Back in 2004, then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andy Card paid a late-night visit to AG Ashcroft to try to persuade him to sign off on the warrantless wiretapping program. When he was in a hospital bed. Barely conscious. To his credit, Ashcroft told them to piss off and threatened to resign (as did Deputy AG James Comey, who broke this story to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, his entire staff, and possibly FBI Director Robert Mueller as well) if they managed to ram the program through as it was presented to him.
So we got the current version, and if that one was watered down enough for Ashcroft to approve, I really don't want to know the rack-and thumbscrews details of the original.
Gonzo and Card, pushing a gravely ill man to sign off on the White House's end run around the Constitution and general rule of law, and then pressuring the acting AG to do so against Ashcroft's clearly stated objections.
Later, Card ordered an 11 p.m. meeting at the White House. But Comey said he told Card that he would not go on his own, pulling then-Solicitor General Theodore Olson from a dinner party to serve as witness to anything Card or Gonzales told him. "After the conduct I had just witnessed, I would not meet with him without a witness present," Comey testified. "He replied, 'What conduct? We were just there to wish him well.'"
The next day, as terrorist bombs killed more than 200 commuters on rail lines in Madrid, the White House approved the executive order without any signature from the Justice Department certifying its legality.
This was the administration that went to great pains to assert it was going to restore dignity to the White House. Instead, it has demonstrated utter contempt for any pesky laws standing between it and its empire. It's the fucking X-Files, but the malevolent force being served by government officials is not alien. It's the enormous collective neocon ego.
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