Wiretapping will always haunt us
Ashcroft’s deputy Attorney General:
“I have encountered just such an apocalyptic situation, where I and the Department of Justice have been asked to be part of something that is fundamentally wrong”
In May of last year, Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified to the U.S. Senate that three years earlier, on the eve of the 2004 election, ALL of the top Department of Justice officials (including Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller) told G.W. Bush they would resign immediately because George Bush was continuing the NSA wiretapping/surveillance program (which had been in place for at least three years) after his own Department of Justice had told him it was illegal.
The politically awkward resignation (imagine all these leaders telling the press that they needed more time with their families suddenly, all at once) was avoided because Bush agreed to change certain aspects of the program (to this day, unrevealed) in order for these officials to stay on and endorse it’s legality.
This all came about well before the N.Y. Times broke the politically charged story of the wiretapping program in 2005, which all of the above officials endorsed. So the program unveiled by the Times, as controversial as it was, was actually a compromise acceptable to the right wing nut-job ‘bushies’ working in these positions! And of course, the story was published only after the Times sat on it for a year and had been actively lobbied by the administration to keep it quiet (Such traitors, these elitist journalists!).
Here is a portion of the amazing resignation letter written by Deputy Attorney General James Comey:
