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March 09, 2007

Special Report Roundtable - March 9

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN CHARLES SCHUMER (D), NEW YORK: It's really a stunning indictment of the Justice Department, of how little faith they have in checks and balances.

SEN PATRICK LEAHY (D), VERMONT: The report indicates abuse of the authority. That needs to change.

SEN ARLEN SPECTER, PENNSYLVANIA: But there had to be checks and the FBI has not followed its own rules.

SEN JOHN SUNUNU (R), NEW HAMPSHIRE: I firmly believe people need to be held accountable.

ROBERT MUELLER, FBI DIRECTOR: None of these involved intentional or deliberate misuse of authorities, and will tell you, my concern is that we did not pick up those mistakes ourselves.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANGLE: Well, there's FBI director Mueller after four members of Congress, evenly divided among Republicans and Democrats. Some members of Congress are in an uproar, some are calling for repeal of parts of the Patriot Act. The FBI director says that even though mistakes were made, they weren't intentional, no one was hurt, and that the practice in question is a critical tool in ferreting out terrorists in our midst.

Now some analytical observations on all that from Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard; Mort Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call; and the syndicated columnist, Charles Krauthammer, FOX NEWS contributors all.

So Charles, is this a paperwork problem for an abuse of civil liberties?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLONIST: Well, look. Let's start by being grownup about this. The 9/11 Commission said that our problem was that we didn't connect dots. This is a program that connects dots. You find a notebook in a cave in Afghanistan, it's got American numbers in it, you identify who it is, and you find who that person called. Not content of those calls.

ANGLE: You're not listening to what they said.

KRAUTHAMMER: You're not listening in. It's just who the contacts are, if there's a cell, you find it. So, it's a necessary, important provision. It's a vast program. You're going to have humans who administer it, and are going to make mistakes. As Mueller has said, as the inspector general has said, there was no intent to evade the law or to abuse it. There were mistakes in understanding the authority, in taking shortcuts and there were transposition of numbers and other innocent mistakes.

So that's going to happen in the program. It may require a tweaking of the oversight and even a tweaking of the law, but if you -- in a post-9/11 world, you're going to have to have a balance between security and civil liberties, and this is a good one.

And let's remember one thing. We have not had a second attack since 9/11 over five years. Nobody expected it and it's because of programs like this that has not recurred.

ANGLE: Mort?

MORT KONDRACKE, ROLL CALL: Well said. I would -- look, this is basically sloppiness on the part of the FBI. I must say the FBI is a pretty sloppy organization. I mean it -- whenever given a chance, it slops something up, including its own computer system. So, there needs to be lots of oversight of the FBI, and there is. This was done by the inspector general of the Justice Department, at the instigation of Congress.

There are a lot of these national security -- I was astounded at how many national security letters there have been issued in the last three years, 150,000. That indicates that something's going on. If it's not a fishing expedition, we have a lot of terrorist leads, you know, to track down.

ANGLE: Well, we should tell people that in the year before 9/11, there were about 8,500 letters. In 2003, 2004, and 2005, there were 140,000 letters.

KONDRACKE: Right, so there needs to be oversight...

ANGLE: National Security Letters, they're called.

KONDRACKE: There was oversight, and the mistakes presumably are going to get corrected. To listen to some critics, you know, you would think that the FBI had turned into the Stasi or something, the East German secret police or that J. Edgar Hoover was back alive again running the COINTEL program, tapping the phone of Martin Luther King and that kind of thing. Black bag jobs in the Nixon administration. I mean, that's ridiculous. Look, whichever senator had said there has to be accountability, there has been accountability.

ANGLE: Fred.

KONDRACKE: I liked the COINTEL program. That was aimed at hardcore anti-leftists in the U.S. who were a threat. Look, here's my problem. How could the FBI be so sloppy with this program that is so sensitive? We just saw these people, I mean, just playing right into the hands of the people Mort was correctly complaining about.

Schumer, Leahy, Specter, Sununu, the ones who have been the critics of the Patriot Act all along. And yet by, you'd think there would be orders that would go out, be very careful with this, because there are a lot of people who would like to eliminate National Security Letters entirely.

ANGLE: Well, there will be -- there will clearly be a move to do that. Even a number of Republicans today were saying they'll likely change the law. I think it's interesting to look at how Mueller explained how they're using the program or how it might have been used before 9/11. Let's listen to what he had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SCHUMER: If you take Almit (ph) or al-Hamsi, two individuals who were in San Diego before September 11. Had we been alerted to them beforehand and identified their telephone numbers, we would want to know who they had contacted. Had we done that, had we been able to, maybe we'd identified the other hijackers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANGLE: That is the kind of thing that they think they can accomplish with this. Now you have Congress in full cry over what has happened here, and I wonder if we are likely to get close to some sort of overreaction based on the kinds of things we've heard members of congress say today, from both parties.

