King George Strikes Again

The President, the ultimate delegator, the guy who hires good people and lets them do good work, personally stepped in to shut down a Justice Department investigation of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program:

SPECTER: Now when you had the first line of review, Mr. Attorney General, by OPR, why wasn’t OPR given clearance as so many other lawyers in the Department of Justice were given clearance?

GONZALES: Mr. Chairman, you and I had lunch several weeks ago, and we had a discussion about this. And during this lunch, I did inform you that the terrorist surveillance program is a highly-classified program. It’s a very important program for the national security of this country –

SPECTER: Highly-classified, very important, many other lawyers in the Justice Department had clearance. Why not OPR?

GONZALES: And the President of the United States ultimately makes decisions about who ultimately is given access –

SPECTER: Did the President make the decision not to clear OPR?

GONZALES: As with all decisions that are non-operational in terms of who has access to the program, the President of the United States makes the decision because this is such an important program –

SPECTER: I want to move on to another subject. The President makes the decision and that’s that.

Step back for a minute and understand this. The President of the United States stepped into an investigation that was going through established channels in the Department of Justice, and interfered with it, forcing it to shut down. This is Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre all over again. This is obstruction of justice, very specifically so.

In the theory of the unitary executive, the President runs the Justice Department and therefore has the power to manage that agency. Of course Nixon's impeachment included one count of "Interfering or endeavoring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States." This is an extreme example of a President acting above the law.

I am anxiously awaiting Arlen Specter's next strongly worded letter on the subject. I'll bet it'll include the strongest wording yet.

UPDATE: Atrios relates this to the calls from the right for an independent Justice Department in the 90s under Janet Reno (which were usually granted, as they should be, since the investigative arm of the government needs the power to investigate itself, under legal statutes, of course). Now we have a Justice Department completely under the thumb of the President.