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Via Marty Lederman, here's a transcript (.pdf) of today's extraordinary testimony by former deputy attorney general James Comey before the Senate Judiciary committee. Read it to get a sense of the dimensions to which top administration justice department appointees including Comey, Jack Goldsmith, Patrick Philbin, and ultimately Ashcroft came to believe that the White House did not have a legal basis for the warrantless NSA domestic spying program, after searching hard for one, a belief that informed then acting attorney general Comey's decision not to sign the presidential order that authorized the program as it had been run for almost three years. Comey later resigned. Comey: "I didn't believe that as the chief law enforcement officer in the country I could stay when they had gone ahead and done something that I had said I could find no legal basis for."
Lederman: "Most importantly: Can anyone think of any historical examples where the Department of Justice told the White House that a course of conduct would be unlawful (in this case, a felony), and the President went ahead and did it anyway, without overruling DOJ's legal conclusion?"