“Congress Was Fully Briefed” … at the Last Minute
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......75 days after the House Intelligence Chair asked for a document that even DOJ claimed to agree was important for all members of Congress to have access to, DOJ finally provided it.
Two days later, on December 16, the House Judiciary Committee reported its bill; at the time the Intelligence and Financial Services Committees got an extension to January 29, 2010, which was just days before the PATRIOT provisions expired. And while those committees ultimately discharged the bill on January 29, it wasn’t that bill that got considered in the House or Senate. Rather, Congress pushed through http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/02/26/us-usa-congress-security-idUSTRE61P0EV20100226 a one year extension of PATRIOT as it existed, thereby avoiding any of the new limits on the dragnet collection passed by the Judiciary Committees.
DOJ played similar games the following year, when Congress tried to pass real extensions. That time around, DOJ provided its document on February 2, a week after Jim Sensenbrenner introduced another emergency bill to http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/2011_CoverLetters_Report_Collection.pdf extend the PATRIOT Act long enough so it could be extended for real later that year.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:SN01038:
We believe that making this document available to all members of Congress, as we did with a similar document in December 2009, is an effective way to inform the legislative debate about reauthorization of Section 215.
DOJ said, as they handed over information about an emergency debate that had already started.
This is what counts as good faith briefing of Congress, providing highly controlled documents to Congress well after important parts of the debate have already taken place.
But don’t worry. All three branches of government have approved the dragnet.
- See more at: http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/02/congress-was-fully-briefed-at-the-last-minute/#more-37116
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