http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/us/politics/12rehnquist.html

June 11, 2010

Rehnquist Was Asked to Review Wiretapping Program

By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON -- The legal battle over the Bush administration's program of eavesdropping without warrants has never reached the Supreme Court. But it may have come closer than previously known, as a result of an approach to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist prompted by National Security Agency employees who believed the program violated the law.

Within months of the beginning of the eavesdropping program in October 2001, a staff member of the House Intelligence Committee, alerted to the possibility of illegal spying by N.S.A. insiders and hoping to prompt a high-level legal review, wrote to Chief Justice Rehnquist asking for a meeting, according to several people familiar with the episode.

The Congressional staff member, Diane S. Roark, routed the letter through the chief justice's daughter, Janet Rehnquist, then the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services; Ms. Rehnquist was a high school acquaintance of one of Ms. Roark's N.S.A. contacts.

There was no response, and it is not known whether the letter was seen by the chief justice or prompted him to make inquiries. Chief Justice Rehnquist, who led the court for 19 years, died in 2005. An initial search of his personal papers at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University on Thursday did not turn up Ms. Roark's letter.

Early in 2003, Ms. Roark and three security agency employees met with investigators for the Defense Department's inspector general to complain about what they called mismanagement, waste and corruption at the agency, prompting a two-year inquiry. Thomas A. Drake, a former employee now under indictment for mishandling classified information, became a major source for the inquiry, which produced a still-classified 2004 report that is described by people briefed on its contents as highly critical of the agency's management.

There is no sign that the report led to major shake-ups at the security agency, but they do appear to have helped put Ms. Roark and the other would-be whistle-blowers on the F.B.I.'s radar when it began investigating the leak about the N.S.A. wiretapping program in December 2005.

In what the employees saw as retaliation, the F.B.I. in 2007 raided the homes of Ms. Roark and the three workers whose complaints started the investigation into the security agency. None have been charged with a crime.