Looking under the rocks — updates on the scandal de jour

Note: remember, cut ‘n paste links — happily, this problem should be resolved by next week.

My ears perked up a bit when I discovered that Fitz was on the infamous list of prosecutors evaluated … his “recommendation” had been redacted from the earliest memo’s available. In this political climate, I would have been surprised to find the Bushies going after him … turns out he was labeled a prosecutor who had “not distinguished himself.” Oh, REALLY?

Of course, how he might have distinguished himself would have involved a complete makeover of his ethical standards. The lawyers were rated thus:

“Bold = Recommend retaining; strong U.S. attorneys who have managed well, and exhibited loyalty to the president and attorney general.

Strikeout = Recommend removing; weak U.S. attorneys who have been ineffectual managers and prosecutors, chafed against administration initiatives, etc.

Nothing = No recommendation; have not distinguished themselves either positively or negatively”

The Congress and the press can chew over the details of all this, but clearly these determinations were partisan, throwing weight towards unitary presidential power and Republican agenda. The Congress is digging through the emails to find connections to “embarrassing” cases — clearly Carol Lam in California had her finger on the trigger of something that could have climbed up the ladder to bite Uncle Dick.

This is obstruction — the same kind of “dampening down” energy and backroom string-pulling that the Bush Coup has given us for seven years. I was pleased to see that the Congress is trying to turn back that bit in the Patriot Act that gave Fredo the power to do this without oversight — if we peck away at the PA, its flaws will take center stage.

Bush sent Gonzales a vote of confidence and the White House is insisting they are not looking for a replacement, but they protest too much, me’thinks … buzz has it that is exactly what’s happening today. The Hard Right is spewing loudly about “fighting back,” already disquieted about Rummy and Scooters demise, which upset the “don’t give an inch” bunch.

Here’s the in’s and out’s … from overview to nasty details being unearthed as the rocks are kicked over … and more on Rove, who came to political light in the Watergate years and is increasingly in the crosshairs of complicity with all this. God/dess bless subpoena power. Snips from Froomkin provide a look at the Rove controversy and links to op/ed’s, first.

An aside, I’ve posted a Wayne Madsen tinfoil-hat report last … but remember, where there’s smoke, there’s fire; Mr. Rove and his Bushie buddies have their fingers in everything, so I’m pulling the hat down firmly over my ears and waiting for the “transmissions.” As the guy behind the curtain, Karl sure casts a wide shadow.

Jude

Will Rove Testify?
Froomkin, WaPo
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/03/19/BL2007031900966_pf.html
[open for links]

Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in the New York Times: “The Democratic senator leading the inquiry into the dismissal of federal prosecutors insisted Sunday that Karl Rove and other top aides to President Bush must testify publicly and under oath, setting up a confrontation between Congress and the White House, which has said it is unlikely to agree to such a demand.

“Some Republicans have suggested that Mr. Rove testify privately, if only to tamp down the political uproar over the inquiry, which centers on whether the White House allowed politics to interfere with law enforcement.

“But Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, seemed to rule out such a move on Sunday. He said his committee would vote Thursday on whether to issue subpoenas for Mr. Rove as well as Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, and William K. Kelley, the deputy White House counsel. . . .

“One Republican strategist close to the White House, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to appear to be representing the administration, said: ‘No president is going to let their senior staff assistant to the president go testify. Forget that. They might agree to do an informal interview, but they’ll never testify.’”

Here is Leahy on ABC: “I do not believe in this, ‘we’ll have a private briefing for you where we’ll tell you everything,’ and they don’t. . . . I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths on this.”

Doyle McManus writes in the Los Angeles Times: “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. . . .

“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. . . .

“‘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.’”

Incompetent, Insular, or Something Else?

A Los Angeles Times editorial argues that the firings “fit into a larger pattern of incompetence on the part of this administration. Any confidence the American people or Congress once had in the administration’s capabilities has long since been depleted.”

Gloria Borger writes in her U.S. News opinion column: “The White House that was once seen as muscular — even invincible — is being tagged as something else: incompetent.”

Edwin Chen and Holly Rosenkrantz write for Bloomberg: “President George W. Bush’s insular management system, which values loyalty and old Texas ties while discouraging dissent, may be at the root of the political misfortunes undermining his presidency.”

