Washington – A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush’s secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.
U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts late Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation.
Two associates familiar with his decision said Tuesday that Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s work.
Robertson, who was appointed to the federal bench in Washington by President Clinton in 1994 and was later selected by then-Chief Justice William Rehn quist to serve on the so-called FISA court, declined to comment when reached at his office late Tuesday.
Word of Robertson’s resignation came as two Senate Republicans Tuesday joined the call for congressional investigations into the National Security Agency’s warrantless interception of telephone calls and e-mails to overseas locations by U.S. citizens suspected of links to terrorists.
They questioned the legality of the operation and the extent to which the White House kept Congress informed.
Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine echoed concerns raised by Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has promised hearings in the new year.
“There’s going to be a great national debate on this subject,” Specter told reporters Tuesday, while emphasizing concerns over the White House’s legal arguments in support of the program.
The hearings, possibly in several committees, would take place at the beginning of a midterm election year during which the prosecution of the Iraq war is also likely to figure prominently in key House and Senate races.
Hagel and Snowe joined three Democratic colleagues – Dianne Feinstein of California, Carl Levin of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon – in calling for a joint investigation by the Senate’s Judiciary and Intelligence panels into the classified program.
Not all Republicans agreed with the need for hearings, and some backed White House assertions that the program is a vital tool in the war against al-Qaeda.
“I am personally comfortable with everything I know about it, and I’ll be watching it as this debate goes on over the next few weeks,” said acting House Majority Leader Roy Blunt, R-Mo.
The White House continued to insist Tuesday that the classified surveillance program is legal and that key congressional leaders have been informed of the NSA activities since they began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Tuesday, Vice President Dick Cheney said the decision to bypass court review and authorize domestic wiretapping by executive order was part of a concerted effort to rebuild presidential powers weakened in the 1970s.
Cheney said threats facing the country require that the president’s authority under the Constitution be “unimpaired.”
“Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both during the 1970s, served, I think, to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area,” Cheney told reporters traveling with him aboard Air Force Two.
“Especially in the day and age we live in … the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy.”
White House spokesman Scott McClellan suggested that the secrecy around the program may prohibit White House cooperation with any investigation.
“This is still a highly classified program, and there are details that it’s important not be disclosed,” McClellan said.
Since the program was made public last week by the New York Times, the White House has sparred publicly with key Democrats over whether Congress was fully informed and allowed to conduct oversight of the operation.
The news also spurred considerable debate among federal judges, including some who serve on the secret FISA court.
Robertson indicated privately to colleagues in recent conversations that he was concerned that information gained from warrantless NSA surveillance could have then been used to obtain FISA warrants.
Robertson is considered a liberal judge who has often ruled against the Bush administration’s assertions of broad powers in the terrorism fight, most notably in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld. Robertson held in that case that the Pentagon’s military commissions for prosecuting terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were illegal and stacked against the detainees.
