Cheney: He Remaid Our World
As Gellman shows in detail, Cheney made use of secrecy and a cadre of dedicated and ruthless allies that he, as chief of Bush’s transition—unprecedented for a vice-president elect—had seeded at strategic points throughout the government.
.. The final irony is that Stellar Wind survived because Bush, when faced with a political crisis that would have exposed it, was willing to compromise, while Cheney, “the antipolitician,” preferred to hold to principles that would have meant watching Stellar Wind collapse into controversy. If there had been a mass resignation, there can be no doubt that the principled objections of the high Justice Department officials would have been widely heard. It is quite possible that had Bush followed the chosen course of “the man of principle”—and had the Justice Department officials resigned while their objections were leaked to the public—the metadata collection would have ended in the spring of 2004, and eight months later, very possibly, the presidency of George W. Bush.