Ashcroft, Gonzales and The Domestic Surveillance Program

I can't speak for the OPJ, but my main reason for having the big word IMPEACH plastered above this blog's logo can be described in three words: warrantless domestic surveillance.

If memory serves, we hoisted the banner just after learning that George W. Bush ok-ed the warrantless electronic surveillance of American citizens. It was already possible to surveil citizens if necessary via the FISA court. But for some reason, that wasn't good enough for dubya.

I understand (though I can't condone) the decisions of the Congressional Democrats NOT to pursue Impeachment, but the insult to the Constitution is so great that someone has to be punished for it.

One curiously distasteful aspect of the story has bubbled up recently - the trip to AG Ashcroft's hospital bedside in March 2004.

According to Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, Congress wants speak to Ashcroft about it.

The Nation has a good description of what happened (sub. req):

The frantic race to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's bedside on March 10, 2004, sounds more Hollywood than history: Acting AG James Comey's foot-to-the-floor drive to head off then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card; FBI Director Robert Mueller's startling imperative to his agents to defy any attempt by Gonzo and Card to throw Comey out; the sedated and badly ailing Ashcroft rousing himself from his sickbed to defend the Constitution; the resignation threats by Comey and Mueller. As Washington lore, the episode joins Richard Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre and Thaddeus Stevens's being carried on a stretcher to vote in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. And behind all this, the President pushing a wiretap program so blatantly illegal that his own top Justice appointees were threatening to resign.

Some telling details:

• According to Comey's testimony, for two years the White House had endorsed still unspecified secret wiretaps by the National Security Agency without a warrant or authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In other words, for two years the NSA and telephone companies had been committing a federal crime with the full endorsement of the Oval Office.

And:

• In spring 2004, when Ashcroft, Comey and every other responsible official in the Justice Department had reviewed the program and declared that the taps blatantly violated the surveillance law, Card, Gonzales and Bush himself all indicated their intention to go forward anyhow. In plain English, that is a conspiracy.

The Nation continues with a further charge. Since Comey had already been assigned the duties of the AG, while Ashcroft was in the hospital, Ashcroft had no authority to sign off on the program. Whatever "authority" they were looking to present would have been fraudulent. They add:

That is how determined the President was to continue an illegal program.

Now perhaps Impeachment doesn't seem too strong a reaction.