Via ex-Justice Department lawyer Marty Lederman, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse released a statement yesterday to reconcile the obvious inconsistencies between Alberto Gonzales's testimony and former Deputy Attorney General James Comey's on warrantless surveillance. Roehrkasse blames Gonzales's woes on the difficulty of publicly discussing classified programs. In other words, no one should expect Gonzales to be candid, but we should nevertheless trust him that Comey wasn't dissenting from the surveillance program that everyone understands as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program."
We humbly recommend that you read our post from last night laying out the probable source of all this "confusion," as Roehrkasse puts it (Democrats would call it dishonesty). In any case, watch Roehrkasse walk the line:
Confusion is inevitable when complicated classified activities are discussed in a public forum, where the greatest care must be used not to compromise sensitive intelligence operations. The Administration first used the term “Terrorist Surveillance Program” in early 2006 to refer publicly to a particular intelligence activity that the President publicly acknowledged and described in December 2005 -- that is, the NSA’s targeting for interception international communications coming into or going out of the United States where the NSA has reasonable grounds to believe that a party to the communication is an agent or member of al Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist organization. That is the only intelligence activity that the Attorney General meant when he used the phrase “Terrorist Surveillance Program.”
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