Welcome to Gonzales Watch - Blawging the Ex-Attorney General

There’s an urgent problem created by Alberto Gonzales’ litany of controversies while serving as U.S. Attorney General and White House Counsel to President Bush.

Will Gonzales’ inability to testify truthfully before Congress, attempts to circumvent the Justice Department’s legal conclusion under former Attorney General John Ashcroft that warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional, and continued lack of Congressional support for firing career criminal prosecutors in U.S. Attorney offices around the country have a catastrophic affect on America’s ability to collect vital intelligence on terrorists and others threatening the U.S. domestically and abroad?

These questions come to mind after reading today’s Washington Post article on efforts by Mike McConnell, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence to get Congress to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (’FISA’) (50 U.S.C. § 1801, et al.

In effect, McConnell appears like he’s trying to ‘pull a Gonzales’ by circumventing the federal judiciary. The changes that he is proposing to Congress for the current FISA law, according to the Post, are of a logistical nature, and raise the following question: “When communications between one foreign-located source and another foreign-located source travel through a U.S.-located terminal or switch, can they be intercepted without a warrant?”

Here are a few hypothetical scenarios that come to mind:

• If potential targets of a terrorism investigation use Skype (which is owned by San Jose, Calif.-based eBay), could the U.S. eavesdrop on VoIP phone calls or text communications simply because the parent company is a U.S.-based entity?
• If VoIP servers used in foreign communications by terrorists are located overseas, would the U.S. still have jurisdiction to eavesdrop on the communication(s) without first obtaining a court-ordered warrant?
• If an al Qaeda terrorist called from a satellite phone in the tribal areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan to a member of a terrorist cell in a country outside of the United States, could the U.S. legally eavesdrop on the conversation and use information collected from to act against the parties when their communication, locations, and systems used were all overseas?

Convicted 9/11 conspirator and admitted al Qaeda terrorist Zarias Moussaoui used Hotmail accounts to help carry out part of his intended operation, according to court documents and news reports in the case.

If he had used a overseas e-mail account instead of his Hotmail account hosted by Microsoft, would McConnell’s proposed changes in the law have enabled U.S. intelligence agencies to legally collect and used information garnered from his communications (the FBI reportedly bungled their collection and use of Moussaoui’s Hotmail e-mails.)?

White House Counsel Fred Fielding rejected subpoenas from Congress seeking documents and testimony from former White House aides to President Bush in the Justice Department’s U.S. Attorney firings scandal .

The full text of Fielding’s letter can be read below.

On June 13th, the Senate and House subpoenaed former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Political Director Sarah Taylor.

The subpoena for ex-White House Counsel Harriet Miers sought “[c]omplete and unredacted versions, including paper and electronic versions, of any and all documents in your possession, custody or control related to the Committee’s investigation into the preservation of prosecutorial independence and the Department of Justice’s politicization of the hiring and firing of United States Attorneys.”

Fielding tells Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (Dem. - Vt.) and House Committee on the Judiciary Chairman John Conyears (Dem. - Mich.) that Executive Privilege protects Pres. Bush from having to respond to the subpoenas: “where the President’s authority to appoint and remove U.S. Attorneys is at stake, the institutional interest of the Executive Branch is very strong.”

Using litigator’s language, Fielding stressed that “the President’s assertion of [Executive Privilege] here comports with prior practices in similar contests, and that it has been appropriately documented.” (emphasis added).

Unfortunately, the response was predictable.

The subpoenas that the Senate Judiciary Committee served on the White House, Dick Cheney, National Security Council, and Dept. of Justice were rejected by the White House within less than twenty-four hours.

The Committee’s latest subpoenas were preceded by similar subpoenas that it served on former White House and Justice Department officials:

* A subpoena was issued by the Committee on June 13, 2007 to former White House Counsel Harriet Miers over the U.S. Attorney firings debacle. Miers was givien a July 12, 2007 deadline to comply with the subpoena.

* The Committee served a subpoena on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on May 2, 2007 when he failed to comply with its repeated requests for turning over correspondence (e-mail, etc.) involving White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and his use of non-White House e-mail to conduct goverment business.

The latest legal battle stems from the revelation by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey that Gonzales tried (unsuccessfully) to ram-rod a very ill Attorney General John Ashcroft into extending warrantless domestic surveillance just after Justice Department officials had concluded that it was unconstitutional.

Youc an re-examine Comey’s testimony here:

As this blog predicted exactly one month ago, Michael Elston announced that he is resigning from his position at the Department of Justice.

The Chief of Staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, who announced his resignation last month, also worked with McNulty during his tenure as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Elston has been named as a key DOJ official who was allegedly involved in the U.S. Attorney firings controversy. Fired U.S. Attorneys Paul K. Charlton of Phoenix, Arizona and John McKay of Seattle, Washington told the House Committee on the Judiciary that felt that they were threatened by Elston exactly one day before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 18, 2007.