Some more on the NSA domestic spying scandal…

The Bush administration is doing a great job of acting guilty of some wrongdoing. While Congress is calling for investigations into whether the President broke any laws, the administration has launched an investigation into who leaked the story to the NYT. Which would be alright except for the fact that, um, the Bush administration knew about the leak over a year ago and chose to do nothing about it. On a related note, the new Public Editor for the Times is pissed that the Times’ Keller and Sulzberger (managing editor and publisher, respectively) aren’t offering any explanation of why they held the story up for a year or why they chose to publish the story now. More discussion at PressThink.

Of course, none of that gets at the substance of the story, and even that’s not going well for the administration. At the center of the latest revelations lies Deputy Attorney General James Comey. Seems that in 2004, he refused to sign off on the program, causing Gonzales and Card to visit Ashcroft in the hospital to try to get him to sign off on it.

Whether this is significant or not depends greatly on the judgement and credibility of Comey. If his objection to the program reflected a wider concern among the top Justice Dept. staff attorneys, then this is indeed significant. If not, well, I doubt all the folks in the administration or even a particular agency agree on everything all the time. As long as the final decisions reflect the best judgement of the staff, that’s OK. Of course, this administration has overridden consensus reports from the staff in the past. Remember the Texas redistricting case or the FDA process on RU486.

Interestingly enough, Comey was the one that convinced Ashcroft to recuse himself and appoint Fitzgerald to investigate the Plame case. Jane Hamsher runs down the particulars. Like Fitzgerald, Comey seems like a by-the-book kind of guy. Is it surprising that the honest ones seem to be causing the administration so much trouble?

Update: Kevin Drum, being a better writer, sums it up best:

I think it’s safe to say that something is seriously wrong here. After all, we now know that the FISA court was unhappy about the NSA program; Congress was unwilling to pass a law authorizing it; and both John Ashcroft and his chief deputy — in an election year! — eventually came to feel that the program was being abused. That’s the trifecta: senior officials in all three branches of government felt that the program went beyond the president’s authority.

Update 2: Jane Hamsher has more on Comey on her blog.