WASHINGTON — President Bush personally sidetracked an internal Justice Department probe into the warrantless domestic surveillance program earlier this year, even as other Justice officials were assigned to defend the program in court and investigate who may have leaked information about it to the news media, according to administration officials and documents released Tuesday.
Raising new questions about the administration's accountability for secret anti-terrorism programs, the White House acknowledged Tuesday that Bush withheld security clearances that attorneys within the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility said they needed to investigate whether department lawyers had acted properly in approving and overseeing the controversial spy program run by the National Security Agency.
The Office of Professional Responsibility, which is the Justice Department's internal ethics unit, had been asked by congressional Democrats in January to review the role that department officials played in the creation and operation of the program that intercepted millions of overseas telephone calls and e-mails originating in the U.S. The program was designed to gather intelligence on possible terrorists.
The Justice Department unit was forced to abandon the probe in April because of its inability to obtain the necessary clearances, although until Tuesday it was unclear who made the decision to withhold them. Officials said they could not recall a case where an investigation by the professional-responsibility unit had been blocked since the unit was created after the abuses of the Watergate era.
Bush's involvement -- revealed by Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales in testimony Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee and later elaborated upon by White House Press Secretary Tony Snow -- added fuel to the debate over one of the administration's most intensely debated anti-terrorism moves.
The government has used the program, launched shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, to monitor international communications by people on U.S. soil in cases where NSA analysts suspect terrorists may be involved. Such surveillance normally requires judicial warrants, but the administration has argued that warrants are unnecessary in part because of the inherent constitutional power of the president to conduct war.
