Congressional testimony is great fun for journalists, both those who wear press passes and those who wear pajamas. Given the bare-bones style of Capitol grillings and the disjointed manner of recorded testimony, anyone who wants to analyze the event can feel free to give the commentary his or her personal little spin. Yesterday’s stunning comments by James Comey, the former deputy attorney general, were of course no exception. For the sake of argument, let’s use this New York Times news report as a neutral baseline against which we can judge the blogospheric reaction:
Mr. Comey, the former No. 2 official in the Justice Department, said the crisis began when he refused to sign a presidential order reauthorizing the program, which allowed monitoring of international telephone calls and e-mail of people inside the United States who were suspected of having terrorist ties … At the time, Mr. Comey was acting attorney general because Mr. Ashcroft had been hospitalized for emergency gall bladder surgery … .
Mr. Comey said that on the evening of March 10, 2004, Mr. Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., then Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, tried to bypass him by secretly visiting Mr. Ashcroft. Mr. Ashcroft was extremely ill and disoriented, Mr. Comey said, and his wife had forbidden any visitors …
Mr. Comey said he arrived first in the darkened room, in time to brief Mr. Ashcroft, who he said seemed barely conscious. Before Mr. Ashcroft became ill, Mr. Comey said the two men had talked and agreed that the program should not be renewed. When the White House officials appeared minutes later, Mr. Gonzales began to explain to Mr. Ashcroft why they were there. Mr. Comey said Mr. Ashcroft rose weakly from his hospital bed, but in strong and unequivocal terms, refused to approve the eavesdropping program.
Nico at Think Progress pretty much sums up the liberal consensus: “Comey’s statements show,” Nico writes, “that President Bush was directly involved in the effort to override the administration’s own lawyers and reauthorize the warrantless spying program despite an ‘extensive review’ by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel stating ‘that the program did not comply with the law.’ ”
Others on the left, however, like Glenn Greenwald of Salon feel that Comey’s testimony raised as many questions as it answered: “The testimony yesterday from James Comey re-focuses attention on one of the long unresolved mysteries of the N.S.A. scandal. And the new information Comey revealed, though not answering that question decisively, suggests some deeply troubling answers. Most of all, yesterday’s hearing underscores how unresolved the entire N.S.A. matter is — how little we know (but ought to know) about what actually happened and how little accountability there has been for some of the most severe and blatant acts of presidential lawbreaking in the country’s history.”
Joshua Micah Marshall and Dan Kurtz over at Talking Points Memo have a different spin: that The Times and The Washington Post are themselves spinning the testimony incorrectly. “Both The Times and The Post suggest that this was a dispute among the president’s subordinates and that, in The Post’s words, the crisis was ‘resolved only when Bush overruled Gonzales and Card.’ ” Marshall writes. “The Times says that the president eventually ‘intervened … to avert a crisis … and quelled the revolt.’ I think it’s a stretch to believe that the president was brought in as some neutral arbiter. A more logical interpretation is that the president dispatched Gonzales and Card to Ashcroft’s bedside and then later backed down.”
O.K., we can bicker about the details, but at least everybody agrees that the president and his team did bad stuff, right? Of course not.
Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters is critical of Mr. Gonzales’s aggressiveness, but lauds Mr. Bush determination and morality:
“He kept the program going for three weeks without the reauthorization but with the agreement that he would change the program to meet Justice’s terms. Bush kept his word, and Ashcroft — now back on the job in a limited manner — reauthorized the program …The Bush administration has had a laser focus on national security and has done an admirable job of preventing further terrorist attacks. If anyone had guessed on 9/12 that no further attacks would occur for more than five years and counting, they would have been dismissed as Pollyannas. That focus led, in this case, to a very poor choice in bypassing a legitimate acting AG and trying to get a signature from an ailing AG who had already acknowledged that he would be temporarily too incapacitated to fulfill his duties
Others on the right are even willing to defend Messrs. Gonzales and Card: “Attorney General John Ashcroft had certified, over and over, that the N.S.A. program was legal,” notes John Hinderaker at Power Line. “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 20 times … 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.”
So what have we learned today? That James Comey may tell a heck of a story, but this didn’t stop anybody on the Internet from trying to improve on it.
- Tobin Harshaw
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