July 30, 2007 (LPAC)--It was Dick Cheney who conducted the secret briefing to the "Gang of Eight" leaders of the House and Senate on the NSA surveillance program on March 10, 2004, urging them to approve continuing the program after the Justice Department had found it to be illegal. This was the meeting which preceded the night-time emergency trip to Attorney General John Ashcroft's intensive-care hospital room by then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card, in an effort to convince Ashcroft to override the decision by his Deputy James Comey to refuse to re-authorize the program.

As we have reported, a number of Senators and others who were in the meeting dispute Gonzales's testimony that they urged that the program be continued. Newsweek's account adds to this picture.

It had previously been reported -- and mostly ignored -- that Cheney conducted more than a dozen such briefings to the Gang of Eight, which consists of the top Congressional party leaders and the leaders of the Intelligence Committees. But this is the first time that it has been confirmed that Cheney conducted the March 10, 2004 briefing. It was, however, implicit in Comey's May 15 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which he said that the only White House officials who disagreed with the DOJ policy in the matter, besides Gonzales and Card, were Cheney and his chief counsel David Addington.

The New York Times of Sunday, July 29, citing unnamed current and former officials who were briefed on the program, reported that the March 2004 dispute over the NSA surveillance program was over the data-mining aspects of the program, as well as other yet-undisclosed aspects of the program. This pertained to the compilation of vast electronic databases by the NSA, involving records of phone calls and e-mails by millions of Americans. The data-mining element of the program has previously been reported (including by EIR on May 25, 2007) but it was not specifically known that this was the subject of the dispute over which top DOJ officials threatened to resign. The NSA's tapping into the telecommunication's companies' databases for Internet usage and e-mails has been reported previously, but has received relatively little attention, even from Congressional committees investigating the NSA program.