Shankar Vedantam, writing about human behavior in The Washington Post sees some parallels between Bush and a certain mad king: “In Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear,’ a powerful man comes to a tragic end because he surrounds himself with flatterers and banishes the friends who will not varnish the truth to please him. . . .

“By the end of the play, with death and disaster all around, Shakespeare makes sure you understand that King Lear’s tragedy was not just his own.”

But Fred Barnes writes in the Weekly Standard that Bush’s only problem is that he’s been too meek in defending himself: “By not instantly and unflinchingly denouncing the Democratic offensive for what it is, an entirely bogus attack on his administration, he has allowed a mere flap to get out of hand.” ++

Justice Department documents released
Think Progress
March 19, 2007
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/03/19/justice-department-documents-released/

ABC News reports:

New e-mails released this evening by the Justice Department reveal the depth of White House involvement in the discussions to fire eight U.S. attorneys last year. The thousands of pages of e-mails suggest the White House was involved in the plan from the beginning.

The e-mails detail conversations about attorneys targeted for dismissal. There are no e-mails from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who reportedly does not use e-mail, though the Justice Department says messages show some indication that Gonzales’ former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, kept the attorney general apprised.

The House Judiciary Committee website is likely to have some of the emails in PDF form available tonight.
http://judiciary.house.gov/

UPDATE: U.S. News reports: “One day after Justice Department Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty testified on Capitol Hill about the reasons eight U.S. attorneys were summarily fired, a Justice Department spokesman…sent an E-mail to Gonzales’ chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, and spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos saying Gonzales was unhappy with McNulty’s testimony regarding why U.S. attorney Bud Cummins of Arkansas had been let go. That E-mail is what is causing the most concern at the Justice Department.” During his hearing, McNulty had agreed that Cummins was fired even though “he had done nothing wrong” and was simply making way for Rove protege Tim Griffin.

UPDATE II: Justice Dept. official: “You have no idea how bad it is here.“
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_03/010957.php
++

Was Carol Lam Targeting The White House Prior To Her Firing?
Think Progress
March 19, 2007
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/03/19/carol-lam-white-house/

Referring to the Bush administration’s purge of former San Diego-based U.S. attorney Carol Lam, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) questioned recently on the Senate floor whether she was let go because she was “about to investigate other people who were politically powerful.”

The media reports this morning that among Lam’s politically powerful targets were former CIA official Kyle “Dusty” Foggo and then-House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA). But there is evidence to believe that the White House may also have been on Lam’s target list. Here are the connections:

– Washington D.C. defense contractor Mitchell Wade pled guilty last February to paying then-California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham more than $1 million in bribes.

– Wade’s company MZM Inc. received its first federal contract from the White House. The contract, which ran from July 15 to August 15, 2002, stipulated that Wade be paid $140,000 to “provide office furniture and computers for Vice President Dick Cheney.”

– Two weeks later, on August 30, 2002, Wade purchased a yacht for $140,000 for Duke Cunningham. The boat’s name was later changed to the “Duke-Stir.” Said one party to the sale: “I knew then that somebody was going to go to jail for that…Duke looked at the boat, and Wade bought it — all in one day. Then they got on the boat and floated away.”

– According to Cunningham’s sentencing memorandum, the purchase price of the boat had been negotiated through a third-party earlier that summer, around the same time the White House contract was signed.

To recap, the White House awarded a one-month, $140,000 contract to an individual who never held a federal contract. Two weeks after he got paid, that same contractor used a cashier’s check for exactly that amount to buy a boat for a now-imprisoned congressman at a price that the congressman had pre-negotiated.

That should raise questions about the White House’s involvement.

UPDATE: Perhaps this was the “real problem” Sampson was referring to:
[open link to see document]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/19/AR2007031902036.html
++

U.S. Attorney’s Firing may be Connected to CIA Corruption Probe
Margaret Talev / Marisa Taylor
Monday, March 19, 2007 by McClatchy Newspapers
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0319-01.htm

WASHINGTON - 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.

“We have stated numerous times that no U.S. attorney was removed to retaliate against or inappropriately interfere with any public corruption investigation or prosecution,” he wrote. “This remains the case and there is no evidence that indicates otherwise.”

