What are the other domestic spying programs?

Yesterday, James Comey testified to the extraordinary disagreement among administration officials over the NSA wiretapping program that Alberto Gonzales was deeply involved in. However, Alberto Gonzales has already testified that there was no disagreement about the NSA wiretapping program. So, there are really only two possibilities:

As Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Peter Swire wrote this morning, Gonzales’s testimony raises two possibilities:

1) Comey’s objections apply to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program that Gonzales was discussing. If so, then Gonzales quite likely made serious mis-statements under oath. And Gonzales was deeply and personally involved in the meeting at Ashcroft’s hospital bed, so he won’t be able to claim “I forgot.”

2) Perhaps Comey’s objections applied to a different domestic spying program. That has a big advantage for Gonzales — he wasn’t lying under oath. But then we would have senior Justice officials confirming that other “programs” exist for domestic spying, something the Administration has never previously stated.

My bet all along is that it's the latter (not that Gonzales wouldn't be happy to perjure himself). There were several things he said in his testimony last year that seemed to suggest there were other domestic spying programs. Nobody followed up at the time, because, of course, the Thuglicans were running the whole show back then. And, of course, those other programs may well be the ones where they're listening in to calls within America, not just those between Americans and foreign parties. This administration has always had a very slippery way of using language to cordon off related problems. Consider, for example, how Gonzales slipped out of providing information on the ninth fired prosecutor by claiming that was a different firing program and, hence, not covered by the Congressional requests for information about the other eight firings.