Second, I recall that Goldsmith has implied (book, testimony, Moyers interview) that Comey was not read into “the program” / “the ‘other’ intel activities” until very late. Goldsmith, anyway, seemed to me to be claiming that he was stewing over the “other” intel activities all on his own for a time. I don’t have his book, but I know that EW and others do. Perhaps someone could check this.

Got the coincidences with the alert from FISC and the Arar filing fixed in tiny mind, though.

I just have to say that I trust her about as far as I could throw her.

Here’s a post D-Day did @ Calitics about 10 days ago

And don’t forget that she is the author of the Thought Crimes Bill which was written by (?) The Rand Corp and that she came up with this bill after a talk by Chertoff at USC Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events

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15 – I still don’t buy that Comey and Goldsmith caused the ripple. I think they responded to the ripple caused by the FISA court which was making threats against those at DOJ who were signing off on FISA applications without complying with the FISA court orders (which could not be complied with bc the program was not set up in such a way that Mueller, Ashcroft or Comey – the guys who could sign off – actually knew if the person on their application had been part of the illegal program) I think the problem was that no one could comply with the FISA orders without changes to the program. Thompson had already run scared on that front. Goldsmith and Comey were there telling Ashcroft that Thompson had good reason to run scared on that front and about then FISA discovered violations of their orders — and since Thompson had refused to sign off, that would track back responsiblity to Ashcroft and/or Mueller.

With FISA ready to hold people in contempt or take action, Goldsmith and Comey didn’t want to be in the loop for violating the Court orders. Gonzales was likely saying that the court couldn’t do anything to reveal any of the classified info and likely even saying that if the President could defy law bc of the “war powers” he could also defy the FISA court.

IMO the showdown basically boiled down to whether or not the President could tell lawyers and DOJ to violate court orders and that is where Comey and Goldsmith and Ashcroft and Mueller drew the line and where they got support for a walkout (bc not too many lawyers want to traipse into court and tell a crew of Fed Dist court judges that they just don’t have to follow their orders – ultimately, even when you own the prosecutorial apparatus, that can come back to bite you personally on the butt and when it was the DOJ crew’s personal butt on the line, vs. the telecoms or NSA employees or CIA torturers butts – they suddenly realized the butt had a spine attached)

After all the things Comey and Goldsmith are both tied to, I have a hard time putting them in the camp of lawyers whose professionalism would blow you away.

That process is disturbing in many respects. Take one: Ashcroft signed off on a program he knew virtually nothing about, briefed by, apparently, a single lawyer. He knew as little about national security law as Alberto Gonzales did before leaving Texas. But he was “not allowed” to brief his second-in-command, who might need to step into his shoes at any time. It’s also not clear to me whether he knew the advise was so double secret that the NSA’s own inherently national security-trained lawyers weren’t briefed on it. An executive, not Congressional, process ripe for abuse; given what we now know, purposely so. An executive at war with itself.

Yet when Comey, a very conservative lawyer (in the pre-Bush sense) became acting AG for a brief period, all hell broke loose. The difference is not just Comey’s brains, energy and professionalism, but also those of Jack Goldsmith, another very conservative lawyer, who replaced the medieval canon lawyer (God and hence, the pope, can do no wrong) John Yoo at the OLC. But because both Comey and Goldsmith were such staunch conservatives, the program had to be overwhelmingly and obviously illegal to any lawyer who’d passed the bar, barring Addington, Libby and Yoo.

At that point, then, she and Jello Jay appear to have learned that:

The US was tracking Al Qaeda communication via US-based access points
The program was legal and was reviewed regularly by top Justice Department officials…

Well see, that right there is where she went wrong–she made the mistake of trusting them. It’s scary how politicization and corruption have seeped into government institutions to the point we must question every single action they do now. No benefit of the doubt can be offered with the sociopaths in power.

Our government is diseased and we must apply the cure. Same goes for the spineless Dems. Schumer can take a flying leap with his buddy Mukasey.

- Tom

http://balkin.blogspot.com/200…..april.html

Lederman’s input and he links the memo in two parts.

The memo was issued out the day after Bybee left, on a weekend, bypassing both the acting head of OLC (Whelan) with Bybee out and the AG – instead, Haynes and Yoo share the straws in this milkshake.

Doesn’t it give you the warm, fuzzy feelings about Comey, Philbin, Thompson and Goldsmith trying to help force Haynes onto the Fourth Circuit? They could look at pictures from Abu Ghraib – read about the detentions of children there as hostages – and know about the human trafficking victims at GITMO and the coverups there – and still get together and put a giddy recommendation together for Haynes.

There just aren’t enough showers you can take.

I’ll wager that no one in the Gang of 8 has ever discussed this with K-K or Lambeth.

I wouldn’t think so, but I do think that when Congress was “briefed” on the program, if that information was suppressed there ought to be a head ready to roll over that. If the whole FISA application process was screwed up because Thompson has cya and career fear because there was no way he could comply with the FISA orders (something that apparently didn’t worry Ashcroft – he was too busy playing Basketball with Kevin Ring and helping his COS pass off classified info to Abramoff and directing the initial Rove aspects of the Plame investigation, etc.) then you’d think someone should have mentioned something, somewhere. Whether it was in the briefings to Congressional intel committees on FISA stuff in general (uh, we have this problem with not being able to get DAG signatures on applications…) or the gang of howevermany briefings on teh program, having one branch of govt declare that they believed the actions being taken by another were illegal is something that the third part of the Sybilesque crew should know.

It would be like Leahy calling Roberts and saying our Judiciary Committee wants you to testify about a recent ruling. It just doesn’t happen.

Actually, it has kind of started to happen, in that Leahy has been asking for copies of the FISA opinions, which FISA said it was happy to give but which DOJ hasn’t wanted to ante up.

The framers of the FISA legislation should have devised a mechanism for briefings among all three branches. As it now works, the Executive branch plays the others off and moves on with its illegal work.

A-Freaking-men and this is where some of the grown up discussions of amending FISA (and, for that matter, the National Security Act) should be heading.

There should be ways for members of Congressional intell committees to access counsel as well, and probably the inclusion of the head and ranking members of Judiciary into the “gang of 8″ if full intel committee access is not being granted. And there should be teeth put into the Nat Sec Act for violations – lawyers and other invovled in programs which they know have not been briefed to the committees or Gang (of 12) should have duties to come forward to those committees (or gangs) within x period of time or have it treated as obstruction, etc. And they should spell out what happens when the Executive covertly plants domestic propaganda for to influence domestic politics. Teeth to the violations.

But it doesn’t seem to be happening. I will say for Lamberth, when all this came out and Congress started to belly flop on giving Bush anything he wants, Lamberth made some uncharacteristically public statements about having seen things Bush’s way and FISA’s way and FISA being infinitely better. But Congress ignored Leonig’s piece, has refused to question Mueller and Ashcroft about the DOJ violations of FISA orders, and ignored Lamberth.

In laying fault between Congress and the FISA court, I’d say the ball is in the Congressional court.