Cheney Not Helping Gonzales

Via Think Progress, here's what the Vice President said to Larry King tonight:

Q In that regard, The New York Times — which, as you said, is not your favorite — reports it was you who dispatched Gonzales and Andy Card to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital in 2004 to push Ashcroft to certify the President’s intelligence-gathering program. Was it you?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don’t recall — first of all, I haven’t seen the story. And I don’t recall that I gave instructions to that effect.

Q That would be something you would recall.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I would think so. But certainly I was involved because I was a big advocate of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and had been responsible and working with General Hayden and George Tenet to get it to the President for approval. By the time this occurred, it had already been approved about 12 times by the Department of Justice. There was nothing new about it.

Q So you didn’t send them to get permission.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don’t recall that I was the one who sent them to the hospital.

So, according to Cheney, the hospital visit was about the "terrorist surveillance program," a program that had been approved many times prior to this 2004 encounter. Let's add that data point to the increasingly compelling case that Alberto Gonzales lied to Congress.

Also, for the record, let's duly note how spectacularly implausible it is that Dick Cheney doesn't "recall" whether he instructed Gonzales and Card to visit Ashcroft in the hospital. By all accounts, Cheney was singularly obsessed with this program, and Comey was refusing to sign off on it. And, needless to say, showdowns between high-ranking executive officials in hospital rooms are a relatively rare occurrence.

By way of comparison, here's how James Comey described this episode:

This was a very memorable period in my life; probably the most difficult time in my entire professional life. And that night was probably the most difficult night of my professional life. So it's not something I'd forget.

For all I know, Cheney routinely instructs people who don't work for him to try to get heavily- medicated officials to sign important legal documents from their hospital beds one day after having an organ removed. I doubt it, though. As Marty puts it:

What's interesting is that Cheney pretended to wrack his brain to recall whether he gave the fateful "instructions." As if that might actually have happened -- as if there would be nothing out of the ordinary if the Vice President had "instructed" the President's two closest advisers to try to squeeze a cabinet official.

Cheney really is a piece of work. Historians are going to have a field day with this presidency.

Meanwhile, on a somewhat tangential note, I found this Times article to be incredibly depressing. The headline: Democrats Scrambling to Expand Eavesdropping. The article claims that:

Under pressure from President Bush, Democratic leaders in Congress are scrambling to pass legislation this week to expand the government’s electronic wiretapping powers. . . .

Democrats appear to be worried that if they block such legislation, the White House will depict them as being weak on terrorism.

Oy. Just shoot me. I guess cowardly instincts are hard-wired in most Democrats. They're so used to being the minority party, so afraid of being labeled as weak. It's all they know. I know of no other way to explain why Democrats would be "scrambling" to amend a law that a president with a 28% approval rating has been violating for the last six years and claims he has the power to violate at will.

And this paragraph is straight out of political bizarro world:

Until recently, Democrats in Congress were reluctant to agree to changing the law, which was proposed by the White House in April. Democratic leaders said they did not want to amend it until the administration provided more information about how the security agency had secretly skirted the law earlier.

But the White House refused Congressional demands to turn over the secret legal opinions that had been used to justify the program of wiretapping without warrants, prompting the Senate Judiciary Committee to issue subpoenas to the administration in June.

Democrats now say they are willing to work with the White House on a narrow FISA bill.

Huh? So let me get this straight. The Democrats were reluctant to amend a law that the administration had been blatantly violating. They requested more information about how the administration was secretly violating the law and what their supposed justification was for doing so. The administration responded to these completely reasonable requests by stonewalling and refusing to turn over anything. The Democrats are now scrambling to amend the law.

How does that make any sense? What's the matter with these people?

Am I completely crazy to think that a necessary precondition to considering any amendment to FISA is a public assurance by the administration that it is not currently and will not in the future violate FISA?