It took him 37 pages of fiction to pretend the laws against warrantless wiretaps were null and void and for at least 16 months afterward, the Fourth Amendment was broken more often than a Rumsfeld war plan. From USA Today:

“Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations,” the footnote states, referring to a document titled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.”

Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, or TSP.

That program intercepted phone calls and e-mails on U.S. soil, bypassing the normal legal requirement that such eavesdropping be authorized by a secret federal court. The program began after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and continued until Jan. 17, 2007, when the White House resumed seeking surveillance warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Wednesday that the Fourth Amendment finding in the October memo was not the legal underpinning for the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

“TSP relied on a separate set of legal memoranda,” Fratto told the Associated Press. The Justice Department outlined that legal framework in its January 2006 white paper.

The October memo was written just days before Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, briefed four House and Senate leaders on the NSA’s secret wiretapping program for the first time.

The government itself related the October memo to the TSP program when it included it on a list of documents that were responsive to the ACLU’s request for records from the program. It refused to hand them over.

On Wednesday, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the statement in the footnote does not reflect the current view of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

“We disagree with the proposition that the Fourth Amendment has no application to domestic military operations,” he said. “Whether a particular search or seizure is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment requires consideration of the particular context and circumstances of the search.”

Roehrkasse would not say exactly when that legal opinion was overturned internally. But he pointed to a January 2006 white paper issued by the Justice Department a month after the TSP was revealed by The New York Times.

The Bush Administration now stresses it no longer holds that view. Yet for far too long, the opinion of a lawyer making shit up provoked one of the most sweeping invasions into our rights as citizens that ever occurred. And what did they gain as a result?

Nothing important to bringing down terrorists.

After all, if their lawbreaking did achieve something vital, that would give them their best defense. But they got nothing.

And we - without Constitutional protections - had a king for 16 months whose every decree could ignore the Constitution and suspend democracy itself. Just because of lousy legal advice from a corrupt lawyer.