After: How America Confronted The Sept. 12 Era

Ashcroft had apparently taken the President's order to him, to "make sure this never happens again," too personally. Bolten now had to call Ashcroft and tell him that this was not the way it was done, that the bill now had to be recalled, circulated and "scrubbed" by the affected departments and the White House staff.

Beyond his predilection to want to control as much as he could, some on his own staff thought that another reason Ashcroft hadn't "scrubbed" the bill beforehand was that he didn't appreciate the significance of the prosecutor-written laundry list he was proposing. Although Ashcroft is a graduate of the highly regarded University of Chicago Law School and a former Missouri state attorney general, even some of his own deputies at Justice were surprised by how uninterested he was in the niceties of the law. One veteran staffer recalls that through six different meetings on this bill and another key legal initiative, he had never once heard Ashcroft cite a legal case and had watched him blanch when someone in the room cited a case, as if that person was discourteously speaking another language. Whether it was lack of interest or lack of intellectual firepower, the Attorney General seemed not to appreciate the complexities of the constitutional issues he was dealing with.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2001

At about 10:00 a.m., Ashcroft took his seat at the witness table of the Senate Judiciary Committee. A week ago Sunday he'd been on the talk shows describing a bill that he hadn't even felt he needed to clear with the White House before proposing. It was as if he could get the staff to write it, chat it up a bit on television, and go to a Rose Garden signing ceremony a few days later. But now it was clear that that was not going to happen.

At the end of the prior week, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero and his top Washington lobbyist, Laura Murphy, had forged an alliance with conservative Republicans in the House that had derailed Ashcroft's plan for legislation on the fly. Romero and Murphy had gotten right-wing Georgia Congressman Bob Barr and four other conservative Republicans on the Judiciary Committee to send Sensenbrenner a letter listing ten provisions of the bill that needed, the letter said, "significant further public debate." Another set of provisions--seven in all--was "unacceptable as written," the letter said.

A special court with looser requirements for warrants related to national security investigations targeting "foreign agents" had been established in 1978. Ashcroft was now proposing a profound expansion of what and whom that court could cover. It was based on the legitimate argument that in the September 12 era, a national security threat no longer meant Russian spies, but could mean people living quietly in their communities, who are not necessarily agents of a foreign country but instruments of a terrorist organization that had some foreign connection.