White House Kept Justice Lawyers in Dark on Warrantless Wiretapping (Inspectors General Report)

[pinto]

Turns out the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" was just a publicity title, the program's activities, as a whole, were the "President's Surveillance Program". ~ pinto

White House Kept Justice Lawyers in Dark on Warrantless Wiretapping

By Carrie Johnson and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 10, 2009; 3:09 PM

The Bush White House so strictly controlled access to its warrantless eavesdropping program that only three Justice Department lawyers were aware of the plan, which nearly ignited mass resignations and a constitutional crisis when a wider circle of administration officials began to question its legality, according to a watchdog report released today.

The unclassified summary by five inspectors general from government intelligence agencies called the arrangements "extraordinary and inappropriate" and asserted that White House secrecy "undermined" the ability of the Justice Department to do its work.

The report is the first public sign of a long running investigative review of a program that provoked fierce conflict within the highest levels of the Bush administration in 2004. At the time, the Justice Department's second in command and the director of the FBI both vowed to resign if President Bush continued with electronic intelligence gathering that they believed was outside the boundaries of the law.

<snip>

President Bush authorized the program shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on American soil in a single document, and the legal approval for the initiative relied on ongoing threat assessments known among some members of the intelligence community as "scary memos," the report said.

The program eventually became a symbol of the administration's excessive secrecy on national security policies. Only three Justice Department officials -- Ashcroft, former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John C. Yoo, and intelligence policy lawyer James Baker -- were read into the electronic surveillance initiative. Many of their superiors were kept in the dark, the unclassified summary reported for the first time today.

more at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/10/AR2009071002536.html

[indepat]

1. Now ain't all these 1984ish bushworld specials special?

:P

[pinto]

2. Really. Check out the whole article. It really is, as one source noted, "chilling."

I was around for the Nixon/Watergate era of Presidential legal malfeasance (I'm 57). This is in a different class altogether. Or at least in a different level of criminal behavior.

[seafan]

3. Cheney on March 9, 2004: President "may have to reauthorize without [the] blessing of DOJ."

March 10, 2004: The hospital bedside showdown between a severely ill Ashcroft, Card, Gonzales and Acting Attorney General James Comey.


Checkmate, Dick.



WP


July 10, 2009

.....

The report said Yoo prepared hypothetical documents in September and early October 2001 before writing a formal memo in November, after Bush had already authorized the initiative.

This is evidence that Bush authorized a rogue declaration for illegal domestic spying, entirely without any proper legal authority whatsoever. And still, he walks free.



More from the Post:

In that memo, Yoo concluded that the FISA law could not "restrict the president's ability to engage in warrantless searches that protect the national security" and that "unless Congress made a clear statement in FISA that it sought to restrict presidential authority to conduct warrantless searches in the national security area -- which it has not-- then the statute must be construed to avoid such a reading," according to the report.

When that analysis reached higher level officials in the Justice Department in late 2003 and early 2004, they became troubled about the conclusions and convinced the plan may have run afoul of the law, ignoring important Supreme Court rulings on the subject of executive branch power.
The full outlines of the program remain murky and subject to strict classification, but the inspectors general report said that Yoo "did not accurately describe the scope" of other intelligence activities in the President's Surveillance Program, presenting "a serious impediment to recertification of the program."

Former Justice Department lawyers Patrick Philbin and Jack Goldsmith, who served in the Office of Legal Counsel, secured access to the program and began meeting with Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and David Addington, counsel to Vice President Cheney, to express their concerns after Yoo left the department in 2003. Goldsmith's notes from the meetings say that the White House lawyers agreed that they would "pull the plug" if the trouble with the program grew serious, the report said.

