Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

WASHINGTON: On the night of March 10, 2004, a high-ranking Justice Department official rushed to a Washington hospital to prevent two White House aides from taking advantage of the critically ill Attorney General, John Ashcroft, the official testified on Tuesday.

One of those aides was Alberto Gonzales, who was then White House counsel and eventually succeeded Ashcroft as Attorney General.

"I was very upset," said James Comey, who was deputy Attorney General at the time, in his testimony Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I was angry. I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me."

The hospital visit by Gonzales and Andrew Card Jr., who was then White House chief of staff, has been disclosed before, but never in such dramatic, personal detail. Comey's account offered a rare and titillating glimpse of a Washington power struggle, complete with a late-night showdown in the White House after a dramatic encounter in a darkened hospital room.

Comey related his story to the committee, which is investigating various aspects of Gonzales's tenure as Attorney General, including the recent dismissals of eight United States attorneys and allegations that applicants for traditionally nonpartisan career prosecutor jobs were screened for political loyalties.

Although Comey declined to say specifically what the business was that sent Gonzales to the bedside of Ashcroft in George Washington Hospital, where he lay critically ill with pancreatitis, it was clear that the subject was the National Security Agency's secret domestic surveillance program. The signature of Ashcroft or his surrogate was needed by the next day, March 11, in order to renew the program, which was still secret at that time. ...

On the night of March 10, as he was being driven home by his security detail, he got a telephone call from Ashcroft's chief of staff, who had just been contacted by Ashcroft's wife, Janet.

Although Janet Ashcroft had banned visitors and telephone calls to her husband's hospital room, she had just gotten a call from the White House telling her that Card and Gonzales were on their way to see her husband, Comey testified. "I have some recollection that the call was from the president himself, but I don't know that for sure," Comey said.

He said his security detail then sped him to the hospital with sirens blaring and emergency lights flashing, while he telephoned the director of the FBI, Robert S. Mueller 3d, from the car. Mueller shared his sense of urgency: "He said, 'I'll meet you at the hospital right now,' " Mr. Comey testified.

When he got to the hospital, Comey recalled, "I got out of the car and ran up - literally, ran up the stairs with my security detail."

"What was your concern?" asked Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, who was the chairman of the committee session on Tuesday.

"I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to do that," Comey replied.

Comey recalled arriving at the darkened hospital room, where Ashcroft seemed hardly aware of his surroundings. For a time, only Comey and the Ashcrofts were in the room. Meanwhile, Mueller, who had not yet arrived, told Comey's security detail by phone "not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances," Comey testified.

Minutes later, he said, Gonzales and Card entered the room, with Gonzales carrying an envelope. "And then Gonzales began to discuss why they were there, to seek his approval for a matter," Comey related.

"And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me," Comey went on: He raised his head from the pillow, reiterated his objections to the program, then lay back down, pointing to Comey as the attorney general during his illness.

When Mueller arrived, "he had a brief, a memorable brief exchange with the attorney general, and then we went outside in the hallway," Comey said.

Gonzales and Card departed, but after a while, Card telephoned Comey and "demanded that I come to the White House immediately," Comey said.

"After what I just witnessed, I will not meet with you without a witness, and I intend that witness to be the solicitor general of the United States," Comey said he told Card.

Whereupon, Comey said, he contacted the solicitor general, Theodore Olson, who was at a dinner party, and arranged to go with him to the White House. At first, Card would not let Olson enter his office, Comey said; he then had a considerably calmer private chat with Card for a quarter-hour, after which Olson entered the room and took part in the conversation.

"Mr. Card was concerned that he had heard reports that there were to be a large number of resignations at the Department of Justice," Comey recalled.

Ashcroft had such serious reservations about the program that he considered resigning then, Comey testified. Instead, he stayed on until November 2004.

Mueller, too, considered resigning, Comey said.

"You had conversations with him about it?" Schumer asked.

"Yes," Comey replied. The surveillance program was reauthorized on March 11, 2004, without a signature from the Department of Justice "attesting to its legality," Comey testified.

Comey said Tuesday that he intended to resign the next day, March 12. But on that day, terrorists carried out deadly train bombings in Madrid, and he put his plans on hold and remained on the job until August 2005. ...

Labels: Alberto Gonzales, Bush administration, NSA, warrantless wiretaps