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Given the gravity of the White House's pronouncements that it is not bound by the law as understood by most Senators and Americans, this sort of "gotcha" find of a one-time only US-to-US call being "accidentally" monitored by the NSA without a warrant seems kind of strange. A kind of, 'we accidentally broke our self made rule once! Only once! See how particular we were?' Something about this doesn't ring quite true.
Also notable is this (from the WaPo tonight):
Did administration officials mislead the FISA court?A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.
U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John D. Roberts Jr. late Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation.
Robertson, who was appointed to the federal bench in Washington by President Bill Clinton in 1994 and was later selected by then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist to serve on the FISA court, declined to comment when reached at his office late yesterday. ...
Robertson indicated privately to colleagues in recent conversations that he was concerned that information gained from warrantless NSA surveillance could have then been used to obtain FISA warrants. FISA court Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who had been briefed on the spying program by the administration, raised the same concern in 2004 and insisted that the Justice Department certify in writing that it was not occurring.
I think the theory discussed here may be partly correct. The means by which the administration got "probable cause" to go to the FISA court for warrants on specific individuals or US phone numbers may have involved some sort of large scale data mining or link analysis involving capturing communications from Americans who had done nothing but call a certain country, in a way that the courts would likely determine "unreasonable search and seizure." From the mined data, they got a target list of US person numbers or individuals. What I presumed is that the administration never went to the FISA court at that point, but this FISA judge resignation story suggests perhaps they did, disguising the means by which they got "probable cause" on some of those they were seeking warrants on.
(What doesn't hold water is the scenario being passed around by those defending the President's bypassing the law, that the US had specific US phone numbers from cell phones of senior al Qaeda suspects captured in Afghanistan, but worried that they wouldn't be able to get a warrant. Of course the FISA court is going to approve a warrant for that! That would be probable cause to anyone. So why in the world are they trying to pull the wool over our eyes on this one? Why the deception?)
(Reader SC sends this information on the composition of the FISA court.)