Last week, embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a different account of the briefing, provoking yet another controversy in his tenure as the country’s top law-enforcement officer. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales, who participated in the briefing as the White House counsel, said the legislators were told the deputy attorney general at the time, James Comey, had raised objections to the program. Gonzales said there was “consensus” that the program, aimed at catching terrorists, was needed. “The congressional leadership … told us, ‘Continue going forward with this very important intelligence activity’,” Gonzales testified.
It was only after getting that go-ahead, Gonzales said, that he and then White House chief of staff Andrew Card visited the hospital room of John Ashcroft, the gravely ill attorney general recovering from surgery. Gonzales tried, unsuccessfully, to get the heavily medicated Ashcroft to overrule Comey—a pivotal moment in one of the fiercest behind-the-scenes clashes of the Bush presidency.
Gonzales’s account of the briefing and his reasons for going to the hospital set off a firestorm. Democratic senators charged that aspects of Gonzales’s testimony were false and demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor; even the committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter, questioned if Gonzales’s testimony was “actionable.” The key point of contention: the A.G.’s long insistence that “there has not been any serious disagreement” within the administration about the Terrorist Surveillance Program. His claim came under scrutiny a few months ago when Comey testified how he, Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were ready to resign in March ‘04 over a classified-intelligence program. Senators familiar with the matter, such as John D. Rockefeller IV and Russ Feingold, say Comey was referring to the same program now called the TSP. Yet Gonzales insisted the subject of the briefing and the dispute with Comey was “not about the TSP” but about “other intelligence activities” he couldn’t discuss.
Apparent evidence to the contrary is strong: a letter written last year by then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte described the March ‘04 briefing as being about the “Terrorist Surveillance Program”; and Mueller himself testified last week the dispute was about the “much discussed” NSA program.
The new dispute is, in part, a semantic game. The name “Terrorist Surveillance Program” wasn’t used by the White House until December 2005. By that time, the program had been scaled back because of protests from Comey and others at the Justice Department. Justice officials insisted last week Gonzales has always been careful to limit his statements to the publicly disclosed TSP, implying that his comments do not refer to the program as it existed before late ‘05. The A.G.’s testimony “was and remains accurate,” a spokesman says.
