{"id":6910,"date":"2006-03-21T11:16:12","date_gmt":"2006-03-21T16:16:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6910"},"modified":"2006-03-21T11:16:12","modified_gmt":"2006-03-21T16:16:12","slug":"dueling-legal-advice-on-nsa-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/dueling-legal-advice-on-nsa-surveillance\/","title":{"rendered":"Dueling legal advice on NSA surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two months ago, the president explained the legal advice<\/a> he received about his warrantless search program.<\/p>\n

“[T]he FISA law was written in 1978. We’re having this discussion in 2006. It’s a different world. And FISA is still an important tool. It’s an important tool. And we still use that tool. But also — and we — look — I said, ‘Look, is it possible to conduct this program under the old law?’ And people said, ‘It doesn’t work in order to be able to do the job we expect us to do.'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Got it. Bush asked his lawyers whether he could conduct domestic surveillance under FISA. Bush acknowledged that these people said he could not, because “the old law…doesn’t work.” (There is no new<\/i> law, of course, just the old law that the president decided he no longer wanted to follow.)<\/p>\n

Yesterday, Bush seemed to quote a different set of lawyers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“I was concerned about the legality of the program, and so I asked lawyers — which you got plenty of them in Washington — (laughter) — to determine whether or not I could do this legally. And they came back and said, ‘Yes.'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, which is it? Did Bush get legal advice from competing sets of lawyers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two months ago, the president explained the legal advice he received about his warrantless search program. “[T]he FISA law was written in 1978. We’re having this discussion in 2006. It’s a different world. And FISA is still an important tool. It’s an important tool. And we still use that tool. But also — and we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6910\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}