Former DOJ Insiders Who Fought Spying Ask Senate to Pardon Snooping Telcos

Former Justice Department insiders who waged a quiet battle to trim back a Bush Administration spying program they thought was over the legal line joined forces Tuesday with the Administration, which is seeking retroactive immunity for telecoms that allowed the nation's spies to data mine Americans' phone records and helped the government target Americans for warrantless email and phone wiretapping.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, and former Office of Legal Counsel attorneys Patrick Philbin and James Goldsmith - all Republicans who fought the White House in 2004 over the scope of the Administration's warrantless wiretapping program - sent a letter (.pdf)Tuesday to the Senate Judiciary committee arguing that the nation's telecoms deserved to be freed from class action lawsuits accusing them of violating the nation's privacy laws.

When corporations are asked to assist the intelligence community based on a program authorized by the President himself and based on assurances that the program has been determined to be lawful at the highest levels of the Executive Branch, they should be able to rely on those representations and accept the determinations of the Government as to the legality of their actions. [...] If immunity is not provided, it is likely that, in the future, the private sector will not provide assistance swiftly and willingly, and critical time in obtaining information will be lost.

The letter is quite powerful given it is signed by the program's former critics who endured Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card's humanity-challenged Intensive Care Shakedown. Still, one must note that these careful lawyers are only saying that the government told the participating telecoms that the Administration thought that its conduct was legal; not that the telecoms' participation was legal. Nor do they say that the telecoms were ordered to participate. If that were the case, this fight would have been over years ago.

The letter is clearly intended to sway wary Judiciary committee members, who are next in line to edit a bill that already includes get-out-of-court free cards for companies like AT&T and Verizon that are being sued in federal court for allegedly helping the government spy on Americans inside the United States.

Though Ashcroft did not note it in the letter, his lobbying firm has represented AT&T since 2006.

The arguments closely track with an Washington Post Op-Ed from Sen. Jay Rockefeller Wednesday, and with an Wall Street Journal op-ed signed by former Carter AG Benjamin Civilleti, Reagan AG Dick Thornburgh, who were joined by former FBI Director William Webster.

Rockefeller fails to mention in his op-ed that AT&T and Verizon both threw fundraisers for him earlier this year, while as BigTentDemocrat points out at TalkLeft, the latter three forgot to mention their own ties:

Civiletti is a Senior Partner in the Washington law firm Venable, which represents telcos. Similarly, Thornburgh is affiliated with Kirkpatrick and Lockhart, also a telco law firm. And Webster is with Milbank Tweed, also a telco law firm. It may have had no effect on their views, but its disclosure is necessary to maintain journalistic ethics.

I've never quite heard of so many former Republican law and order types argue for leniency for accused scofflaws. One might suspect they all contracted Ramsey Clark disease.

Meanwhile, the same disease seems to infected the Justice Department's own Life and Liberty site, which is using federal tax money to tell Congress to give immunity to companies that violated federal privacy laws.