But the revelation is sure to heighten demands in Congress for a full investigation into whether something other than job performance was behind the Justice Department’s dismissals late last year of eight U.S. attorneys, including Lam.

On Sunday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said he intends to force President Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, to testify and will insist that the testimony be under oath. Leahy, who appeared on ABC’s “This Week,” said he is “sick and tired” of the administration’s changing rationale for the firings.

Justice Department officials originally told Congress that the U.S. attorneys had been dismissed for poor performance. But since it’s become known that most of the attorneys received positive job evaluations.

Last week, the Justice Department released e-mails showing that loyalty to President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was among the criteria used to judge U.S. attorneys’ performance and that Rove and former White House counsel Harriet Miers were deeply involved in discussions leading up to the dismissals.

Roehrkasse said the Justice Department would provide additional e-mails to Congress on Monday. The documents were to have been surrendered last week, but Justice officials delayed the delivery, saying they needed more time to prepare them.

In an appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Feinstein said she’d not yet decided what motivated Lam’s dismissal.

“There were clearly U.S. attorneys that were thorns in the side for one reason or another of the Justice Department,” Feinstein said. “The attorney general has said he did not know what was going on … that is very difficult for me to believe.”

Feinstein said Lam notified the Justice Department on May 10, 2006, that she planned to serve search warrants on Kyle Dustin “Dusty” Foggo, who’d resigned two days earlier as the No. 3 official at the CIA.

On May 11, 2006, Kyle Sampson, then Gonzales’ chief of staff, sent an e-mail to deputy White House counsel William Kelley, asking Kelley to call to discuss “the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires.”

The e-mail did not spell out what the “real problem” was, and it was unclear whether Kelley and Sampson talked later.

Until now, lawmakers have focused on two of Lam’s other inquiries into Republicans as possible ways in which she may have chafed the administration.

Lam oversaw the investigation that led to the corruption conviction of then-Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif., who pleaded guilty in late 2005 to accepting $2.4 million in bribes. He was sentenced in March 2006 to eight years and four months in prison.

On the same day last year as the Sampson e-mail, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Cunningham probe was being expanded to look at the actions of another California Republican, then-House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis.

Feinstein did not say how she learned that Lam had notified the Justice Department about her plans to serve search warrants on Foggo, who on May 8 had resigned as the executive director of the CIA. FBI agents seized records from Foggo’s CIA offices and his suburban Vienna, Va., home on May 12.

Who Lam notified about her plans was unknown. Ordinarily, information about search warrants in high-profile cases would be passed to the U.S. attorney executive office in Washington. At the time, that office was headed by Michael Battle. Battle, who notified the dismissed U.S. attorneys they were being replaced in December, resigned March 5.

Sampson, who resigned last week, declined comment through his lawyer. Feinstein’s office also declined interview requests.

Sampson’s May 11 e-mail was released as part of a congressional investigation into the firings last year of Lam and seven other U.S. attorneys, and the Bush administration’s changing explanations as to what role politics or performance played.

Democrats say they will investigate whether independent prosecutors were forced out for going after Republican corruption or ignoring pressure to prosecute Democrats in order to sway elections and are expected to seek testimony from Sampson and Kelley as well as Rove and Miers. The White House is scheduled to tell Congress on Tuesday whether it will allow the testimony or invoke executive privilege.

Also this week, the House and Senate are scheduled to vote to undo a law quietly passed last year that stripped the Senate’s power to reject interim U.S. attorneys the administration might pick to replace ousted prosecutors.

Meanwhile, the controversy over the firings dominated the Sunday morning political talk shows as lawmakers geared up for more developments in the week ahead.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., predicted on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Gonzales would be forced from his job within a week. Schumer also proposed a short list of three Republican replacements.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the top Republican on the panel, said Congress should consider writing legislation to require the Justice Department to show cause if the administration wants to remove one of its U.S. attorneys.

“Congress has the constitutional authority to set some parameters and guidelines,” Specter said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We don’t really want to interfere with the president’s basic right to set policy. If he wants immigration cases emphasized, his U.S. attorneys ought to do that. Whatever classifications he wants ought to be followed. But we’re learning from this experience. If we find there’s a way to better regulate this kind of a situation, Congress ought to act.”