KRAUTHAMMER: Overreaction would be abolition of the program. You've got to have it, it's extremely important. Appropriate reaction is strong oversight, training of these FBI agents in what's allowed and what's not. As of last year, apparently, one of the shortcuts, sort of the so- called letters of exigency with an emergency, a request, they were being sent with a promise of subpoena to follow, and it never did.

So that's been abolished, which is a good thing. So you're going to have tweaks on this and perhaps even a tightening of the law with new oversight, but as long as it stays in place, I think it'll be all right.

KONDRACKE: I think, in closed session, not in open session, Mueller should be invited to tell the intelligence committees what we have learned. You know, just how grave is the threat and if the threat is as grave as is suggested by all these National Security Letters, then maybe they will back off.

ANGLE: He's going to get that opportunity because the House Intelligence Committee has already announced a hearing.

FRED BARNES, WEEKLY STANDARD: You have to remember, Jim, that overreaction is one of the things Congress specializes in. I can't think of anything that Congress does better than overreact.

ANGLE: All right, when we come back, Vice President Cheney, Time magazine echoes Libby prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald's assertion there's a cloud over him. We will ask our all-star meteorologists about that, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PATRICK FITZGERALD, LIBBY PROSECUTOR: There was a cloud there, not caused by us, and by Mr. Libby obstructing justice and lying about what happened, he had failed to remove the cloud.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANGLE: OK, there is Patrick Fitzgerald talking about a cloud over the White House, more specifically, a cloud over the vice president's office. A view echoed in a Time magazine cover story this week which talks about the same thing. There you go, "The Verdict on Cheney." Suggesting, Charles, this verdict wasn't on Scooter Libby, but really on the vice president.

KRAUTHAMMER: Well, I don't know about the meteorology here, but there have been a lot of wind gusts ever since this verdict was brought in. That's one of them. Look, the charge of a prosecutor is not to dispel clouds. His charge is to find crimes. And there wasn't any underlying crime here. The prosecutor himself never even alleged that there was a violation of the Intelligence Identity Protection Act. And once he knew that, this was a case he should never have brought.

And that's not only what I'm saying, it's what David Boyce, the attorney for Al Gore in the recount in 2000 has said that once he determined that you did not have an underlying crime, the rest was a political issue and you don't pursue a political issue in a criminal investigation. That's why I think this is a verdict that deserves a pardon. It was a political issue, it should never have happened and it ought to be rectified right now.

ANGLE: Mort?

KONDRACKE: Well, it probably won't be rectified until Bush is on his way out of office, I would guess. But look, my theory is that Fitzpatrick -- well, one, he definitely knew that the Bob Novak leak did not come from the White House, but he apparently thought there was another channel -- another leak channel against Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame that may have been originated in the White House and that Dick Cheney was involved in it, and that Scooter Libby was covering for Dick Cheney. That's the presumptive theory, and that he wasn't able to investigate that channel because Scooter Libby stood in the way and told him these lies.

ANGLE: This is Fitzgerald's phrase, "throwing sand in the face of the empire," right?

KONDRACKE: Yeah and it's pretty clear that Scooter Libby did commit perjury, I think. The jury didn't believe this bad memory, busy man defense. I mean, indeed, the vice president's office seemed to have gone a little bonkers over Joe Wilson's allegations and they were scurrying around and Scooter Libby was talking to the FBI and the State Department and the CIA and the State Department. I mean he -- and the idea that he learned it from Tim Russert, come on.

ANGLE: But there's a key distinction here between going bonkers over Joe Wilson's assertions about policy and just going out to try to punish him, which is what Joe Wilson argues.

KONDRACKE: I frankly don't think since Valerie Plame was not a covert officer that there was a crime here.

BARNES: Of course there wasn't. I mean look, Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, should not be alleging that there's a cloud over somebody when he doesn't have any evidence for that. He may have -- in his theory may have been what Mort's theory is, but he interviewed many, many other people besides Lewis Libby, including vice president Cheney. He got nowhere. There was not that conspiracy there. It was as simple as that.

Now, I disagree with Mort. They didn't go bonkers, they had legitimate reasons for disagreeing with the -- with Joe Wilson and what he wrote in the New York Times, which turned out to be totally false, and they had -- and they had good reason to want to rebut it and they tried to. But this notion that there's a cloud, a cloud over Cheney, the cloud is over Fitzgerald for this specious prosecution, it's not over Cheney. And Time magazine ought to be ashamed of itself.

ANGLE: Well, Time magazine says from the start this case was only "marginally" about Libby.

KONDRACKE: Well, it was centrally about the court, as you covered it. The court case was all about Libby. You know, they never got to anything else.

KRAUTHAMMER: It was about a leak that was done by Armitage which the prosecutor knew at the beginning. It was an innocent leak. It was not intended to smear Armitage; he was not an enemy of the Wilson's. He knew that at the beginning. That was the end of it. And yet he pursued it and he created a crime. It ought to be wiped out right now with...

(CROSSTALK)

BARNES: There's a difference between an investigation and a prosecution, the investigation was about more than Libby. The prosecution was only about him.

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