Did the GOP Minority Leader in the House really leak classified information in order to help the Bush administration negotiate an amendment to the FISA law? How could that be? I’m sure we’ll soon learn that the Vice President must have secretly declassified this before Boehner talked to FOX News about it:
A federal intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush administration’s wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources, providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by congressional lawmakers this week to expand the president’s spying powers.
House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court’s decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.
The judge, whose name could not be learned, concluded early this year that the government had overstepped its authority in attempting to broadly surveil communications between two locations overseas that are passed through routing stations in the United States, according to two other government sources familiar with the decision. […]
“There’s been a ruling, over the last four or five months, that prohibits the ability of our intelligence services and our counterintelligence people from listening in to two terrorists in other parts of the world where the communication could come through the United States,” Boehner told Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto in a Tuesday interview.
“This means that our intelligence agencies are missing a wide swath of potential information that could help protect the American people,” he said. Boehner added that some Democrats are aware of the problems caused by the judge’s restrictive ruling and the problems it has caused for the administration’s surveillance of terrorism suspects.
“The Democrats have known about this for months,” Boehner said. “We have had private conversations, we have had public conversations that this needs to be fixed. And Republicans are not going to leave this week until this problem is addressed.”
Of course the fix to FISA which Bush is proposing is to give Attorney General “Fredo” Gonzales the power to unilaterally decide when to issue a warrant, without any oversight or review of his decision for 120 days. Gee, I can’t imagine why the Democrats might not think that’s such a hot idea, can you?
Hat tip to The Raw Story.
