The [tag]Justice Department[/tag]’s ethics office had launched a probe of the department’s lawyers who approved the president’s [tag]warrantless[/tag]-[tag]search[/tag] program. Yesterday, the investigation ended – because the NSA wouldn’t give Justice clearance.
The head of the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, H. Marshall Jarrett, wrote in the letter to Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat of New York, that “we have been unable to make meaningful progress in our investigation because O.P.R. has been denied security clearances for access to information about the N.S.A. program.”
Mr. Jarrett said his office had requested clearances since January, when it began an investigation, and was told on Tuesday that they had been denied. “Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have [tag]closed[/tag] our [tag]investigation[/tag],” the letter said.
Mr. Hinchey said the denial of clearances was “hard to believe” and compounded what he called a violation of the law by the program itself, which eavesdrops without court warrants on people in the United States suspected of ties to Al Qaeda.
Hard to believe, indeed. 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.
Since the program in question was an NSA program, presumably the decision on access would have been made within the NSA. So in effect the NSA has decided that the public interest would not be served by having the means by which its program was approved reviewed by an independent set of investigators.
Now couple that with Bobby Ray Inman’s flat declaration that the warrantless-wiretapping program “was not authorized” by law, and what you have isn’t a security decision: it’s a coverup.
I’m looking forward to Michael Hayden’s confirmation hearings; how about you?