House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers is a bulldog. He's worried more bones that the Bush Administration has tried to bury in the DoJ than any backyard canine. Now he's worrying another.
Could it be that the electronic government database is the controversial bone that top-level Justice Department officials were worried about, and could it be that it was the topic causing dissension in the White House ranks, and could it be that the database, not the warrantless wiretaps is the issue that sent AGAG into fits of worm squirmery in his overly parsed testimony concerning his bedside visit to then-AG John Ashcroft before the Judiciary Committee hearings?
Most importantly, could it be that
the anonymous divulgence of the previously undisclosed database might have been a leak by Gonzales’s office "designed to rehabilitate previous controversial testimony" by the attorney general. The Hill.com
Now that the Judiciary Committee has voted two members of the Bush Administration in contempt of Congress and that same administration has signaled its own contempt for Congress' contempt, one wonders why such stubbornness in reaction to a request about a program (warrantless wiretaps) that had been backed by Ashcroft for two years, and likely from its inception.
Wouldn't all the starchy resistance be wasted in that regard? Conversely, wouldn't it be a typical BushRovian response if the target of the Judiciary Committee was the far more secret, and potentially far more damaging, electronic J. Edgar Hoover-like database itself, containing the probably mined information gleaned from those illegal wiretaps?
"The disagreement that occurred, and the reason for the visit to the hospital, senator, was about other intelligence activities. It was not about the terrorist surveillance program that the president announced to the American people," Gonzales told Sen. Arlen Specter, ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee..
"Mr. Attorney General, do you expect us to believe that?" Specter asked impatiently. CNN Political Ticker
Maybe we should believe him.
Gonzales again:
The disagreements, he said, "dealt with operational capabilities that we're not talking about today."
Obviously, if you want to go on mining more data it's important to keep the mines open and running. It seems logical that the fear of Congressional oversight stems not from the warrantless eavesdropping, but from the information gathered from those wiretaps that is clearly beyond the bounds of intent covered by Ashcroft's previous legal approval to those wiretaps. It's the content of that mined material that's contained in the documents that Joshua Bolton is fighting to keep away from the prying eyes of the Judiciary Committee perhaps because some of that mined information may have been used by him and others in putting together The List of attorneys to be fired in Attorneygate, among other illegal political purposes.
__________________________
They burn our children in their wars and grow rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
