This is a cut-to-the-chase post, a wonk’s post — if you’ve got the Eight Gate fever. This scandal is clearly where the rubber meets the road in that so much ties back into it … and it’s the first one we have had oversight on in “real time.” The dots that connect, here, would need a Ms. PackMan champ to gobble … but some of the most interesting:
The arguments made for some of the legal eagles firing has been lethargy in prosecuting “voter fraud” [that would be DEMS attempting to steal Pub thunder.] The politicization of the DoJ was designed to work for the Bushies now and in the future [think 2008 election ... and do note that it was put into place before the election which the Bushies thought they'd own, along with their ailing but workable Thirty Year Domination plan] and while such a move is rash and unprecedented, in order to prove that it is illegal something will have to point to obstruction of justice. I think it was early in the game for that, at least to be obvious in this case … but if there hadn’t been a Blue win in November, we’d have seen plenty in upcoming elections. This has Rove spittle on it, it’s his signature issue.
Two points to ponder — how might “salting” the DoJ with loyalists keep the brakes on in the newly energized lawsuits regarding the voting fraud cases in PA and OH … and if Fitz was an underachiever, what exactly HAVE the fabulous loyalists managed to achieve for their Boss? How much crud and crap could they have overlayed on corruption cases to earn them those kudo’s? The “voter fraud” angle is something we’ll hear more about … and most definitely SHOULD.
In the newest wrinkle, Monica Goodling of Fredo’s staff will take the 5th rather than testify to Congress — she’s hired a mega-expensive legal shark to defend her. As some of the pieces below analyze, this smacks of criminality. This was probably NOT a smart move.
Rather than have their emails tracked through the White House system, various insiders have been using the Republican National Committee email ISP … Waxman is on that like white on rice. As the ripples spread, we have selective leaking, the gap — and a panicked Justice Department.
As for Gonzales, I still think he’s toast — when your own parties Senators turn on you, your numbers up. Dubby keeps up the affirmations, but we only have to look at Rummy’s dismissal to see how that works; nothing Dub says is credible. The Cabal will decide. I would add that this is another example of the cronyism that has colored this administration and peopled it with dolts, dumbells and deceivers. Anyone with a shred of integrity would have left Dub’s service already — like Clark and Powell. Fredo is not the sharpest tool in the shed … and Dubby’s insistence that he go to Congress and “fix it” is not the sharpest move.
This will continue to unravel and the dots will continue to appear, linking the larger picture of Constitutional hijack and promotion of the unitary executive. If all paths lead to Rove, all dots come back to misuse of authority — in this case, down and dirty in the Department of Justice.
We are at that point, finally, where we will begin to untangle the knots and ask the question that we’ve waited all these years to put forth: are we a nation of laws … or are we a tinhorn dictatorship?
The wonk reports, below.
Jude
Olbermann does Attorneygate [VIDEO x 2]
The last 12 hours have been full of new twists & turns…
Richard Blair
March 27, 2007
Let’s just recap quickly, as there have been quite a few interesting developments over the past 12 hours:
1. Monica Goodling of A.G. Gonzales’ staff has lawyered up, and her attorney (John Dowd, of Pete Rose and John McCain / Keating S&L scandal fame) fired off a lengthy letter to whoever in congress would read it, stating that she will invoke her 5th amendment right not to testify before a congressional committee. There’s a whole lot of nuance to this piece of the story, but suffice it to say that Goodling’s way out on a limb with her invocation of the 5th. And Dowd’s on very shaky legal ground. Conventional wisdom: Dowd’s letter is fishing for an immunity deal for Goodling from Sen. Pat Leahy.
2. Alberto Gonzales did an appearance on NBC last night, with Bush 41 sidekick Pete Williams conducting the interview - and gawd, if Abu Al came off that bad with a supporter and journalistic enabler like Williams, what will actually happen when someone in congress is tossing him some hardball questions - under oath? Keith Olbermann did a “must see” segment [VIDEO upper right] on AttorneyGate yesterday evening. Conventional wisdom: Gonzales is as incompetent as he appears to be (a hallmark of most Bush regime appointees).
