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What Did Bush Tell Gonzales?
(Murray Waas, The Atlantic.com)
In March 2004, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales made a now-famous late-night visit to the hospital room of Attorney General John Ashcroft, seeking to get Ashcroft to sign a certification stating that the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program was legal. According to people familiar with statements recently made by Gonzales to federal investigators, Gonzales is now saying that George Bush personally directed him to make that hospital visit. . . . The hospital visit is already central to many contemporaneous historical accounts of the Bush presidency. At the time of the visit, Ashcroft had been in intensive care for six days, was heavily medicated, and was recovering from emergency surgery to remove his gall bladder. Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey has said that he believes that Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who accompanied Gonzales to Ashcroft's hospital room, were trying to take advantage of Ashcroft's grievously ill state—pressing him to sign the certification possibly without even comprehending what he was doing—and in the process authorize a government surveillance program which both Ashcroft and the Justice Department had concluded was of questionable legality. . . . Gonzales has also told Justice Department investigators that President Bush played a more central and active role than was previously known in devising a strategy to have Congress enable the continuation of the surveillance program when questions about its legality were raised by the Justice Department, as well as devising other ways to circumvent the Justice Department's legal concerns about the program, according to people who have read Gonzales's interviews with investigators. The White House declined to comment for this story. An attorney for Gonzales, George J. Terwilliger III, himself a former deputy attorney general, declined to comment as well. . . . Gonzales and his legal team are apparently attempting to lessen his own legal jeopardy. The Justice Department's inspector general (IG) is investigating whether Gonzales lied to Congress when he was questioned under oath about the surveillance program. And the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is separately investigating whether Gonzales and other Justice Department attorneys acted within the law in authorizing and overseeing the surveillance program. . . . According to Richman, by invoking Bush's name and authority, Gonzales and his legal team are making it more difficult for investigators to seek a criminal investigation of his actions, or for other investigators to later bring criminal charges against him: "The clearer it is that Gonzales did what he did at the behest of the president of the United States, the safer that he [Gonzales] is legally," says Richman. At the same time, by saying that he is advising the president, Gonzales also makes it easier for those at the White House to claim executive privilege if they do indeed become embroiled in the probe. . . . Moreover, according to one senior Justice Department official, Gonzales, his legal team, and the White House also know that Justice's IG and OPR are unlikely to press senior White House officials, let alone the president, to answer their questions. . . . Even in the face of Ashcroft's refusal to certify the program as being within the law, President Bush initially reauthorized the surveillance program on his own. In The Angler, Barton Gellman suggests that this move "may have been the nearest thing to a claim of unlimited power ever made by an American president, all the more radical for having been issued in secret. Not only would the will of Congress be flouted, but if the White House had its way, Congress would never know." . . . Learning of the reauthorization, Ashcroft, Comey, and more than a dozen officials at the highest levels of government became concerned that if the surveillance program was allowed to continue on as it had been, the government could be engaging in an illegal activity at the direction of the president, and they quietly spoke of resigning en masse. . . . The mass resignation of so many senior officials of the government would have been all but unprecedented in modern American political history. . . . The former Justice Department official says that the Saturday Night Massacre would have "been nothing compared to what almost came to be … I mean, it would have been poof! and the attorney general would have been gone. The deputy attorney general would have been gone. Goldsmith—he would have been gone. The FBI director would have resigned." . . . If all those men had resigned, top aides to each of them would have resigned as well. Ashcroft's chief of staff and two deputy chiefs of staff said they would go with their boss. Comey's top aides would have resigned with him. The general counsels of the CIA and FBI said they were going to resign as well. . . . Adding to this constitutional spectacle would have been the fact that the administration's warrantless surveillance program was considered one of the most closely held national-security secrets in government at the time. There would have been no immediate explanation of why a portion of the government just up and resigned at once. . . . Ultimately, confronted with the possible resignations of his own top aides, Bush backed down. . . . Bush's change of heart apparently had little to do with the rule of law, but rather more to do with political pragmatism and his fear that the entire affair might become public.

posted by Lorenzo 4:26 PM