Fredo and Dubby and the Brain … oh, my!

March 19th, 2007

Here’s a collection of reads on the Gonzales affair. I think it will be very hard for Bush to ignore the bulk of his presence weighing down the Republican persona, which is already crawling on its knees under the load of corruption. I doubt that Dub would fire him, but he would be pressured from all sides to accept a resignation. Tony Snow answered a reporters questions by saying, “We hope he stays” — a surprisingly wimpy response from the take-no-prisoners Administration. The fire under this pot continues to burn HOT.

I feel badly for Gonzales, on some levels — an interesting article below explores his roots and it’s clear that he is, on a number of levels, an amazing success story. On the other hand, as with Scooter, when you lay down with dogs you get fleas. If Alberto confused the Great American Dream with the Great Republican Takeover, he is paying that price … and it’s always some foot soldier doing the paying, isn’t it. Dubby still dreams on, crown in place, drink [so they whisper, and that would explain much] in one hand and scepter in the other.

The Pubs are uneasy with Fredo, he’s always been Bush’s man, not theirs … which is why they feel free to turn on him now. Still, the whole issue of attorney purge, they insist, is just conspiracy theory — yeah, Hillary’s “vast Right Wing conspiracy” finally evident to anyone with a brain.

Alberto will be easier to deal with than Rove, who has fingers in this pot as well [see last piece] — this “serving at the pleasure of the president” crappola can only go so far with Fredo, who is appointed to protect the AMERICAN PEOPLE rather than pander to the American President [who has his own personal counsel.] Rove is the guy who whispers in the presidents ear, and any position he has truly IS at Bush’s pleasure. Karl is NOT a foot soldier, he’s an “architect” — and I’m not sure Dubby would get rid of him without surrendering to a lobotomy. Bush may be an ignorant man, but he’s canny — and Karl is his long-standing play mate and enforcer.

Driving a stake through Rove would ultimately neuter a weakened George W. Bush and his machine. Bringing down Gonzales would be another of the bruises spreading on the presidency, but it won’t solve our problem. Getting rid of Karl well might, he’s the spider that spins the web … and the attorney web appears to connect to the CIA, among other dark agendas. One of the “replacement” attorneys appears to no longer be credentialed. And one of them was investigating my own Governor, Roy [Big Dog Pub] Blunt’s son.

There IS a certain Watergate feel to all this [and isn't it amazing that we're THERE again?!] Time will tell … but I’m pleased at the return of oversight — and America is watching.

Jude

U.S. Attorney’s firing may be linked to CIA probe
Think Progress
March 18, 2007
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/03/18/us-attorneys-firing-may-be-linked-to-cia-probe/

McClatchy reports tonight:

Fired San Diego U.S. attorney Carol Lam notified the Justice Department that she intended to execute search warrants on a high-ranking CIA official as part of a corruption probe the day before a Justice Department official sent an e-mail that said Lam needed to be fired, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Sunday.

Feinstein, D-Calif., said the timing of the e-mail suggested that Lam’s dismissal may have been connected to the corruption probe.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse denied in an e-mail that there was any link.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said last week that while President Bush has the authority to fire attorneys at will, “if it is done to stop an ongoing investigation, then you do get into the criminal area.” ++

CBS: Gonzales Firing “Only A Matter Of Time”
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/16/politics/main2580260.shtml

Why Conservatives Can’t Govern
Robert L. Borosage
March 19, 2007
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/03/19/why_conservatives_cant_govern.php

Donald Rumsfeld has been axed. Tom DeLay cut and ran. “Scooter” Libby stands convicted. Michael “you’re doing a heck of a job” Brown was tossed. Newt Gingrich disgraced himself. And now the clueless Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, is surely the next to go.

Why this confederacy of dunces? The conservative National Review cover asks plaintively, “Can’t Anyone Here Play this Game?” Time Magazine puts conservative icon Ronald Reagan on its cover, a tear rolling down his face, reporting on “How the Right Went Wrong.” But it’s not incompetence or corruption—although both abound—that fostered the misrule of this conservative administration. And Reagan would feel not dismayed, but right at home with the follies and crimes. Remember: Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese, was disgraced. His national security advisor copped a plea. Oliver North stood convicted. His defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, would have been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice if George Bush the first hadn’t issued a preemptive pardon.

What is it about conservative administrations that lead them into disgrace and indictment?

Incompetence isn’t at the core of these scandals—ideology is.

