A federal judge ordered on Thursday that the Justice Department must “respond within 20 days to requests by a civil liberties group” for documents about Bush’s domestic spying program.

The ruling was a victory for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which sued the department under the Freedom of Information Act in seeking the release of the documents. U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy ruled that the department must finish processing the group’s requests and produce or identify all records within 20 days.

“Given the great public and media attention that the government’s warrantless surveillance program has garnered and the recent hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the public interest is particularly well served by the timely release of the requested documents,” he said.

Kennedy also ordered the department to give the group a document index and declaration stating its justification for withholding any documents within 30 days.

No doubt this decision with be appealed, the Justice Department isn’t about to turn over those documents just because a liberal activist judge has ordered them to.

Meanwhile, in related news on the domestic spying issue….

The Bush administration helped derail a Senate bid to investigate a warrantless eavesdropping program yesterday after signaling it would reject Congress’s request to have former attorney general John D. Ashcroft and other officials testify about the program’s legality. The actions underscored a dramatic and possibly permanent drop in momentum for a congressional inquiry, which had seemed likely two months ago.

Democrats called the Bush administration’s overture “so vague that it amounts to nothing.” They called it a “stalling tactic to give Republican lawmakers political cover for rejecting a full inquiry.”

“For the past three years, the Senate intelligence committee has avoided carrying out its oversight of our nation’s intelligence programs whenever the White House becomes uncomfortable with the questions being asked,” Rockefeller told reporters. “The very independence of this committee is called into question.”

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