The three lawyers Schumer suggested Democrats might support to replace Gonzales are:

Michael B. Mukasey, who returned last year to the private sector after serving as chief U.S. district court judge of the southern district of New York. Mukasey, a Reagan administration nominee, presided over the terrorism trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 co-defendants.

Larry Thompson, left the Justice Department in 2003 after serving as deputy attorney general under John Ashcroft. Thompson focused on terrorism and corporate crime, including a role in going after Enron Corp.

James Comey, left the Justice Department in 2005 after serving as Thompson’s replacement. Comey is trusted by some Democrats because of his perceived discomfort with some of the administration’s terrorism surveillance policies and because he named U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that ended with the conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. ++

Fitzgerald Ranked During Leak Case
Justice Dept. Fired 2 With Same Rating
Dan Eggen and John Solomon, WaPo
Tuesday, March 20, 2007; Front Page
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=ktfkz6bab.0.qdxqz6bab.ruvvpabab.4911&ts=S0233&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fwp-dyn%2Fcontent%2Farticle%2F2007%2F03%2F19%2FAR2007031902036.html

U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald was ranked among prosecutors who had “not distinguished themselves” on a Justice Department chart sent to the White House in March 2005, when he was in the midst of leading the CIA leak investigation that resulted in the perjury conviction of a vice presidential aide, administration officials said yesterday.

The ranking placed Fitzgerald below “strong U.S. Attorneys . . . who exhibited loyalty” to the administration but above “weak U.S. Attorneys who . . . chafed against Administration initiatives, etc.,” according to Justice documents.

The chart was the first step in an effort to identify U.S. attorneys who should be removed. Two prosecutors who received the same ranking as Fitzgerald were later fired, documents show.

Fitzgerald’s ranking adds another dimension to the prosecutor firings, which began as a White House proposal to remove all 93 U.S. attorneys after the 2004 elections and evolved into the coordinated dismissal of eight last year, a move that has infuriated lawmakers and led to calls for Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to resign.

The Justice Department last night gave the House and Senate Judiciary committees 3,000 pages of new documents related to the firings, including one e-mail that says Gonzales was “extremely upset” by Senate testimony Feb. 6 from his deputy, Paul J. McNulty. Gonzales felt that “some of the . . . statements were inaccurate,” the e-mail says.

Justice officials said Gonzales specifically disagreed with McNulty’s statement that a Little Rock prosecutor was fired to make way for a GOP operative. They also said the new documents show that political motivations were not a factor in the firings.

The latest revelations came amid reports that the White House has already launched a search for Gonzales’s replacement and that support for the attorney general among Republicans in Congress is fading fast. One GOP strategist with close ties to the White House said last night that it is likely Gonzales will leave and that White House counsel Fred F. Fielding already has potential replacements in mind.

White House press secretary Tony Snow offered tepid support for Gonzales, saying President Bush still has full confidence in his longtime friend and ally. “We hope he stays,” Snow said.

The March 2005 chart ranking Fitzgerald and other prosecutors was drawn up by Gonzales aide D. Kyle Sampson and sent to then-White House counsel Harriet Miers. The reference to Fitzgerald is in a portion of the memo that Justice has refused to turn over to Congress, officials told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity because Fitzgerald’s ranking has not been made public.

At the time, Fitzgerald was leading the independent probe into the leak of the identity of a CIA operative, which led this month to the perjury conviction of former vice presidential aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, had also recently brought a corruption indictment in Illinois against former Republican governor George H. Ryan.

A Justice Department official yesterday sought to play down the importance of Fitzgerald’s ranking, saying the chart was “put together by Sampson and is not an official department position on these U.S. attorneys.”

Sampson resigned as Gonzales’s chief of staff last week, and his attorney declined to comment yesterday.

Mary Jo White, who supervised Fitzgerald when she served as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan and who has criticized the firings, said ranking him as a middling prosecutor “lacks total credibility across the board.”

“He is probably the best prosecutor in the nation — certainly one of them,” said White, who worked in the Clinton and Bush administrations. “It casts total doubt on the whole process. It’s kind of the icing on the cake.”

Fitzgerald has been widely recognized for his pursuit of criminal cases against al-Qaeda’s terrorist network before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and he drew up the official U.S. indictment against Osama bin Laden. He was named as special counsel in the CIA leak case in December 2003 by then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who had recused himself.

Fitzgerald also won the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service in 2002 under Ashcroft.

