Whitehouse Reveals Smoking Gun of White House Claiming Not to Be Bound by Any Law
Damn, I love me some Sheldon Whitehouse. He, like, actually knows the law. And he, like, is willing to actually read the stuff he is exercising oversight over.
Which is why this speech he gave today is so important (link to speech; here’s a link to video). Apparently, Whitehouse actually read the OLC opinions that justified the warrantless wiretap program and continue to justify the Administration’s wiretap authority today. Then, Whitehouse got the key concepts of some of those opinions declassified. Here’s his description of what he found.
For years under the Bush Administration, the Office of Legal Counsel within the Department of Justice has issued highly classified secret legal opinions related to surveillance. This is an administration that hates answering to an American court, that wants to grade its own papers, and OLC is the inside place the administration goes to get legal support for its spying program.
As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I was given access to those opinions, and spent hours poring over them. Sitting in that secure room, as a lawyer, as a former U.S. Attorney, legal counsel to Rhode Island’s Governor, and State Attorney General, I was increasingly dismayed and amazed as I read on.
To give you an example of what I read, I have gotten three legal propositions from these OLC opinions declassified. Here they are, as accurately as my note taking could reproduce them from the classified documents. Listen for yourself. I will read all three, and then discuss each one.
- An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.
- The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II.
- The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations. [my emphasis]
I noticed Whitehouse sniffing around the question of Executive Orders before. I thought (okay, hoped, really) that he was sniffing around 13292, which governs classification and declassification, including whether the Vice President can unilaterally declassify the identity of a CIA NOC. But it turns out he was sniffing around EO 12333, which governs Intelligence Activities (and though it’s not central to this discussion, here’s an amendment Bush made in 2004 to set up DNI).
Here’s what–according to Whitehouse, who after all ought to know–Bush believes about whether or not he has to follow EO 12333, an Executive Order signed by Saint Reagan. Read more →