’s ethics office.

  • “Department of Justice’s ethics office”

    In the current mis-Administration, that surely is an oxymoron worthy of addition to George Carlin’s routine, right next to jumbo shrimp and military intelligence.

  • Racerx’s observation hits the nail on the head. The headline need not have been extreme, but ‘domestic’ is a more accurate word. News ‘reporting’ is now filled with soft, polite words that explain nothing. If the same pisswits wrote headlines 60 years ago, we’d see “Six Million Jews Involved in Ethnic Squabble.”

  • I liked this comment so much, I had to post it here.

    “When the program was disclosed in December, it outraged Democrats and civil libertarians who said Bush overstepped his authority. Republicans had no opinion and kindly asked Bush to please take them as he saw fit.”

    That sounds like what they are saying…

  • This could be a wonderful, albeit slightly late, holiday present for the American People. Our next Congress (the 110th) will be seated, under the 20th Amendment, on January 3rd, 2007.

    T-Minus 169 days—and counting….

  • This could be a wonderful, albeit slightly late, holiday present for the American People. Our next Congress (the 110th) will be seated, under the 20th Amendment, on January 3rd, 2007.

    T-Minus 169 days—and counting….

    You realize that the ‘T’ which is minus 169 days is meaningless unless we address the issue of election fraud. There’s no reason to believe that the people who stole the last three elections are prepared to stop stealing them – and particularly not with potential impeachment and even prison terms at stake.

    Check this out:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-crispin-miller/how-to-preempt-a-novemb_b_25234.html

    We have to be ready, or we’re all going to be stumbling around in a daze again come November.

  • Astrogeek, tomorrows WaPo story answers your question about when the OPR was created.

    “Since its creation some 31 years ago, OPR has conducted many highly sensitive investigations involving Executive Branch programs and has obtained access to information classified at the highest levels,” the office’s chief lawyer, H. Marshall Jarrett, wrote in a memorandum released yesterday. “In all those years, OPR has never been prevented from initiating or pursuing an investigation.”

  • Also from the WaPo article linked to in #27:

    A series of memos released yesterday indicates that Jarrett was increasingly frustrated by the refusal to grant his staff the security clearances necessary to investigate the NSA program.

    Jarrett noted that clearances were granted to lawyers and agents from Justice and the FBI who were assigned to investigate the original leak of the NSA program’s existence to the media. He also noted that numerous other investigators and officials — including members of Congress and the members of a federal civil liberties board — had been granted access to or had been briefed on the program.

    “In contrast, our repeated requests for access to classified information about the NSA program have not been granted,” Jarrett wrote on March 21 to Gonzales’s deputy. By late April, he wrote internally that the office intended to close its investigation.

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