LEAKS

Bush Wiretap Probe Dropped

Lawyers have not heard from prosecutors for "very long time."

The Justice Department has dropped its longtime criminal investigation of lawyer Thomas Tamm, who admitted to having leaked details about President George W. Bush's wiretapping program to The New York Times, according to Tamm's attorney. The Justice Department declined to discuss the status of the probe. The leaks, which Bush condemned as a breach of national security, stirred a debate in Congress over whether the government had gone too far in trying to find terrorists after the 9/11 attacks. The Times published Tamm's wiretapping details in a Pulitzer Prize-winning story in December 2005, which said that Bush had ordered interception of incoming and outgoing phone calls and email messages to and from the U.S. without a warrant. Lawyers like Tamm argued that Bush had breached the 1978 federal law governing CIA-related wiretaps. Prosecutors have also ceased investigating Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency official who contributed reports of Bush's wiretapping to the Times story. Tamm's attorney told Politico he knew "seven or eight months ago" that the investigation had been dropped. Tice's attorney recently commented, "I have not heard anything from them in a very, very long time."