3. The White House is apparently…
… selectively leaking emails that it won’t disclose to congress under claims of “executive privilege”. In doing so, another DOJ underling - Assistant Attorney General Paul McNulty - is being thrown under a bus. How many more sheep in the justice department will be thrown under the bus before one of them really starts to squeal? I guess the Bush regime learns nothing from history (re: Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre). Conventional Wisdom: The hail mary passes are starting, and the whole case is devolving quickly. By selectively leaking previously undisclosed emails, the White House is damaging its executive privilege claims. The lawyers in the regime know the jig is up. And they know what’s really at stake - their own professional careers (and perhaps freedom from jail time).
4. Hammerin’ Hank Waxman has written letters to the RNC (and copied everyone in the world) directing that the RNC and its email service provider are to preserve all internet email correspondence on private email domains of the RNC. Waxman believes that there has been correspondence on RNC email domains regarding executive branch operational decisions that should have been limited exclusively to government email domains ( eop.gov, anyone?). Conventional Wisdom: This could be explosive - and will most certainly set up yet another constitutional showdown between the executive branch and congress.
If I were a betting man, last Wednesday I would have placed a large wager on Gonzales having resigned by Friday due to internal pressure from the leadership of the Republican Party (and I’m not necessarily speaking about elected officials). He is hanging on by the barest of threads. This is not playing well for the GOP, and the elected representatives in congress (both Senate and House) have to be able to read the handwriting on the wall.
Polling just released by USAToday is clearly indicating that a vast majority of the public favors further investigation by congress. There is a general election approaching next year, and the longer this drags out, the worse it’s going to be for the Republican Party. It’s already bad - but unless they can get Alberto Gonzales off of the front page very quickly, this is just going to keep festering and festering. More importantly, I now know in my heart of hearts that this scandal goes all the way to the top. If George Bush was not intimately involved in the entire proceeding, Goodling (the designated runner between DOJ and the White House) would not be invoking the fifth. If he were not intimately involved in attempts to obstruct justice (San Diego) and tamper with elections (New Mexico), the coverup and denials simply wouldn’t be this strong. And let’s not forget that these are arguably among the least egregious potential crimes committed by the Bush regime.
My prediction: the investigations won’t stop with Gonzales, even when Bush reluctantly lets Abu Al fall on his own sword (and mark my words, it will happen, sooner than later). When all is said and done, and when we look back at this scandal from a historical perspective, I think we’ll all be a bit surprised that, after all of the other malfeasance the Bush regime was involved in, AttorneyGate was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I guess you go to impeachment with the scandal you have, not the scandal you might like to prosecute…
The Right To Remain Silent…Or Not
Christy Hardin Smith, FireDogLake
Guess which story just sprouted a hundred new legs, all of them connected to media types within the Beltway that sat up and discovered it with one giant whiff of the Fifth Amendment yesterday:
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The senior counselor to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales will refuse to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the unfolding U.S. attorneys scandal, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, her attorneys said today.
Monica M. Goodling — who is on an indefinite leave of absence from Gonzales’s office — also said that at least one senior Justice Department official blames her for failing to fully brief him prior to a Senate appearance, leading to “less than candid” testimony.
That game of pass the political buck just isn’t fun any longer, is it Mr. McNulty? Especially when flinging all that poo in the air ultimately meant that you wound up with a lap full.
Especially when your boss, the United States Attorney General is floating the “pure heart empty head” defense. (Which, as any prosecutor worth anything can tell you, is useless — ignorance of the law is no excuse. H/T to Michael Froomkin for catching this bit of idiocy. One wonders how the GOP whisper set could possibly be floating rumors that Gonzales is incompetent, doesn’t one?) And according to ABCNews this morning, it looks like Mr. McNulty may be the designated fall guy of the moment:
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The official, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, ignored White House Counsel Harriet Miers and senior lawyers in the Justice Department when he told the committee last month of specific reasons why the administration fired seven U.S. attorneys — and appeared to acknowledge for the first time that politics was behind one dismissal. McNulty’s testimony directly conflicted with the approach Miers advised, according to an unreleased internal White House e-mail described to ABC News. According to that e-mail, sources said, Miers said the administration should take the firm position that it would not comment on personnel issues.
Until McNulty’s testimony, administration officials had consistently refused to publicly say why specific attorneys were dismissed and insisted that the White House had complete authority to replace them. That was Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ approach when he testified before the committee in January.