Conservative presidents—from Nixon to Reagan to Bush—believe in the imperial presidency. They assume that in the area of the national security, the president operates above the law, or as Nixon put it, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” They operate routinely behind the shield of secrecy and executive privilege, with utter disdain for the law. So Reagan spurned the Congress when it cut off funds for his loony covert war on tiny Nicaragua. And Bush trampled the laws to set up the torture camps in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and elsewhere. Each would seek to keep their lawlessness secret; and that would foster lies, obstruction of justice and ultimately disgrace.

Second, conservatives are acutely aware that they represent a minority, not a majority, position in America. From Nixon to Lee Atwater to Karl Rove, they play politics and exploit America’s divides with back-alley brass knuckles—from Reagan’s welfare queen to Bush’s impugning the patriotism of Georgia Senator Max Cleland, a Vietnam War hero who literally sacrificed his limbs in the service of his country. They excel in the politics of personal destruction, as Democratic presidential candidates Michael Dukakis and John Kerry discovered. And in the grand tradition of the establishment in American politics, they are relentless in seeking to suppress the vote, particularly of the poor and minorities who would vote against them in large numbers.

Gonzales’ imbroglio is a direct expression of this. At its core is the run-up to the 2006 elections with the Republicans under siege for the most corrupt Congress ever. The White House and Republican politicians grew exercised at Republican prosecutors who they considered too lax in exposing potential Democratic corruption, too avid in pursuing Republican crimes or too slow in prosecuting reports of “voter fraud,” the GOP code for using investigations to disrupt minority registration and get out the vote programs, and to intimidate wary black and Latino voters. Justice was ranking U.S. attorneys based on whether they were “loyal Bushies.”

The axing of David C. Iglesias, the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, is the archetype. With New Mexico up for grabs, Iglesias was being pressured directly and shamelessly by Republican Sen. Pete Domenici and Mickey Barnett, the attorney representing the Bush campaign in New Mexico to hustle up indictments on alleged incidents of voter fraud. (Iglesias found no evidence of any program designed to influence an election.) Vulnerable Rep. Heather Wilson lobbied him to bring indictments against state Democratic officials before the election to help make the point that when it comes to corruption, everyone does it. When Iglesias refused to respond, he was targeted despite glowing performance reviews. The firings took place as an object lesson for U.S .attorneys headed into the donnybrook that will be the 2008 election. As Iglesias put it , “main Justice was up to its eyeballs in partisan political maneuvers.”

Gonzales will surely be the next administration official to fall on his sword. Republican legislators are already questioning his ability to serve the president effectively. We’ll see more stories about White House mismanagement and incompetence. But don’t be misled. Bush and Rove know how to play this game. They play by their rules, the rules that conservative administrations have followed since Nixon. And that’s the real lesson. The phrase “conservative misrule” is a redundancy. The two words mean exactly the same thing. ++

Gonzales’ plight puts Bush at risk
Aides focus on keeping the controversy at Justice from spreading.
Doyle McManus, LA Times
March 18, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-assess18mar18,1,543110,full.story?coll=la-news-politics-national

WASHINGTON — As more Republicans called last week on Alberto R. Gonzales to resign, President Bush’s aides began to look beyond the attorney general and focus on preventing the controversy over the firing of federal prosecutors from spreading — and endangering Karl Rove, the president’s top political advisor.

“This is not going to go away,” warned Joseph E. DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration. “I’m sure the president is going to let it go as long as he can … but there’s only so much bleeding he can take.”

The fracas over the fired prosecutors reflects a larger underlying problem for Bush: His political standing as president, already battered by the war in Iraq and domestic missteps like the handling of Hurricane Katrina, has only continued to erode since his party lost control of Congress in November.

Initially, the dispute centered on the Justice Department, Gonzales and his top aides. But documents released last week suggested that Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers were also involved in the decision to fire eight U.S. attorneys after the 2004 election. That brought the issue to the threshold of the Oval Office and prompted reporters to ask whether Bush had been involved.

“I want you to be clear here: Don’t go dropping it at the president’s door,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday when asked about Bush’s involvement.

Although U.S. attorneys are presidential appointees who can be removed at the president’s discretion, the firings have flared into a potentially damaging issue for the administration because of indications that they may have resulted from political pressure.

Gonzales and his aides initially told Congress that the prosecutors were fired because their performance was unsatisfactory. But documents released last week showed that officials also discussed whether the U.S. attorneys had been “loyal Bushies,” in the words of one Justice Department e-mail.

Democrats, with their new majorities in the House and Senate, quickly jumped on the issue.

