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Bush was denied wiretaps, bypassed them
By UPI
12/27/05 WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 (UPI)
-- U.S. President George Bush decided to skip seeking warrants
for international wiretaps because the court was challenging him at
an unprecedented rate.
A review of Justice Department reports to Congress by Hearst
newspapers shows the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration
than the four previous presidential administrations combined.
The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps modified only two
search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications approved over
the first 22 years of the court's operation.
But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests
for surveillance by the Bush administration, the report said. A
total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took
place in 2003 and 2004. And, the judges also rejected or deferred at
least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first
outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court's history.
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