Court orders Bush administration to disclose telecom lobbying ties. What about senators?

Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has won another significant legal battle, as a federal judge in California yesterday ordered the Bush administration (.pdf) to comply with EFF's FOIA demand and disclose documents revealing its "communications with telecommunications carriers and members of Congress" regarding efforts to amend FISA and provide amnesty to telecoms. Better still, the court imposed an extremely quick deadline for release of these documents -- December 10 -- so that "the public may participate in the debate over the pending legislation on an informed basis."

Needless to say, the Bush administration raised every argument it could to avoid having to disclose this information. These disclosures will reveal -- among other things -- which telecom lobbyists and other representatives were meeting with DNI Michael McConnell in order to secure telecom amnesty, as well as which members of Congress McConnell and other Bush officials privately lobbied. As an argument of last resort, the administration even proposed disclosing these documents on December 31 so that -- as EFF pointed out -- the information would be available only after Congress passed the new FISA bill. The court rejected every administration claim as to why it should not have to disclose these records.

It is vital that this information be publicly available. The administration is eager to have Congress bestow onto this industry an extraordinary gift, whereby the entire industry becomes retroactively immunized from the consequences of its past lawbreaking. The administration's primary spokesman on this issue is DNI McConnell, who continously invokes shrill national security warnings to justify this amnesty, though it is rarely mentioned that McConnell has more extensive ties to this industry than almost any other government official.

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