The Daily Background

The New York Times will publish a big splash Sunday containing new details about the 2004 internal Department of Justice dispute over the NSA’s unconstitutional spying program which led FBI Director Robert Mueller and others, including then-acting Attorney General James Comey, to threaten resignation.

Here’s the general thrust of the article. The NYT’s Scott Shane and David Johnston report that DoJ officials anonymous DoJ officials told them that the legal dispute was over the data mining portion of the NSA’s spying program, rather than the wiretapping portion of the program.

If that’s true, then Gonzales was obviously trying to confuse lawmakers in his sworn testimony, when he said “There has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed.” The NYT notes that Bush only “confirmed” the wiretapping portion of the NSA’s program, not the data mining, which includes searching of email records and other internet activity.

Still, Gonzales may have committed perjury. The technicality which his legal safety hinges upon is that the data mining program was separate from the wiretapping program– an assertion that Senators briefed on both, as well as FBI Director Mueller, disagree with.

The article seems to raise more questions than answers in my mind, and there are bound to be some eyebrows raised by this:

A half-dozen officials and former officials interviewed for this article would speak only on the condition of anonymity, in part because unauthorized disclosures about the classified program are already the subject of a criminal investigation. Some of the officials said the 2004 dispute involved other issues in addition to the data mining, but would not provide details. They would not say whether the differences were over how the databases were searched or how the resulting information was used.

Nor would they explain what modifications to the surveillance program President Bush authorized to head off the threatened resignations by Justice Department officials.

In my mind, there’s no way that this article is going to do anything but turn up the volume this scandal.

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