Slate has another fascinating excerpt of Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration. Goldsmith describes meeting with two FBI agents in a cafe on Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. They were there to serve him with a subpoena as part of the investigation into the leaking of the secret NSA warrantless-wiretapping program to James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times.
“We wanted to serve you in person as a favor because we expected you’d be mad,” Doe said. “We believe you told us the truth,” he added, assuring me that he did not suspect me as the source of the leak. He said he was not sure why the lawyers at the Justice Department had decided to subpoena me, but he suspected it was because of my contact with Lichtblau.
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What angered me most about the subpoena I received on that wet day in Cambridge was not the expense of lawyers or a possible perjury trap, but rather the fact that it was Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department that had issued it. As Doe and Smith knew, I had spent hundreds of very difficult hours at OLC, in the face of extraordinary White House resistance, trying to clean up the legal mess that then-White House Counsel Gonzales, David Addington, John Yoo, and others had created in designing the foundations of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. It seemed rich beyond my comprehension for a Gonzales-led Department of Justice to be pursuing me for possibly illegal actions in connection with the Terrorist Surveillance Program, I told the two wide-eyed FBI agents in Harvard Square.
Gotta get this book.
