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Thursday, June 7, 2007
It’s Raining Subpoenas
The House Judiciary Committee will “more than likely” issue subpoenas to unearth the secrets behind President Bush’s secret domestic terrorist surveillance program, Rep. Jerrold D. Nadler, D-N.Y., said today.
Nadler made the comments following a House Judiciary Committee hearing where he said a senior Justice Department official evaded repeated questions about how the National Security Agency has eavesdropped on Americans over the past six years.
“We want to know what they were doing,” said Nadler, chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s panel on the constitution, civil rights and liberties. “We are determined to get to the bottom of it.”
A vote of two-thirds of the full House Judiciary Committee is required before subpoenas can be issued.
But a confident Nadler said Republicans would surely join Democrats in demanding answers after learning of the “evasive” testimony today from Steven G. Bradbury, principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Bradbury refused to answer repeated questions about the program’s operations other than to say the president authorized it some 45 times before it went under the jurisdiction of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—where Democrats and Republicans assert it should have been to begin with.
The program is no longer operational, he said.
Rep. Melvin Watt, D-N.C., asked Bradbury about what Attorney General John Ashcroft thought of the program and why he refused to authorize it.
Watt was building upon testimony from former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month that he was prepared to resign, along with other high ranking Justice Department officials, over the program because it was deemed illegal by the department.
Alberto Gonzales, acting as White House counsel at the time, visited Ashcroft in an intensive care unit of a local hospital in the hopes of getting him to approve the program over Comey’s objections. But Ashcroft sided with Comey and refused.
Bradbury would only repeat what Ashcroft has said publicly: that there were concerns but those concerns have been addressed.
Democrats on the panel were frustrated by Bradbury’s reluctance to discuss particulars about the program because the committee is responsible for overseeing the constitutional right that protects the public against eavesdropping without a warrant.
Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., defended the secrecy surrounding the president’s program, saying it was necessary to protect the country against another terrorist attack.
Lee A. Casey, a Washington lawyer with Baker Hostetler, agreed with Franks.
“The president’s critics have variously described the NSA program as “widespread,” “domestic,” and “illegal,’” Casey said. “It is none of these things. Rather, the program is limited, targeted on international communications of individuals engaged in armed conflict with the United States.”
But Bruce Fein, a conservative and former Justice Department official during the Reagan administration, urged Congress to get answers.
Fein told the panel that it was their duty to inform the public about the program, which circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.
Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security project, agreed with Fein.
“The NSA’s warrantless surveillance activities violate the law,” Jaffer said. “Unchecked and judicially unsupervised surveillance by the NSA presents a serious threat to American Democracy.”
Jaffer urged the committee to subpoena all documents relating to the controversial program dating back to 2001.
Voter Supression?
The Bush administration engaged in a three-year effort to suppress likely Democratic votes, a new report from the New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law found.
The liberal-leaning non-profit groups reported that 55 percent of career prosecutors have left the Justice Department’s voting section. They were driven away by a partisan hiring process, altered evaluations and political retaliation on the job, according to their report and interviews with Joseph Rich, the former head of the section.
And the groups state that the so-called “hotbeds” of voter fraud in Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Washington and Wisconsin are non-existent.
The report comes as the House and Senate Judiciary panels are investigating the questionable dismissals of nine U.S. attorneys last year. A central point in the investigation is whether some of the prosecutors were fired for failing to investigate allegations of voter fraud against Democratic-leaning groups.
The administration has strongly denied that the prosecutors were fired for improper reasons.
Bradley J. Schlozman, the U.S. attorney for Kansas City last fall, indicted four workers for a Democratic-leaning voter registration organization, just days before last fall’s historic congressional election that put the Democrats back in charge of Congress.
The action violates the Justice Department’s rules governing election conduct. Schlozman, now a senior department official in Washington, said he did not think it would impact the election.
Schlozman’s actions starkly contrast with how other Justice Department officials handled voter fraud cases right before the election.
Matthew W. Friedrich, a top Justice Department official, told committee investigators that he declined to pursue allegations of voter fraud just before the election because it would be in violation of the department’s rules.
Friedrich gave a sworn statement to the committee that Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ former chief of staff, hand-delivered a packet of information about voter fraud cases around the country. The packet, he said in the statement, came from either presidential adviser Karl Rove or his office.
“They wanted us to take a look at it,” Friedrich told the committee investigators. Committee staff asked Friedrich what he did with the packet.
“Not a darn thing,” Friedrich told the committee investigators. “I did not copy it or communicate it down the chain of command in substance or in form.”
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Worst President?
He’s ranked as one of the nation’s worst presidents. He pursued policies that some say led to a bloody and possibly avoidable war that killed many Americans. His tenure cost him support of many in his own political party.
He’s not George W. Bush.
He’s Franklin Pierce, and an upcoming biography will make the case that Pierce, according to a promotional pitch from the publisher, “made the best possible decision considering the alternatives,” when he backed the Kansas-Nebraska Act that fueled the slavery debate and helped ignite the Civil War.
Peter A. Wallner’s “Franklin Pierce: Martyr for The Union: is due out next month. It’s his second volume on Pierce, who served as president from 1853-1857 and remains the only president denied renomination by his own party.
Says a release from Plaidswede Publishing: “Wallner concludes that the life of Franklin Pierce is relevant today as he confronted many issues that still resonate, including proposed restrictions on open immigration, the imposition of religious agendas into the political process, threats to individual liberties and the Bill of Rights, and the unchecked growth of presidential power particularly in time of war.”
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Step One
Here comes another effort to move an issue to the 2008 front burner.
Two former Senate majority leaders, one from each party, will launch the ONE Vote ‘08 campaign on Monday. Ex-Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and ex-GOP Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee are co-chairs of what the group pitches as an “unprecedented, bipartisan, high-tech, high-energy campaign to mobilize voters and engage U.S. presidential candidates to make the fight against global poverty and disease a key foreign policy and security issue at the 2008 ballot box.”
Formal launch will be Monday in Washington. The former leaders will be joined at the event by actress Ashley Judd, GOP strategist Jack Oliver, retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones and others.
The group claims the backing of “over 100 of the nation’s leading relief, humanitarian, religious and advocacy organizations.”
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