Cheney’s Sinister Hand
Former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey submitted his written responses to questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee today. Here’s what he had to say about events leading up to the Alberto Gonzales’s late-night visit to Ashcroft’s hospital bed in an effort to get him to renew the warrantless NSA wiretap program:
Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday.
The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital…
Comey said that Cheney’s office later blocked the promotion of a senior Justice Department lawyer, Patrick Philbin, because of his role in raising concerns about the surveillance.
The disclosures also provide further details about the role played by then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales. He visited Ashcroft in his hospital room and wrote an internal memorandum on the surveillance program shortly afterward…
It is unclear who directed the two Bush aides to make the visit.
Democrats said yesterday that the new details from Comey raise further questions about the role of Cheney and other White House officials in the episode.
“Mr. Comey has confirmed what we suspected for a while — that White House hands guided Justice Department business,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). “The vice president’s fingerprints are all over the effort to strong-arm Justice on the NSA program, and the obvious next question is: Exactly what role did the president play?”
A White House spokesman declined to comment.
Comey also named eight Justice Department officials who were prepared to quit if the White House had not backed down, including FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, current U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg of Alexandria and Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel and led an internal legal review of the surveillance program.
The only thing that is “unclear” here is whether or not Cheney was acting on Bush’s orders or if he was pushing his own agenda. Cheney was definitely involved in the decision to renew the illegal spying program even after many members of the Justice Department raised questions about its constitutioinality and recommended that it be discontinued.
But that didn’t stop Cheney from attempting to undermine the Justice Department by trying to get an ailing, drugged John Ashcroft to sign off on its renewal.
Congress should subpoena Cheney immediately and require him to tell them about the NSA program and why he thought it necessary to ignore the advice he was getting from lawyers in the Justice Department and push through what he was being told was an illegal program.
I’ve always said that THIS is the issue that will unravel the Bush Administration, because they were clearly in violation of existing laws and the U.S. Constitution, and they’ve even admitted to it.
If there is an investigation and for some crazy reason the TRUTH is revealed, Bush and Cheney will be impeached for their total disregard of laws they swore on The Bible to uphold when they took office.