But McNulty, who worked on Capitol Hill 12 years, believed he had little choice but to more fully discuss the circumstances of the attorneys’ firings, according to a a senior Justice Department official familiar the circumstances. McNulty believed the senators would demand additional information, and he was confident he could draw on a long relationship with New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, in explaining in more detail, sources told ABC News.
In doing so, however, McNulty went well beyond the scope of what the White House cleared him to say when it approved his written testimony the week before the hearing, according to administration sources closely involved in the matter.
As a reader wrote to me this morning, “They’re going after McNulty, tossing him to wolves. Selective leak of WH e-mail could be construed as waiver. If McNulty has any brains he’ll demand release of all of them to show complete picture.” Absolutely right. And I’d bet that McNulty has copies of quite a few of those stashed away for just such an occasion — because you don’t work in a nest of vipers without keeping a little “antivenom” on hand, just in case. (Or, if you don’t plan ahead, you are an idiot.)
Huge kudos go out to Sen. Pat Leahy, who had this to say after learning that Goodling would take the 5th before his Senate Judiciary Committee:
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It is disappointing that Ms. Goodling has decided to withhold her important testimony from the Committee as it pursues its investigation into this matter, but everybody has the constitutional right not to incriminate themselves with regard to criminal conduct.
The American people are left to wonder what conduct is at the base of Ms. Goodling’s concern that she may incriminate herself in connection with criminal charges if she appears before the Committee under oath.
Sen. Leahy, you see, also used to be a prosecutor back in the day.
And Sen. Leahy is more than familiar with the 5th Amendment as a result, and knows that it cannot be invoked unless or until the person invoking it feels that they will be incriminating themselves with regard to specific criminal conduct, not just some vague possibility for the White House laying its own perjury trap for underlings to keep Rove and Gonzales safe — unfortunately for Goodling, having snakes as colleagues and being worried that they will stab you in the back in a heartbeat to save themselves is NOT a valid reason to take the Fifth. The text of the Fifth Amendment in its entirety:
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No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. (emphasis mine)
No fear of criminal implication against oneself, no 5th Amendment. Which means that Ms. Goodling can only invoke this if she fears that she has done something which is prosecutable under the law. No taking the 5th because you might embarrass yourself, your boss, or your political cronies — there has to be a connection to some criminal matter in order for it to be properly invoked. And no invoking it as a means to avoid testimony that might be difficult because you might have to rat out folks higher up on the crony chain — the law does not make exceptions for the powerful, nor does it make exceptions for the vindictive and nasty. Truth is truth. Period.
And no taking the 5th just because the mean old Senators and Congresspeople want to do their sworn Constitutional duty and provide oversight in the possibility that you and your peeps at the DoJ, and all the various and sundry minions in Rove’s political shop decided that you could run the United States government as your own personal electioneering machine, regardless of the laws of this nation. Even Boss Tweed had to pay the piper for his corruption and graft in the end, and just because you work for the President’s bestest buddy does not mean that you don’t have to follow the law, too. (Hint: You work at the DoJ. Try hanging out in the law library and actually reading the books there. Start with a text on the Constitution — you clearly need a refresher.)
What does this say to me? It says that Ms. Goodling’s attorney, one John Dowd, will begin negotiations with the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the potential for Ms. Goodling to put up under cover of immunity. (Note to Mr. Dowd: if your letter to the committee chair was as snotty as it is rumored to have been, it’s a nice public act to put on for the GOP cronies of your client while you negotiate behind the scenes, but you might want to back that down a notch because Pat Leahy is not the sort to put up with a lot of posturing crap for very long. Just FYI.) It also says to me that Ms. Goodling either has a nice cash stash, that someone else is footing her legal bills, or that Mr. Dowd is an old family friend, because a man with this background does not come cheaply to the negotiation table:
Mr. Dowd has prosecuted and defended significant criminal matters at trial and in parallel proceedings before Congress and regulatory agencies for more than 30 years. His practice focuses on the trial of complex civil and criminal cases.
Mr. Dowd is noted for his representation of a U.S. district judge, a former U.S. attorney and two U.S. senators. In addition, he represented a U.S. governor in a lengthy, high-profile criminal trial involving 23 counts charging false statements, wire fraud and attempted extortion.
