White House blasts Gore’s ‘hypocrisy’

updated 7:53 p.m. ET Jan. 17, 2006

WASHINGTON - The White House accused former Vice President Al Gore of hypocrisy Tuesday for his assertion that President Bush broke the law by eavesdropping on Americans without court approval.

“If Al Gore is going to be the voice of the Democrats on national security matters, we welcome it,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said in a swipe at the Democrat, who lost the 2000 election to Bush only after the Supreme Court intervened.

Gore, in a speech Monday, called for an independent investigation of the administration program that he says broke the law by listening in — without warrants — on Americans suspected of talking with terrorists abroad.

Gore called the program, authorized by President Bush, “a threat to the very structure of our government” and charged that the administration acted without congressional authority and made a “direct assault” on a federal court set up to authorize requests to eavesdrop on Americans.

McClellan also said Sen. Hillary Clinton was “out of bounds” when she said Monday that the Bush administration was “one of the worst” in U.S. history and compared the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to a “plantation” where dissenting voices are squelched.

Asked about the criticism coming from the two high-profile Democrats on the same day, McClellan said, “Well, I think we know, one tends to like or enjoy grabbing headlines; the other one — sounds like the political season may be starting early.”

Clinton is running for re-election to the Senate this year and is a potential candidate for the 2008 presidential race.

Two new legal challenges
Meanwhile, two civil liberties groups — the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights — filed federal lawsuits Tuesday seeking to block the eavesdropping program, which they called unconstitutional electronic surveillance of American citizens.

McClellan said the Clinton-Gore administration had engaged in warrantless physical searches, and he cited an FBI search of the home of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames without permission from a judge. He said Clinton’s deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, had testified before Congress that the president had the inherent authority to engage in physical searches without warrants.

“I think his hypocrisy knows no bounds,” McClellan said of Gore.

But at the time of the Ames search in 1993 and when Gorelick testified a year later, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required warrants for electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes, but did not cover physical searches. The law was changed to cover physical searches in 1995 under legislation that Clinton supported and signed.

Attorney general weighs in
Gore said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should name a special counsel to investigate the program, saying Gonzales had an “obvious conflict of interest” as a member of the Bush Cabinet as well as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

Gonzales, who has agreed to testify publicly at a Senate hearing on the program, defended the surveillance on cable news talk shows Monday night.

“This program has been reviewed carefully by lawyers at the Department of Justice and other agencies,” Gonzales said on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes.” “We firmly believe that this program is perfectly lawful. The president has the legal authority to authorize these kinds of programs.”

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