Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 5, 2007 11:12:16 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: At His Ministry of Lies, Gonzales Hunting Down Truth-tellers
Looking For a Leaker
The subject of the raid was a federal prosecutor who was in the
DoJ's watchdog unit when Justice officials objected so strongly to
domestic surveillance that Atty Genl Ashcroft and FBI Director
Mueller threatened to resign. The subject had expressed doubts
about the program's legality.
Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20121795/site/newsweek/
Aug. 13, 2007 issue - The controversy over President Bush's
warrantless surveillance program took another surprise turn last
week when a team of FBI agents, armed with a classified search
warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice
Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in
Justice's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR) — the
supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and
espionage targets. The agents seized Tamm's desktop computer, two
of his children's laptops and a cache of personal files. Tamm and
his lawyer, Paul Kemp, declined any comment. So did the FBI.
But two legal sources who asked not to be identified talking about
an ongoing case told NEWSWEEK the raid was related to a Justice
criminal probe into who leaked details of the warrantless
eavesdropping program to the news media. The raid appears to be the
first significant development in the probe since The New York Times
reported in December 2005 that Bush had authorized the National
Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-
mails of U.S. residents without court warrants. (At the time,
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said of the leak: "This is really
hurting national security; this has really hurt our country.")
A veteran federal prosecutor who left DOJ last year, Tamm worked at
OIPR during a critical period in 2004 when senior Justice officials
first strongly objected to the surveillance program. Those protests
led to a crisis that March when, according to recent Senate
testimony, then A.G. John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and
others threatened to resign, prompting Bush to scale the program
back. Tamm, said one of the legal sources, had shared concerns
about he program's legality, but it was unclear whether he actively
participated in the internal DOJ protest.
The FBI raid on Tamm's home comes when Gonzales himself is facing
criticism for allegedly misleading Congress by denying there had
been "serious disagreement" within Justice about the surveillance
program. The A.G. last week apologized for "creating confusion,"
but Senate Judiciary Committee chair Sen. Patrick Leahy said he is
weighing asking Justice's inspector general to review Gonzales's
testimony.
The raid also came while the White House and Congress were battling
over expanding NSA wiretapping authority in order to plug purported
"surveillance gaps." James X. Dempsey of the Center for Democracy
and Technology said the raid was "amazing" and shows the
administration's misplaced priorities: using FBI agents to track
down leakers instead of processing intel warrants to close the
gaps. A Justice spokesman declined to comment.
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