How unseemly is this story?
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.
According to testimony yesterday by Comey, the Bush administration was so keen on creating a a paper trail that would make its illegal wiretapping program appear legal that it was willing to take advantage of a deathly ill member of its administration, hoping to catch him in his weakness.
The irony in all this, as Keith Olbermann pointed out last night, is that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft comes off looking like a paragon of virtue and a defender of civil liberties — a crazy notion given his record in office.
What does this say about Gonzales, the current occupant of the attorney general’s office, and the lengths to which this administration might go to protect its prerogatives and advance its notion of the unitary executive?
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Hank Kalet 