by Christopher Ketcham - April 29, 2008
For decades the federal government has been developing a highly
classified plan that would override the Constitution in the event of a
terrorist attack. Is it also compiling a secret enemies list of citizens who
could face detention under martial law?
In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice
Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could
have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a
principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified
program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car
chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White
House, where the president’s henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he
demanded a neutral witness be present.
The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft’s second-in-command at the
Department of Justice during Bush’s first term. Comey had been a loyal political
foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before
the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly
uneasy reviewing the Bush administration’s various domestic surveillance
and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so
clandestine he wasn’t allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did
say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004,
trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the
certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting
attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he
communicated his decision to the White House, Bush’s men told him, in so many
words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.
Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on the cold
night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program’s authorization was to expire.
At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington Hospital
following emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of President Bush
himself, the White House tried, in Comey’s words, “to take advantage of a very
sick man,” sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then-White House counsel
Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft’s sickroom to persuade the heavily
doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey,
accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in his car, raced through the
streets of the capital, lights blazing, and “literally ran” up the hospital
stairs to beat them there.
Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the
requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their
heavy-handed ploy. “I’m not the attorney general,” Ashcroft told Bush’s men.
“There”—he pointed weakly to Comey—“is the attorney general.” Gonzales and Card
were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey’s presence in the room.
The following day, the classified domestic spying program that Comey found so
disturbing went forward at the demand of the White House—“without a signature
from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality,” he
testified.