Justice spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said yesterday that “Pat Fitzgerald has a distinguished record as one of the most experienced and well-respected prosecutors at the Justice Department. His track record speaks for itself.”

But Fitzgerald also came under sharp criticism from many Republicans and press advocates for his aggressive pursuit of the Libby case.

The March 2, 2005, memo from Sampson came in response to a proposal floated by Miers to remove all U.S. attorneys during Bush’s second term. Fitzgerald was placed in a middle category among his peers: “No recommendation; have not distinguished themselves either positively or negatively.”

Although the ranking meant Sampson was not recommending those prosecutors for removal at the time, two U.S. attorneys who received the same ranking were fired last Dec. 7: Daniel G. Bogden of Nevada and Paul K. Charlton of Arizona.

Two prosecutors who were listed in the top category on Sampson’s chart were also fired: David C. Iglesias in New Mexico and Kevin V. Ryan in San Francisco.

Two administration officials said Fitzgerald was never included on later lists of U.S. attorneys targeted for removal by Sampson. Administration officials and documents have portrayed Sampson as being in charge of the firings effort.

Sampson’s memo was among more than 140 pages of documents sent to congressional investigators last week, but the names of most of the prosecutors and their rankings had been deleted. Senate Judiciary Committee investigators have been demanding an unredacted version of the memo, but the administration has refused to provide it, according to a Justice official and a Democratic Senate aide.

Administration officials said they do not know why Sampson put Fitzgerald in the “not distinguished” category. Bush said last year that Fitzgerald had done “a very professional job” in the CIA leak investigation.

The thousands of pages of documents released last night highlight the tension among the highest officials at the Justice Department as they struggle to cope with the firings and the resulting public outcry.

In the wake of McNulty’s Feb. 6 appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales was furious with how the deputy attorney general characterized the departure of Little Rock U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins It was explained as a move to insert Tim Griffin, a former White House political aide, into the slot.

In an e-mail, Justice’s deputy communications director, Brian Roehrkasse, wrote to Sampson and another aide: “The attorney general is extremely upset with the stories on US attys this morning. He also thought some of the DAG’s statements were inaccurate. . . . I think from a straight news perspective we just want the stories to die.”

Roehrkasse said in a statement last night: “The Attorney General was upset because he believed Bud Cummins’ removal involved performance considerations and it was that aspect of [McNulty's] testimony the Attorney General was questioning.”

Another e-mail exchange shows that Sampson and McNulty aide Michael Elston did not want the fired federal prosecutors to testify before the Senate committee, a position that seems to support an allegation by Cummins that Elston threatened to retaliate against the former U.S. attorneys if they continued speaking out. Justice officials said last night that McNulty later verbally told Elston he should not take a position on testimony.

On Dec. 5, two days before seven U.S. attorneys were fired, McNulty admitted in an e-mail to Sampson that he was having second thoughts about firing Bogden, the U.S. attorney for Nevada, whose record provided no obvious performance issues or policy differences. McNulty also said he had not reviewed Bogden’s performance before including him in the dismissal group.

“I’m a little skittish about Bogden,” McNulty wrote. “He has been with DOJ since 1990 and, at age 50, has never had a job outside of government. My guess is he was hoping to ride this out well into ‘09 or beyond. I’ll admit [I] have not looked at his district’s performance.”

The e-mails detail some of the personal and financial hardships the fired prosecutors have been going through — particularly Margaret Chiara of Grand Rapids, Mich., who begged for help finding another job. ++

Staff writer Michael Abramowitz and washingtonpost.com staff writer Paul Kane contributed to this report.

The Porn Plot Against Prosecutors
Max Blumenthal
Mar 20 2007
— first posted at The Nation
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/6211

In September 2006, just weeks before pivotal Congressional midterm elections, Paul Charlton, US Attorney for Arizona, opened a preliminary investigation into Republican Representative Rick Renzi of the state’s First Congressional District for an alleged pattern of corruption involving influence-peddling and land deals. Almost immediately, Charlton’s name was added to a blacklist of federal prosecutors the White House wanted to force from their jobs. Charlton is someone “we should now consider pushing out,” D. Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez’s chief of staff, wrote to then White House Counsel Harriet Miers on September 16. In his previously safe Republican district, Renzi had barely held on in the election. On December 7, the White House demanded Charlton’s resignation without offering him any explanation.

