Yesterday, Attorney General [tag]Alberto Gonzales[/tag] acknowledged for the first time that the [tag]president[/tag] personally blocked [tag]Justice Department[/tag] lawyers from pursuing an internal probe of the White House’s [tag]warrantless[/tag]-[tag]search[/tag] program. As it turns out, this is a story that may have some legs.
Bush’s decision represents an unusually direct and unprecedented White House intervention into an investigation by the [tag]Office of Professional Responsibility[/tag], the internal affairs office at Justice, administration officials and legal experts said. It forced OPR to abandon its investigation of the role Justice officials played in authorizing and monitoring the controversial NSA eavesdropping effort, according to officials and government documents.
“Since its creation some 31 years ago, [tag]OPR[/tag] 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.”
That is, until now. Part of what made yesterday’s revelations especially interesting was the White House’s inability to defend the president’s decision to [tag]interfere[/tag] with the [tag]investigation[/tag]. Tony Snow was asked about the move during yesterday’s briefing and argued that Bush simply showed some discretion.
“There were proper channels for doing legal review, and in fact, a legal review was done every 45 days, and the Attorney General, himself, was involved in it. The Office of Professional Responsibility was not the proper venue for conducting that.”
But this doesn’t make a lot of sense. As Justin Rood explained, the Office of Professional Responsibility is responsible for making sure Justice Department officials are “adhering to the law as they…make sure the rest of us adhere to the law.” Snow’s argument intentionally misses the point — Gonzales and other Bush allies at the DoJ approved the program, but the OPR wanted to check to make sure they were right. That’s not only the “proper” venue; it’s the only venue.
Except [tag]Bush[/tag] intervened to kill the investigation. That’s a real problem.
Some congressional Dems are saying the right things.
Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who had also sought an O.P.R. investigation of the surveillance program, said Tuesday that she was shocked that Mr. Bush had blocked the clearances of lawyers from that office.
“The president’s latest action shows that he is willing to be personally involved in the cover-up of suspected illegal activity,” Ms. Lofgren said.
That really is the point here. Political appointees at the Justice Department gave the White House some questionable legal advice. The OPR was going to check to make sure that advice was sound — so the president personally intervened to ensure that certain questions weren’t asked.
Murray Waas’ item on this is a must-read.
The statement by Gonzales stunned some senior Justice Department officials, who were led to believe that Gonzales himself had made the decision to deny the clearances after consulting with intelligence agencies whose activities would be scrutinized, a senior federal law enforcement official said in an interview. […]
A senior Justice official said that the refusal to grant the clearances was “unprecedented” and questioned whether the clearances were denied because investigators might find “misconduct by those who were attempting to defeat” the probe from being conducted.
Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), who had helped request the OPR investigation in the first place, told Waas, “It was the president of the United States himself who prevented this investigation from going forward. In obstructing the investigation, he was protecting the people around him, and not protecting the Constitution.”
Stepping back, it’s worth noting that Bush believes a) he can tap phones without a warrant; b) he doesn’t need judicial oversight; c) he doesn’t need to notify Congress; and d) he can personally shut down a legal review of the program at the Justice Department. If the cover-up is always worse than the crime, the president’s decision to shut down this investigation is at least as big a deal as the warrantless searches themselves.
Indeed, it shifts the political debate in a way that the GOP may find unhelpful. For months, Republicans have seemed to relish this issue — they get to tout their defense of the so-called “terrorist surveillance program,” while arguing that Dems care too much about the rule of law. But this revelation is a curveball. It’s not about monitoring suspected bad guys; it’s about the president interfering with a legal investigation.
Even for Dems who were unnecessarily sheepish about warrantless searches, yesterday’s revelation is worth following up on.