He was ALREADY suspicious of Bush activity that was being undertaken. Little did he know the extent. Now he does and he knows he was being stroked!!
<All clips from judiciary oversight committee February 2003> .......
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2003_rpt/fisa.html Within weeks of passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings with senior DOJ officials on implementation of the new law and other steps that were being taken by the Administration to combat terrorism. The Committee heard testimony on November 28, 2001, from Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff and, on December 6, 2001, from Attorney General Ashcroft. In response to written questions submitted in connection with the latter hearing, DOJ confirmed that shortly after the USA PATRIOT Act had been signed by the President on October 26, 2001, DOJ began to press the Congress for additional changes to relax FISA requirements, including expansion of the definition of “foreign power” to include individual, non-U.S. persons engaged in international terrorism. DOJ explained that this proposal was to address the threat posed by a single foreign terrorist without an obvious tie to another person, group, or state overseas.
Yet, when asked to “provide this Committee with information about specific cases that support your claim to need such broad new powers,” DOJ was silent in its response and named no specific cases showing such a need, nor did it say that it could provide such specificity even in a classified setting.4 In short, DOJ sought more power but was either unwilling or unable to provide an example as to why.Particularly with respect to our FISA oversight efforts, we are disappointed with the non-responsiveness of the DOJ and FBI. Although the FBI and the DOJ have sometimes cooperated with our oversight efforts, often, legitimate requests went unanswered or the DOJ answers were delayed for so long or were so incomplete that they were of minimal use in the oversight efforts of this Committee.
The difficulty in obtaining responses from DOJ prompted Senator Specter to ask the Attorney General directly, “how do we communicate with you and are you really too busy to respond?” Second, the FBI and DOJ repeatedly refused to provide Members of the Judiciary Committee with a copy of the FISA Court’s May 17, 2002, opinion rejecting the DOJ’s proposed implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act’s FISA amendments.
This refusal was made despite the fact that the opinion, which was highly critical of aspects of the FBI’s past performance on FISA warrants, was not classified and bore directly upon the meaning of provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act authored by Members of the Judiciary Committee. Indeed, the Committee eventually had to obtain the opinion not from the DOJ but directly from the FISA Court, and it was only through these efforts that the public was first made aware of the important appeal being pursued by the DOJ and the legal positions being taken by the Department on the FISA Amendments.
In both of these instances, and in others, the DOJ and FBI have made exercise of our oversight responsibilities difficult. It is our sincere hope that the FBI and DOJ will reconsider their approach to congressional oversight in the future.
The Congress and the American people deserve to know what their government is doing. Certainly, the Department should not expect Congress to be a “rubber stamp” on its requests for new or expanded powers if requests for information about how the Department has handled its existing powers have been either ignored or summarily paid lip service.An undeniable and distinguishing feature of the flawed FISA implementation system that has developed at the DOJ and FBI over the last 23 years is its secrecy. Both at the legal and operational level,
the most generalized aspects of the DOJ’s FISA activities have not only been kept secret from the general public but from the Congress as well. As we stated above, much of this secrecy has been due to a lack of diligence on the part of Congress exercising its oversight responsibility.
Equally disturbing, however, is the difficulty that a properly constituted Senate Committee, including a bipartisan group of senior senators, had in conducting effective oversight of the FISA process when we did attempt to perform our constitutional duties.The Judiciary Committee’s ability to conduct its inquiry was seriously hampered by the initial failure of the DOJ and the Administrative Office of the United States Courts to provide to the Committee an unclassified opinion of the FISA Court relevant to these matters. As noted above, we only received this opinion on August 22, 2002, in the middle of the August recess.
Many things are different now since the tragic events of last September,
but one thing that has not changed is the United States Constitution. Congress must work to guarantee the civil liberties of our people while at the same time meet our obligations to America’s national security. Excessive secrecy and unilateral decision making by a single branch of government is not the proper method of striking that all important balance. We hope that, joining together, the Congress and the Executive Branch can work in a bipartisan manner to best serve the American people on these important issues.
The stakes are too high for any other approach. Patrick Leahy
U.S. Senator
Arlen Specter :applause:
U.S. Senator
Charles E. Grassley
U.S. Senator: