Judge's ruling in FISA lawsuit suggests Bush is a felon

Amid all the recent controversy over the presumptive presidential nominees' stances on the congressional bill regarding FISA regulations, the media appears to have forgotten the central issue, of the actual lawsuit itself, and possible consequences for the defendant, George W. Bush.

Late last week, a federal judge ruled against the legality of Bush's secret wiretapping campaign, rejecting certain aspects of his lawyers' argument that "the president has exclusive authority over matters of national security and may disregard laws like FISA that impose checks on presidential power." If successful, the lawsuit would hold Bush personally accountable for violating these laws, constituting a series of felonies.

"On July 3, Chief Judge Vaughn Walker… ruled, effectively, that President George W. Bush is a felon."

Much of the story is still shrouded in secrecy, but due to the inventiveness of the plaintiff's legal team, who managed to argue against arguments they couldn't see, using documents they could only construct in secret (and shred immediately), flirting with treason simply by remembering certain aspects of the case, some of the proceedings are finally bubbling up from the gutter of 'national security' into the public eye.

Amazingly, the defendant's legal team seems to have made several key blunders, effectively invalidating some of the national security laws hampering other such lawsuits from establishing proof and cause. "Of the four dozen lawsuits challenging various aspects of Bush's warrantless electronic surveillance program, the Al-Haramain case is unique because… we can show they were victims of the unlawful conduct for which they are suing. Nobody else has been able to produce such proof. Our proof is a top-secret classified document, which the government accidentally gave to Al-Haramain's lawyers in August of 2004."

In the protracted, seven year process of constructing a legal defense, "We [the plaintiffs' lawyers] went forward, drafting our secret appellate brief in a DOJ office, on a DOJ computer, under the watch of a DOJ security officer -- that is, under the auspices and control of our adversary in the legal case. We could print out drafts but couldn't take them from the room; instead, we were to leave the drafts on the table to be shredded by Hogarty [the government's defense lawyer] later… We would not be allowed to keep a copy of what we had written; the brief in Hogarty's safe was 'our' copy.

Hogarty explained that anything we wrote down that contained classified information, then or later, would instantly become 'derivatively classified' and thus unlawful for us to possess. I wondered whether this meant that the portion of my brain that remembers the Document is also 'derivatively classified,' making its presence in my skull unlawful."

This is but one moment in a baffling, twisted tale of modern constitutional law colliding with Congressional regulation and post-9/11 Bush administration fear tactics. Follow the jump to read the lawyer's actual first-person account, Involving impossibly Byzantine legal semantics, a 'who's on first' style courtroom scene, a banana peel which may (or may not) have been shredded for its implication in state secrets, and a pervasive, Orwellian level of privelaged secrecy. It is an intricate network of checks and balances, almost beyond belief.

Although this ruling will not end the case,

"Judge Walker's decision last week was a major victory for us. Walker concluded that FISA does indeed preempt the state secrets privilege. More broadly, he addressed the key issue raised by our lawsuit -- the validity of the 'unitary executive' theory -- and said what we've been long awaiting: that the president does not have unbridled power to disregard federal statutory law in the name of national security."

With this ruling, handed down on the day before Independence Day, the federal judge's decision suggests that freedom may still reign in America.