Wiretapping leak probe dropped

[kpete]

Source: Politico

Wiretapping leak probe dropped
By: Josh Gerstein
April 26, 2011 10:59 AM EDT

The Justice Department has dropped its long-running criminal investigation of a lawyer who publicly admitted leaking information about President George W. Bush’s top-secret warrantless wiretapping program to The New York Times — disclosures that Bush vehemently denounced as a breach of national security. They also stoked a congressional debate about whether the government had overstepped its authority as it scrambled to respond to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The decision not to prosecute former Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tamm means it is unlikely that anyone will ever be charged for the disclosures that led to the Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story in December 2005 revealing that, after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush ordered the interception of certain phone calls and email messages into and out of the U.S. without a warrant — a move many lawyers contend violated the 1978 law governing intelligence-related wiretaps.

The petering out of the warrantless wiretapping leak investigation amounts to a low-profile and ambiguous conclusion to an episode that dominated the headlines in the second half of the Bush administration. While Washington is immersed in the latest round of Wikileaks revelations and the investigation into new disclosures of a trove of government secrets, the dropped wiretapping investigation amounts to the final chapter of the most significant leak of the Bush era.

The Justice Department would not discuss the current status of the probe, which began in late 2005, after the Times story was published, with a formal leak complaint from the National Security Agency. However, Tamm’s attorney, Paul Kemp, told POLITICO he and his client were informed “seven or eight months ago” that the investigation into Tamm was over.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53718.html

[SugarShack]

1. Why am i not surprised?

[AllTooEasy]

4. I'm happy and surprised. The guy who outed Bush is off the hook!

[Sinistrous]

2. I wonder if they dropped this investigation out of fear

that it would reveal facts that would have made it even more imperative to prosecute the criminal bush cabal.

[Sonoman]

6. That has to be it.

Discovery would have been a bitch.

Sonoman

[KeepItReal]

3. The genius of Bush & Co. was to get the term "warrantless wiretapping" out there

...instead of "Illegal wiretap".

They willfully ignored the process of obtaining warrants for wiretaps and even the FISA court (which approves warrants *after* you've wiretapped and grants them on a super secret basis to preserve methods and sources) and spied on folks left and right.

[The Backlash Cometh]

5. It means it will happen again.

Unless we unseat this corrupt status quo.

[EFerrari]

7. The story says the whistleblower is no longer being prosecuted. n/t

[The Backlash Cometh]

8. When they stop an investigation it also stops the discovery process

I bet there was more to be uncovered and the whistle blower would have been in his full rights to dig further through depositions. I suspect that's why they didn't want to prosecute.

[EFerrari]

9. Likely so. n/t