Bush’s diminished popularity, combined with his administration’s disdain for Congress’ view of legislative prerogatives, have given the president a slimmer margin for error — even with members of his own party.

“You’ve got Republicans in Congress who have run out their string with him,” said Norman J. Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the largely conservative American Enterprise Institute.

The shift to Democratic control has accelerated the controversy.

“Elections matter,” Ornstein said. “If the Republicans were still in charge of Congress, even by one vote, the reaction to this would have been that it was just a personnel matter. The administration might still have had a problem, but it would have taken a lot longer to develop.”

Several leading Republicans said they expected Gonzales to resign in the next few weeks.

They asked to speak on condition of anonymity because their comments conflicted with Bush’s public position that his attorney general does not need to leave.

Two Republican senators, John E. Sununu of New Hampshire and Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, and one Republican congressman, Dana Rohrabacher of Huntington Beach, have publicly called on Gonzales to resign.

Others have said privately that the attorney general should leave.

And no leading Republican in Congress has stepped forward to defend Gonzales — a sign that any political support he once enjoyed has virtually disappeared.

Democrats in the Senate and House have said they want Miers and Rove, President Bush’s chief political strategist, to testify about their roles in the decision to fire the prosecutors. Rove, Miers and Gonzales have been among the president’s closest aides for more than a decade; all worked for him when he was governor of Texas in the 1990s.

Early reports had indicated that the idea of the firings originated with Miers, but on Friday, Snow said that may not be the case. “At this juncture, people have hazy memories,” he said.

Snow said the White House has not decided whether Rove or Miers should testify or whether to release internal documents to Congress, which has the power to subpoena witnesses — Justice Department officials and others.

But the president can assert a counterclaim of executive privilege to shield internal deliberations at the White House.

White House Counsel Fred F. Fielding spent much of last week on Capitol Hill trying to determine what Congress would insist on, officials said, but he gave no indication of what the administration was prepared to give.

“This is one more chapter in the defense of Karl Rove,” said one leading GOP figure who insisted on anonymity because he was speaking ill of the president’s most powerful aide. “This isn’t accountability, it’s damage control, and it’s protection for Karl.”

But other Republicans defended Rove.

“There’s no suggestion of illegality in anything he has done,” DiGenova said. “He wasn’t the one making inaccurate representations on Capitol Hill. I would think that would trump any demand [from Congress] for testimony.”

Rove, speaking at a university last week, dismissed the controversy as groundless. “We’re at a point where people want to play politics with it,” he said.

Some Republicans in Congress have been gauging the electoral cross-currents along with the Democrats.

The two Republican senators who have called on Gonzales to resign face reelection campaigns next year.

Another senator who faces reelection, John Cornyn of Texas, normally one of the White House’s most reliable allies, has said he was disappointed in the attorney general.

“The appearances are troubling,” Cornyn told reporters last week. “But in Texas we believe in having a fair trial, and then we have the hanging,” he added.

Gonzales compounded his own vulnerability by being high-handed with Congress, Ornstein noted.

“He has treated Congress with the back of his hand,” he said. “He stonewalled everything, even when he had Republican chairmen. He built no reservoir of support.”

As a result, he said, “we’re seeing what I call the battered Congress syndrome. After years of being slapped around by the White House, at some point there’s a counter-reaction.”

Finally, the Justice Department and White House made matters worse by repeatedly issuing inconsistent and incomplete accounts of how the U.S. attorneys had been fired.

“The incompetence has been amazing,” DiGenova charged. “Managing crises, beginning with preventing crises, is what life in Washington is about…. But these guys didn’t have a plan ready to answer questions once the problem became public. They still don’t have their stories straight.

“There are too many Stepford husbands in this administration: young men who are perfectly coiffed and have great clothes, but very few of them have ever been in a courtroom,” he added.

Charles O. Jones, a presidential scholar at the University of Wisconsin, said the controversy had weakened a presidency that was already fragile.

“By the normal measures of electoral support and popular support, Bush had the lowest political standing of any president on record when he was reelected in 2004,” Jones said.

“He argued that his reelection alone gave him political capital, but it was damned slim,” Jones said. “And since then, there has been a decline in his position — a steady decline. There’s not a whole lot of political capital left for him to draw on.”

The fragility of Bush’s mandate, Jones said, stems partly from his governing style: an “executive approach” that rests on unilateral action instead of a “legislative approach” that relies on patient negotiation with Congress.

