Here is the 1984 SECRET MEMO regarding executive privilege & prosecution.

[Grasswire2]

Secret 1984 Surveillance Memo to Remain Secret

By Tim Ryan, Courthouse News Service

WASHINGTON (CN) – A federal judge backed the government on its withholding of a 1984 memo that purportedly details the constitutionality of a National Security Agency surveillance program.

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Charlie Savage brought the underlying complaint in Washington after filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the Office of Legal Counsel in October 2016. The request, which the office did not answer within statutory deadlines, sought a memo by former Assistant Attorney General Theodore Olson on the constitutionality of conducting surveillance not mentioned in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Though the Office of Legal Counsel later admitted to having found two responsive documents, it told the court that a law akin to attorney-client privilege exempted them from production. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper agreed with this justification on Friday, comparing Olson’s memo advising the attorney general to an attorney at a law firm lending help to a colleague.

“This is a quintessential example of the sort of document that falls within the attorney-client privilege: advice from an attorney (the head of OLC) to his client (the attorney general and, subsequently, the NSA) concerning the legal aspects of the client’s contemplated actions and based on confidential information from the client concerning those contemplated actions,” the 13-page opinion (pdf) states (parentheses in original).

The Times argued the NSA was not Olson’s client, but rather a third party the attorney general represented. As a result, the paper argued the memo did not contain confidential information covered under the attorney-client privilege.

But Cooper said this reasoning would “undermine the purposes of the attorney-client privilege,” suggesting agencies would be less likely to seek legal advice knowing it might one day become public.

“Without a guarantee of confidentiality, executive branch agencies, like all legal clients, would hesitate to share private details about planned agency actions with the attorney general when seeking legal advice,” Cooper wrote. “And without such confidentiality, executive branch agencies might choose to forgo seeking legal advice altogether and thereby risk public disclosure of private, confidential details about their activities.”

Olson also brushed aside the Times’ argument that the attorney-client privilege no longer covers the memo because the memo has not been kept confidential, saying the paper provided no evidence supporting this claim.

The New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.

The Department of Justice also did not immediately return an email requesting comment on the decision.

To Learn More:

New York Times, et al, v. U.S. Department of Justice (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia) (pdf)

Judge Pulls Plug on NSA Mass Phone Data Collection, Even as Program Shifts Gears (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

“Orwellian” NSA Phone Spying Probably Unconstitutional, Rules Outraged Federal Judge (by Danny Biederman and Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

Stung by Criticism, FISA Court Judges Ask to Make Public their Decisions (by Matt Bewig, AllGov)
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[Grasswire2]

1. link

http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/secret-1984-surveillance-memo-to-remain-secret-171025?news=860345

[burrowowl]

2. Kick

[Kid Berwyn]

3. Congress doesn't even know what's in NSA Charter.

The first congressman to battle the NSA is dead.

No-one noticed, no-one cares.

By Mark Ames
Pando, written on February 4, 2014

EXCERPT...

It was Pike’s committee that got the first ever admission—from CIA director William Colby—that the NSA was routinely tapping Americans' phone calls. Days after that stunning confession, Pike succeeded in getting the head of the NSA, Lew Allen Jr., to testify in public before his committee—the first time in history that an NSA chief publicly testified. It was the first time that the NSA publicly maintained that it was legally entitled to wiretap Americans’ communications overseas, in spite of the 1934 Communications Act and other legal restrictions placed on other intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

It was also the first time an NSA chief publicly lied to Congress, claiming it was not eavesdropping on domestic or overseas phone calls involving American citizens. (Technically, legalistically, the NSA argued that it hadn't lied—the reason being that since Americans weren’t specifically “targeted” in the NSA's vast data-vacuuming programs in the 1970s, recording and storing every phone call and telex cable in computers which were then data-mined for keywords, that therefore they weren’t technically eavesdropping on Americans who just happened to be swept up into the wiretapping vacuum.)

Pike quickly discovered the fundamental problem with the NSA: It was by far the largest intelligence agency, and yet it was birthed unlike any other, as a series of murky executive orders under Truman at the peak of Cold War hysteria. Digging into the NSA’s murky beginnings, it quickly became clear that the agency was explicitly chartered in such a way that placed it beyond legal accountability, out of reach of the other branches of government. Unlike the CIA, which came into being under an act of Congress, the NSA’s founding charter was a national secret.

SNIP...

In early August, 1975, Pike ordered the NSA to produce its “charter” document, National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 6. The Pentagon’s intelligence czar, Albert Hall, appeared before the Pike Committee that day—but without the classified NSA charter. Hall reminded Pike that the Ford White House had offered to show the NSA charter document to Pike’s committee just as it had done with Church’s Senate Committee members, who had agreed to merely view the charter at a government location outside of Congress, without entering the secret document into the Senate record. Officially, publicly, it still didn’t exist. Pike refused to accept that:

“You’re talking about the document that set up the entire N.S.A., it’s one which all members [of Congress] are entitled to see without shuttling back and forth downtown to look at.”

Assistant Defense Secretary Hall told an incredulous Pike that he hadn’t brought the NSA charter with him as he’d been told to, and that he couldn’t because “I need clearance” and the charter “has secret material in it.”

Pike exploded:

“It seems incredible to me, very frankly, that we are asked to appropriate large amounts of money for that agency which employs large numbers of people without being provided a copy of the piece of paper by which the agency is authorized.”

CONTINUED...

https://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-the-nsa-is-dead-no-one-noticed-no-one-cares/

Waybac Web archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20140223215456/https://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-the-nsa-is-dead-no-one-noticed-no-one-cares/

[spanone]

4. ...K&R...