The WaPo reports that James A. Baker, intelligence policy counsel for the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, had discovered in ‘04 that the Bush administration’s “failure to share information about its spying program had rendered useless a federal screening system that the judges had insisted upon to shield the court from tainted information.” Baker alerted Kollar-Kotelly, the presiding judge of the FISA court, who had complained to Justice, “prompting a temporary suspension of the NSA spying program.”

…Colleen Kollar-Kotelly — who, like her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen.

Both Colleen Kollar-Kotelly and Royce C. Lamberth, “expressed concern to senior officials that the president’s program, if ever made public and challenged in court, ran a significant risk of being declared unconstitutional.”

In related news, responding to pressure from both parties, the White House relented yesterday to give Congress more information about its domestic spying program. It’s not enough to satisfy some in Congress and several prominent Republicans said they “will pursue legislation enabling Congress to conduct more aggressive oversight of the National Security Agency’s warrantless monitoring of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) announced he is drafting a bill that would “require the administration to take the program to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

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