“That approach can produce positive results … and you can argue that it did after Sept. 11,” Jones said.

But “it means you’d better get it right, because if you screw up, you’re going to lose your supporters too.

“It’s Bush’s governing style, and no one can expect that someone like Bush can simply switch styles,” he added. ++

Dazzling rise from difficult history
`I’ve overcome a lot of obstacles in my life’
Andrew Zajac, Chicago Trib
March 18, 2007
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0703180179mar18,1,1785526.story

WASHINGTON — At his lowest moment in the highest law-enforcement office, with criticism pouring in from all sides, including the president who appointed him, Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales made a rare reference last week to his difficult past, speaking defiantly of his determination to weather the controversy over the firing of eight federal prosecutors.

“Let me just say one thing,” Gonzales said. “I’ve overcome a lot of obstacles in my life to become attorney general. I am here not because I give up. I am here because I’ve learned from my mistakes, because I accept responsibility, and because I’m committed to doing my job.”

Gonzales has rarely spoken of the turmoil that has shadowed his family, emphasizing instead an inspirational biography that takes him from a boyhood in a cramped house that lacked hot water all the way to the elbow of a president.

The story is indeed impressive. Gonzales’ parents, Pablo and Maria, met as migrant farmworkers in Texas and settled in a town aptly named Humble. Pablo Gonzales worked in construction and later as a maintenance man. He was a hard drinker but a good provider, the story goes, who, with two brothers, built a two-bedroom house in which he raised Alberto and seven other children.

The reality, however, as reflected in public records and interviews, is grittier and more tragic. Gonzales’ family members have repeatedly stumbled, creating a bleak counterpoint to his dazzling rise to become the nation’s first Hispanic attorney general.

Gonzales’ father was arrested on drunken driving charges five times in 17 years covering much of Gonzales’ childhood and adolescence. Pablo Gonzales died in an industrial accident in 1982 when Gonzales was at Harvard Law School.

A younger brother, Rene Gonzales, died under mysterious circumstances in 1980. In 1991, the same year Alberto Gonzales became one of the first Hispanic partners at the white shoe Houston law firm of Vinson & Elkins, his younger sister Theresa pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine with intent to deliver. Nine years later, while Gonzales was on the Texas Supreme Court, his mother, Maria Gonzales, and another brother put up their homes as collateral to raise bail for Theresa after she was charged with the same offense, according to court records.

Most of these details did not arise in his Senate confirmation hearings, even though they might reasonably have been thought to affect his views about crime, drug and alcohol policy, and sentencing–all issues overseen or influenced by an attorney general.

Their omissions illustrate the remarkable extent to which Gonzales, 51, has managed to control the telling of his life story and the impenetrability of his outwardly mild and friendly manner.

They are also a function of Gonzales’ peculiar rise to power. His career in government, first in Texas and then in Washington, has been under the protective wing of a single man. Since 1995, Gonzales has worked exclusively in jobs given to him by George W. Bush.

Focus on background

The current tempest is refocusing attention on this feature of Gonzales’ ascent. Some Democrats blame Gonzales’ loyalty to President Bush for his failure to challenge the firings of the prosecutors as politically and judicially questionable. And with many now calling for his head, Gonzales has no power base outside the Oval Office to protect him and lend support.

In addition, Gonzales’ sudden moment in the unflattering spotlight has prompted a re-examination of who he is as a person and the background that propelled him to his position.

The first son and second-oldest of the Gonzales children, Alberto Gonzales from an early age seemed intent on advancing beyond Humble.

Gonzales attended Houston-area public schools and earned notice as an undersized but hard-hitting defensive back and linebacker at MacArthur High School. He belonged to the National Honor Society, the International Club and the Christian Student Union.

“He surrounded himself with people he thought were going to be successful,” recalled Marine Jones, one of Gonzales’ guidance counselors.

But Gonzales learned early that friendship with whites was subject to painful challenges, and he carries that memory to this day.

“I dated a girl in high school whose parents did not like me dating their daughter because I was Mexican,” Gonzales said in an unusually revealing address at the Air Force Academy last month. “She and I didn’t care about our differences, but her parents couldn’t see past them.

“I remember vowing, at that time, to prove to the girl’s parents, someday, that I was just as good as they were,” he said.

In fact, he did just that, according to Teresa Osborne Brown, a MacArthur High classmate and former girlfriend.

Gonzales and Brown dated for part of their junior and most of their senior year, and attended the prom together.

But their courtship was bittersweet because, Brown said, her parents didn’t like their daughter dating a Hispanic.

