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Adviser Says McCain Backs
Bush Wiretaps
CHARLIE SAVAGE
NY
Times
Friday, June 6, 2008
WASHINGTON — A top adviser to Senator John McCain says
Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping
without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring
him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive
authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.
In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser,
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution
gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency
to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail
without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required
court oversight of surveillance.
Mr. McCain believes that “neither the administration nor
the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except
for the A.C.L.U. and trial lawyers, understand were constitutional
and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001,”
Mr. Holtz-Eakin wrote.
(Article continues below)
And if Mr. McCain is elected president, Mr. Holtz-Eakin added,
he would do everything he could to prevent terrorist attacks,
“including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance
to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United
States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.”
Although a spokesman for Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican
presidential nominee, denied that the senator’s views on
surveillance and executive power had shifted, legal specialists
said the letter contrasted with statements Mr. McCain previously
made about the limits of presidential power.
In an interview about his views on the limits of executive power
with The Boston Globe six months ago, Mr. McCain strongly suggested
that if he became the next commander in chief, he would consider
himself obligated to obey a statute restricting what he did in
national security matters.
Full
article here.
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