Crime Blotter: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
By Paul Craig Roberts
03/19/07 "ICH" --- - While serving as President Bush’s White
House lawyer, Alberto Gonzales advised Bush that the president’s
war time powers permitted Bush to ignore the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and to use the National
Security Agency (NSA) to spy on US citizens without obtaining
warrants from the FISA court as required by law. Under an order
signed by Bush in 2002, NSA illegally spied on Americans without
warrants.
By spying on Americans without obtaining warrants, Bush
committed felonies under FISA. Moreover, there is strong, indeed
overwhelming, evidence that justice was obstructed when Bush and
Gonzales blocked a 2006 Justice Department investigation into
whether Gonzales acted properly as Attorney General in approving
and overseeing the Bush administration’s program of spying on US
citizens. Also at issue is whether Gonzales acted properly in
advising Bush to kill an investigation of Gonzales’ professional
actions with regard to the NSA spy program.
We are faced with the almost certain fact that the two highest
law enforcement officials of the United States are criminals.
The evidence that Bush and Gonzales have obstructed justice
comes from internal Justice Department memos and exchanges of
letters between the Justice Department’s Office of Professional
Responsibility (OPR), an investigative office, and members of
Congress. The documents were leaked to the National Journal, and
the story was reported in the March 15, 2007, issue by Murray
Waas, who also relied on interviews with both current and former
high ranking DOJ officials. Ten months previously on May 25,
2006, Waas broke the story in the National Journal about the
derailing of the OPR investigation.
From Waas’s report it is obvious that many current and former
Justice Department officials have serious concerns about the
high-handed behavior of the Bush administration. The
incriminating documents were leaked to the National Journal, the
only remaining national publication that has any credibility.
The New York Times and Washington Post have proven to be supine
tools of the Bush administration and are no longer trusted.
When the Bush administration’s violation of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act was leaked to the New York Times,
the paper’s editors obliged Bush by spiking the story for one
year, while Bush illegally collected information that he could
use to blackmail his critics into silence. As I wrote at the
time, the only possible reason for violating FISA is to collect
information that can be used to silence critics. The
administration’s claim that bypassing FISA was essential to the
“war on terror” is totally false and is a justification and
practice that the Bush administration, no longer able to defend,
abandoned in January of this year.
The known facts: After keeping the information from Congress and
the public for one year, on Dec. 16, 2005, the New York Times
reported that Bush was spying on Americans without complying
with the FISA statute. In response to a request from members of
Congress, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional
Responsibility launched an investigation into the Bush
administration’s decision to ignore FISA and to conduct domestic
spying on American citizens without obtaining the warrants
required by law. On January 20, 2006, Marshall Jarrett, the
Justice Department official in charge of OPR, informed senior
Justice Department officials of his investigation and its scope.
Gonzales informed President Bush about the OPR investigation,
and Bush shut down the investigation by refusing security
clearances to the Justice Department officials in OPR. In a
response to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter on
July 18, 2006, Gonzales disclosed that President Bush had halted
the OPR investigation.
This is the first and only time in history that DOJ officials
have been denied security clearances necessary to conduct an
investigation. The Bush administration claimed that the secret
spying was too crucial to our national security to permit even
Justice Department officials to learn about it. However, even as
Bush was denying clearances to OPR, he granted identical
clearances to: (1) the FBI agents ordered to find who leaked the
administration’s secret spying to the New York Times, (2) DOJ
officials in the Civil Division who had to respond to legal
challenges to the illegal spy program, and (3) five private
sector individuals who sit on the Privacy and Civil Liberties
Oversight Board.
Obviously, the unprecedented denial of security clearances to
OPR was done in order to prevent the investigation.
On March 21, 2006, Marshall Jarrett wrote to Deputy Attorney
General Paul McNulty that OPR was being “precluded from
performing its duties.”
In May, 2006, Jarrett informed Congress: ”On May 9, 2006, we
were informed that our requests had been denied. Without these
clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have
closed our investigation.” The National Journal reports: “[Rep.
Maurice] Hinchey and other Democratic House members asked
Jarrett why he was unable to obtain the necessary clearances;
Jarrett’s superiors, according to government records and to
interviews, instructed him not to inform Congress that President
Bush had made the decision.”
When the illegal domestic spying program was launched in 2002,
Gonzales was still White House Counsel. Documents and interviews
show that most high ranking Justice Department officials opposed
the illegal program. Attorney General Ashcroft, Deputy Attorney
General James Comey, Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith
in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, and James A. Baker,
counsel for the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review all
raised objections to the illegality and propriety of Bush’s
National Security Agency eavesdropping program. Baker went so
far as to warn the presiding judge of the FISA court that
authorities were improperly obtaining information and bypassing
the court. On learning that the administration was violating
FISA, one of the federal judges on the FISA court resigned in
protest.
Goldsmith was troubled by Bush’s claim that the “war on terror”
gave the president virtually unlimited powers. Goldsmith’s
objections to the Bush-Cheney-Gonzales view that the president
is above the law during time of war brought him under fierce
attack from Vice President Dick Cheney and Cheney’s two
principal henchmen, Scooter Libby, now a convicted felon, and
David Addington.
Goldsmith found an ally in Deputy Attorney General Comey. Comey
defied the White House in March 2004 when he refused to
reauthorize Bush’s spying on American citizens unless the
program was brought within the law. Comey incurred additional
Bush-Cheney enmity when he appointed Patrick J. Fitzgerald to
investigate the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity, an
investigation that resulted in the arrest and conviction of Vice
President Cheney’s chief of staff.
In his lengthy and detailed report in the National Journal, Waas
quotes a former White House Official: “Comey showed us that he
was a guy who wouldn’t be kept on a leash in an administration
that likes to keep everybody on a short leash.”
A criminal political administration has no choice but to keep
everyone on a short leash in order to keep its illegal acts
under wraps. Americans have never experienced an administration
so replete with crimes as the Bush Regime.
This criminal regime must now be brought to an end. Impeachments
of Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales, followed by felony indictments
and trials are imperative if the rule of law in the United
States is to be preserved.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in
the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall
Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of
National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good
Intentions.Click here
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