Mr. Dowd has represented a U.S. senator before the Department of Justice and the Senate Ethics Committee; a U.S. Army colonel in the Iran Contra Hearings; a U.S. senator before the Senate Ethics Committee; and a U.S . governor in litigation with the Resolution Trust Corporation and in a fact-finding hearing before the House Subcommittee on General Oversight and Investigations, Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, which inquired into the failure of the savings and loan industry. He has served as an arbitrator for the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris.
You tell me — do you hire an attorney with this level of legal experience for no reason, because you just randomly picked a name out of Martindale-Hubbell? I didn’t think so. You hire this sort of attorney because you need all of what he knows and what he has done. Because a man with this level of expertise knows a lot about the law, and about how Washington works, and there is definitely some strategic dance in the works that will become more and more apparent as we watch it unfold. The lawyers in the audience can back me up on this: this sort of experience does not come cheaply, and it is often hired for very specific reasons — and, in Ms. Goodling’s case, I can think of an awful lot of potential reasons. How about you guys?
But wait, there is more. Readers at TPM have reviewed the letter and come to the same conclusion that I have (H/T to Phoenix Woman for the link on this). Josh is absolutely correct that the best defense against a perjury indictment is to simply be honest, and I agree with him that Goodling’s problem has more to do with the fact that the White House hasn’t yet decided where the line for honesty lies on this one. From Josh:
Now, one more point. Above I said ‘almost’ the whole argument. On page two of the letter, Goodling’s lawyer asserts as the fourth reason for her refusal to testify that “it has come to our attention that a senior Department of Justice official has privately told Senator Schumer that he (the official) was not entirely candid in his report to the Committee, and that the official allegedly claimed that others, including our client, did not inform him of certain pertinent facts.”
His name isn’t stated. But this appears to be a reference to Deputy Attorney General McNulty, the subject of this post from earlier this evening. Here we finally appear to have a bad act that Goodling believes or at least claims may expose her to criminal prosecution — lying to Congress by proxy by intentionally misinforming an official about to testify before Congress.
Just watching this from the outside, it looks as though that is the bad act she’s afraid to testify about or — and somehow I find this more believeable — she’s afraid of indictment for perjury because she has to go up to Congress and testify under oath before the White House has decided what its story is. And yeah, I’d feel like I was in jeopardy then too.
And that seems to me to be the crux of the problem for Ms. Goodling: the cover story hasn’t been settled on this one, and in a fluid situation where telling the truth can get you in trouble with the vindictive pit of vipers that work in “Rove’s shop,” she’d rather not have to be honest, thank you very much. Except that isn’t what the law provides, and I’m certain that her lawyer is more than aware of that — and that folks on the Judiciary Committees in both houses of Congress are more than aware of this as well. So, why the public feint? Again, I think it’s a maneuver to buy some time for behind-the-scenes negotiations. But I’m going to do some more digging on this.
While we are at it: huge kudos to Rep. Henry Waxman who sent out a lovely note to the White House document folks reminding them of their legal responsibility to maintain and archive ALL e-mails, even those using an non-WH addy, and that Waxman would like to have a chat about just how many of those are being used. You know, while we’re thinking about it. [...]
Ahhhh, I love the smell of oversight in the morning.
Who’s Scripting Gonzales?
Dan Froomkin, WaPo
Monday, March 26, 2007
McKay Watch
R. Jeffrey Smith writes in The Washington Post: “John McKay of Washington state, who had decided two years earlier not to bring voter fraud charges that could have undermined a Democratic victory in a closely fought gubernatorial race, said White House counsel Harriet Miers and her deputy, William Kelley, ‘asked me why Republicans in the state of Washington would be angry with me.’ . . .
“McKay’s disclosure of an explicit White House question about the damage his decision caused to his standing among party loyalists added new detail to his previous statement that Miers accused him of having ‘mishandled’ the voter fraud inquiry.”
Cummins Watch
Fired Arkansas U.S. attorney Bud Cummins tells CBS’s Face the Nation: “We do serve at the pleasure of the president. But in this case, it looks like the authority was delegated down through Harriet Miers, Karl Rove, Judge Gonzales and all the way down to a bunch of 35-year-old kids who got in a room together and tried to decide who was the most loyal to the president.”
