WASHINGTON – Attorney General Alberto Gonzales expanded Congress’ access Wednesday to classified documents detailing the government’s domestic spying program but still didn’t satisfy several lawmakers demanding information about surveillance.
Investigators’ applications, legal briefs and orders issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are now open to the two leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales said.
Two weeks ago, the panel – led by Democratic Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania – criticized the attorney general for refusing to answer specific questions about the secret court’s new oversight of the controversial program.
“We obviously would be concerned about the public disclosure that may jeopardize the national security of our country,” Gonzales said Wednesday. “But we’re working with the Congress to provide the information that it needs.”
The documents would not be released publicly, the attorney general said. “We’re talking about highly classified documents about highly classified activities of the United States government.”
Leahy and Specter both said they welcomed the Bush administration’s decision to show them the documents, which could give insight on how judges on the secret court consider evidence when approving government requests to spy on people in the United States who have suspected links to al-Qaida.
The warrantless program, run by the National Security Agency, monitors phone calls and e-mails between the United States and other countries that are suspected to be linked to agents of al-Qaida or affiliated terror groups. A federal judge in Detroit last August declared the program unconstitutional, and government lawyers were back in court Wednesday asking a Cincinnati-based appeals panel to drop a civil lawsuit against it.
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