Promoted from the diaries by Steven D.
Ok pop quiz time. Who said this about George W. Bush in December 2001?
‘This is not a monarchy…We’ve got a dictatorial president and a Justice Department that does not want Congress involved. … Your guy’s acting like he’s king.”
I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t a liberal, a Democrat, a peace activist, an anti-war protester or Fidel Castro.
Give up? It was actually Republican Congressman Dan Burton. And he wasn’t alone. Republican Congressman LaTourette called Bush’s actions a bunch of crap. Democrat Representative Henry Waxman said:
“An imperial presidency or an imperial justice department conflicts with the democratic principles of our nation”
So why were these three men so angry in 2001? Why did a leading conservative Republican member of the House refer to Bush as a “king” and a “dictatorial president” just a few weeks after September 11, 2001?
In December 2001, the House Government Reform Committee was reviewing a number of old cases, some of which dealt with the FBI’s actions in Boston over the past 40 years. From 1960-1995, the FBI had an extremely close relationship to a mob being operated in Boston called the Winter Hill Gang. The FBI had two “confidential informants” named James “Whitey” Bulger and Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi. The FBI protected these two men from prosecution even as they continued to operate their criminal enterprises, including killing rivals.
Perhaps the FBI’s most egregious actions were letting Joseph Salvati spend 30 years in prison for a murder committed in 1965. Salvati was released when a judge ruled that the FBI hid testimony that would’ve cleared Salvati because the FBI wanted to protect their informants. The murder of a gangster named John B. Callahan went unsolved also because of alleged FBI actions to protect their informants. An FBI agent named James Connolly Jr. was accused of tipping off his informants like Flemmi before impending arrests.
So in 2001, Burton’s committee subpoenaed the Justice Department for files relating to these cases and suddenly Bush wrote a memo and instructed John Ashcroft (then the Attorney General) to not deliver the files to the House committee, invoking executive privilege for the first time:
“It is my decision that you should not release these documents or otherwise make them available to the committee,” Mr. Bush wrote. “I have decided to assert executive privilege with respect to the documents.”
Mr. Bush wrote that the “disclosure to Congress of confidential advice to the attorney general regarding the appointment of a special counsel and confidential recommendations to Department of Justice officials regarding whether to bring criminal charges would inhibit the candor necessary to the effectiveness of the deliberative process by which the department makes prosecutorial decisions. I believe congressional access to these documents would be contrary to the national interest.”
It’s worth noting here that the records that Burton wanted dealt with very old cases that were closed. Robert Mueller, the FBI director, had been a U.S. Attorney in Boston during the 1980’s but he is not suspected of any wrongdoing in this case (it was strictly an internal FBI operation). So why the cover-up? Why invoke executive privilege?
Furthemore, Burton had also subpoenaed records concerning Bill Clinton’s presidency, including why Janet Reno did not order a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton’s overseas fund-raising. Any evidence Burton would’ve uncovered would’ve been damaging to Clinton, not Bush. So why did Bush do it?
At the time, Burton was absolutely incensed:
”You tell the president there’s going to be war between the president and this committee,” Dan Burton, the Indiana Republican who heads the House Government Reform Committee, told a Justice Department official during what was supposed to be a routine prehearing handshake.
”His dad was at a 90 percent approval rating and he lost, and the same thing can happen to him,” Burton added, jabbing his finger and glaring at Carl Thorsen, a deputy assistant attorney general who was attempting to introduce a superior who was testifying.
Burton also threatened to charge Bush with “contempt of Congress”, the only resort he had when the administration blocked his request, but it never happened. After a lot of grumbling and negotiating, the Bush administration finally released the Boston FBI files to Burton’s committee, but they weren’t made public. Later, in February 2002, there was some public testimony about the long-running corruption in Boston.
At the time, writers were puzzled about why Bush would invoke executive privilege concerning files that couldn’t hurt his administration and would potentially add more damage to the legacy of Clinton’s presidency:
The refusal by Bush and Ashcroft to turn over the information to Burton is puzzling. Some think that Bush is getting very bad counsel in this matter. Others think that Bush seeks to protect the current FBI Director Bob Mueller who was in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston during part of the relevant time period; or to keep intact the reputation of the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who apparently was aware of at least some of the irregularities in the Boston FBI office’s informant-protection program.
But it was actually none other than Alberto Gonzales who recommended to Bush that he invoke the executive privilege. As we all know now, at the time Gonzales did this he was busy crafting legal justifications for the torture of prisoners with John Yoo over at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. And Bush and Ashcroft (with Gonzales’ input) were also devising their domestic spying program as well. It seems they had a lot of documents written by the Department of Justice to hide from Congress just after September 11, 2001.
