A major reversal is about to take place in the Bush administration. The seemingly sandbagged-from-within investigation into the controversial warrant-less wiretaps program is about to start up again:
The Bush administration has apparently changed policy and cleared the way for the Justice Department to restart an investigation into the government’s no-warrant electronic surveillance program, a department official told Congress on Tuesday.
For months the White House had blocked granting the security clearances necessary for investigators in the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility to determine whether any department attorneys had engaged in unethical behavior.
In a March letter to congressional leaders, an assistant attorney general had stressed that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had recommended the clearances be granted, but the president decided not to do so.
H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the Justice office, told members of Congress on Tuesday that the investigation will be reopened. But in his one-paragraph letter Jarrett sidestepped the issue of who in the Bush administration had reversed course.
“We recently received the necessary security clearances and are now able to proceed with our investigation,” Jarrett said in the letter he wrote to five members of the House, including Rep. Maurice Hinchey, a Democrat from New York.
So what has changed since the spring?
The Attorney General:
“I am happily surprised,” Hinchey told The Associated Press. “It now seems because we have a new attorney general [Michael Mukasey] the situation has changed. Maybe this attorney general understands that his obligation is not to be the private counsel to the president but the chief law enforcement officer for the entire country.”
Jarrett said the investigation will be confined to the “role of Department of Justice attorneys in the authorization and oversight of the warrantless electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency and in complying with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”
The Justice Department is still stressing the limited nature of this probe. And since election year is on the horizon it would not be a shock if no major, earth shattering revelations eventually come of it.
But it does seem to signal a shift from the “I can do what I want, I dare you” attitude of Alberto Gonzales to a style the acknowledges the importance of cooperation. Plus, it shows a smarter perspective on the importance of image. Substance? Don’t be your house in Vegas yet. But in this instance at least the Justice Department has seemingly shifted a gear out of defiance mode.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.