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Neocon Nuttery See other Neocon Nuttery Articles Title: Calling John Ashcroft The House and Senate Intelligence Committees have asked the former attorney general to testify about his role in a dramatic showdown over a controversial eavesdropping program. Will he play ball? The Senate and House Intelligence Committees are asking former attorney general John Ashcroft to testify about a March 2004 hospital-room confrontation during which he refused to sign off on a continuation of President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program, according to congressional and administration sources. The sources, who asked not to identified talking about sensitive matters, said the Senate Intelligence Committee has tentatively scheduled a closed-door hearing for later this month. The panel plans to question Ashcroft, his former chief of staff David Ayres and former deputy attorney general James Comey about a heated dispute with the White House that roiled the Justice Department three years ago. The House committee is also planning a separate closed-door hearing with Ashcroft, according to a spokeswoman for Ashcroft. The requests for Ashcroft’s testimony reflect the mounting frustration on the part of committee leaders in both chambers who feel they have been denied vital information about the wiretapping issue by the Bush administration. Despite having received numerous private briefings from senior administration officials over the last year, members were stunned to learn just how deeply troubled the Justice Department was about aspects of the program—a glimpse they got only when Comey publicly testified about the program at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month. The invitation from Capitol Hill could also create a dilemma for Ashcroft, who prides himself on his loyalty to President Bush—despite clear tensions that arose with the White House over wiretapping and other issues related to the war on terror. Ashcroft, 65, now a Washington lobbyist, has steadfastly refused to make any public comment about the eavesdropping dispute. While confirming the House request, his spokeswoman, Juleanna Glover Weiss, said he was out of town and would be unavailable to discuss the matter until next week. Administration officials and congressional staffers say Ashcroft will have difficulty finding a reason to refuse to talk about it at this point—especially in closed-door hearings, given that Comey has already publicly recounted the dispute. Although Ashcroft is a private citizen, Justice officials expect that he will likely seek their guidance on how far he can go in discussing the issue. A meeting has been scheduled for this Monday by Senate Intelligence Committee aides and Justice Department officials to discuss the “contours” of the testimony, one official said. If Ashcroft declined to cooperate, the committees could ultimately issue subpoenas. In startling testimony May 15, Comey recounted how Alberto Gonzales, then White House counselor, and Andrew Card, then White House chief of staff, went to George Washington University Hospital on the evening of March 10, 2004, in an attempt to persuade a barely conscious Ashcroft, who had just undergone emergency surgery for gallstone pancreatitis, to sign a document recertifying what Comey called a “particular classified program.” (He indicated that a just-completed internal Justice review had led him to conclude that the department could no longer certify its legality.) But Ashcroft refused—and deferred to Comey as the acting attorney general, according to Comey—who said that when President Bush reauthorized the program anyway the next day, he, Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were all prepared to resign. A story in this week’s NEWSWEEK magazine reported that as many as 30 senior Justice Department officials would have resigned over the matter. “This was a showdown,” a former senior Justice official was quoted as saying in the story. Comey refused discuss publicly the nature of the disagreement. But he indicated that, after a meeting with Mueller, President Bush subsequently agreed to changes that the Justice Department was prepared to accept. But that has still left the two intelligence committees—which have oversight responsibility for the surveillance program—with a host of unanswered questions. In December 2005, The New York Times first publicly disclosed that after September 11 the White House began a highly classified program designed to intercept phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens speaking to Al Qaeda suspects abroad without seeking approval from a special foreign-intelligence surveillance court. In the aftermath of that disclosure, the administration downplayed reports that there were any legal disagreements over what was being done. Michael Hayden, who headed the National Security Agency when the program began, told the Senate Intelligence Committee last year that the Justice Department and the White House had given “consistent” guidance that the program was legal. Gonzales, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last February, said that, “there has not been any serious disagreement … about the program that the president has confirmed." At the same time, the Senate committee has been consistently rebuffed in their requests to obtain key documents related to the program—including memos and opinions about the program from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and the actual presidential orders authorizing the eavesdropping, according to a report released by the panel this week accompanying its passage of a new authorization bill for the intelligence community. Although the Justice Department has turned over internal OLC memos to Congress in the past, and frequently makes them public on its Web site, they have refused to do so in the case of the wiretapping program under orders from the department’s client: the White House. Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the panel’s chairman, said the committee will refuse to consider the president’s request to revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to accommodate the wiretapping program until it receives the documents it is seeking. A Justice Department spokesman declined comment, but pointed out that in a public statement following Comey's testimony, the department said Gonzales had acknowledged there had been "disagreements about other intelligence activities" and that "the fact and nature of such disagreements have been briefed to the Intelligence Committees.”
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#1. To: aristeides, BTP Holdings, robin (#0)
(Edited)
Could indeed be related to the Plame case...and, 'USS Libertizing' our "ally."
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