Today’s Must Read

Was it or wasn’t it a briefing on the Terrorist Surveillance Program? The answer may determine Alberto Gonzales’s fate.

As the world knows, Gonzales testified on Tuesday that James Comey, the former deputy attorney general, may have had legal objections to … to… well, to some “intelligence activities” by the Bush administration, but not to the surveillance program announced by President Bush in December 2005, known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Stunned lawmakers immediately began talking about perjury charges: the previously-unknown “program” came as very convenient for Gonzales, who had told the Senate on February 6, 2006 that no one within the Justice Department had dissented from the program the “president described.”

The crux of the distinction is now a White House meeting with Congressional leaders on the mysterious program that occurred on March 10, 2004. Gonzales told the Senate about the meeting in order to add “context” to his controversial bedside visit that day to recused Attorney General John Ashcroft to “inform” him about Comey’s refusal to reauthorize Program X. If Gonzales is telling the truth, then the March 10, 2004 meeting wasn’t about the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Unfortunately for him, as the AP first reported, in 2006, then-intelligence chief John Negroponte, wrote to then-Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert to inform him of the dates of the congressional/White House meetings on the Terrorist Surveillance Program. And sure enough, the March 10, 2004 meeting is on Negroponte’s list. You can read Negroponte’s letter here.

Gonzales had been careful to avoid ever using the words “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” apparently to avoid precisely the bind he’s in now. At Tuesday’s hearing, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) asked him about the distinction he’s drawing. His answer? He won’t answer in public.

SPECTER: Going back to the question about your credibility on whether there was dissent within the administration as to the terrorist surveillance program, was there any distinction between the terrorist surveillance program in existence on March 10th, when you and the chief of staff went to see Attorney General Ashcroft, contrasted with the terrorist surveillance program which President Bush made public in December of 2005?

GONZALES: Senator, this is a question that I should answer in a classified setting, quite frankly, because now you’re asking me to hint or talk — to hint about our operational activities. And I’d be happy to answer that question, but in a classified setting.

That better be one unbelievably convincing closed-session briefing, because options are running low for Gonzales. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has given him until next week to revise his testimony. If not, he’ll ask the Justice Department’s inspector general to “determine who’s telling the truth” via a perjury inquiry. So far, Gonzales’s spokesman is standing by the Tuesday testimony.

That’s not surprising. If Gonzales concedes that the March 10, 2004 meeting was about the TSP, he’ll be conceding that Comey’s objections were indeed about the TSP — and that means that his February 6, 2006 testimony misled the Senate. In other words, unless Gonzales can prove that the March 10, 2004 meeting wasn’t about the TSP, he’s going to be hounded by perjury charges for the rest of his tenure.