By Dan Eggen, Washington Post
No more than four Justice Department officials had access to details of the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program when the department deemed portions of it illegal, following a pattern of poor consultation that helped create a “legal mess,” a former Justice official told Congress yesterday.
Jack L. Goldsmith, former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the White House so tightly restricted access to the National Security Agency’s program that even the attorney general and the NSA’s general counsel were partly in the dark.
When the Justice Department began a formal review of the program’s legal underpinnings in late 2003, the White House initially resisted allowing then-Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey to be briefed on it, Goldsmith said.
Goldsmith’s testimony provided further details about the fierce legal debate and intense secrecy surrounding the NSA surveillance program within the Bush administration in early 2004. The fight culminated in a threat by Goldsmith, Comey and others to resign en masse if the program were allowed to continue without changes.