Archive for category: Law

Most people who linked to Isikoff’s latest did so to note that Jack Goldsmith will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, for example, has already planned ahearing next month featuring the first public testimony of formerOffice of Legal Counsel chief Jack Goldsmith. A one-time administrationstalwart, he became convinced that Gonzales and other administrationofficials were breaking the law in eavesdropping on conversations ofU.S. residents without judicial warrants, according to multiple formerdepartment officials.

Well, I’m glad it only took Isikoff two months to get around to the "who what why when where" details of this story.

But I’m interested in a different detail. Isikoff relies on one named source–David Iglesias–and two unnamed sources in his story. The first of those had this to say:

The investigation (headed by the department’s respected inspectorgeneral, Glenn Fine) has already turned up new documents and e-mailsabout the purge that have not been made public and that areinconsistent with previous Justice Department statements, according toa key witness who was recently interviewed by the investigators and wasshown the material. (The witness asked not to be publicly identifiedwhile the probe is ongoing.)

Not that Iglesias would be a "key witness" or anything. Wait a minute …

Already, the House Judiciary Committee has revealed abundant evidence that there was a concerted cover-up of the reasons for Iglesias’ firing. Emails released earlier this month only added to the evidence. If I’m wild-arsed-guessing correctly that Iglesias is both Isikoff’s named–and unnamed–source, it suggests there is still more documentary evidence that the White House and DOJ worked together to hide the real reasons for Iglesias’ firing.

One more detail. Isikoff reaffirms–and this article supports–the fact that there is an ongoing Senate Ethics investigation into Domenici’s actions. Domenici sure seemed like he was happy that Gonzales had resigned.

Domenici was more tempered in his response. “The resignation ofAlberto Gonzales had become inevitable,” he said in a statement Monday.“His situation was a distraction to the Department of Justice and itsattempt to carry out its important duties.”

Domeniciadded that he looked forward to reviewing Bush’s as-yet unnamed nomineeto replace Gonzales “carefully and objectively.”

Then again, he has played dumb about his own involvement in this issue before. Lucky for Domenici that he and Bush had another opportunity to coordinate their stories on Monday, huh?

Just some random thoughts on AGAG’s resignation.

AGAG and Kim

There have been a number of people connecting Gonzales’ resignation with Rove’s (Cenk Uygur’s take and Sidney Blumenthal’s). I am much much more interested in the timing of DOJ Civil Rights Division head Wan Kim’s resignation. Here’s the chronology:

The week of August 13: Bradley Schlozman resigns 

August 23: Wan Kim resigns, apparently giving all of six day’s notice

August 24: Gonzales first offers his resignation to Bush

According to this NYT story,the whole Gonzales thing was rushed and sudden, and it all took placestarting the day after Kim was reported to have resigned.

A senior administration official said today that Mr. Gonzales, whowas in Washington, had called the president in Crawford, Tex., onFriday to offer his resignation. The president rebuffed the offer, butsaid the two should talk face to face on Sunday.

Mr. Gonzales andhis wife flew to Texas, and over lunch on Sunday the president acceptedthe resignation with regret, the official said.

On Saturday nightMr. Gonzales was contacted by his press spokesman to ask how thedepartment should respond to inquiries from reporters about rumors ofhis resignation, and he told the spokesman to deny the reports.

WhiteHouse spokesmen also insisted on Sunday that they did not believe thatMr. Gonzales was planning to resign. Aides to senior members of theSenate Judiciary Committee said over the weekend that they had receivedno suggestion from the administration that Mr. Gonzales intended toresign.

As late as Sunday afternoon, Mr. Gonzales himself wasdenying through his spokesman that he was quitting. The spokesman,Brian Roehrkasse, said Sunday that he telephoned the attorney generalabout the reports of his imminent resignation “and he said it wasn’ttrue — so I don’t know what more I can say.” [my emphasis]

Now, granted, unlike Kim, Gonzales gave three week’s notice. But the IG investigation of the Civil Rights Division is one (of several) that clearly has merit. And the politicization of the Civil Rights Division is one that was reported to have been ordered from on high. Is it possible that Gonzales was unwilling to further perjure himself to protect those who had politicized justice in this country?

All of which is not to say that Gonzales’ resignation was unrelated to Rove’s. But from the descriptions, it sounds like Gonzales’ wife had a major influence in his decision to resign. And something seems to have triggered her influence just in the last week.

In this post, I compare what Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell revealed yesterday about why Democratic bills amending FISA were unacceptable with the content of those bills. The comparison shows that DNI McConnell found it unacceptable to require the government to:

• List what the minimization procedures were that protect data collected from Americans
  
• Allow either a FISA judge or Congress to review its compliance with its own minimization procedures

In short, the government promises it will protect American persons’ data, but it refused to allow any meaningful oversight of that promise.

McConnell Reveals that Democratic Requirements on Minimization Are Too Harsh

Along with blabbing about the fictional "surgical" precision of the Administration’s warrantless wiretap program yesterday, Mike McConnell also revealed why the Administration found the Democrats’ bills to amend FISA unacceptable: because of some restrictions their bills made on minimization procedures.

