Life outdoing art

I just finished watch The Good Shepherd on DVD. Interesting piece, but it seems rather tame when placed next to the testimony of James B. Comey on the attempts by then White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales to induce a very sick, bedridden, and medicated then Attorney General John Ashcroft to approve as legally sound a procedure that Comey had refused to do so on as acting AG. The procedure in question is widely accepted to be the Warrantless Domestic Wiretapping Program that has become so controversial. The attempt by Card and Gonzo was apparently at the direct behest of the Shrub (who may have ultimately been advised to do so by the Shooter, but that gets into some serious Black Helicopter hypothesizing...)



On the Shrub's press conference dodging today when queried about these events...

Digby:

Bush's answer (like most of Gonzales' ) is entirely unresponsive and should be greeted with howls of protest from the press and relentless pounding from the punditocrisy. This isn't some "investigation" about which Bush has "promised" not to comment, as he has claimed with previous scandals. This was a direct question about whether he ordered Card and Gonzales to go over to Ashcroft's room in the ICU to get him to sign off on a program that he had already said he would not sign off on.

That's key, you know, as to just how despicable this gambit was. Ashcroft had made it known that he would no longer sign off on this (or these) programs before he got sick. They were trying to get the man to sign something with which he disagreed while he was under heavy sedation in the ICU. And according to Comey, it was his impression that Bush had personally called Mrs Ashcroft to get her to let them in the room. How low is that? (And how important it was to them that they would even risk it for what would surely be a short period --- after all, Ashcroft would recover, and presumably would resent the fact that they had done this thing.)

In any case, Bush was deeply involved. He met with both Comey and Mueller on the issue after they all said they'd resign. The spinners are trying to say that their Dear Leader finally overruled others who had nefarious intentions , but his refusal to answer the question today should put that to rest. There's no reason for him to launch into such outdated 2003 gibberish about enemies lurking who "would like to strike" if he didn't order it. It's obvious that he did.

Greenwald:

Behold the royal hubris from the President's press conference today. Bush categorically refuses to answer questions about whether he sent Card and Gonzales to obtain Ashcroft's authorization for his illegal eavesdropping while Ashcroft was in intensive care. The reason, of course, is because the Terrorists are out there and are scary and want to kill us. Therefore, Bush does not have to answer questions about what he did.

These are the type of facially absurd and democracy-subverting shenanigans to which we have been subjected for the last six years. They will continue unless and until the press, the Democrats in Congress and/or Americans generally decide that they will no longer tolerate it.

As former OLC official Marty Lederman noted last night, John Ashcroft and James Comey are both Republican ideologues who proved that they were willing to endorse and defend even the most radical (and illegal) behavior (including the lawless detention of Jose Padilla and the administration's "refashioned" -- though still illegal -- warrantless eavesdropping program). If they were insisting that the conduct of the Bush administration was not only illegal, but so illegal that they were ready to resign en masse over it, then, as Lederman asks: "can you even imagine how bad it must have been?"

There is just no excuse left for allowing the administration to keep this behavior concealed from the country. What James Comey described on Tuesday is the behavior of a government completely unmoored from any constraints of law, operating only by the rules of thuggery, intimidation, and pure lawlessness. Even for the most establishment-defending organs, there are now indisputably clear facts suggesting that the scope and breadth and brazenness of the lawbreaking here is far beyond even what was known previously, and it occurred at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

James Comey's testimony amounts to a statement that -- even according to the administration's own loyal DOJ officials -- the President ordered still-unknown spying on Americans, and engaged in that spying for a full two-and-a-half-years, that was so blatantly and shockingly illegal that they were all ready to resign over it. And the President's Attorney General then lied to ensure that this episode remain concealed. Mere one-day calls for a Congressional investigation are woefully inadequate here.

There is clear and definitive evidence of deliberate lawbreaking. In addition to Congressional investigations, there is simply no excuse for anything other than the immediate commencement of a criminal investigation by a Special Prosecutor. And the administration ought to be pressured every day to account for what it did here. This is not a one-day or one-week fleeting scandal. These revelations amount to the most transparent and deliberate crimes -- felonies -- by our top government officials, not with regard to private and personal matters but with regard to how our government spies on us.

The only thing there is to add is that this is most likely tatamount to the camel's nose in the tent, i.e. there are many more of these revelations to follow...