The Washington Post has a couple of extraordinary excerpts from Barton Gellman’s new book about Dick Cheney, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. It’s a captivating read, detailing how the Vice President and his small cadre of allies drove the administration to the brink of a Constitutional crisis — with President Bush almost entirely in the dark. At issue: the renewal of the administration’s warrentless domestic surveillance program, which Justice Department lawyers had determined was illegal.

Read the entire series, but here’s an excerpt with remarkable new details about the gathering at then-Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital bed at George Washington University Medical Center in March 2004. The principals in the scene: Deputy Attorney General James Comey, FBI director Robert Mueller, and Jack Goldsmith, Chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Late that Wednesday afternoon, Bush returned from Cleveland. In early evening, the phone rang at the makeshift FBI command center at George Washington University Medical Center, where Ashcroft remained in intensive care. According to two officials who saw the FBI logs, the president was on the line [4]. Bush told the ailing Cabinet chief to expect a visit from Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.

A Senate hearing in 2007 described some of what happened next. But much of the story remained untold [5].

Alerted by Ashcroft’s chief of staff, Comey, Goldsmith and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III raced toward the hospital, abandoning double-parked vehicles and running up a stairwell as fast as their legs could pump.

Comey reached Ashcroft’s bedside first. Goldsmith and his colleague Patrick F. Philbin were close behind. Now came Card and Gonzales, holding an envelope. If Comey would not sign the papers, maybe Ashcroft would.

The showdown with the vice president the day before had been excruciating, the pressure “so great it could crush you like a grape,” Comey said [6]. This was worse.

Was Comey going to sit there and watch a barely conscious man make his mark? On an order that he believed, and knew Ashcroft believed, to be unlawful?

Unexpectedly, Ashcroft roused himself. Previous accounts have said he backed his deputy. He did far more than that. Ashcroft told the president’s men he never should have certified the program in the first place [7].

“You drew the circle so tight I couldn’t get the advice that I needed,” Ashcroft said, according to Comey. He knew things now, the attorney general said, that he should have been told before. Spent, he sank back in his bed.

Mueller arrived just after Card and Gonzales departed. He shared a private moment with Ashcroft, bending over to hear the man’s voice.

“Bob, I’m struggling,” Ashcroft said.

“In every man’s life there comes a time when the good Lord tests him,” Mueller replied. “You have passed your test tonight.”