“It’s pretty much a case of racial discrimination. It just didn’t set well with mom and dad,” said Brown, who now lives in Tennessee.

Years later, Gonzales, by then a partner at Vinson & Elkins, ran into Brown’s father on a Houston street. “He could have been vengeful, but he was nice to my father,” Brown said. “My father was very impressed. Dad had to admit he might have been wrong.”

Of his own father, Gonzales speaks almost worshipfully, marveling at a man “who worked harder than any person I have ever known.”

“I suppose to some he was just a common laborer with a 2nd-grade education; to me he was a hero with hands that could create anything,” he said in a speech last fall.

Gonzales acknowledged a darker side to his father. “My father had a terrible drinking problem,” Gonzales said in a June 2005 interview with the Academy of Achievement.”There were many nights when I remember him coming home and, you know, severe arguments with my mother and throwing the pillow over my head and just trying not to listen.”

Still, he said in the same interview, “no matter how much he drank on a particular night, if it was a work day the next morning, he was always up.”

From 1960 through 1977, records in Harris County, Texas, show that Pablo Gonzales was arrested five times for driving while intoxicated and convicted four times, the last time on a felony count.

He died at 52 in 1982 in an accident at the rice mill where he worked. Two years earlier, Gonzales’ younger brother, Rene, died violently in circumstances that are a tightly held secret within the family.

“He was killed back in ‘80 or ‘81 in Houston,” Gonzales’ brother, Antonio Gonzales, a Houston police officer, said in a telephone interview last summer. He also declined further comment.

Building his career

By then Alberto Gonzales had gone farther than anyone in his family ever had. He’d graduated from high school, joined the Air Force, then won admission to the Air Force Academy.

After deciding he wasn’t suited to a military career, Gonzales transferred to Rice University in Houston, before moving on to Harvard for law school.

Gonzales spent much of the 1980s and early 1990s in a “dirt and deals” real estate practice at Vinson & Elkins, while building up his resume with service for civic groups like Catholic Charities, Leadership Houston and United Way.

Months after making partner at the law firm in 1991, Gonzales married his wife, Rebecca Turner Gonzales. Through service in the Texas State Bar Association, Gonzales met Harriet Miers of Dallas, who until January was White House counsel.

In the 1990s, Miers was Bush’s personal lawyer and helped bring Gonzales into the inner circle of the soon-to-be candidate for governor of Texas.

In the ensuing years, Gonzales has been a Bush retainer exclusively, serving as general counsel, Texas secretary of state, Texas Supreme Court justice and White House counsel before taking the helm of the Justice Department in February 2005.

Bush took Gonzales to unimagined heights, but the rapid, unimpeded rise left him without much experience in making friends or in political street-fighting, both of which would come in handy now, said Glenn Smith, a former Democratic consultant in Texas.

“He was never in many public conflicts that he had to fight his way through,” Smith said. “We’ve never had a chance to take his measure. He is where he is because of Bush.”

In January 2000, while Gonzales sat on the Texas Supreme Court, his sister Theresa and an accomplice were arrested in a Houston-area drug bust in which police seized 40 grams of cocaine, nearly a pound of marijuana, more than $3,000 in cash, an assault rifle, a sawed-off shotgun and a .50 caliber handgun, plus several hundred rounds of ammunition.

Court records indicate that at the time of her arrest, Theresa Gonzales was on 10 years’ probation following a guilty plea to a similar charge in 1991.

Theresa Gonzales was sentenced to 90 days’ “jail therapy” and the charge against her was dismissed, court records show.

Theresa Gonzales, now 43, declined to comment. Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said Alberto Gonzales didn’t know about his sister’s arrest until after the case was settled.

“The Gonzales family chose not to inform then-Judge Gonzales because of his position until after the matter had been fully adjudicated,” Roehrkasse said in a statement.

But now, perhaps for the first time, it is Alberto Gonzales who is the target of those who say he did something wrong and should be punished. So far, he has offered a vigorous defense, but that resolve will no doubt be tested as he faces his own form of public trial. ++

Pressure Builds Over Gonzales, Rove
Michael Isikoff, Richard Wolffe And Evan Thomas, Newsweek
26 March 2007 Issue
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17664172/site/newsweek/

At highly charged moments, attorney General Alberto Gonzales can seem placid, passive - at times, just plain out of it. In the summer of 2002, high-level Bush administration officials met to debate secretly a delicate issue: how aggressively could the CIA interrogate terror suspects? While the lawyers from Justice, Defense and the vice president’s office hotly debated definitions of torture (at times discussing specific interrogation techniques), Gonzales, who was then the White House counsel, sat by and said virtually nothing. The attorney general’s behavior was typical, say administration officials who have worked with him. His defenders say he likes to keep his counsel. Others wonder if he’s ill prepared, insecure or simply has nothing to say.

