I'm in Nashville for a couple of days of intensive meetings, so I don't have the energy to blog about this important development in the Gonzales scandal: thanks to James Comey's testimony before Congress, it seems that top officials in the White House, including then-counsel Gonzales were so anxious to keep on with a secret, illegal wiretapping program (whose details remain unknown) that the entire Justice Dept. opposed they tried to get Ashcroft to sign off on it while he was in intensive care. To his credit, Ashcroft, like Comey, refused.
The Comey video is at Talking Points Memo and some good discussions are in my brother's column, and at Hullabaloo, Glenn Greenwald and FireDogLake.
It is now is impossible to dismiss the suspicion is that for more than two years — before the Justice Dept got around to complaining about it — there were illegal domestic wiretaps aimed at the Bush regime's domestic opponents.
Previous post about James Comey: An Honest Man.
Don’t leave out Marty Lederman, who is writing most insightfully (and incisively) at Balkinization about the implications of the Comey testimony.