Interior Secretary Ken Salazar sent a letter yesterday to Interior Department Inspector General Mary Kendall arguing that her investigation into the circumstances surrounding the release of a 30-day report on the oil spill “confirms that there was no wrongdoing or intent to mislead the public.”

Kendra Barkoff, Interior Department spokeswoman, highlighted the letter in an attempt to downplay the report:

Secretary Salazar’s letter speaks for itself. There was no intent to mislead the public. The decision to impose a temporary moratorium on deepwater drilling was made by the Secretary, following consultation with colleagues including the White House.

In addition, Barkoff pointed to a June 3 letter to Dr. Per Holland addressing his concerns that the report misrepresented the extent to which he and other experts reviewed the recommendations. In the letter, Interior Department Deputy Secretary David Hayes said:

By listing you as a member of the [National Academy of Engineering] panel that peer-reviewed the 22 safety recommendations contained in the Report, we did not mean to imply that you also agreed with the decision to impose a moratorium on all new deepwater drilling. We acknowledge that you were not asked to review or comment on the moratorium.

Barkoff, referencing Hayes’ June 3 letter, said that the issue had been resolved months ago:

As the report makes clear, the misunderstanding with the reviewers was resolved with the June 3rd letter and a subsequent conference call with those experts.

The report, obtained by Politico, said scientists and industry experts “had neither reviewed nor supported such a policy decision and had never been asked to do so.”

Interior Department officials told the department’s inspector general that they never intended to give that impression in their version of the report. But a White House edit of the executive summary of the report,  by staffers in White House climate and energy policy director Carol Browner’s office, “led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer reviewed by the experts,” the report said.

????Here is the text in question, from the executive summary of the report:

The Secretary further recommends an immediate halt to drilling operations on the 33 permitted wells, not including the relief wells currently being drilling by BP, that are currently being drilling using floating rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Drilling operations should cease as soon as safely practicable for a 6-month period.

The recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering. Those experts, who volunteered their time and expertise, are identified in Appendix 1. The government also consulted with a wide range of experts from government, academia and industry.

An Interior Department official who worked on the report, Steve Black, told the inspector general that the executive summary was not intentionally unclear, and he stressed that the recommendations that came later in the report were peer reviewed, though the moratorium recommendation was not.

The inspector general report was requested by a number of Republicans, including Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who opposed the drilling moratorium.

Such a review threatens to “chill the legitimate exercise of First Amendment rights,” wrote two Republican senators, Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and Jon Kyl of Arizona, in a letter sent to the I.R.S. on Wednesday.

Republicans were quick to point out that the I.R.S. was put under tight restrictions about access to Americans’ tax returns as a result of political shenanigans by the Nixon administration involving tax audits.

Kyl and Hatch’s request also comes on the heels of an allegation by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) that the Obama administration improperly disclosed the confidential taxpayer information of Koch Industries during a background call with journalists:

Mr. Grassley called the matter “a very serious allegation.” The White House said it was a simple misunderstanding.

It grew out of a briefing that officials held for reporters in August in discussing possible changes in the tax code for corporations.

A administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in the background briefing, pointed to Koch Industries as an example of “multibillion-dollar businesses that are structured as partnerships in ways that allow them to avoid paying sizable corporate taxes.”

Mr. Grassley, in requesting an investigation, said that the official’s statement implied “direct knowledge of Koch’s legal and tax status,” in possible violation of taxpayers’ privacy laws, and may have been “politically motivated.” The White House, in a statement, denied any improper accessing of confidential taxpayer information. “The official’s statement was not based on any review of tax filings and we will not use this example in the future,” the White House said.

The White House, in other words, claims it was simply pointing to Koch Industries as an example of a broad phenomenon, much like the president did when he discussed Koch’s brainchild, Americans for Prosperity, and the possibility that it could be receiving foreign funding. It wasn’t actually sifting through Koch’s taxpayer information. But Grassley’s accusation has been sufficient to prompt an investigation by the Treasury Department’s Inspector General into the issue.

Sens. Hatch and Kyl, for their part, are apparently afraid that Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus’s request for the IRS to investigate will be a partisan process. In response, they wrote in their own letter to the IRS on Wednesday that, ”I.R.S. audits and investigations are specifically intended to be separated from the political process. We expect the I.R.S. will adhere to those standards despite requests to the contrary from high-level political officials.”

