Rep. Nancy Pelosi last month responded to the Bush administration's warrantless spying scandal by revealing that she'd known about it all along and had privately "expressed [her] strong concerns in a classified letter to the Administration and later verbally."

Pelosi was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and she recently asked that her Oct. 11, 2001, letter to Michael V. Hayden, then director of the National Security Agency, be declassified.

"During your appearance before the committee on October 1, you indicated that you had been operating since the September 11 attacks with an expansive view of your authorities with respect to the conduct of electronic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and related statutes, orders, regulations, and guidelines. You seemed to be inviting expressions of concern from us," Pelosi wrote at the time.

Although she expressed concern and asked for more information about whether "specific presidential authorization" had been given, Congress didn't intervene, and the illegal wiretaps continued for about four years, unbeknownst to the public until the New York Times revealed them last month. In other words, Pelosi appears to have participated in the cover-up of what Harvard professor Laurence Tribe this month, in a letter to Rep. John Conyers, called "as grave an abuse of executive authority as I can recall ever having studied."

While leaking the classified information to the media or otherwise revealing it publicly could have exposed Pelosi to criminal liability, the information finally came to light because the Times was given it by "nearly a dozen current and former officials."

Pelosi addressed the matter during a Jan. 14 town hall forum by saying, "They say she went along with this all along, but I did not. I objected in writing." (Steven T. Jones)