Ex-White House officials lobby for telecoms over spying

The nation's biggest telecommunications companies, working closely with the White House, have mounted a secretive lobbying campaign to get Congress to quickly approve a measure wiping out all private lawsuits against them for assisting the US intelligence community's warrantless surveillance programs. The campaign–which involves some of Washington's most prominent lobbying and law firms–has taken on new urgency in recent weeks because of fears that a US appellate court in San Francisco is poised to rule that the lawsuits should be allowed to proceed. If that happens, the telecom companies say, they may be forced to terminate their cooperation with the US intelligence community–or risk potentially crippling damage awards for allegedly turning over personal information about their customers to the government without a judicial warrant. "It's not an exaggeration to say the US intelligence community is in a near-panic about this," said one communications industry lawyer familiar with the debate who asked not to be publicly identified because of the sensitivity surrounding the issue. But critics say the language proposed by the White House–drafted in close cooperation with the industry officials–is so extraordinarily broad that it would provide retroactive immunity for all past telecom actions related to the surveillance program. Its practical effect, they argue, would be to shut down any independent judicial or state inquires into how the companies have assisted the government in eavesdropping on the telephone calls and emails of US residents in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. "It's clear the goal is to kill our case," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based privacy group that filed the main lawsuit against the telecoms after The New York Times first disclosed, in December 2005, that President Bush had approved a secret program to monitor the phone conversations of US residents without first seeking judicial warrants. "They are trying to completely immunize this [the surveillance program] from any kind of judicial review," added Cohn. "I find it a little shocking that Congress would participate in the covering up of what has been going on." Among those coordinating the industry's effort are two well-connected capital players who both worked for President George H.W. Bush: Verizon general counsel William Barr, who served as attorney general under Bush Sr., and AT&T senior executive vice president James Cicconi, who was the elder Bush's deputy chief of staff. Working with them are a battery of major DC lobbyists and lawyers who are providing strategic advice to the companies on the issue. Among the players: powerhouse Republican lobbyists Charlie Black and Wayne Berman (who represent AT&T and Verizon, respectively), former GOP senator and US ambassador to Germany Dan Coats (a lawyer at King & Spaulding who is representing Sprint), former Democratic Party strategist and one-time assistant secretary of State Tom Donilon (who represents Verizon), former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick (whose law firm also represents Verizon) and Brad Berenson, a former assistant White House counsel under President George W. Bush who now represents AT&T.