Last week Gonzales’s bland, what-me-worry? smile seemed to fade. He appeared slightly forlorn as he answered hostile questions from reporters at a hastily called press conference. He was asked about the role of the White House in firing a group of U.S. attorneys. “As we can all imagine,” he began, “in an organization of 110,000 people, I am not aware of every bit of information that passes through the halls of the Department of Justice …” He was aware, he said, that there was “a request from the White House as to the possibility of replacing all the U.S. attorneys. That was immediately rejected by me.” The impression was that Gonzales was merely responding to the ill-considered scheme of his successor as White House counsel (Harriet Miers); that he, personally, had not been in the loop for a series of controversial decisions that have set off a congressional brouhaha over the dismissal of one U.S. attorney in the summer of 2006 and seven more in December.

Two days after that presser, however, the White House turned over newly discovered e-mails showing that Gonzales, while he was still on the job at the White House in January 2005, had “briefly” discussed the idea of firing U.S. attorneys. (A Justice Department spokeswoman said Gonzales had “no recollection” of that.) The e-mails showed that Kyle Sampson, then a top aide to Attorney General John Ashcroft and later Gonzales’s chief of staff, talked about the possible purge of “15-20 percent” of the U.S. attorney corps deemed not to be “loyal Bushies.” The e-mails also showed that Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, had “stopped by” to ask a White House lawyer “how we planned to proceed regarding US Attorneys, whether we are going to allow all to stay, request resignations from all and accept only some of them, or selectively replace them, etc.” Sampson warned that firing all the U.S. attorneys could cause political problems. “That said,” Sampson wrote, “if Karl thinks there would be political will to do it, then so do I.”

The e-mails inflamed lawmakers who have long felt misled or ignored by the Bush White House. At least two Republicans have publicly demanded Gonzales’s firing or resignation. And Democrats who now control Congress want to know more about Rove and other White House officials. At the time Rove was asking questions, he was himself under investigation by a U.S. attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the Valerie Plame leak case. (Last week Rove dismissed the controversy over his role in firing the U.S. attorneys as “a lot of politics.”)

The controversy was in some ways Beltway political theater. Appointed for four-year terms, U.S. attorneys serve “at the pleasure of the president,” but their loyalties have long been mixed. These high-profile prosecutors are sometimes protégés of U.S. senators and routinely have their own political ambitions and law-enforcement agendas. Tension between independent-minded U.S. attorneys and their nominal bosses at the Justice Department is the norm. Presidents are within their rights to remove prosecutors deemed to be poor performers or political mavericks.

But in two or three cases, the Bush administration may have gone over the line. In New Mexico the administration canned David Iglesias, a clean-cut former Navy lawyer who had been the model for the Tom Cruise character in the movie “A Few Good Men.” Iglesias has told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was getting political pressure from lawmakers to indict Democrats in a local corruption case before the November elections. In Washington state, the ousted U.S. attorney, John McKay, has said that he took heat from local Republicans for failing to bring voter-fraud charges in a deadlocked gubernatorial race.

As Congress probes deeper, real crimes, like obstruction of justice, may be exposed. But for now, the scandal is perhaps best understood as the late-term agonies of an unpopular president - made more poignant by the possibility that President Bush will have to dump Gonzales, one of his oldest friends in politics. And if nothing else, the flap is one more instance of administration bumbling.

Judging from the e-mails released last week, the White House knew a backlash was coming. In December, as the Justice Department was preparing to sack seven U.S. attorneys, Gonzales’s chief of staff Sampson e-mailed Harriet Miers, “Prepare to Withstand Political Upheaval.” Sampson warned that “U.S. attorneys desiring to save their jobs (aided by their allies in the political arena as well as the Justice Department community) likely will make efforts to preserve themselves in office. We should expect those efforts to be strenuous.”

The message to be careful apparently did not sink in. Or perhaps, after six years of a Republican-controlled Congress, the Bush White House thought it could be highhanded with newly elected Democratic congressional leaders. In hindsight, the controversy might have been muted by a more straightforward approach to Congress.