The evidence is a letter from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the congressman who’s made a hobby out of sensational letters and reports on low-wattage scandals. And Issa’s letter only says that “there was speculation in the press that former Chief of Staff to the First Lady Jackie Norris may have influenced the President’s action because she left the White House to become a senior advisor at [the Corporation for National and Community Service] around the time of Mr. Walpin’s removal.” Where did that speculation come from? It came from a Michelle Malkin column.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) (WDCpix)

Eight years after it was passed, the USA Patriot Act remains among the most controversial pieces of counterterrorism legislation in the so-called “war on terror.” On December 31 of this year, some of its more controversial provisions will expire, forcing Congress to revisit it and decide whether to reauthorize the expiring provisions, amend them, or re-work the entire law.

The sections set to expire give the government the authority to access business records, operate roving wiretaps and conduct surveillance on “lone wolf” suspects with no known link to foreign governments or terrorist groups. A justice Department official last week told Congress that the Obama administration supports their renewal. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote to Senator Patrick Leahy (D- Vt.) that the administration would consider stronger civil rights protections “provided that they do not undermine the effectiveness of these important (provisions).”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, it was clear that Democrats don’t uniformly support the White House on that. Some Democrats on the committee were still bitter that some Republicans back in 2001 had pushed aside a bipartisan version of the bill produced by the Judiciary Committee in favor of a version substantially revised and altered by the Rules Committee, led by then-chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.).

“Then-Chairman Dreier under Lord knows whose instructions, substituted that bill for another bill, that we at judiciary had never seen. So we come here today now to consider what we do with those parts that are expiring” and that, according to committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), created problems that the bill he’d approved would have prevented.

“We held in this committee five days of markup and achieved unanimity on the Patriot Act,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) echoed later in the hearing. “Then the bill just disappeared. And we had a new several hundred page bill revealed from the Rules Committee” that had to be voted on the next day, before most members of Congress even had a chance to read it, said Nadler.

The fight over the bill appears to be as partisan today as ever. At the House hearing, Democrats and their witnesses warned that provisions of the law that allow “roving wiretaps” of different communications devices used by unnamed suspects, or electronic surveillance of suspects with no affiliation to known terrorist organizations, violate constitutional safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures. And a “gag order” provision of the bill, they complained, violate the First Amendment by preventing the recipient of an FBI-issued National Security Letter, which can request customer information from businesses, from disclosing to their customers that the information was requested.

While Democrats in the House yesterday cast these provisions as unnecessary and abusive, Republicans deemed them critical to national security.

“We must not be lulled into a false sense of security,” warned Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas). “The threat remains high,” he added, and proceeded to list about a half a dozen terrorist plots that were either carried out or planned but foiled by the FBI since September 11, 2001, including the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and the thwarting of what he called a “plot to kill U.S. soldiers at the Fort Dix Army base” in 2007.

But several witnesses, such as Suzanne Spaulding, a national security lawyer and former staff director of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, testified that parts of the law such as the “lone wolf” provision, which allows the FBI to monitor suspects with no connection to foreign terrorist organizations, “undermines the policy and constitutional justification for the entire [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] statute. “This extraordinary departure from the Fourth Amendment’s warrant standards is justified only in investigation of foreign powers or their agents,” she said. The “lone wolf” provision would allow the government to spy an someone suspected of participating in terrorism but where the evidence is not strong enough to meet the stricter standards for obtaining a regular warrant from an ordinary federal court.

Michael German, a former FBI agent and now policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, noted that the FBI inspector general himself in 2007 concluded that the Patriot Act had been abused. Section 505 of the Act increased the number of officials who could authorize national security letters, seeking private information about certain businesses’ customers, reduced the standard necessary to obtain information with them, to the point where information could be collected about people who are not even suspected of having done anything wrong, testified German.

Even with such broad latitude, German testified, the Inspector general reports “confirmed widespread FBI mismanagement, misuse and abuse of these Patriot Act authorities.” The inspector general reported that the FBI’s record-keeping was so poor it didn’t know how many national security lettesr it had issued, and it often sought private information that it was not entitled to.

“Most troubling, FBI supervisors used hundreds of illegal “exigent letters” to obtain telephone records without national security letters by falsely claiming emergencies,” German added in written testimony submitted to the subcommittee on Tuesday.

And Thomas Evans, a former Republican Congressman from Delaware testified on behalf of the bipartisan Constitution Project that the section of the Act allowing the FBI to issue National Security Letters without a court order and accompanied by gag orders creates “great potential for abuse.” Last week the Constitution Project sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, signed by 26 policy experts across the political spectrum, seeking major reforms to the Patriot Act.

