And Out Come The SubpoenasConsider the trigger pulled. Today the Senate Judiciary Committee broke an internal deadlock over President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program, voting to subpoena Justice Department documents related to the program’s origin. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has consistently denied requests for the documents over the past two years.
The warrantless surveillance program returned to the center of political controversy last month, when former Deputy Attorney General James Comey dramatically testified that in 2004, as acting attorney general, he had refused to sign off on the then-secret program’s legality. As a result, Comey testified, then-White House Counsel Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card pressed an infirm John Ashcroft to override Comey. Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and ranking member Arlen Specter (R-PA) again requested documentation from Gonzales clarifying the legal arguments justifying the program, which allows the National Security Agency to intercept international communications believed to be related to terrorism without the approval of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge.
A June 5 deadline for the documents came and went, without explanation from Gonzales, but last week, Sen. John Kyl (R-NV) invoked a procedure to delay the issuance of the panel’s threatened subpoenas by a week. Kyl was only delaying the inevitable, as the committee voted 13 to 3 to subpoena the information.
Leahy made this argument in the committee’s morning business meeting. Expect to hear a reiteration of it if Gonzales, as expected, resists the subpoenas:
There is no legitimate argument for withholding these materials from this Committee. There is abundant precedent for providing Executive Branch legal analysis to the Congress, particularly to this Committee. Indeed, volumes upon volumes of Attorney General and Office of Legal Counsel legal opinions have even been made public. Sometimes in previous Administrations a particularly sensitive subject has resulted in an accommodation between branches on the manner in which it was shared. But this Administration has no policy of accommodation. Its policy is to deny and to stonewall. Neither is the fact that the matters involve classified information a reason to withhold these legal documents. Congress receives sensitive classified information regularly.
Gonzales may need to claim executive privilege to deny the warrantless-surveillance documents to the judiciary committee, thereby prompting an even bigger fight between the panel and the Bush administration.
