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Justice Official Opens Spying Inquiry

After months of pressure from Congressional Democrats, the Justice Department’s inspector general said Monday that his office had opened a full review into the department’s role in President Bush’s domestic eavesdropping program and the legal requirements governing the program. Democrats said they saw the investigation as a welcome step that could answer questions about the operations and legal underpinnings of the program, which allows the National Security Agency to monitor, without obtaining court warrants, the international communications of Americans and others inside this country with suspected terrorist ties. “This is a long overdue investigation of a highly controversial program,” said Representative John Conyers Jr., the Michigan Democrat who will take over as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Last December, more than three dozen Democrats called for the Justice Department inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, to open an investigation. Mr. Fine declined at the time, saying a review of the program’s legality fell outside his jurisdiction. He referred the matter to another arm of the Justice Department, the Office of Professional Responsibility. That office sought to examine ethical issues surrounding the roles played by Justice Department lawyers in the eavesdropping program. But its review was blocked this year when Mr. Bush personally refused security clearances for its investigators. Democrats have since renewed their calls for a full Justice Department investigation, accusing the Bush administration of stonewalling. On Monday, Mr. Fine informed members of Congress in a letter that he was opening an investigation after the White House had agreed to approve the necessary security clearances for members of his staff. The review will have a somewhat different scope than the investigation sought and rejected last year. The review, Mr. Fine said in his letter, will examine the controls in place at the Justice Department for the eavesdropping, the way information developed from it was used, and the department’s “compliance with legal requirements governing the program.” Officials said the investigation could examine the legal authority given to the Justice Department under a secret executive order first signed by Mr. Bush in October 2001, as well as the laws and procedures governing intelligence wiretaps under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was approved by Congress in 1978 after the Watergate scandal and required a special court warrant for wiretaps on Americans. The review could also look at how intelligence generated by the eavesdropping was used to seek traditional court warrants and to pursue criminal cases, the officials said....

Justices Rebuff Times on Leak Inquiry

The United States Supreme Court refused today to stop a federal prosecutor from reviewing the telephone records of two reporters for The New York Times. The records, the paper said, include information about many of the reporters’ confidential sources. In a one-sentence order offering no reasoning and noting no dissenting votes, the Supreme Court rejected a request from The Times to stay a lower court’s decision while the paper tried to persuade the high court to review the case. Today’s order effectively allows the United States attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, to begin reviewing the records, which he has already obtained from phone companies, as early as this week. The Justice Department told the Supreme Court on Friday that Mr. Fitzgerald is under enormous time pressure. “The statute of limitations,” the government said, “will imminently expire on December 3 and 13, 2006, on certain substantive offenses that the grand jury is investigating.” The grand jury, in Chicago, is looking into who told the two reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, about actions the government was planning to take in December 2001 against two Islamic charities in Illinois and Texas. The disclosures to the reporters, the government lawyers wrote Friday, may have amounted to obstruction of justice. In August, a divided three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled in favor of Mr. Fitzgerald, saying that the reporters were not entitled to shield their sources in the unusual circumstances of the case. The government contended that the reporters had tipped off the charities to the impeding actions against them. The Times said the reporters had engaged only in routine newsgathering....