...and its coverage, including Glenn's post.

http://tinyurl.com/24xkw2

Don't miss the cartoons at the end.

This is twisting of testimony, speculation run amuck, and a vendetta revisited. I've only just been through the transcript and the post so let me posit these points quickly....

* Comey said there was NO statute requiring the DOJ sign off.

* Ashcroft had done so anyway 29 times previously.

* Could it be that the difference here was Ashcroft's illness and a new Deputy AG changing the context?

* That is certainly enough to make Gonzales and Card believe that Comey was the thug taking advantage of a sick man, not the other way around.

* Doesn't anyone consider Glenn's simultaneous declarations that he doesn't know what the program does, yet is illegal anyway, seem presumptuous at best? How does one know a crime is committed yet admit ignorance of the circumstances?

* As Glenn states Bush tells Comey to fix whatever needs fixing to get his signature, that hardly seems the actions of a wanton criminal as so many here want to describe Bush. Nor was Comey pressured, by his own admission.

* Here's the transcript, read the whole thing before making any stupid accusations based on conveniently edited versions....

http://gulcfac.typepad.com/georgetown_university_law/files/comey.transcript.pdf

The Washington Post editorial board writes: "James B. Comey, the straight-as-an-arrow former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, yesterday offered the Senate Judiciary Committee an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source.

This is of course the clarion call for the character-assasin squad. Watch for Hindraker and Malkin to search high and low for evidence of Comey's leftist proclivities. (if it hasn't begun already.)

The troll period of silence on this issue is now over. They've received their talking points and marching orders, the daily ration of kool-aid has been consumed, and now it's time to spew some drivel, ladies and gentlemen. Let the troll games begin!

stevkar...What changed? Domestic spying program had been going for about two years already. It seems like Ashcroft and Cromey had not objected for the first two years of the program. Had they been signing of on approvals previously? Certainly had not been threatening to resign over it previously. So what changed?

Glenn's Update II re: JaO's comment:

Note that nowhere in Comey's story are NSA officials mentioned. But FBI Director Robert Mueller was a central player in the drama -- he even met personally with President Bush -- and also was one who threatened resignation. This indicates that, whatever was going on before the program was modified, those activities were being conducted by the FBI, not just the NSA. That could mean purely domestic unwarranted wiretaps, unwarranted black-bag jobs, or similar misconduct.

And Update III:

UPDATE III: As Peter Swire over at Think Progress notes, Gonzales testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee last year that "there has not been any serious disagreement about the program" and "to my knowledge, none of the reservations dealt with the program that we are talking about today."

They were talking about eavesdropping, which the NSA would do, not warrantless "Sneak and Peaks" allowed under the Patriot Act, which the FBI would do...

And I guess the House amended that to prohibit those in July of 2003.

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2003_cr/h072203.html

I wonder if there is a connection...The DoJ and FBI could have been concerned that such an activity was now prohibited yet they may still have been pressured to engage in that type of surveillance.

One amazing result of these revelations is that strange-ranger John Ashcroft looks sort of like a hero. Mirabile dictu!

Comey and Mueller were clearly both operating on the premise that Card and Gonzales were basically thugs.

And part of that premise is that these thugs were doing exactly what the thug-in-chief wanted them to. It’s quite clear that President Bush was personally engaged in willful lawbreaking that was too much even for Ashcroft, Comey and other senior members of his administration. It’s also quite clear that Bush wanted to continue with the program that members of his administration were ready to resign over. My point is that there is no way Bush can blame this scandal on subordinates or say he was out of the loop in some way, there’s too much evidence to the contrary.

Perhaps this is why so many in the media and Congress don’t want to pursue the most important aspects of this story or have the investigation that needs to be done – because the President’s fingerprints are all over this crime scene.

None of them want to come out and say the ugly truth: that The President of United States is a lawless thug. And, sadly, after listening to clips from the last Republican presidential debate, that’s precisely the quality that a lot of Republicans seem to be looking for in a President.

As I see the unfolding of an extremely complicated network of illegal spying programs, the whole thing begins to look a lot like the network of offshore entities Enron used to hide its losses. Maybe Kenny-boy shared more than energy policy in those secret meetings with Cheney.

In the early part of 2004, the Department of Justice was engaged -- the Office of Legal Counsel, under my supervision -- in a reevaluation both factually and legally of a particular classified program.

Doesn't the inclusion of "factually" in this statement imply that Comey had come to the realization that he was being misled as to the nature of the program?

I haven't heard of any other governmental entity that has data gathering capabilities that come close to what the feds have. Over time they might be able to "outsource" electronic spying in a way analogous to extraordinary renditions... but not all of it overnight.

I agree.

But these technologies are built by contractors, and they are pieces of equipment. The Supreme Court would not let the Bush people claim that Guantanamo Bay, a U.S. land lease from Cuba with an American military base on it, was not U.S. soil, and so U.S. law has jurisdiction over it.

But if a British contractor, together with some data integrators like some of our international defense contractors or search companies, set up software to surveil Americans on the internet from servers in another country owned by that country's government, that just happens to generate the same link analyses, word frequency surges, and contact frequency changes that the feds wanted to see, and results just happened to go from Singapore intelligence to U.S. intelligence, do you think the Supreme Court will say that it has jurisdiction over Singapore and Cognitive Edge? The intelligence community doesn't need to prove that information given to them by a foreign entity was obtained "legally", whatever that means in the country they got it in.