On Tuesday, Todd Hinnen, Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the National Security Division of the Justice Department testified that many of the problems identified by the Inspector General and others have been solved. “Since that time, FBI has put in a new data subsystem governing those [national security letters],” he said, adding that the National Security Division of the Justice Department has increased its oversight and Congress and the Inspector General retain their oversight authority.

Hinnen testified further that the expiring Patriot Act provisions were absolutely necessary tools for law enforcement to pursue terror suspects. “We feel that these are very important investigative authorities and that it would be very unfortunate to allow them to lapse. The administration firmly supports renewal before December 31 so there’s no gap in the investigative abilities of the government.”

Conyers was not impressed. “You sound like a lot of people from DOJ that have come over here before, and yet you’ve only been there a few months,” he said, after Hinnen said he started in the job on January 21. “Do you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing?” Conyers asked. As Hinnen hesitated, Conyers added: “You don’t have to respond to that.”

On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold its own hearing on the Patriot Act. That promises to be equally contentious. Already, several senators have introduced bills to reauthorize and amend expiring provisions of the Patriot Act, although there’s already evidence of disagreement among Senators on the same side of the aisle.

Last week, Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.), with co-sponsorship from Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jon Tester (D-MT), Tom Udall (D-NM), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Daniel Akaka (D-HI) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), introduced a bill to narrow the Patriot Act, called The Judicious Use of Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts Act, or the JUSTICE Act. The Act would amend not just the expiring provisions but would add protections for privacy civil liberties in each section fo the Patriot Act and other surveillance laws. It would also repeal the retroactive immunity granted to telecommunications companies included in the FISA Amendments Act passed last year.

The Obama administration has supported and defended in court this immunity for telecom companies.

A bill introduced on Tuesday by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.) and Ted Kaufmann (D-Md.), does not repeal the immunity provision, and makes more modest amendments to the Patriot Act. It extends all three of the provisions set to expire this year, but expands reporting requirements to allow Congress to monitor how the administration is using the law.

Infuriatingly, in response to the recent revelations, the State Department has repeated baseless statements that “at no time was security jeopardized.” Based on what facts can they possibly make those assurances? Four times between June 2007 and March 2009, the State Department itself told ArmorGroup that the inadequate number of guards put “security in jeopardy,” “negatively impacted the security posture,” caused “serious” and “grave concerns,” and “gravely endangers the performance of guard services.” NOTHING has changed since those statements were made. Yet the State Department is now assuring the Congress and the Wartime Commission that security at the Embassy is sound? I have last week’s shift schedule. I know they are still operating on a schedule that their own commander described as unsustainable and causing sleep deprivation. These public assurances by State are not supported in fact, and make clear the Department does not yet recognize its own role in this public policy failure.

Brian might also have added the inspector general office’s insistence that it didn’t receive whistleblower information in 2007 that Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (I-Conn.) office insists on the record that it gave to the IG.

Also note that Brian says that her organization has learned State plans to “transition security of the U.S. Embassy Kabul from ArmorGroup to trained Afghan nationals over the next three years.” That sounds like ArmorGroup is losing its contract.

But the Project on Government Oversight, the good-government watchdog nonprofit that exposed the latest abuses, confirms that it was contacted yesterday by the Office of the Inspector General for the State Department and was told it could “neither confirm nor deny” that it was investigating the organization’s allegations. Which is, uh, bizarre, given Kelly confirmed it yesterday afternoon. POGO ran into this wall of silence just shortly after 4 p.m. yesterday. But Kelly’s briefing ended, according to the official transcript, an hour earlier. Clearly these are some diligent investigators we’re dealing with.

What’s more, POGO informed the inspector general’s office that it will not turn over any of the whistleblowers whose accounts formed the basis for the allegations, according to executive director Danielle Brian. Already, the organization says, at least one whistleblower has been fired in an act of retaliation.

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The official told ABC news: “a few just got lost and the CIA does not know what happened to them.”

The information was supposedly blacked out for “national security” reasons.

As I mentioned earlier, the American Civil Liberties Union, which sought the documents in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, is considering whether it will challenge the legitimacy of the government’s redactions.

Here is the full report:

The IG report also apparently reveals that at least one detainee was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation.

Although Bush administration officials investigated the cases discussed in the report and concluded that no prosecutions were warranted, Attorney General Eric Holder is now considering re-opening some of those cases to see if perhaps some CIA officials, despite the wide latitude they were given by the Bush administration, went even farther than Bush-era legal memoranda said was allowed.