Senior Justice Officials "Stunned" Prez Ordered NSA Probe Blocked By Justin Rood - July 18, 2006, 6:26 PM
The news today that President Bush acted to block an internal Justice Department probe relating to the NSA's domestic spying operations is both a bigger and more complicated a story than one would think, given the space it will probably be given in tomorrow's papers. In sum, it's an example of how even arcane tools of oversight can be subverted by the Executive Office of the President.
As we know, for at least three years, the NSA's domestic spying efforts have evaded scrutiny by Congress, the secret FISA review process, and the judicial branch.
This Justice Department probe came from a curious little office in the organization called the Office of Professional Responsibility. Their job isn't to figure out if the NSA can spy on Americans. They exist to watchdog Justice officials, and make sure they're adhering to the law as they, er, make sure the rest of us adhere to the law.
On the theory that someone at Justice had reviewed and approved the NSA's domestic spying efforts, four Democratic lawmakers had written the office in January to request an investigation. Did Justice officials obey the law, when they reviewed and approved this program?
To answer that question, OPR investigators needed only to review the files on the program which belonged to Justice officials. Of course, this being a secret, White House-favored program, that circle was relatively small. It probably included the Attorney General and a handful of other people. And they don't like their files gone through.
So the investigators -- whose colleagues and predecessors have reviewed classified material before in the course of their work -- were told they could not receive clearance high enough to allow them to review the documents.
It was a bogus dodge, folks grumbled, and probably came directly from the Attorney General's office -- after all, the files they needed included some of his own.
Which explains why the news today that Bush himself had ordered the review blocked was shocking -- not only to everyday Americans, but to Justice Department officials themselves. As Murray Waas (who's responsible for this arriving in the public eye) reports today:
The statement by Gonzales stunned some senior Justice Department officials, who were led to believe that Gonzales himself had made the decision to deny the clearances after consulting with intelligence agencies whose activities would be scrutinized, a senior federal law enforcement official said in an interview. . . . A senior Justice official said that the refusal to grant the clearances was "unprecedented" and questioned whether the clearances were denied because investigators might find "misconduct by those who were attempting to defeat" the probe from being conducted. The official made the comments without knowing that Bush had made the decision to refuse the clearances.
In effect, this means that the President himself -- not the Vice President, not David Addington, not senior advisers -- believes he has the right to insulate any program he chooses from any type of review, from congressional oversight to an arcane internal audit.
Makes you pine for a good backrub, doesn't it?