Time's Barton Gellman takes on one particular falsehood in
Dick Cheney's new book, this one surrounding the bedside reauthorization of the administration's warrantless surveillance program against American citizens:
Cheney’s version of this story adds a stunning twist: Ashcroft told Bush on the phone, before Gonzales and Card arrived, “that he would sign the documents” to certify the surveillance as lawful. But the two men found Comey there when they arrived, Cheney writes, and “it became immediately clear that Ashcroft had changed his mind.” Only then, Cheney suggests, did the White House aides learn that Ashcroft “had delegated all the responsibilities of his office to the Deputy Attorney General.”
The former vice president’s account is meant to rebut the consensus view at Justice and the FBI that Bush tried to circumvent Comey’s lawful authority and take advantage of a sick man. But it is very difficult to see how Cheney’s claims on either point could be true.
Comey and four other officials with contemporary knowledge told me in interviews that Janet Ashcroft, the attorney general’s wife, refused two attempts that evening by the White House operator to patch a call to her husband. Doctors said he was far too sick to speak. According to contemporary notes from Ashcroft’s FBI security detail, quoted in an inspectors general report of 2009, she refused to put her husband on the phone even when Bush joined Card on the line. “Mrs. Ashcroft took the call from Card and the President and was informed that Gonzales and Card were coming to the hospital to see Ashcroft regarding a matter involving national security.” Bush implied in his memoir that he did reach Ashcroft, but said he told him only that “I was sending Andy and Al to talk to him about an urgent matter.”
Even if Ashcroft picked up the phone, there are many reasons to doubt Cheney’s version of the call. It would mean that Bush discussed a codeword-classified intelligence program on an open phone line; that Ashcroft took exactly the opposite position that he took before and after the call; and that the attorney general was even coherent. Those around Ashcroft that evening say he was heavily doped on morphine, slipping in and out of awareness.
The consensus opinion seems to be that this book is meant as personal redemption or personal I-told-you so by Cheney, explaining away the various controversies surrounding him while telling readers all the ways the Bush administration would have been more successful, if Bush had listened more often to him instead of those meddling lawyers/advisors/whatever. Towards that end, it appears that Cheney takes as many liberties with facts in his book as he did when he was in the White House.
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