Josh Gerstein, at Politico, talks of an implausible claim from the Department of Justice. He needed to come up with some words adequate to convey this particular story.
The Justice Department is persisting in the implausible claim that there is no reliable proof that Verizon Wireless was part of the National Security Agency's program to sweep up data on U.S. telephone calls, notwithstanding a government document officially released last month that appears to confirm the cellphone carrier's involvement.
Feds: Still no proof Verizon Wireless in NSA surveillance program, Politico
emptywheel talks, among other words, of delusion.
So now DOJ has gone a bit batshit.
Delusional DOJ Claims Documents Declassified, Released Under FOIA Not Declassified, Not Authentic, emptywheel
Anna Smith, a nurse in Idaho, is suing the government for collecting her phone records under the Section 215 program. She is a Verizon Wireless customer. The first document in the Edward Snowden leaks showed that all Verizon
Business customers were having their phone records collected under Section 215. The government has argued that Anna Smith cannot prove that Verizon Wireless records were collected.
Last month, Charlie Savage of the New York Times received a document, under the Freedom of Information Act, that referred to a production order of Verizon Wireless records.
Anna Smith had her proof. Larry Klayman, of Judicial Watch, another Verizon Wireless customer, would have standing to sue as well.
The Department of Justice is now arguing that a letter from the Department of Justice, released under the Freedom of Information Act, does not count as an unquestionable source.
An adjudicative fact is one that "can be accurately and readily determined from sources whose accuracy cannot reasonably be questioned,”
Response to Plaintiff's Request for Judicial Notice, Department of Justice
The government has not confirmed the authenticity of the letter from the Department of Justice that was released under the Freedom of Information Act, the Department of Justice says to a judge.
But plaintiff does not contend that this document was declassified, and in fact the government has not confirmed the authenticity of the document plaintiff has produced or of any facts plaintiff purports to infer from it.
Response to Plaintiff's Request for Judicial Notice, Department of Justice
It has been 14 years since 9/11. Can we, meaning our government, start giving up on the batshit insane secrecy stuff used to protect the spying, assassination, and torture programs please? It has been long enough.
A former Secretary of State, and a potential candidate for leader of the country, and the wife of a previous one, has been referred to counterintelligence, for as best as anyone can figure out, having received emails about a newspaper article about the government's assassination program, which emails contained information that was secret, the determination of the secrecy coming later, but the secrecy itself always having been there. And the people who might select the candidate as their leader cannot figure it all out, because so much of it is secret. Franz Kafka never came up with a nightmare like that.
I mean, there is a government assassination program. Everyone knows this.
The legal adviser to the Secretary of State who is being investigated by counterintelligence for having gotten the letter about the newspaper article about the assassinations, and who is a human rights advocate, as is the Secretary of State, has probably said as much as anyone about how the secret program works. And this is all very twisted in a way beyond what Kafka could invent.
But this stuff, 14 years after 9/11.
Where the government has released a document that will be useful in the trial, and then just outright claimed that it didn't, and this to a judge. There is a frightening government power there, combined with an absurdity in how government works, combined with the fact that the absurdity is to protect mass surveillance of the citizenry, torture, and assassination. Where all this batshit insane stuff is happening under the relatively saner of the country's two political factions.
Well, OK, at a literal level, it would actually be worse if tomorrow we should wake up being a bug.
But this story, that the government says that its own document cannot be relied on, with the reason the government is saying so, is Kafkaesque to a degree beyond Franz Kafka's worst nightmare.