In 2004, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had doubts about the legality of the White House's NSA surveillance program -- so much so that a deputy refused to reauthorize the warrantless spying while Ashcroft was in the hospital.
Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he refused to recertify the program because Attorney General John Ashcroft had reservations about its legality just before falling ill with pancreatitis in March 2004.
The White House, Comey said, recertified the program without the Justice Department's signoff, allowing it to operate for about three weeks without concurrence on whether it was legal. Comey, Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and other Justice Department officials at one point considered resigning, Comey said.
"I couldn't stay, if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis," Comey told the panel.
Full AP story here. Here's the president in 2006 talking about how he only launched the NSA program after consulting with his AG and Justice.
But before I implemented the program -- I'm mindful of the fact that I took an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United States. So I had lawyers -- the Attorney General and the Justice Department look at what I was doing. I'm also mindful that people want to make sure the President safeguards civil liberties while we protect the country, that there needs to be a balance. And so this is a program -- and I became comfortable with that balance, and confident that I had the legal authority to do what I did.
True enough: Justice looked at it. And when the department didn't authorize the surveillance for three weeks, Bush just went ahead and did it anyway. Once Ashcroft got out of the hospital, he signed off on the program, and the spying went from grossly illegal back to just seriously illegal.
But what's really going to bake your noodle later on is, Ashcroft had reservations? Ashcroft? You know a government surveillance program is getting a tad iffy when John Ashcroft balks at giving it his John Hancock, even just for a while.