Instead, a pair of senior Justice officials gave accounts to lawmakers that were, at best, incomplete. At a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, William Moschella, a top aide to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, vigorously defended the firings of the U.S. attorneys as a purely managerial move that had originated within the Justice Department. He said nothing about any nudging from the White House. McNulty had earlier given similar testimony, saying the attorneys had been let go for “job performance” reasons, an assertion that infuriated the fired prosecutors. But the two Justice officials have told colleagues that when they saw the e-mail accounts showing the attorney-purge idea had originated in the White House, they were surprised and appalled. “I felt sick,” Moschella told NEWSWEEK. “I basically saw my professional life flash before my eyes.” Moschella and McNulty blamed Sampson. The attorney general’s chief of staff had sat in as they prepped for their testimony and “never said a word,” according to a Justice Department official who wished to remain anonymous discussing a private meeting. Sampson resigned last week. His lawyer, Brad Berenson, says Sampson believed he had “let the attorney general down,” but that other senior Justice officials knew about White House involvement. “Kyle did not mislead anyone,” the lawyer said.

The conflicting accounts have spurred congressional investigators to cry cover-up. Democrats are now pushing to get White House officials, especially Rove, on the witness stand. The White House will probably argue that it would set a bad precedent to allow congressmen to grill the president’s personal advisers and rummage through their files. But since the White House has already started releasing confidential e-mails, it will have more difficulty making the familiar case for Executive Privilege.

The man chosen by the president to handle this delicate task - Fred Fielding, who replaced Miers as White House counsel last month - has plenty of experience. He was a young White House lawyer during Watergate in the Nixon administration and counsel to President Reagan during the Iran-contra scandal. Fielding, 67, is regarded as a savvy lawyer who believes in getting out ahead of a scandal. Fielding is also seen as a Washington establishment figure brought in to rescue Bush from the mistakes of his old Texas cronies, Rove, Miers and Gonzales.

One of Fielding’s tougher tasks may be to push out Gonzales. It is doubtful that Bush himself will have the stomach for it. (According to the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, voters are evenly divided: about a third think Gonzales should resign, a third say he should stay on and a third are undecided.) As governor of Texas, Bush appointed Gonzales to be his counsel and then elevated him to become Texas secretary of State and then justice of the state Supreme Court. Bush sees Gonzales as a classic American success story, the son of Mexican immigrants who overcame childhood poverty. The president is personally close to Gonzales and his family. And he owes Gonzales a debt of gratitude: in 1996, Gonzales pulled off a skillful courtroom maneuver to allow Bush to escape jury duty in a drunken-driving case. Bush’s lawyer made the clever argument that the governor had a conflict of interest, since he might be called on one day to pardon the defendant (a dancer at a local strip club). Had Bush gone through the normal jury voir dire, he might have had to disclose a 1976 DUI arrest, thereby jeopardizing his presidential ambitions.

There is one more catch to shoving out Gonzales: finding a replacement who can be confirmed by the Democratic-controlled Senate may be difficult. A former senior White House aide who is knowledgeable about current thinking inside the White House (but did not wish to be quoted discussing it) says that one of the few possible contenders is Bill Barr, who was attorney general in the Bush 41 administration. But any contender would have to want the job - in the last two years of a weakened administration - and President Bush can be touchy about any suggestion that he needs to be rescued by his father’s former aides.

Recently, a trio of senators - Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy; Arlen Specter, the senior Republican on the committee, and Democrat Charles Schumer - sat down with Gonzales in his wood-paneled conference room to discuss the firings of the U.S. attorneys. Gonzales was initially combative and defensive. “Why do I have to prove anything to you?” he demanded at one point, according to a source who was in the room but does not wish to be identified revealing a private conversation. He insisted that only poor performers had been fired. “Everyone was in the bottom tier,” he said. “Everyone?” asked Schumer. What about David Iglesias of New Mexico? (The department’s internal evaluations had given Iglesias glowing marks.) Gonzales hesitated. “I believe so,” he said, but he seemed uncertain. As the meeting was breaking up, Gonzales suddenly switched tacks and seemed to want to be cooperative. “How can we make this better?” he asked. “What can we do?” According to this source, the attorney general seemed to some in the room to be genuinely befuddled. ++

Rove in the Dock
The Architects of Centralized Power
MIKE WHITNEY, Counter Punch
March 19, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney03192007.html

Democratic leaders have consistently shown that they are no match for their Republican counterparts. Whenever an opportunity presents itself to swoop down for the kill; congressional Democrats start preening for the cameras or bloviating on the floor of the House.

