Posted by Andrew Zajac at 6:30 a.m. CDT
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush to approve security clearances for Justice Department lawyers in an internal investigation connected to the administration’s controversial domestic spying program, but he was overruled by the president, who refused to grant the clearances, according to a DOJ letter to a leading congressional critic of the surveillance program.
Bush’s refusal to approve the clearances effectively idled the investigation.
Gonzales’ stance, while admirable, didn’t go far enough, said Jeff Lieberson, spokesman for Rep. Maurice Hinchey, a New York Democrat who has been prodding the administration to investigate the legality of the eavesdropping operation. “Gonzales should have stood up to the president. He should have followed in Elliot Richardson’s footsteps and resigned,” said Lieberson. Richardson, of course, was the attorney general who in the October 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre” quit rather than obey President Nixon’s order to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox.
Copies of the DOJ letter went out to seven other Congressional critics of warrantless surveillance including Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin.
At issue is whether Justice Department lawyers sidestepped the law in helping craft the legal justification for the program, which allowed the government to eavesdrop on the overseas phone conversations of persons in the U.S. without getting a search warrant.
After insisting for months that he had the inherent authority as president to order the spying, Bush announced in January that he was putting the program under court review.
One recent twist in the story is that according to at least one account, Gonzales would be a subject of the investigation because he was White House counsel at the time it was authorized. A National Journal story published last week says Gonzales knew he would be a target of the inquiry at the time he counseled Bush.
The National Journal report says it’s unclear whether Gonzales told Bush he would be under scrutiny in the probe or what advice he gave the President.
The Justice Department letter disputes the National Journal account, saying that “the Attorney General was not told that he was a subject or target of the…investigation, nor did he believe himself to be.”
