WAR  (CONT)

Contacted by Comey, Mueller "instructed the FBI agents present not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances".

Comey sat in an armchair to the left of Ashcroft's bed. His officers, Jack Goldsmith and Patrick Philbin, stood behind him. Janet Ashcroft held her husband's arm. "And," Comey said, "we waited."

Minutes later, Gonzales, carrying an envelope, and Card arrived. Ignoring the phalanx, Seedy told Ashcroft he was there "to seek his approval" for the renewal.

Comey said: "Attorney-General Ashcroft then stunned me. He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact … and then laid his head back down on the pillow, seemed spent, and said to them, 'But that doesn't matter, because I'm not the attorney-general … There is the attorney-general', and he pointed to me."

Gonzales and Card turned and left, but Card soon after called Comey and "demanded that I come to the White House immediately". Comey said he "would not meet with him without a witness present".

Bush alone renewed the order on March 11, but the following day Comey and then Mueller told him that they and other Justice Department officers, probably including Ashcroft, were ready to resign on the issue.

Bush understood what that portended. In October 1973, he was 27 and a drunk but he was involved in Republican politics and he knew that impeachment bills followed president Richard Nixon's Saturday night massacre of Justice Department lawyers. Bush told Mueller to tell Comey to put the spying on a proper legal footing.

It is a pity that Bush did not mulishly persist. The resignations would have revealed the illegal surveillance and it is probable that even John Kerry would have become president eight months later and that the war in Iraq would be over.

Evan Whitton is a columnist for the legal journal, Justinian, in which a version of this article first appeared. He is the author of Serial Liars: How Lawyers Get the Money.

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