The Department of Justice’s (DOJ for short) paranoid and secretive approach to litigating the numerous lawsuits regarding its “allegedly” illegal wiretapping program is beyond the boundary of the absurd, and has reached Kafkaesque proportions. That’s not my opinion, its the experience of an attorney for one of the plaintiffs who is quoted in this New York Times article by Adam Liptak today:
The tactics, said a lawyer in the Oregon case, Jon B. Eisenberg, prompted him to conduct unusual research.
“Sometime during all of this,” Mr. Eisenberg said, “I went on Amazon and ordered a copy of Kafka’s ‘The Trial,’ because I needed a refresher course in bizarre legal procedures.”
What prompted Mr. Eisenberg to make such a claim? Read on …
(cont.)
According to Liptak’s article here are some of the strange goings on that have become commonplace in these lawsuits:
1. DOJ attorneys have filed pleadings in cases by placing them in rooms at the Justice Department, essentially filing them with themselves.
2. Judges have been told that they must write their decisions on DOJ computers.
3.DOJ lawyers have threatened to seize exhibits filed with the court by plaintiffs as part of their pleadings.
4.DOJ lawyers have refused to disclose information about their own security clearances to judges, claiming their response would reveal “classified information.”
5. DOJ attorneys argued that an appeal of its unusual “procedures” in one case before a federal appeals court in Cincinnati is moot (i.e., can no longer be litigated) because the administration announced last week that it would submit the program to a secret court, ending its eavesdropping without warrants.
6. Had the FBI take physical possession of one plaintiff attorney’s laptop computer to “scrub it” of any “classified material” which was inadvertently leaked by the DOJ attorney to the plaintiff in that case.
7. Sent FBI agents to remove documents from a federal judge’s possession on the grounds that they contained “sensitive material” even though the documents in question had already been distributed to parties overseas.
8. A DOJ attorney informed the same judge in No. 7 above that “The document must be completely removed from the case, and plaintiffs are not allowed to rely on it to prove their claims.”
You see what I mean. It’s one absurdity after another. If the DOJ has its way, none of these cases will ever be resolved by the Justice system. In essence, this is a direct assertion of raw, untrammeled executive authority in violation of the separation of powers doctrine provided under the Constitution. In effect, Abu Gonzales’ Justice Department is telling the Judiciary that all they can do is act as a rubber stamp for executive decisions where “The War on Terror” is concerned.
There can be little doubt that the person ultimately behind this decision is our own modern day version of Cardinal Richelieu, Vice President Cheney, who has pushed for the broadest possible interpretation of Presidential powers in our history since the day he took office in January, 2001. Given enough time, he would anoint Bush as King, turn Congress into merely a debating society, and allow the the Federal Judiciary to continue only to provide a patina of legality for executive decisions regarding our rights and liberties.
Bush Wiretapping Program Lawsuits