That’s not how you get things done in Washington. If the Democrats are serious about ruling, they ought to bring a sledgehammer to work and start pounding away at the obstacles.

The firing of the “Gonzales 8″ is a perfect opportunity to zero-in on the Justice Department and start tossing bodies on the burn pile. But it’ll take someone with enough brains to figure out what’s really going on and big enough cahones to go for the jugular. That’s how a predator brings down the live-game and that’s what it’ll take to rout the mob bosses at the D.O.J. Anyone who gets squeamish over a little political blood-letting should probably get a job in retail–not government.

Gonzales is already on his last legs. He signed his own death warrant by his ham-fisted treatment of the US Attorneys. The firings have turned out to be big trouble for Team Bush. Gonzales has hung a giant Bull’s Eye on the administration’s back and then pushed them in front of the firing squad.All the Democrats have to do is take aim and blast away.

But are they up to it?

The firing of the Attorney’s appears to be one of those careless slip-ups that happen when men are blinded by hubris. Rove and Gonzales knew that their actions would start a political firestorm, but decided to go ahead anyway. Now they’re getting pummeled from all sides and someone will have to be thrown to the wolves. The question is: Who?

There’s no doubt now that the firings were politically motivated. Whether the attorneys failed to investigate voter fraud cases (which would have contested elections where Democrats won) or whether they were just too eager in pursuing corruption charges against Republicans; the cases all bear one striking similarity”the attorneys’ resisted Washington’s meddling and then ended up paying the price. They were all canned. End of story.

The Dems need to find out who was behind the purge? Was it Bush’s buddy Gonzales or the Houston schoolmarm, Harriet Miers?

The problem is that neither Miers nor Gonzales had a motive. They didn’t care how cases were prosecuted in San Diego or Seattle. What difference did it make to them? And why would they want to replace hard working, conservative attorneys with party hacks? They had nothing to gain and everything to lose.

The only one who had a motive was Karl Rove. Rove’s job is to build a permanent Republican majority and smash the Democratic Party in the process. If that means replacing principled conservatives in the US Attorneys Office with Bush loyalists; then, so be it.

The question of “corrupting the justice system” probably never entered Rove’s mind. The Military Commissions Act, the Patriot Act, the repeal of habeas corpus, due process and the presumption of innocence are all grim reminders of the administration’s contempt for justice. They have equal disdain for law enforcement; preferring 9-11-type round ups by federal shock troops rather than the traditional methods of crime prevention.

So why are the Democrats so surprised that the US Attorney’s offices would be turned into a political beehive for Bush loyalists?

Isn’t that the logical extension of the way the administration conducts all of its business? Politics are of paramount importance and everything else is secondary. Rove was just assembling the levers of power so he could destroy his rivals whenever he chose.

Wasn’t that the real objective?

Of the hundreds of articles which have appeared in the mainstream press; only one reveals the real strategy behind firings. Adam Liptak of the New York Times summed it up like this:

“Whatever motivated the recent firings, they are of a piece with the administration’s efforts to centralize power in Washington.A crisis like the Sept. 11 attacks creates the occasion for a monolithic model for law enforcement and national security..It creates a lot of pressure for a top-down model. That includes even traditionally autonomous actors like U.S. attorneys”
~ Adam Liptak, “For Federal Prosecutors, Politics is Ever-Present” NY Times

Bingo!

“Centralized power”, “top-down model”, “monolithic model of law enforcement and national security”; these are the basic elements of authoritarian, “one party” rule. In other words–dictatorship.

Whose dream is that; Gonzales? Miers?

Nonsense.

The purge of the US Attorneys has Rove’s bloody fingerprints all over it. Justice doesn’t matter. Law enforcement doesn’t matter. All that matters is destroying one’s enemies, rewarding one’s friends, and strengthening the one party system. That’s it. It’s even better if the friends are crooks. That just makes them easier to control.

The Democrats need to realize that the Bush administration’s success relies heavily on key players who are indispensable to the smooth operation of the political machine. Rove is the main gear in the state apparatus. He is the brain-trust for Bush’s oligarchy of racketeers.

Taking down Rove should be the Democrats’ top priority. Ousting Miers or Gonzales achieves nothing. It is a waste of time. If you’re gonna beat Bush, you gotta go after Rove.

That means issuing subpoenas, building a case, marching Rove to the dock, and grilling him until he cracks.

Anything else is bound to fail. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Entry Filed under: Political Waves