Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee this week seems to have sent a shockwave through much of the political world, renewing interest in a scandal that was never resolved. All of a sudden, questions that were unanswered months ago are being asked again, and thanks to Comey’s dramatic insights, new questions have arisen alongside the old.
“We’re doing what?”
That’s a quotation from the original Risen & Lichtblau New York Times article that broke the unlawful wiretapping story., attributed to “a senior government official [who] recalled that he was taken aback when he first learned of the operation.”
What, indeed, was the nature of the “program” before Goldsmith, Comey and Ashcroft — those notorious civil libertarian extremists — called a halt to it, and threatened to resign if the President continued to break the law? And what was the nature and breadth of its legal justification?
Some of these details are slowly coming together. A Paul Kiel piece, in combination with an NYT story today, is filling in some of the blanks.
In March 2004, when Comey refused to reauthorize the administration’s domestic surveillance program, the operation had already been in place for more than two years. If then-AG John Ashcroft agreed that the surveillance exceeded the law, why did it culminate in a showdown at that point?
Apparently because it was then that the Justice Department had completed a comprehensive review of the program. Ashcroft has been signing off on the initiative for two years without fully appreciating what it entailed. Comey and former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith started asking questions, and conducting a thorough review, upon getting hired in 2003. As the Muckraker piece noted, it was the first time “trained and qualified attorneys within the Justice Department had conducted a careful review of the program.”
Comey and Goldsmith concluded that the surveillance exceeded the law, and shared their findings with Ashcroft, who agreed that the program could no longer be reauthorized. This, of course, led to the showdown in Ashcroft’s hospital room, and the White House reauthorizing its own surveillance program over the objections of the Justice Department.
So what stopped Comey & Co. from resigning en masse? The White House tweaked the program, adding requirements to protect against abuses, though the Bush gang continued to utilize the surveillance for weeks. (Apparently, to make the DoJ happy, the White House added some minimal safeguards to protect against abuses, two years after the program went into operation. It naturally leads one to wonder how bad the program was before these modest changes were made.)
And why are we learning about this now? Because Alberto Gonzales orchestrated a cover-up.
Why is it only now that the disturbing story of the Bush administration’s willingness to override the legal advice of its own Justice Department is emerging? The chief reason is that the administration, in the person of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, stonewalled congressional inquiries and did its best to ensure that the shameful episode never came to light. […]
Consider: Mr. Gonzales, as the president’s lawyer, went to the hospital room of a man so ill he had temporarily relinquished his authority. There, Mr. Gonzales tried to persuade Mr. Ashcroft to override the views of the attorney general’s own legal counsel. When the attorney general refused, Mr. Gonzales apparently took part in a plan to go forward with a program that the Justice Department had refused to certify as legal.
Then, when part of the story became public, Mr. Gonzales resorted to word-parsing. “[W]ith respect to what the president has confirmed, I believe — I do not believe that these DOJ officials that you’re identifying had concerns about this program,” he said. Mr. Gonzales’s lack of candor is no longer surprising.
Of course not. The Post op-ed page has defended the Bush administration against all kinds of charges, but now, even Hiatt & Co. seem to understand the scope of the dishonesty from the Bush White House.
As usual, Glenn Greenwald summarizes the big picture, just as he has for years, capturing the seriousness of the scandal.
There is just no excuse left for allowing the administration to keep this behavior concealed from the country. What James Comey described on Tuesday is the behavior of a government completely unmoored from any constraints of law, operating only by the rules of thuggery, intimidation, and pure lawlessness. Even for the most establishment-defending organs, there are now indisputably clear facts suggesting that the scope and breadth and brazenness of the lawbreaking here is far beyond even what was known previously, and it occurred at the highest levels of the Bush administration.
We are so plainly beyond the point of no return with this criminality. It is now inescapably evident even for those who struggled for so long to avoid acknowledging it. Here is one of the most establishment-friendly voices of the Bush administration proclaiming the Attorney General of the United States to be a chronic liar and accusing the Bush administration — as part of events in which the President was deeply and personally involved — of engaging in deliberate cover-up of blatant lawbreaking. […]
James Comey’s testimony amounts to a statement that — even according to the administration’s own loyal DOJ officials — the President ordered still-unknown spying on Americans, and engaged in that spying for a full two-and-a-half-years, that was so blatantly and shockingly illegal that they were all ready to resign over it. And the President’s Attorney General then lied to ensure that this episode remain concealed. Mere one-day calls for a Congressional investigation are woefully inadequate here.
There is clear and definitive evidence of deliberate lawbreaking. In addition to Congressional investigations, there is simply no excuse for anything other than the immediate commencement of a criminal investigation by a Special Prosecutor. And the administration ought to be pressured every day to account for what it did here. This is not a one-day or one-week fleeting scandal. These revelations amount to the most transparent and deliberate crimes — felonies — by our top government officials, not with regard to private and personal matters but with regard to how our government spies on us.
Glenn concludes, “What now?” I wish I knew.