So I walked over to the chamber and as I walkedinto the office just off the chamber, it’s the vice president’s office,somebody gave me a copy. So I looked at the version and said, ‘Can’t doit. The same language was back in there.’

Q: What was it?

A: Just let me leave it, not too much detail, there were things withregard to our authorities some language around minimization.

Minimization refers to what the Administration does with information that they collect on people in the United States when they get that information incidentally while tapping someone purportedly outside of the US. This matters to you, because it determines how the Administration will ensure that, if they collect your end of the phone call when you call Pakistan, they don’t get to keep or use any part of your end of the phone call that isn’t absolutely necessary for the spooks to interpret the wiretap.

McConnell Tries to Deny Withdrawing Support from the House Bill

Helpfully, McConnell also specified how he responded to the bills the Democrats and Republicans proposed leading up to August 4. McConnell is basically trying to dismiss Democratic claims that he reneged on his support for their bill and in the end sided with the Administration’s harsher bill.

So we kept going back and forth, so we sent up aversion like Monday, we sent up a version on Wednesday, we sent up aversion on Thursday. The House leadership, or the Democratic leadershipon Thursday took that bill and we talked about it. And my response wasthere are some things I can’t live with in this bill and they saidalright we’re going to fix them. Now, here’s the issue. I never thenhad a chance to read it for the fix because, again, it’s so complex, ifyou change a word or phrase, or even a paragraph reference, you cancause unintended …

Q: You have to make sure it’s all consistent?

A: Right. So I can’t agree to it until it’s in writing and my 20lawyers, who have been doing this for two years, can work through it.So in the final analysis, I was put in the position of making a call onsomething I hadn’t read. So when it came down to crunch time, we got acopy and it had some of the offending language back in it. So I said,’I can’t support it.’ And it played out in the House the way it playedout in the House. Meantime on the Senate side, there were two versionsbeing looked at. The Wednesday version and the Thursday version. Andone side took one version and the other side took the other version.The Thursday version, we had some help, and I didn’t get a chance toreview it. So now, it’s Friday night, the Senate’s voting. They werehaving their debate and I still had not had a chance to review it. So,I walked over, I was up visiting some senators trying to explain someof the background. So I walked over to the chamber and as I walked intothe office just off the chamber, it’s the vice president’s office,somebody gave me a copy. So I looked at the version and said, ‘Can’t doit. The same language was back in there.’

Q: What was it?

A: Just let me leave it, not too much detail, there were things withregard to our authorities some language around minimization. So it putus in an untenable position. So then I had another version to take alook at, which was our Wednesday version, which basically wasunchanged. So I said, well certainly, I’m going to support thatWednesday version. So that’s what I said and the vote happened in theSenate and that was on Friday. So now it rolled to the House onSaturday.

McConnell talks about three bills:

• The House version, which failed as H3356.
• The Thursday Senate version, S2911.
• The Wednesday version, which eventually passed as S1927.

From McConnell’s description, we know that he found several things about H3356 unacceptable, probably minimization and some other things. And we know that his primary complaint with S2911 was its requirements on minimization. By comparing what each of these bills require in terms of minimization, we can figure out what was unacceptable to the Administration–and therefore what we can presume they’re doing with data on US citizens and permanent residents.

From TPMM, though no details about why or when:

Bradley Schlozman, a former Justice Departmentofficial who was at the center of the U.S. attorneys scandal and isunder investigation by the Departments inspector general for hisalleged efforts to politicize the Civil Rights Division, has finallyleft his post at the Department.

And while we’re counting people leaving DOJ, one of the good guys is leaving, too:

DLA Piper US LLP today announced that Peter Zeidenberg, a leading trialattorney, has joined the firm as a partner in the Washington, D.C.office. He comes to the firm from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)where he served as trial attorney in the Public Integrity Section ofthe Criminal Division.

In his capacity as Trial Attorney,Zeidenberg was engaged in the investigation and prosecution of local,state and federal public officials. His trial experience includesprosecution of some of the highest profile criminal cases handled bythe DOJ.

In addition to winning the "Who’s Your Daddy" contest at the Libby trial, Zeidenberg won the first trial conviction, of David Safavian, in the Abramoff case. Our country will miss the services of Zeidenberg much more acutely than those of Schlozman.

I only caught the tail end of Pat Leahy’s uneventful press conference. But apparently, I didn’t miss much. The deadline for the White House still stands–but they’re going to miss it. And Leahy–he says he can’t do anything until everyone returns in September.

But there is something he can do now. Why don’t those on the Senate Judiciary Committee–and anyone else in the Senate who’d like to join in–submit a friend of the court brief in support of the ACLU’s motion to unseal the FISC rulings. It seems that the Administration’s defiance of a Senate subpoena–for which they’re not making a blanket claim of privilege–is reason enough to intervene. It makes the issues the ACLU raised more pressing, since the Administration is defying normal oversight. And it supports the ACLU argument that the Administration is playing games.

Is there a downside to this? Any reason it’d not be beneficial?

Update: Oh, one thing I forgot. Twenty-seven members of Congress signed on to an a.c. brief to the Pentagon Papers case. A very close parallel to a lot of the issues here.