Mueller's Notes Confirm Ashcroft Pressured On Spy Program

Posted on August 16, 2007

FBI Director Robert Mueller is a very organized man -- which is not good news for Alberto Gonzales. Mueller's notes clearly confirm that then Attorney General Ashcroft was very weak and ill in the hospital when he was pressured by Andy Card and then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to approve a dubious surveillance program.

The White House demanded in 2004 that the Justice Department approve a secret national security program without allowing the ailing attorney general, "feeble, barely articulate, clearly stressed," to discuss the matter with top advisers, according to the FBI director's personal notes. The partially censored notes from FBI chief Robert S. Mueller, dated March 12, 2004, describe a distraught and feeble Attorney General John Ashcroft in his hospital room just moments after being visited by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card, the president's chief of staff at the time.
Mueller's account backs up earlier descriptions of the dispute over whether to continue the program despite Justice Department concerns about its legality. Last month, Mueller told a House committee that the clash was about the government's warrantless wiretapping; Gonzales and the White House denied that and said it was about other intelligence activities. "Saw AG," Mueller wrote in his timed log of the events on the evening of March 10, 2004. "Janet Ashcroft in the room. AG is feeble, barely articulate, clearly stressed." Ashcroft was in the hospital with pancreatitis.
Before seeing Ashcroft, Mueller met with then-Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey at the hospital about 7:40 p.m., the notes indicate. Comey said Ashcroft told Card and Gonzales that he would not approve the classified terrorist surveillance program, which was set to expire the next day. "The AG then reviewed for them the legal concerns relating to the program," Mueller's notes show. "The AG also told them that he was barred from obtaining the advice he needed on the program by the strict compartmentalization rules of the WH."
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The notes were released by the House Judiciary Committee, which had asked Mueller to hand them over when he testified in late July. The committee chairman, Rep. John Conyers, said the notes prove the White House tried to strong-arm the ailing Ashcroft. "Particularly disconcerting is the new revelation that the White House sought Mr. Ashcroft's authorization for the surveillance program, yet refused to let him seek the advice he needed on the program," Conyers, D-Mich., said in a statement.

Mueller's notes flatly contradict the testimony that Gonzales gave to congress. The White House sent Card and Gonzales to an ill man's hospital bed in an attempt to pressure him into changing his mind about approving a program he considered illegal. The administration's behavior in this instance was appalling.