MB Civic

Senate examines wiretap program

By Charlie Savage | July 19, 2006 | The Boston Globe

WASHINGTON — President Bush personally blocked an ethics investigation by Justice Department officials into his administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales testified yesterday.

The disclosure was made after the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Arlen Specter , Republican of Pennsylvania, pressed Gonzales to explain why the department’s investigators were denied security clearance to look into the program.

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The department’s Office of Professional Responsibility wanted to investigate whether administration attorneys had provided bad legal advice when they said Bush had the wartime authority to wiretap Americans’ international phone calls without a warrant, defying a 1978 law requiring warrants.

“It is very difficult to understand why OPR was not given clearance so they could conduct their investigation . . . Many other lawyers in the Department of Justice had clearance. ” Specter said.

Gonzales said Bush decided not to grant the security clearances because the program was “highly classified” and there was a need to limit the number of people who knew its details.

“In terms of who has access to the program, the president of the United States makes the decision,” Gonzales said.

The Justice Department also released a series of internal memos about the OPR clearance dispute yesterday in connection to the hearing. In several, the head of the ethics watchdog office, H. Marshall Jarrett, contended that his investigators were being prevented from doing their job.

“Since its creation some 31 years ago, OPR has conducted many highly sensitive investigations involving executive branch programs and has obtained access to information classified at the highest levels,” Jarrett wrote in an April 21, 2006, memo. “In all those years, OPR has never been prevented from initiating or pursuing an investigation.”

The attorney general faced heated questioning from senators on issues beyond the president’s spying program, including the administration’s efforts to try detainees in the war on terrorism before military tribunals, which the Supreme Court struck down last month.

Gonzales reiterated that the administration wants to work with Congress to pass a law authorizing a new version of such tribunals.

In addition, Gonzales defended the president’s practice of issuing “signing statements” to reserve the right to bypass laws he considers unconstitutional. Bush has issued signing statements to challenge more than 750 laws, a figure cited in a series of Globe stories.

Gonzales testified that the Globe had retracted the figure. The news paper has not retracted any stories or figures on Bush’s signing statements. The paper corrected an editing error in one follow-up story that referred to Bush challenging 750 “bills” instead of laws; a single bill often includes many separate laws.

As of last week, Bush’s signing statements covered 807 laws, according to Christopher Kelley , a government professor at Miami University of Ohio who has studied presidents’ use of signing statements through history.

Gonzales made his comments about signing statements during an exchange with Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the committee. Leahy noted that Bush’s numbers amounted to “more than all other presidents put together.”

Gonzales responded that he believed Bush’s numbers were “closer to 125 to 110,” and he asserted that Bill Clinton “signed 382 signing statements in his eight years in office.”

Kelley questioned Gonzales’ s figure for Clinton, saying the former president had challenged 140 laws over eight years.

The number of challenges Gonzales said Bush had issued, 110 to 125, is close to the number of bills to which Bush has attached signing statements, Kelley added. However, focusing on the number of bills is misleading, he said, because Congress often lumps many statutes together and passes them as a single bill.

Earlier in yesterday’s hearing, Specter pressed Gonzales to justify Bush’s practice of declaring sections of bills unconstitutional in signing statements, rather than vetoing them.

Gonzales told Specter that Bush was being respectful of Congress by preserving the rest of the bill. But Specter accused Bush of cherry-picking which parts of bills he wanted to obey.

“I think you’re wrong on your evaluation of what the Congress would conclude was respect for the Congress,” Specter said. “I think the Congress would prefer a veto and battling it out within the constitutional confines of a veto as opposed to the cherry-pick.”