Pathetic…

“On the night of March 10, 2004, as Attorney General John D. Ashcroft lay ill in an intensive-care unit, his deputy, James B. Comey, received an urgent call.

White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., were on their way to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush’s domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department had just determined was illegal.

In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced, sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey’s presence in the room, turned and left.

The sickbed visit was the start of a dramatic showdown between the White House and the Justice Department in early 2004 that, according to Comey, was resolved only when Bush overruled Gonzales and Card. But that was not before Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller and their aides prepared a mass resignation, Comey said. The domestic spying by the National Security Agency continued for several weeks without Justice approval, he said.

“I was angry,” Comey testified. “I thought I just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me.”

Comey is – how should I say it? “Lying”, or at best telling the story larger than life. As noted the event did take place, but not according to Comey’s dire description. First, Comey description of a coup from Mueller and aides is more likely suited to him.

Point of fact, Comey, McNulty and Schumer, all key players in an attempted coup on the DOJ. Powerline notes:

“The problem apparently–based on an exchange between Chuck Schumer and Comey–had to do with the way in which the NSA program was being administered or overseen at that time.

The timing here is important. Comey explained that it was immediately before Ashcroft was stricken with pancreatitis that he and Ashcroft came to the conclusion that they could not certify the legality of the NSA program, given the conclusions of the Department’s recent review. Comey described his conversation with Ashcroft, in which that conclusion was reached, and continued:

The Attorney General was taken that very afternoon to George Washington Hospital, where he went into intensive care and remained there for over a week. And I became the acting attorney general.
And over the next week–particularly the following week, on Tuesday–we communicated to the relevant parties at the White House and elsewhere our decision that as acting attorney general I would not certify the program as to its legality and explained our reasoning in detail….

That was Tuesday that we communicated that. The next day was Wednesday, March the 10th, the night of the hospital incident.

This strikes me as the information that is vital to understand what likely happened. Attorney General John Ashcroft had certified, over and over, that the NSA program was legal. Suddenly, Ashcroft was taken ill. The next thing that happened, according to Comey, was that Comey notified the White House that he would not sign the certification that Ashcroft had signed some 29 times. Comey did not say–amazingly, no one asked him–whether he ever told the White House that Ashcroft had agreed with this conclusion on the very day when he was taken to the hospital.

So it is hardly surprising if, confronted with sudden intransigence from a brand-new, acting attorney general, Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card thought that the problem lay with Comey’s staging a sort of palace coup. It may well have been reasonable for them to go to see Ashcroft to get the same certification they had gotten many times before.”

Comey’s attempt at throwing the NSA program to the winds was thwarted – as it should have by Gonzales and Card and was not as Comey stated an effort on Gonzales to take advantage of a sick man.

In fact it was Comey who owned that honor.