When Gonzales and Card entered the ICU room, carrying a document, they didn't want to talk to Comey. (Comey had the reputation as somewhat independent. Comey was the DOJ official who appointed Patrick Fitzgerald, another straight-arrow, to prosecute the Plame case.) Instead, Gonzales and Card spoke to Ashcroft about the need for him to approve the top-secret surveillance program -- it needed to be re-authorized every 45 days, and the deadline was the next day -- and they wanted him to sign the paper.
THE DRAMATIC TENSION IN THAT ROOM
Ashcroft gathered enough strength to push himself up off his pillow, denounced their behavior, and informed them that, in any case, Comey was the Acting Attorney General. In the infighting that followed over the next few days, FBI Director Robert Mueller stood with Ashcroft and Comey, with Cheney on the side of Gonzales and Card.
The tension in that ICU room must have been positively electric. "Comey was so concerned that the White House officials would resort to thuggish behavior he [had] called FBI Director Robert Mueller and had Mueller instruct the FBI agents present in Ashcroft's room 'not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances'." ( http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/come-m17.shtml )
(When White House Press Secretary Tony Snow was asked the other day about the mob-style tactics in that hospital room, trying to lean on a very sick man to get what they wanted, Snow said, apparently with a straight face: "Because he had an appendectomy, his brain didn't work?" Snow -- who may have been speaking metaphorically when he got the operation wrong -- would say no more about the incident. And Bush would not answer reporters' questions about whether he sent his heavies to Ashcroft's room in the ICU.)
CARD ORDERS COMEY TO WHITE HOUSE
After Gonzales and Card left the hospital, having obtained no DOJ signature on the document, Card called Comey and angrily ordered him to come to the White House later that evening for a meeting. Comey told Card that based on the behavior of White House officials that afternoon in the hospital room, there was no way he would meet with Card without an outside witness being present. He chose Solicitor General Theodore Olson as his witness.
The White House meeting solved nothing. The DOJ officials would not agree to authorize a domestic-spying program they had determined to be illegal.
What did Bush do? According to Comey, "The program was reauthorized without us and without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality."
Ashcroft, Comey, and Mueller threatened to resign in protest unless Bush changed his policy. Perhaps because of the threat of another scandal going public just before the November 2004 election, Bush said he would back off and make adjustments to the program to meet the DOJ objections. But, to this day it's not clear what changes, if any, he might have made in the program.
BUT WHICH DOMESTIC SPYING PROGRAM?
One reason virtually nobody is sure what Bush did is that it's still unclear what domestic spying operation was being discussed by Gonzales and then by Comey.
On the surface, the program would seem to be the NSA's domestic spying program that Bush&Co. took out of the hands of the legally-constituted FISA authorities, the super-secret court that has jurisdiction in okaying wiretaps on U.S. citizens suspected of ties with terrorists. This is the domestic-spying program that received all the publicity when the New York Times finally made it public in 2005 -- notably, after the presidential election.
But if one pays careful attention to Gonzales' February 6, 2006 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, one is led to wonder if Ashcroft, Comey and Mueller were adamant about the admitted-to NSA spy operation or about another, still undisclosed domestic-spying program.
In that testimony, when questioned by senators as to the NSA domestic-spying operations, Gonzales continually used the phrase "the program which I'm testifying about today." ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/28/AR2006022801587.html ) In a later written clarification, he said: "I did not and could not address . . . any other classified intelligence activities." Using the administration's term for the recently disclosed operation, he continued, "I was confining my remarks to the Terrorist Surveillance Program as described by the President, the legality of which was the subject" of that day's hearing.
The clear implicaton in Gonzales' carefully-parsed language is that there were other domestic spying programs in place that Bush had not described.
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).
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