The wages of obscuring a wide-ranging surveillance program are severe, and they force White House spokesmen to enter into absurdity.
Yesterday, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified that former Deputy Attorney General James Comey had legal objections to the “much discussed” NSA program known, as Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) pointed out, as the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Mueller’s admission contradicted the sworn testimony of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who has now staked his reputation — and the results of a possible perjury investigation — on the proposition that Comey objected to “other intelligence activities.” You might say this is a bit of a problem for Gonzales.
Not so, says Tony Snow. During Snow’s press briefing today, Snow employed the restricted definition of TSP-post-Comey (“that acknowledged program — the program that the president disclosed to the American people”) in order to say that, as Gonzales testified, “that program was not something that was legally controversial.” But didn’t Mueller’s disclosure refute that argument, by conceding that Comey objected to the TSP? Nah, says Snow, because Mueller said “National Security Agency programs” instead of “TSP”:
Actually, Snow tries to get away with a sleight of hand here. Mueller never said “programs” — as in more than one program. He said — oh, let’s just go to the transcript:
Lee: Did you have an understanding that the discussion was on TSP?
Mueller: I had an understanding that the discussion was on a, uh, a, uh — an NSA program, yes.
Lee: I guess we use “TSP,” we use “warrantless wiretapping,” so would I be comfortable in saying that those were the items that were part of the discussion?
Mueller: The discussion was on a National — uh, NSA program that has been much discussed, yes.
Very obviously, the program Mueller referred to was the Terrorist Surveillance Program. It doesn’t matter that Mueller never used the term himself, as it’s unambiguous from context. Had Mueller been so inclined, he could have very easily told Lee that he’d prefer to answer in closed session given classification worries, or that he wasn’t sure, or that he couldn’t recall. Instead, when asked if he was talking about TSP, Mueller said, “yes.” In order for what Snow is saying to be true, “yes” would have to mean something more like “no.”
The reporter here has it half-right. It’s not that administration is employing two different definitions of TSP. It’s that the administration is linguistically splicing a program in half; calling its own half “TSP”; and insisting that anyone not echoing its misleading distinction is talking about a different program. That’s why Snow is so careful to describe “TSP” as, say, “the activity of providing surveillance of al-Qaeda members overseas, or al-Qaeda affiliates, talking with people in the United States or communicating with them, having the federal government go after them.”
That definition satisfies the objections that Comey raised, which is why he ultimately signed off on a more-restrained program. What it neglects is everything else the surveillance program encompassed, from its inception in October 2001 until Comey’s concerns in March 2004, that Comey and is DOJ colleague Jack Goldsmith found unacceptable.
Mueller’s definition of the program is the all-encompassing one. The definition of TSP offered by Snow, and Gonzales, and Bush, isn’t. And no amount of linguistic violence or contextual distortion can bring Mueller’s testimony in line with Gonzales’s.
