The unredacted sections of the Goldsmith Memo do not rely on In re Sealed Case to claim warrantless wiretapping qualifies as a special need, whereas the White Paper does.

As has often been noted, the White Paper the Bush Administration released on January 19, 2006 largely repeats the analysis Jack Goldsmith did in his May 6, 2004 Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion on the warrantless wiretap program. So I decided to compare the two documents.

Not only did such a comparison help me see things in both documents I hadn’t seen before. But there are a number of things that appear in the White Paper but not the unredacted parts of the opinion. Some of this, such as Administration statements after the warrantless wiretap program was exposed in 2005, simply serve as the publicly acceptable discussion of the program.

What’s so horrible in Walker’s rulings that the government might entertain “letting the terrorists win” in exchange for vacating the rulings? It seems there are three possible parts of Walker’s July 2008 ruling the government might want vacated.

The U.S. Department of Justice just announced that Assistant Attorney General David Kris just resigned, effective March 4. No reason for his departure was given, though Kris did mention his two year tenure; that might explain the March departure, two years after he was confirmed.