Rep. Hoekstra warns White House about illegal spying

Michigan's Peter Hoekstra was recently in the news for teaming up with Rick Santorum to claim that they'd found the elusive weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The claim was promptly discredited.

Now Hoekstra has joined the ranks of Congressmen who are publicly commenting on the administration's history of ramping up domestic spying without briefing Congress or submitting to oversight. Note the last sentence.

In a sharply worded letter to President Bush in May, an important Congressional ally charged that the administration might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress of some secret intelligence programs and risked losing Republican support on national security matters.

The letter from Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, did not specify the intelligence activities that he believed had been hidden from Congress.

But Mr. Hoekstra, who was briefed on and supported the National Security Agency'sdomestic surveillance program and the Treasury Department's tracking of international banking transactions, clearly was referring to programs that have not been publicly revealed.