Framing the Issue
Late last week, the new White House line of defense on the firings themselves begin to emerge.
Charles Krauthammer summed it up in his Washington Post opinion column on Friday: “If the White House decides that a U.S. attorney is showing insufficient zeal in pursuing voter fraud — or the death penalty or illegal immigration or drug dealing — it has the perfect right to fire him. There is only one impermissible reason for presidential intervention: to sabotage an active investigation. That is obstruction of justice. Until the Democrats come up with real evidence of that — and they have not — this affair remains a pseudo-scandal. Which would never have developed had Gonzales made the easy and obvious case from day one.”
The Washington Post editorial board chimed in today: “The president was entitled to replace any he chose, as long as he wasn’t intending to short-circuit ongoing investigations.”
But removing prosecutors for not being sufficiently partisan — when, once appointed, they are supposed to do their jobs without fear or favor — is unprecedented and certainly worth exposing and debating. If the fired prosecutors were indeed fired because they weren’t partisan enough, then what sorts of hacks are they going to be replaced with? What sort of chilling effect does this send? And what does this say about what the rest of the U.S. attorneys are having to do to keep their jobs?
Josh Marshall, the liberal blogger who has driven this story from the beginning, explains: “This isn’t about the AG’s lies. It’s not about the attempted cover-up. It’s not about executive privilege and investigative process mumbojumbo.
“This is about using US Attorneys to damage Democrats and protect Republicans, using the Department of Justice as a partisan cudgel in the war for national political dominance. All the secrecy and lies, the blundering and covering-up stems from this one central fact.”
Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon: “Whatever one thinks of how convincing the available evidence is thus far, nobody who has an even basic understanding of how our government functions could dispute that the accusations in this scandal are extremely serious.
Presumably, even those incapable of ingesting the danger of having U.S. attorneys fired due to their refusal to launch partisan-motivated prosecutions (or stifle prosecutions for partisan reasons) at least understand that it is highly disturbing and simply intolerable for the Attorney General of the U.S. — the head of our Justice Department — to lie repeatedly about what happened, including to Congress, and to have done so with the obvious assent and (at the very least) implicit cooperation of the White House. Even the most vapid media stars should be able to understand that.
“And yet so many of them do not.”
E. J. Dionne Jr. writes in his Washington Post opinion column: “By trying to recast the controversy as a partisan catfight, the president has temporarily diverted attention from the central issues in this inquiry: whether any of the eight fired U.S. attorneys were asked to step down for political reasons; whether political aides in the White House played an important role in the firings; and whether replacing independent-minded prosecutors was a way of influencing ongoing or future investigations.
“In the broadest sense, this is about whether the Bush administration has illegitimately politicized the justice system.”
Voter Fraud
What may very well have cost some of the fired attorneys their jobs was that they weren’t as tough on “voter fraud” as the White House wanted.
Greg Gordon, Margaret Talev and Marisa Taylor write in McClatchy Newspapers with some important context: “Under President Bush, the Justice Department has backed laws that narrow minority voting rights and pressed U.S. attorneys to investigate voter fraud - policies that critics say have been intended to suppress Democratic votes.
“Bush, his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, and other Republican political advisers have highlighted voting rights issues and what Rove has called the ‘growing problem’ of election fraud by Democrats since Bush took power in the tumultuous election of 2000, a race ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Since 2005, McClatchy Newspapers has found, Bush has appointed at least three U.S. attorneys who had worked in the Justice Department’s civil rights division when it was rolling back longstanding voting-rights policies aimed at protecting predominantly poor, minority voters.
“Another newly installed U.S. attorney, Tim Griffin in Little Rock, Ark., was accused of participating in efforts to suppress Democratic votes in Florida during the 2004 presidential election while he was a research director for the Republican National Committee. He’s denied any wrongdoing.”
Rove’s Motivation
In fact, if you believe that the whole purge was Karl Rove’s idea (see my Friday column) then the McClatchy team exposes what could be his central motivation: “Last April, while the Justice Department and the White House were planning the firings, Rove gave a speech in Washington to the Republican National Lawyers Association. He ticked off 11 states that he said could be pivotal in the 2008 elections. Bush has appointed new U.S. attorneys in nine of them since 2005: Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico. U.S. attorneys in the latter four were among those fired.
