Murray Waas, the National Journal reporter that wrote major pieces on the CIA leak investigation, has a huge article out on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the aborted warrantless domestic surveillance investigation. According to Waas, Gonzales counseled President George W. Bush to abandon the investigation after he learned that he would be a subject in it.
Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration’s warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews.
Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work. [emphasis added; link added]
Gonzales’ actions as White House counsel and Attorney General would have been examined, the National Journal reports.
Sources familiar with the halted inquiry said that if the probe had been allowed to continue, it would have examined Gonzales’s role in authorizing the eavesdropping program while he was White House counsel, as well as his subsequent oversight of the program as attorney general. […]
President Bush’s shutting down of the Justice Department probe was disclosed in July. However, it has not been previously reported that investigators were about to question at least two crucial witnesses and examine documents that might have shed light on Gonzales’s role in authorizing and overseeing the eavesdropping program.
Investigators from the Office of Professional Responsibility notified senior aides to Gonzales early last year that the first two people they intended to interview were Jack Goldsmith, who had been an assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, and James A. Baker, the counsel for Justice’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. Both men had raised questions about the propriety and legality of various aspects of the eavesdropping program, which was undertaken after September 11 as an anti-terrorism tool. [original emphasis]
Earlier this year when the administration, likely due to the turnover of the Republican Congress to Democratic control, decided to allow the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to oversee the program, White House officials were possibly feeling the “worries at justice.”
A senior federal law enforcement official said that after OPR launched its inquiry in early 2006, Justice Department political appointees were concerned that the internal ethics office might conclude that Gonzales or other administration officials had sidestepped the law in the authorization and oversight of the program.
OPR did not have a mandate to determine whether the eavesdropping program itself was illegal or unconstitutional. Rather, the office was to investigate “allegations of misconduct involving department attorneys that relate to the exercise of their authority to investigate, litigate, or provide legal advice,” according to the office’s policies and procedures.
What OPR could have found over a year ago, the American public may not know for quite sometime. In fact, with Gonzales’ work to shield the records of ex-presidents, it may be longer than tradition. An extremely cynical point to raise would be if the administration retooled the surveillance program prior to submitting it to the jurisdiction of the FISA court.
Both the White House and Gonzales declined to comment and refused to state if Gonzales had informed President Bush that he would be a focus of the investigation.
Last year, Gonzales testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the denied security clearances to the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) were decided by the president. The attorney general, at first, did not want to say why the clearances were denied, and he danced around the question to committee chairman, Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) in July.
“The president of the United States makes the decision,” Gonzales replied.
But what Gonzales failed to state was that he advised the president to do it and that his actions would be a subject of the investigation. Gonzales claimed that granting the investigators clearances could “jeopardize” the program and “diminish its usefulness in locating terrorists,” reported the National Journal in May 2006.
Almost a year later and his tenure as the nation’s top law enforcer, Gonzales may have employed the president to protect himself from criminal liability. A separate issue would be if the president knowingly protected Gonzales or was left out of the loop.
ABC News blog, The Blotter, noted in July 2006 that OPR investigators were “frustrated” by the blocked access and how “unusual the action was.”
In the March letter, OPR notes that it had been denied security clearances even though attorneys from the Civil Division and Criminal Division had been granted clearance to learn about the program.
There is serious potential for obstruction of justice charges against Gonzales, though unlikely to unfold that way. With the prosecutor purge already drawing calls for his resignation, the attorney general’s possible interference in an investigation aimed at a government program to protect himself from scrutiny adds a barrel of kerosene onto the fire.
For more background, TPMmuckraker noted the reaction of “senior Justice officials” when the president yanked the security clearances for the investigators.
Meanwhile, the President supports Gonzales, says White House Press Secretary Tony Snow. How long will that last? (Also, Snow flatly lies about the prosecutor purge and the explicit classifications of “strong” and “weak” U.S. attorneys, in part, based on loyalty to the president.)
(Hat tip: Duncan Black, Eschaton)