Jonathan Alter, writing in Newsweek, says his sources tell him President George W. Bush tried to get the New York Times from running the story about the NSA wiretaps on American citizens.

Alter makes it clear where he stands in his piece’s lead:

Finally we have a Washington scandal that goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power. President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

Perhaps in his next column he’ll tell us how he REALLY feels. But here is the “nut graph” with the real news in this piece:

No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president’s desperation…..

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.� But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force� in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.

This will all be debated, of course. It IS an opinion column — and at this point we don’t have CONFIRMATION that Bush was desperate to get the story held because “he knew” it would reveal him as a law-breaker. That’s one interpretation — one the White House will reject. But Alter’s theory sounds logical unless there is some truly massive or unusual program that we don’t know about. And even then the legality is questionable.

So the big, definitive issue is: What IS THE LAW? Orin Kerr takes a long, scholarly stab at it (his post is not to be read by Democratic and Republican partisans expecting demonization of anyone). Here’s a small taste:

Was the secret NSA surveillance program legal? Was it constitutional? Did it violate federal statutory law? It turns out these are hard questions, but I wanted to try my best to answer them. My answer is pretty tentative, but here it goes: Although it hinges somewhat on technical details we don’t know, it seems that the program was probably constitutional but probably violated the federal law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. My answer is extra-cautious for two reasons. First, there is some wiggle room in FISA, depending on technical details we don’t know of how the surveillance was done. Second, there is at least a colorable argument — if, I think in the end, an unpersuasive one — that the surveillance was authorized by the Authorization to Use Miltary Force as construed in the Hamdi opinion.

Read it in its entirety.