“Rove thanked the audience for ‘all that you are doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the integrity of the ballot is protected.’ He added, ‘A lot in American politics is up for grabs.’”
Blogger Hilzoy proposes another possible 2008-related Rove motivation: “It’s not surprising, at the beginning of a Presidential campaign season, for the Republican party to send its chief opposition researcher — the guy responsible for digging up dirt on political opponents — to the very state where Hillary Clinton, one of the frontrunners for the Democratic nomination, spent most of her adult life. But it’s completely out of line for them to send their chief opposition researcher to Arkansas as a US Attorney with subpoena power.”
Justice Politics
Tom Hamburger writes in the Los Angeles Times that “suspicions that the White House’s partisan political priorities may have made their way into Justice Department decision-making have grown in recent weeks.
“Not only have two of eight recently fired U.S. attorneys complained that in specific cases they felt pressure to make decisions that would advance Republican political interests, but last week several former career officials in the Justice Department said they had felt similar pressures on voting rights cases.
“‘The political decision-making process that led to the dismissal of eight United States attorneys was standard practice in the Civil Rights Division years before these revelations,’ Joseph D. Rich, recently retired head of the division’s voting rights section, said in a sparsely attended House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing last week.”
The liberal Center for American Progress is out with a major new report on civil rights enforcement under the Bush administration, which concludes: “The Bush administration continues to use the courts and the judicial appointment process to narrow civil rights protections and repeal remedies for legal redress while allowing the traditional tools of the executive branch for civil rights enforcement to wither and die.”
Politicization Watch
Scott Higham and Robert O’Harrow Jr. write in The Washington Post: “Witnesses have told congressional investigators that the chief of the General Services Administration and a deputy in Karl Rove’s political affairs office at the White House joined in a videoconference earlier this year with top GSA political appointees, who discussed ways to help Republican candidates.
“With GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan and up to 40 regional administrators on hand, J. Scott Jennings, the White House’s deputy director of political affairs, gave a PowerPoint presentation on Jan. 26 of polling data about the 2006 elections.
“When Jennings concluded his presentation to the GSA political appointees, Doan allegedly asked them how they could ‘help ‘our candidates’ in the next elections,’ according to a March 6 letter to Doan from Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Waxman said in the letter that one method suggested was using ‘targeted public events, such as the opening of federal facilities around the country.’”
E-Mail Watch
Regular White House Watch readers will know I’ve been mighty curious about the use of outside e-mail accounts by White House staffers in the course of doing official business. (See my March 15 and 16 columns.)
And as I wrote in Friday’s column, National Journal’s Alexis Simendinger has taken up the issue as well.
Here’s her fruitless attempt to get some answers from Tony Snow at Friday’s press briefing:
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“Q: Clarification, is the President prepared as part of his offer to turn over all materials and emails that were created on the RNC domain, which is primarily –
“MR. SNOW: As I said, all responsive documents will be provided.
“Q: So he has the authority to tell the RNC to turn it over?
“MR. SNOW: I’m not going to get into the vagaries of document production, because that is an issue for lawyers to go into. But any documents that would be generated, that would be germane to the inquiry, would be provided.
“Q: Whether or not they were created on this system here –
“MR. SNOW: Like I said, I don’t want to get into the technical issues.”
And several bloggers and e-mailers have now pointed out that last year’s report on convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff from the Democrats on the House government reform committee documented that Abramoff’s people were aware that their friends in the White House didn’t want any e-mails sent to their White House e-mail addresses.
In a February 7, 2003, e-mail to Abramoff, his associate Kevin Ring described how an e-mail from Abramoff to Rove aide Susan Ralston had gotten forwarded to a White House e-mail address by mistake. Yet another Abramoff associate warned that “it is better not to put this stuff in writing in their e-mail system because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc.” Abramoff replied: “Dammit. It was sent to Susan on her rnc pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system.” The e-mails are on page 14 of this document.
And the House government reform committee today announced: “Citing evidence that senior White House officials are using RNC and other political email accounts to avoid leaving a record of official communications, Chairman Waxman directs the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney ‘04 Campaign to preserve the emails of White House officials and to meet with Committee staff to explain how the accounts are managed and what steps are being taken to protect the emails from destruction and tampering.”
“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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