Stacks of internal Justice Department e-mails subpoenaed by Congress in early March from the White House provided evidence that the dismissals of Charlton and seven other US Attorneys was a political purge orchestrated to install “loyal Bushies,” as Sampson called them, into their posts and to protect Republican lawmakers like Renzi from indictments for corruption. The Administration’s explanation that the ousters were “performance-related” has been discredited in light of the exposure of the e-mails–and especially proved false in Charlton’s case. A model of professionalism, Charlton’s office was honored with the Federal Service Award and hailed by the Justice Department as a “Model Program” for its protection of crime victims.

The Justice Department and the White House offered a scattershot of alibis for firing Charlton. The Bush Administration’s case against Charlton rested ultimately on the account of a little-known Justice Department official named Brent Ward, who claimed in a September 20, 2006 e-mail that Charlton was “unwilling to take good cases.” Ward’s allegation was vague in its claim, mysterious for its submission and vacant in context.

What accounts for this bizarre e-mail? And who is Brent Ward?

Ward first came to prominence in Utah, where as US Attorney during the Reagan era he cast himself as a crusader against pornography. His battles made him one of the most fervent and earnest witnesses before Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Commission on Pornography; he urged “testing the endurance” of pornographers by relentless prosecutions. Meese was so impressed that he named Ward a leader of a group of US Attorneys engaged in a federal anti-pornography campaign, which soon disappeared into the back rooms of adult bookshops to ferret out evildoers. Ward returned to government last year as the chief of the Justice Department’s newly created Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, where his main achievement has been the prosecution of the producer of the Girls Gone Wild film series.

The appointment of the obscure Ward was a sop to the Christian right. His accomplishments, such as they are, have been symbolic at best. But when a paper trail to support the charge that US Attorneys were deficient in their performance was required to cover the reality of political dismissals, the Justice Department finally discovered an important use for its top porn cop.

The US Attorneys sensed that the White House was organizing smear campaigns against them, apparent in a February e-mail written by Bud Cummins, the US Attorney for Arkansas, who was fired last December to make room for the appointment of one of Karl Rove’s political protegés.

“Mike Elston from the DAG’s [Deputy Attorney General's] office called me today,” Cummins wrote to Charlton and four other fired US Attorneys. “They [the Bush Administration] feel like any of us intend to continue to offer quotes to the press, or organize behind the scenes congressional pressure, then they would feel forced to somehow pull their gloves off and offer public criticisms to defend their actions more fully.”

On March 15, Rove heatedly declared before a group of journalism students at Alabama’s Troy University that Charlton was fired because of his refusal to seek the death penalty. Rove’s claim ostensibly referred to a case review of an August 2006 prosecution by Charlton of a man whose alleged victim’s body could not be found, whose murder weapon was never produced, and who was convicted solely on the basis of evidence gleaned from drug addicts and dealers. Charlton protested pursuing the death penalty against the defendant, but was overruled by Justice Department officials.

Yet Rove’s complaint against Charlton was not supported anywhere in the e-mails released by the White House to Congress. In fact, only two of those e-mails mention Charlton in a negative light. One of them, written by a Justice Department aide, noted that then Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert’s criticism of Charlton’s policy on prosecuting marijuana cases. The aide went on to defend Charlton, asserting that limited resources hampered border state prosecutors like him.
The other e-mail contained a weirder charge: that Charlton refused to prosecute obscenity cases.

Written by Ward to Sampson on September 20, 2006, the e-mail leveled the same allegation against Dan Bogden, the US Attorney for Nevada, who was also dismissed in the prosecutor purge, despite positive performance reviews. “We have two US Attorneys who are unwilling to take good cases we have presented to them. They are Paul Charlton in Phoenix (this is urgent) and Dan Bogden in Las Vegas,” wrote Ward. “In light of the AG’s [Attorney General's] comments…to ‘kick butt and take names,’ what do you suggest I do?”

But the Justice Department did not explain which “good cases” Charlton had refused to prosecute, why he’d refused to prosecute them, or whether he’d even refused the cases.

“The date of the e-mail is subsequent to the date when they asked for [Charlton's] resignation, so it’s gratuitous,” a former Justice Department source intimately familiar with Charlton’s disputed obscenity case told me. “It looks like the White House put this out just to dirty the waters.”