Disputes over the program prompted a series of meetings in March 2004, including lobbying by the White House, to try to persuade the Justice Department lawyers to agree to a temporary continuation of the surveillance while its legal problems were fixed.
On March 9, 2004, intelligence officials and Cheney met to discuss the issue without inviting Justice Department leaders. Cheney suggested that the president "may have to reauthorize without blessing of DOJ," according to previously unreported notes taken by Mueller described in today's report. Mueller told the investigators he would have a problem with that approach.
Later that day, Cheney met with Justice Department officials and told them that "thousands" of lives could be risked if they did not agree to continue the program, the inspectors general report said.

The resignation threats came after a dramatic March 10, 2004, hospital visit by Card, who was then the White House chief of staff, and Gonzales to the bedside of an ailing Ashcroft. They appeared at the hospital in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to convince the attorney general, who was weakened by severe pancreatitis, to sign a document that would give reauthorize the program despite legal advice from others in the Justice Department.
Former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey told the Senate years later that he had literally sprinted up the stairs of George Washington University Hospital in an effort to arrive before the White House advisers. Comey said the episode marked the "most difficult night of my professional life."

Several subordinates at the Justice Department and FBI Director Robert Mueller III stood behind Comey in the aftermath of the hospital confrontation, raising the possibility of a mass departure that would have attracted wide public attention and invited comparisons to the Nixon era's Saturday Night Massacre.

Senior White House officials disdained the legal regime imposed on the program, according to a book by Goldsmith. He reported that Addington said in February 2004 that "we're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court."
Goldsmith also said that the information on the program had been so closely held that Addington denied a request by the National Security Agency's inspector general to see a copy of the Justice Department memo supporting the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

"The White House had found it much easier to go it alone, in secret," Goldsmith wrote.

Chilling.



(bold type added)

[Qutzupalotl]

4. BEFORE, not after 9/11.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/10/nsa-asked-for-p/
Nacchio unsuccessfully attempted to defend himself by arguing that he actually expected Qwest’s 2001 earnings to be higher because of secret NSA contracts, which, he contends, were denied by the NSA after he declined in a February 27, 2001 meeting to give the NSA customer calling records, court documents released this week show.

[struggle4progress]

5. Yoo seems to specialize in BS legal opinions providing ass-cover for criminal acts

[pinto]

8. No shit.

Sure seems to be the case.

[riderinthestorm]

6. Gotta look forward!111!! No looking backward!11! Obama!!111!! Yay!!!1!! nt

[noise]

7. We have been told over and over again

that police state counterterrorism tactics were required to prevent terrorist attacks. In effect, the Bush administration claimed that they had to commit criminal acts to defend the country. All the while they pretended these criminal acts were actually legal. One way they did this was by having corrupt OLC lawyers write "after the fact" legal opinions.

This is a good exchange that puts the Bush administration's conduct in the proper context. The unitary executive theory is basically a call for dictatorship:

PROFESSOR FIRMAGE : I think the survival of the state is what the Constitution is about. The reason of state argument is a very slippery thing, and at heart, at best amoral.

MOYERS: Amoral?

PROFESSOR FIRMAGE: Oh, you bet. I would say it ranges from amoral on the good side, to just basically immoral.

MOYERS: Assume I'm president, and I'm going to say, Professor Firmage, that's all wonderful, but I deal in an ugly world. The United States is a wonderful place, relatively, because of this document, because of the values the founders inculcated in us, but the world beyond these borders is a pretty ugly world. People don't like us, people don't share those values, people are out to get us. And if I don't do the ugly things that are necessary to protect us from an ugly world, you won't be able to exercise the right of free speech out at that university."

PROFESSOR FIRMAGE: I would say poppycock, Mr. President. That is simply nonsense. The whole fight is over means, not ends. Every president with every good intention, and every tyrant, with whatever his intention, has used precisely the same argument. That is, don't constrain me by means, and I will get you there safely and well. And I think any time we accept a reason of state argument to justify means that are totally incongruent with the values of our state, we're on the high road to tyranny and we deserve to be there.

from The Secret Government by Bill Moyers

[bobthedrummer]

9. .

[bobthedrummer]

10. The Decider's Surveillance Program=TIA

Indict and prosecute them all...