White House threatens veto of wiretap bill

WHITE HOUSE THREATENS VETO OF WIRETAP BILL
[SOURCE: Reuters, AUTHOR: Randall Mikkelsen]
The White House threatened to veto wiretap legislation a day before Wednesday's planned vote in Congress, and said that restrictions on government authority would hamper its fight against terrorism. The bill would set rules for the warrantless surveillance of foreigners and safeguards over the rights of Americans in their international conversations. The measure "falls far short of providing the intelligence community with the tools it needs to collect foreign intelligence effectively from individuals outside the United States," the White House budget office said on Tuesday. It said National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell and other advisers would recommend that President George W. Bush veto the bill if passed in its current form.
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN1630815420071016

--See Also --
* White House to Give Senate Panel Surveillance Program Documents
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Ellen Nakashima and Paul Kane]
The White House agreed yesterday to give Senate intelligence committee members and staff access to internal documents related to its domestic surveillance program in a bid to win Democratic lawmakers' support for the administration's version of an intelligence measure. The move was meant in part to defuse a months-long clash between Congress and the Bush administration over access to legal memoranda and presidential decisions underpinning the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which allowed the government to eavesdrop without court warrants on communications between people in the United States and abroad when one of the parties is a terrorism-related suspect. Some of the documents had been demanded by Senate Judiciary Committee members as a condition for considering the administration's nomination of former judge Michael B. Mukasey as the nation's 81st attorney general. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT), the committee's chairman, dropped that condition weeks ago but said yesterday that he still wants to see the documents.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/16/AR200710...
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