dirty tricks aimed at the Democrats

According to a report in Sunday's New York Times, in 2004, the White House found itself unable to continue with its warrantless NSA domestic spying campaign because James B. Comey, acting attorney general while John Ashcroft was hospitalized with an inflamed gall bladder, would not approve it.


Seems the White House had set up a system where the president could authorize the spying without notifying the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, but he should get the okay form his own Justice Department. But what the White House wanted the National Security Agency to do apparently worried so Comey--no hero of civil liberties--that he wouldn't sign on.


This led the president and his spymasters to turn to Ashcroft himself--the man who pushed through the USA PATRIOT Act and who tried, with a mad scheme called Operation TIPS, to turn 20 million Americans into volunteer spies on their neighbors. Reportedly White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then White House counsel (and now Attorney General) Alberto Gonzales, went to the hospital where Ashcroft was undergoing a difficult recovery from his operation, and asked him to give the needed approval.


Pretty scary right?


But it gets worse! According to the Times, even Ashcroft was "reluctant" to sign on to what the White House and the NSA were doing.


So just what were they doing?


I think it's safe to say that they were probably not just tapping phones and emails of suspected terrorists. That would surely not have bothered Comey or Ashcroft.


I had earlier assumed that much of the NSA spying that Bush was approving illegally was on anti-war activists.


But think about it: why would that bother Ashcroft? He on several occasions equated anti-war activists with terrorists himself, so surely this kind of spying wouldn't have been hard for him to sign onto.


No, it had to be something so obviously and patently unconstitutional and criminal that Ashcroft had visions of himself following Nixon's AG, John Mitchell, into the slammer when it finally got exposed.


And what might that spying be?


My guess is that it has to do with the 2004 election, and dirty tricks aimed at the Democrats.


So get ready. Either this stinking swamp of deception and criminality is about to be dragged into the sunlight and exposed, or we are heading into a very dark time of tyranny under one-party rule.