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Thursday, June 28th, 2007
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By William Roberts

A Senate panel probing the National Security Agency’s domestic wiretapping program issued subpoenas to the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Justice Department for documents showing the Bush administration’s legal justification for the secret surveillance.

“This committee has made no fewer than nine formal requests to the Department of Justice and to the White House, seeking information and documents about the authorization of and legal justification for this program,” Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote in letters accompanying the subpoenas.

Those requests were “rebuffed” by a “pattern of evasion and misdirection” from administration officials, Leahy said.

The panel authorized Leahy to issue subpoenas on the secret surveillance on June 21. The panel is reviewing whether the White House properly developed a legal basis for the classified eavesdropping on the international phone calls and e-mails of suspected terrorist agents that was disclosed in December 2005.

President George W. Bush claimed authority to order the eavesdropping as commander-in-chief after the Sept. 11 attacks. The program allowed monitoring without a court order of communications into or out of the U.S. when one of the parties was suspected of having ties to terrorists.

Judicial Review

The Bush administration agreed earlier this year to allow the program to be subjected to review by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court.

“The terrorist surveillance program is lawful, limited, safeguarded and — most importantly — effective in protecting American citizens from terrorist attacks,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. “It’s specifically designed to be effective without infringing Americans’ civil liberties.”

The subpoenas seek documents related to the authorization of the program, agreements between the administration and telecommunications companies regarding liability for assisting the surveillance and information about the shutting down of an investigation of the surveillance by the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

“We hope the White House doesn’t stonewall on this issue that’s vitally important to what America is all about,” New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer said.

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified May 15 that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while White House counsel, pressured then-Attorney General John Ashcroft against the advice of Justice Department lawyers to recertify a classified program, which senators said apparently was the wiretap program.

Gonzales Testimony

Meanwhile, Leahy said at a news conference that the Judiciary Committee will call Gonzales to testify again next month to follow up on his April 19 testimony about last year’s firings of eight U.S. prosecutors.

At the earlier hearing, Gonzales repeatedly said he didn’t remember events related to the firings, leading senators of both parties to question his candor.

Leahy said Gonzales will be provided with questions ahead of next month’s hearing “so that he will not do 60 or 70 times, `I don’t remember.”’

Also, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman asked Gonzales to explain his role in Cheney’s refusal to submit to an order that his office preserve classified records.

Democrats Conyers, of Michigan, and Waxman, of California, said Gonzales hasn’t responded to a request from the National Archives and Records Administration for a ruling on the legality of Cheney’s actions.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said the matter was under review. “The department will weigh all the issues raised by this request carefully and professionally,” he said.

Two days ago, Schumer called on Gonzales to disqualify himself from deciding whether Cheney’s office must comply with the order. Schumer said Gonzales’s testimony about the U.S. attorney firings put his impartiality in doubt.

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Have Your Say: Senate Panel Subpoenas White House Wiretapping Papers

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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