Triangulating on the Truth

One possibility, of course, is that Gonzales was simply lying. That was the subtext of this letter sent by Senate Democrats to Gonzales yesterday, citing the testimony quoted above, and asking: "In light of Mr. Comey's testimony yesterday, do you stand by your 2006 Senate and House testimony, or do you wish to revise it?"

But as R. Jeffrey Smith writes in The Washington Post today: "The Justice Department said yesterday that it will not retract a sworn statement in 2006 by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that the Terrorist Surveillance Program had aroused no controversy inside the Bush administration, despite congressional testimony Tuesday that senior departmental officials nearly resigned in 2004 to protest such a program."

The Questions To Ask

The New York Times editorial board cobbles together the clues in Gonzales's hair-splitting testimony and concludes that "the really big question, an urgent avenue for investigation, is what exactly the National Security Agency was doing before that night, under Mr. Bush's personal orders. Did Mr. Bush start by authorizing the agency to intercept domestic e-mails and telephone calls without first getting a warrant?

"Mr. Bush has acknowledged authorizing surveillance without a court order of communications between people abroad and people in the United States. That alone violates the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Domestic spying without a warrant would be an even more grievous offense.

"The question cannot be answered because Mr. Bush is hiding so much about the program. But whatever was going on, it so alarmed Mr. Comey and F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller that they sped to the hospital, roused the barely conscious Mr. Ashcroft and got him ready to fend off the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, and Mr. Bush's counsel, Alberto Gonzales. There are clues in Mr. Comey's testimony and in earlier testimony by Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Ashcroft's successor, that suggest that Mr. Bush initially ordered broader surveillance than he and his aides have acknowledged. . . .

"With the benefit of Mr. Comey's testimony, we can see how Mr. Gonzales, in his effort to mislead the Congress and confuse the American public about how much their civil liberties were being violated, may have unintentionally given away vital clues that only now are falling into place. . . .

"The Republican-controlled Congress did a disservice to the nation by refusing to hold Mr. Bush to account for the illegal wiretapping. The current Congress should resume a vigorous investigation of this egregious abuse of power."

On the Thinkprogress blog, Clinton-era White House privacy counsel Peter Swire suggested yesterday: "Perhaps Comey's objections applied to a different domestic spying program. . . . But then we would have senior Justice officials confirming that other 'programs' exist for domestic spying, something the Administration has never previously stated."

Former Clinton administration Justice official Marty Lederman blogs that the "revised" program approved some weeks after the March incident "apparently was narrower in some fundamental respects than the program that had been authorized [previously]. . . .

"If that's the narrow version of the NSA program, just how broad and indiscriminate was the surveillance under the program that Ashcroft, et al. would not approve? . . .

"This is the real heart of the Comey story -- What happened . . . before Comey and [colleague Jack] Goldsmith came aboard? Just how radical were the Administration's legal judgments? How extreme were the programs they implemented? How egregious was the lawbreaking?

"It is imperative now that the Senate do all it can to obtain and investigate the entire paper trail that led up to the events described yesterday."