More subpoenas - Leahy's got Nadler's back

all i have to say is this...

NO MORE SUBPOENAS WITHOUT ENFORCEMENT...!

"The warrantless wiretapping program has operated for over five years outside of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and without the approval of the FISA Court. The Committee has continued to ask for the legal justification for this sweeping and secret program, and has continually been rebuffed by inadequate and at times, misleading, responses from this Justice Department," said Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, in a statement sent to RAW STORY. "The information we have requested has been specific to the legal justification for this program and is firmly within the Committee’s oversight jurisdiction."

[...]

In a hearing Thursday afternoon at the House Judiciary Committee, a Justice Department official refused to turn over President Bush's legal justification for the warrantless spying program.

"Those [Office of Legal Counsel opinions] reflect the internal confidential legal advice of the executive branch," said Steven G. Bradbury, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. "We are citing the confidentiality interests that the executive branch has in internal confidential deliberative advice of the executive branch."

The program is operated by the National Security Agency and legally certified by the Justice Department.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who chairs the subcommittee on constitutional issues and is investigating the program, slammed the Bush White House's actions in warrantless eavesdropping.

"We rejected monarchy in this country more than 200 years ago...This President appears to have forgotten that fact," he said in his opening statement. "Not only has he asserted the right to go around the FISA Court and the Wiretap Act, but he has actually done so."

Nadler went further in an earlier interview with Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall.

"This entire warrantless wiretapping is illegal and the President and Attorney General are engaged in a criminal conspiracy. I mean, to me this is worse than Watergate," he said in the video interview.

(click here to watch...)

< sigh > let's get this constitutional crisis party started, fercryinoutloud...

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A "surge" of lawyers to achieve "victory" in the White House

josh at tpm offers this...

Lawyering up. Prez adds nine new lawyers to the White House Counsel's staff.

Late Update: TPM Reader AB checks in ...

Did you note that three of the nine came from the Washington, D.C. firm previously known as Wiley, Rein & Fielding? It is now called Wiley Rein, LLP, since its name member, Fred Fielding, moved to the White House late last year, to help defend BushCo from Congressional oversight and investigation. It appears that Fielding's assessment is that the situation ahead is dire and so he is moving part of his lawyer firm into the White House as reinforcements, a "surge" of lawyers we might call it.Later Update: As many TPM Readers have noted, not a single Regent Univ. Law School alum among the nine. For the people, Regent, for the prez, the Ivy Leagues.

all i ask is that we get this long-delayed constitutional crisis underway... i know everybody in congress is avoiding it like the plague, but, goddam it, it's way, way overdue, and we better get after it rather than sitting around watching our country continue to be dismembered by the most lawless presidential administration in history...

(thanks to mcjoan at daily kos...)

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Was DOJ #2, McNulty, Comey's successor, cut out as well?

following on my earlier post...

Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, told congressional investigators last week that he, too, was kept in the dark about the White House's role in the firings.

[...]

According to a congressional aide, McNulty said he attended a White House meeting with Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, and other officials on March 5, the day before McNulty's deputy William Moschella was to testify to Congress about the firings.

White House officials told the Justice Department group that they needed to agree on clear reasons why each prosecutor was fired and explain them to Congress, McNulty said, according to the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the transcript of McNulty's interview hasn't been made public.

McNulty said that White House officials never revealed during the meeting that they'd been discussing plans to replace some prosecutors with Gonzales aides, the congressional aide said.

McNulty recalled feeling disturbed and concerned when he found out days later that the White House had been involved, the congressional aide said. McNulty considered the extent of White House coordination to be "extremely problematic."

this raises a few questions in josh's mind, as well it should...

Why do you need to 'agree on clear reasons why each prosecutor was fired' if the reasons were actually clear when you did the firing and if the reasons can be stated publicly? Think about [it]. Why do Rove and the other heavies from the White House need to tell these guys how important it is to get their stories straight?

yeah... why...?

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