he Justice Department is investigating
whether former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales created a set of fictitious notes so that President Bush would have a rationale
for reauthorizing his warrantless eavesdropping program, according to sources close to the investigation.
Related story:
Sources say Alberto Gonzales now claims that President Bush personally directed him to John Ashcroft's hospital
room in the infamous wiretap renewal incident. By Murray Waas
President Bush reauthorized the surveillance
program on March 11, 2004, one day after the hospitalized Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to sign a certification saying
that the program was legal and could therefore continue.
In reauthorizing the surveillance program over the objections
of his own Justice Department, President Bush later claimed to have relied on notes made by Gonzales about a meeting that
had taken place the day before (March 10), in which Gonzales and Vice President Cheney had met with eight congressional leaders—also
known as the “Gang of Eight”—who receive briefings about covert intelligence programs. According to Gonzales’s
notes, the congressional leaders had said in the meeting that they wanted the surveillance program to continue despite the
attorney general’s refusal to certify that it was legal.
But four of the congressional
leaders present at the meeting say that’s not true; they never encouraged the White House to sidestep the objections of the attorney general and continue the program without
his approval.
Investigators are skeptical of the notes because Gonzales did not write them until days after the
meeting with the congressional leaders, and he wrote them after both Bush and Gonzales had together signed a reauthorization
of the surveillance program.
Gonzales, who was White House counsel at the time he met with the congressional leaders,
has told investigators working for the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General that President Bush personally
directed him to write the notes so that he could “memorialize” what the legislators had told him, according to
a report made public by the Inspector General’s Office on September 2 and sources close to the investigation.
It is unclear whether it was before the March 10 meeting that Bush directed Gonzales to write the notes, or after the meeting
occurred. The White House declined to comment for this story. An attorney for Gonzales, George J. Terwilliger III, himself
a former deputy attorney general, declined to comment as well.
The timing of when Bush directed Gonzales to write
the notes is important: investigators say the fact that they were written after both the meeting and the reauthorization of
the program might indicate that they were written in order to provide an after-the-fact justification for the signing of the
reauthorization—and that that timing might have given Gonzales a motive to lie in the notes.
