Official: Cheney urged wiretaps

Vice President Dick Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators on June 6. The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey. Comey's disclosures indicate that Cheney and his aides were more closely involved than previously known in a fierce internal battle over the legality of the warrantless surveillance program. The program allowed the National Security Agency to monitor phone calls and emails between the United States and overseas. Comey said that Cheney's office later blocked the promotion of a senior Justice Department lawyer, Patrick Philbin, because of his role in raising concerns about the surveillance. The new details follow Comey's gripping testimony last month about the visit by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., then President Bush's chief of staff, to Ashcroft's hospital bed on the night of Mar. 10, 2004. The two Bush aides tried to persuade Ashcroft to renew the authorization of the NSA surveillance program, after Comey and other Justice Department officials had said they would not certify the legality of the effort. Democrats said that the new details from Comey raise further questions about the role of Cheney and other White House officials in the episode.