According to the source, Ward’s accusation against Charlton stems from a case he filed in June 2006. That month, Ward ordered Charlton to prosecute Five Star Video, an adult video store that registered on Ward’s radar when it mailed copies of the DVD’s Gag Factor 18, Filthy Things 6, Gag Factor 15, and American Bukkake 13 to customers across state lines. Charlton agreed to take the case, but as the source told me, Ward implored him to attach an additional US Attorney to it. Concerned about wasting the already limited resources at his disposal on a case of dubious value, Charlton hesitated. Despite his misgivings, he assigned the additional prosecutor–a key fact missing from the White House e-mails.

Ward’s endless stream of mandates, the source revealed, were a source of frustration to many US Attorneys. “There were countless child obscenity cases crying out to be prosecuted,” the source told me, “but [Brent] Ward wanted to focus on cases involving consenting adults. That’s just not a good way of dedicating resources. When you have so many children being harmed, why not allocate your resources towards that?”

Ward’s heedless prosecutions of legally available pornography reflected more than his ideology; they also defined his power within the Justice Department. Once Bush began his second term in the White House, Gonzales declared the prosecution of pornography portraying sex acts between consenting adults “one of the top priorities” of his department. He signed off on an FBI headquarters memo that recruited agents for an anti-porn task force. That memo stated that prosecutions would focus particularly on material depicting “bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior.” These acts, according to the memo, were most likely to offend local juries.

Christian right organizations, from the Family Research Council to Concerned Women for America, lavished praise on Gonzales’s anti-porn initiative. “We will watch closely, though with a growing sense of confidence in our new Attorney General, to see who is appointed to direct the effort,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.

When Gonzales met with Phil Burress, a self-described former porn addict who directs the anti-pornography group, Citizens for Community Values, Burress praised Ward for an aggressive and single-minded attack on sexually explicit material over nearly three decades, which had earned him the adulation of the Christian right. “He’s one of my heroes,” Burress said in describing Ward to the Salt Lake Tribune . As Utah’s US Attorney during the 1980s, Ward prosecuted phone sex operators, shut down Utah’s last two porn theaters by nailing their owner on tax charges, and tried unsuccessfully to force nude art-class models to wear bikinis. When Gonzales tapped Ward as his top porn cop in 2006, the Christian right’s confidence soared.

To support Ward’s task force, Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller diverted eight FBI agents and other staff. Ward soon secured his biggest score, the successful prosecution of the Girls Gone Wild series producer Joseph Francis for knowingly including footage of two young women without receiving legible documentation, on paper, of their ages. Francis’s company, Mantra Films, Inc., was slapped with a $500,000 fine–a drop in the bucket for an operation that rakes in at least $40 million a year.

Many veterans of the FBI consider Ward’s efforts a burden on their ability to fulfill serious departmental priorities. “I guess this means we’ve won the war on terror,” an anonymous FBI agent sarcastically remarked to the Washington Post about agents diverted to Ward’s task force. “We must not need any more resources for espionage.”

Though his anti-porn crusades rankled the FBI agents and US Attorneys compelled to participate in them, Ward produced an unintended benefit for the White House when it needed to fire politically “chafing” federal prosecutors. Ward’s complaint against Charlton, filed by Sampson for use at a later date, was unsheathed by Rove and Gonzales to smear a competent professional prosecutor–and a Republican–for political purposes.

The revelation of Ward’s participation in the dismissals arrived as the Christian right clamored that more resources be funneled to him. “Give him some gas and he’ll win the war,” Burress told the Salt Lake Tribune. “I wish the Department of Justice was full of Brent Wards.” The prosecutor purge may have backfired, but Burress and his allies can take heart that the Bush White House is devoted to their culture war, even at the expense of its “war on terror.”

Whether or not Attorney General Gonzales survives the fallout, the purge has fulfilled urgent political goals. Congressman Renzi, once a target of Charlton’s investigation, still sits comfortably in his Capitol Hill office, apparently unconcerned about scrutiny of his alleged ethical lapses.++

Senate Debate On Revoking Gonzales’s Appointment Authority Begins
Bob Geiger
Mar 19 2007
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/6195

Not a moment too soon with the political firings emerging from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s office, the Senate will today begin debate on the Preserving United States Attorney Independence Act of 2007, legislation that will reverse a provision slipped into the USA Patriot Act to give Gonzales unfettered power in selecting new U.S. Attorneys.

