I think it's possible to demonstrate, without a great deal of elaborate research, that the Justice Department's current investigation into the leak of the NSA surveillance story is a politically motivated diversion. My argument continues below.
The New York Times delayed publication of the FISA bypass story for approximately one year "after meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns." Presumably, these senior administration officials were aware, at the time of this meeting, of the nature of the Times story. If the problem was the leak of the information to the Times (and not the subsequent publication of that information), why wasn't an investigation undertaken immediately?
The fact that the administration waited until after publication to initiate an investigation into the "leak" clearly shows that their motivation was not concern over national security, but obfuscation. The argument could be made that a Justice Department investigation would have exacerbated the security breach, but surely the vastly reformed and improved US intelligence services could have found a way to investigate an insider leak without alerting America's enemies.
Many of us instinctively felt that the Administration's righteous anger at the leak of the FISA runaround story was smoke and mirrors. The timing of the investigation proves it. Underlying all of this, of course, is the real question of what was leaked. NSA sources and methods? Hardly. Any operative worth their sodium-free salt substitute would assume that their electronic and digital communications were being monitored. What was leaked was the illegal procedure of the Bush administration in circumventing the Congress and the Constitution. While this information posed no threat to national security, it posed a grave threat to the Bush administration, which has acted accordingly.
A final footnote: many Bush apologists within and without the Administration have proffered a variant of the "world has changed" argument in justifying the circumvention of the law. This argument can be stated: "The status of communication technology has advanced so drastically that the FISA legislation is no longer adequate to the changed circumstances." It is interesting to note that James Bamford, author of The Puzzle Palace, an exposé of the NSA published in 1982, agreed over two decades ago that technology advances would require changes to FISA. The changes he envisioned, however, were very different from those implemented by this Administration: ''Like an ever-widening sinkhole, NSA's surveillance technology will continue to expand, quietly pulling in more and more communications and gradually eliminating more and more privacy.'' Mr. Bamford would probably be shocked, but not surprised, by our current President's complicity in widening that sinkhole.