Lawless Authoritarian Thugs

I guess I didn't take much notice of James Comey's amazing story about his mad dash to John Ashcroft's hospital to head off Abu G and Andy Card from getting a bedridden Ashcroft to sign off on the warrantless spying program. That's because it was already known to me for at least a year. But it is significant that Comey testified to it in open testimony, because it forced the traditional media to take notice:

JAMES B. COMEY, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source. The episode involved a 2004 nighttime visit to the hospital room of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft by Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff. Only the broadest outlines of this visit were previously known: that Mr. Comey, who was acting as attorney general during Mr. Ashcroft's illness, had refused to recertify the legality of the administration's warrantless wiretapping program; that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card had tried to do an end-run around Mr. Comey; that Mr. Ashcroft had rebuffed them.

Mr. Comey's vivid depiction, worthy of a Hollywood script, showed the lengths to which the administration and the man who is now attorney general were willing to go to pursue the surveillance program. First, they tried to coerce a man in intensive care -- a man so sick he had transferred the reins of power to Mr. Comey -- to grant them legal approval. Having failed, they were willing to defy the conclusions of the nation's chief law enforcement officer and pursue the surveillance without Justice's authorization. Only in the face of the prospect of mass resignations -- Mr. Comey, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and most likely Mr. Ashcroft himself -- did the president back down.

The real revelation in the testimony is that, when Comey asked what Gonzales and Card were doing at the hospital and if they were going behind his back, they replied that "they were just making a social call." That's well-written black comedy right there.

And apparently the President himself was involved in this:

COMEY: Mrs. Ashcroft reported that a call had come through, and that as a result of that call Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales were on their way to the hospital to see Mr. Ashcroft.

SCHUMER: Do you have any idea who that call was from?

COMEY: I have some recollection that the call was from the president himself.

So the President himself was instructing his personal Rosencrantz and Guildensterns to get the near-unconscious Attorney General to sign a piece of paper essentially allowing illegal spying to continue for another 45 days. And there's another disturbing side to this testimony.

In a 2006 hearing, when Sen. Chuck Schumer asked him about Comey’s objections to the NSA wiretapping program, Gonzales denied there was any “serious disagreement about the program“:

GONZALES: Senator, here is a response that I feel that I can give with respect to recent speculation or stories about disagreements. There has not been any serious disagreement, including — and I think this is accurate — there has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed. There have been disagreements about other matters regarding operations, which I cannot get into. I will also say –

SCHUMER: But there was some — I am sorry to cut you off, but there was some dissent within the administration, and Jim Comey did express at some point — that is all I asked you — some reservations.

GONZALES: The point I want to make is that, to my knowledge, none of the reservations dealt with the program that we are talking about today.

Gonzales’ answer suggests two possibilities.

1) Comey’s objections apply to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program that Gonzales was discussing. If so, then Gonzales quite likely made serious mis-statements under oath. And Gonzales was deeply and personally involved in the meeting at Ashcroft’s hospital bed, so he won’t be able to claim “I forgot.”

2) Perhaps Comey’s objections applied to a different domestic spying program. That has a big advantage for Gonzales — he wasn’t lying under oath. But then we would have senior Justice officials confirming that other “programs” exist for domestic spying, something the Administration has never previously stated.

Gonzales often used weasel phrases like that when talking about the spying program, confining his remarks to "the program we are talking about today." It was often suspected that there are other, more wide-ranging programs that have yet to be determined. So I opt for #2.

Glenn Greenwald, who rose to prominence over the warrantless wiretapping story, writes a tour de force post about this new development today, focusing not on the high drama of the Ashcroft visit, but what else Comey's long-sought testimony revealed. He makes clear that Ashcroft and Comey both believed that the NSA program was illegal, and that the President sought to continue the program anyway without authorization from the Justice Department (This was back when the Justice Department wasn't headquartered under the RNC). So lawbreaking wasn't really a problem to this White House.

The overarching point here, as always, is that it is simply crystal clear that the President consciously and deliberately violated the law and committed multiple felonies by eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law.

Recall that the only federal court to rule on this matter has concluded that the NSA program violated both federal law and the U.S. Constitution, and although that decision is being appealed by the Bush administration, they are relying largely on technical arguments to have it reversed (i.e., standing and "state secrets" arguments) and -- as has been true for the entire case -- are devoting very little efforts to arguing that the program was actually legal or constitutional [...]

But the more important issue here, by far, is that we should not have to speculate in this way about how the illegal eavesdropping powers were used. We enacted a law 30 years ago making it a felony for the government to eavesdrop on us without warrants, precisely because that power had been so severely and continuously abused. The President deliberately violated that law by eavesdropping in secret. Why don't we know -- a-year-a-half after this lawbreaking was revealed -- whether these eavesdropping powers were abused for improper purposes? Is anyone in Congress investigating that question? Why don't we know the answers to that? [...]

How is this not a major scandal on the level of the greatest presidential corruption and lawbreaking scandals in our country's history? Why is this only a one-day story that will focus on the hospital drama but not on what it reveals about the bulging and unparalleled corruption of this administration and the complete erosion of the rule of law in our country? And, as I've asked many times before, if we passively allow the President to simply break the law with impunity in how the government spies on our conversations, what don't we allow?

If we had a functioning political press, these are the questions that would be dominating our political discourse and which would have been resolved long ago.

The Bush Administration simply feels that they have no checks on their power because the press, and to some extent the Democrats, and certainly the American people, don't bother to hold them accountable. This is the most lawless Administration in history, beyond even that of Ulysses S. Grant. They have nothing but contempt for the rule of law, and the lasting impact of that was on display at yesterday's "Three Cheers for Torture" Republican debate. This needs to be swiftly and directly rejected. I feel like we're on the precipice of an era not unlike the fall of Rome.

UPDATE: Chuck Hagel thinks Gonzales should resign now, and therefore gives me a sliver of hope that all is not lost in this country.