Without notice, the Bush administration inserted a provision into the Patriot Act reauthorization last year, changing the law so that Gonzales would be able to fill any vacancies for an indefinite period of time – thus completely avoiding the Senate confirmation process.

S.214, was proposed by Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and cosponsored by 14 Democrats and Republican Arlen Specter, and amends the federal judicial code to allow the Attorney General to appoint interim U.S. Attorneys for only 120 days. If after that time the President has not sent a nominee to the Senate and had that nominee confirmed, the authority to appoint an interim U.S. Attorney would fall to the district court.

Feinstein introduced the legislation, which was approved in the Judiciary Committee last month by a vote of 13-6, to restore the process in place before 2006.

Referring to the latest developments in the U.S. Attorneys scandal that show involvement by Karl Rove, Feinstein said that the latest revelation “provides one more indication that this was not a cursory move and instead it was a well-strategized, well-executed plan that was done with the knowledge of the Department of Justice and the White House.”

“There is a clear remedy: return the law to what it was before the Justice Department slipped in the change to the Patriot Act reauthorization, and continue the on-going investigation of the matter,” said Feinstein.

The legislation should receive a full Senate vote by the end of the week.

Update: A lot of people have written to ask which six Republican Senators wanted to take the legislation limiting Gonzales’s “hiring authority” and kill it in the Judiciary Committee. No major surprises, but here they are:

Jon Kyl (R-AZ)
Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Sam Brownback (R-KS)
Tom Coburn (R-OK) ++

Wayne Madsen Report
March 19, 2007
http://waynemadsenreport.com/

Democratic Party sources have reported to WMR that Karl Rove and a team of Republican Party election manipulators he has used in the past for tampering with U.S. elections, particularly in Florida, Ohio, and New Mexico, are under investigation by the Italian government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi and the opposition Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) of Mexico.

The sources report that investigators are looking at alleged technical and strategic advice given by Rove and GOP election tampering consultants to Silvio Berlusconi’s government, particularly the arch-neo-cons in the Berlusconi Cabinet — then Interior Minister Beppe Pisanu and Foreign Minister Ginafranco Fini. Although polls before the April 2006 election indicated that Prodi’s Center-Left coalition was far ahead of Berlusconi’s right-wing/neo-fascist alliance and exit polls also indicated a large Center-Left win, Prodi squeaked by with a mere 0.1 percent of the vote.

Our sources claim that Rove and his Italian counterparts severely miscalculated in their planning for tampering with the Italian election returns. Rove and his advisers forgot to include the expatriate Italian vote in their calculations. The 2006 national elections were the first in which Italians abroad were allowed to vote and by failing to calculate those votes, Berlusconi lost by a hair, despite the vote counting fraud that reportedly also included siphoning blank protest votes to the Berlusconi column.

Similarly, PRD officials are also looking at Rove and his team’s involvement in providing election tampering assistance to conservative National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderon in last July’s Mexico presidential election. Calderon beat PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador by a razor-thin 0.6 percent. However, as with Italy, pre-election polls and exit polls showed the PRD candidate with a commanding lead. Ballot boxes were found in garbage dumps in pro-PRD precincts. In addition, votes for the PRD were either shaved from the total count and some precincts were not even counted.

Some of the financial support for Republican interference in the Italian and Mexican elections may have been laundered through the U.S. taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which, in turn, funds the International Republican Institute (IRI), an arm of the Republican Party. The IRI has been involved in funding election campaigns in Venezuela against Hugo Chavez and in Haiti against Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Rove now under investigation for election fraud by Italian and Mexican officials. Is an INTERPOL Red Notice for Rove in the offing?

Italian government and PRD officials have been in direct contact with Democratic Party election experts concerning the suspected international vote fraud committed by the GOP and Rove. If Rove is asked to testify in Italy about his contacts with Berlusconi government officials and refuses, he will have more than U.S. congressional subpoenas to worry about — he could be faced with an INTERPOL Red Notice, a international arrest warrant recognized by INTERPOL member states. ++

“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.)

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