Michael Isikoff

It was the last thing the White House needed at a time when President Bush is already on the defensive over Iraq: a circular firing squad in a federal courtroom in which the president's men—and Vice President Dick Cheney's—are all shooting at each other.But that's how the perjury trial of I.

Intel director John Negroponte gave Congress a sobering assessment last week of the continued threats from groups like Al Qaeda and Hizbullah. But even gloomier comments came from Henry Crumpton, the outgoing State Department terror coordinator.

The Bush administration announced Wednesday that a secret court has authorized intelligence agencies to monitor suspected Al Qaeda phone calls into and out of the United States.

A CIA panel has told former officer Valerie Plame she can't write about her undercover work for the agency, a position that may threaten a lucrative book project with her publisher.

Sen. Joe Lieberman,  the only Democrat to endorse President Bush's new plan for Iraq, has quietly backed away from his pre-election demands that the White House turn over potentially embarrassing documents relating to its handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.Lieberman's reversal underscores the new role that he is seeking to play in the Senate as the leading apostle of bipartisanship, especially on national-security issues.

As a young helicopter-crew chief in Vietnam, Silvestre Reyes learned the costs of war firsthand. Holed up in a camp that came under attack one night in March 1968, Reyes was knocked unconscious by a mortar.

Lawyers for "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla claim he is so disoriented from three years of isolation and aggressive interrogations that he is now mentally ill.

What was President Bush's personal role, if any, in giving a green light to harsh interrogation methods? That's never been clear, but now Democratic leaders are more determined than ever to find out.

National intelligence Director John Negroponte shut down a government Web site after the disclosure that it had posted nuclear-research documents from Iraq's pre-Gulf War I weapons program.

The Bush Administration is increasingly worried that ex-Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega--once the scourge of the Reagan White House--may prevail in the first round of Nicaragua's presidential election Nov. 5.

In the fall of 2003, Mark Foley huddled in his Capitol Hill office with his sister for a soul-searching talk. The Florida congressman had just exited a Senate race amid hints that he was gay--but that wasn't all that was troubling him.

Mark Foley, a six-term Republican congressman from Florida, championed the protection of children from sexual predators. Chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, he often spoke out about the need to catch pedophiles.

What did John Boehner know and when did he know it? The House majority leader is apparently having a tough time with his memory. In less than a week, he's trotted out three different versions of his conversations with House Speaker Dennis Hastert about the Mark Foley sex scandal.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has played a key role in opposing President Bush's plan to authorize military tribunals for terror suspects and reinterpret the Geneva Conventions to permit some aggressive interrogation techniques.

In the early morning of Oct. 1, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell received an urgent phone call from his No. 2 at the State Department. Richard Armitage was clearly agitated.

It began, as the Feds tell the tale, with a run-of-the-mill tax-fraud scheme. Imad Hammoud and his ring of Lebanese Americans from the Detroit area would buy boxes of cigarettes in North Carolina, where the state tax on smokes is among the lowest in the country, allegedly truck the goods back to Michigan and sell them at a profit of more than $10 a carton.

An effort by Dick Cheney to prod Alaska lawmakers to approve a controversial $20 billion natural-gas pipeline project has misfired amid charges from some legislators that the veep was seeking to benefit major energy-company interests.

David Bowker vividly remembers the first time he heard the phrase. A lawyer in the State Department, Bow-ker was part of a Bush administration "working group" assembled in the panicked aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Over the last four years, U.S. law enforcement agencies have gained access to over 28,000 financial records inside the United States under a little known provision of the USA Patriot Act that parallels the secret international bank data program disclosed by news organizations last week, Treasury Department records show.The disclosure of the overseas program—under which Treasury Department officials have tapped into the records of a vast Belgian-based international financial database called...

The suicides of three Guantánamo detainees are likely to add momentum to calls--both inside the administration and in Congress--to close the U.S. facility in Cuba.

Don't ever accuse Robert Mueller of shirking his civic duty. Smack in the middle of last week's constitutional crisis over the FBI raid of Rep. William Jefferson's Capitol Hill office, the conscientous FBI director didn't show up at the office one morning.

The role of Vice President Dick Cheney in the criminal case stemming from the outing of White House critic Joseph Wilson's CIA wife is likely to get fresh attention as a result of newly disclosed notes showing that Cheney personally asked whether Wilson had been sent by his wife on a "junket" to Africa.Cheney's notes, written on the margins of a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed column by former ambassador Joseph Wilson, were included as part of a filing Friday night by prosecutor Patrick...

George W. Bush likes to be seen as a man who dwells above the pettiness of political warfare. He has said he doesn't read the newspapers and shrugs off media criticism as carping of the chattering classes.

The disclosure by federal prosecutors of more than 200 e-mails from lobbyist Jack Abramoff sheds new light on how the disgraced Washington power broker worked tirelessly to provide perks and favors to a former Bush administration official in a quest for favorable treatment from the government.Abramoff, the e-mails show, bombarded then General Services Administration chief of staff David Safavian—who later worked in a senior position at the White House—with offers of sports tickets, golf...

The Supreme Court this week will hear arguments in a big case: whether to allow the Bush administration to try Guantánamo detainees in special military tribunals with limited rights for the accused.

The justice department's case against accused 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui is in trouble. The Feds also have a problem in another case. The credibility of the FBI's star witness against a Pakistani-American accused of Qaeda ties is under fire after he testified he saw Ayman al-Zawahiri at a mosque attended by the de-fendant in Lodi, Calif., in 1999.

The upcoming trial of two pro-Israeli lobbyists accused of sharing classified U.S. government information with Israeli diplomats is causing anxiety within the State Department in the wake of a subpoena to a top U.S. diplomat who now serves as Washington's deputy ambassador to Iraq.The diplomat, David Satterfield, was one of a number of high level U.S. government officials—including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, national security advisor Stephen Hadley and national security advisor for...

Newly released court papers could put holes in the defense of Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, in the Valerie Plame leak case.

The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Bush administration says its phone spying program yielded information that helped to foil at least two terror attacks. Some critics aren't convinced.