At the time, journalist Timothy Maier seems to have taken an accurate guess as to what Bush and Gonzales were up to:
But more likely the Bush administration simply is testing the waters, something most administrations have done in their first months, says Jim Wilson, chief counsel for the House Government Reform Committee. “There is a desire for fewer documents out of the door because they are withholding on principle” to protect the executive decision-making process, says Wilson. “This is not well-founded in law. It’s hard to roll back the clock to before the 1920 Teapot Dome scandal.”
Unsurprising to me, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) also guessed right:
“This is a test of Congress to see how much the Administration can get away with,” says Steve Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “It is not at all surprising the executive branch would want to operate in secret. The question is, How much will Congress accept?”
Apparently a heck of a lot. But the most accurate guess came from Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore:
Why is Bush trying to stake a claim of executive privilege in two closed investigations in which there is no longer any threat to law enforcement or prosecution? Indeed, the political fallout from any revelations about Janet Reno’s decision not to pursue an independent investigation of Clinton/Gore campaign finances could only hurt Democrats. Tiefer and others worry that this may be part of a far-reaching strategy. “President Bush will want to stake out his secrecy powers in cases like these where he can’t be accused of covering up a matter of political or corrupt self-interest,” says Tiefer.
And it wasn’t just Justice Department papers that Bush was busy hiding from the public view. From early 2002:
Bush is blocking the scheduled release of documents under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which mandates that all but the most highly sensitive documents are to be made public twelve years after a President leaves office. Under the PRA, Ronald Reagan’s papers were supposed to be released last year.
On January 20, 2001, the first batch (68,000 pages) of Reagan’s papers, mostly notes from meetings with advisers and internal White House memos, came up for routine release. It should have come off without a hitch–after all, presidential libraries have for years been releasing documents informally. But the new Bush Administration, fresh from its own Florida election controversy, took advantage of a PRA clause allowing a thirty-day presidential consultation, and thus began what turned into a grand stall. By last August, half a year had passed and still nothing had been released.
This raised suspicions. Since the law already exempted the most sensitive documents from disclosure, why did the Bush Administration have to review the rest for what it said were national security purposes? “It’s pretty fishy,” says Anna Nelson, an American University history professor who works with a number of scholarly and historical organizations on presidential papers access. “The precautions on ‘national security’ are extreme. These are not Iran/contra papers.”
Bush also got Ashcroft to change how the government handles Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests:
Four weeks after terrorists attacked New York City and Washington, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft fired off a memo to federal agencies that set the tone for how the Bush administration now would honor the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The memorandum created a level of secrecy unsurpassed since FOIA became law in 1966.
The Oct. 12, 2001, directive instructed federal agencies to stall on releasing documents until a “full and deliberate consideration” of the implications of the disclosure of any such information was conducted. It superseded former attorney general Janet Reno’s 1993 FOIA policy that put the burden on the federal agencies to justify any withholding of “FOIAed” documents.
The Bush administration has also used executive privilege to shield Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force. It’s worth noting that the details of that group, which likely involved heavy involvement from Enron, have still not been released to the public or Congress.
And it’s no coincidence that Cheney is involved here. More from Tim Meier:
Bush’s reluctance to release records may reflect Cheney’s ideas and experience as chief of staff at the White House under President Ford. It was Ford who vetoed H.R. 12471, a bill to strengthen the FOIA, calling it “unconstitutional and unworkable.” Congress overrode Ford’s veto. And it was Cheney who sought to punish gadfly journalist Seymour Hersh for his investigative reporting on the U.S. intelligence community, pushing for an FBI probe of Hersh and the New York Times.
Indeed Cheney has defended his recent efforts to keep secret his energy records by saying it is time to restore presidential powers eroded by “unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 or 35 years.”
Starting to sound familiar? Unwise compromises about presidential powers? And now we learn that the administration is actively stumping on the issue that the president has the “war-time power” to supersede any law passed by Congress, including FISA which forbids warrantless NSA surveillance of American citizens.
The NSA program is nothing new and neither is Bush’s imperial presidency. And hardliner Dan Burton warned us from the beginning, even though now he is defending Bush:
Representative Dan Burton, of Indiana speaks on behalf of Bush’s defense and states that, “the liberal media and its liberal allies are attacking the President. The fact is the President is defending the United States of America.”
I guess it’s ok for Bush to be king sometimes, eh Dan?
This is cross-posted from Flogging the Simian
Peace
