California Conservative

Maurice Hinchey, the NY moonbat, won’t be happy with this AP article.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, (D-NY), on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers’ role in the program.
“We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program,” OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey’s office shared the letter with The AP. Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday. “Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation,” wrote Jarrett.

The NSA intercept program is highly classified so this comes as no surprise. It also isn’t surprising that Rep. Hinchey, who is as far out there on the left fringe as they get, is whining about this news:

“This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they’ve created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It’s up to us to stand up to them,” said Hinchey.

Hinchey doesn’t know the particulars of what’s involved with the NSA intercept program. Hinchey either hasn’t looked into case law on warrantless wiretaps or is ignoring it to suit his political purposes. Because of those reasons, there’s no way Hinchey can definitively say that the Bush Administration is breaking the law.

This is just proof that Democrats think anything they don’t agree with is breaking a law. It isn’t. This is central to their claims about the “culture of corruption” campaign. While there has been some laws broken, most of their accusations of corruption are empty.

Separately, the Justice Department sought last month to dismiss a federal lawsuit accusing the telephone company AT&T of colluding with the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. The lawsuit, brought by an Internet privacy group, does not name the government as a defendant, but the Department of Justice has sought to quash the lawsuit, saying it threatens to expose government and military secrets.

Anytime a Democrat says that they care about national security, remind them that they’re the ones who think that the nation’s largest spy agency protecting us from terrorists is illegal and can only be justified if we tie it in bureaucratic red tape. And that they’re the ones who crowed that they’d “killed the Patriot Act.” And that they’re the ones who said we “can’t win in Iraq.” And that our soldiers are living hand to mouth. And that fighting in Iraq took our eyes off the real terrorists. (Nevermind this story that says the terrorists think they’re losing ground each year.)

Technorati Tags: Maurice Hinchey, NSA, Bush

Cross-post at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Homeland Security, Terrorism, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.