“Thanks for Everything” — the emails
It’s interesting how this Liberal Press works — when Dubby gets popped by both the House and Senate with a timeline, we hear that the Dem’s are in trouble; when polls show that 2/3rds of the nation want direct action on Eight Gate, it’s announced that this is an insider cat fight and the public has little interest. Yeah — that Liberal Press, what a propaganda machine!
Some interesting bits here — everybody is focused on the e-mail issue; if you’re only interested in the outlines, you’ll find MSM links below — if you’re a wonk and you want the juicy stuff, read on and we’ll look at the internal communications systems in the Whore House [oooo, I know -- that hurt, didn't it. Even now, while the barbarians hold the country hostage, the White House seems like a mythical, never-to-be-besmirched edifice. Well, not today; it will have to be thoroughly fumigated before another leader sits in the Oval ... much as American policy will have to rise like a Phoenix if it's to survive.]
First, a Fiori and an op/ed that opens the discussion about replacing Fredo … with so many of Bush’s cohorts disgraced or suspect, he doesn’t have much of a gene pool to draw from now, and letting in your average decent citizen can’t have much appeal. Secrecy has been the Bushies long-standing bulwark against public scrutiny — and those days are over. He’s in trouble … thank God/dess!
We’ll examine the e-mails, look at the Blossom’s hand in all of this — my man Digby will discuss an interesting interview with David Iglesias, and a really nasty SwiftBoat attempt — and last, you’ll see yet another example of Republican humor-deficit. Yikes! But first, DO pop over to Huffy and see the multi-picture on their story of the day — don’t know how long it’ll be up, but it’s a pip!
Eight Gate, with speculations about who will get thrown under the bus next! Lots here — a jump on your weekend reads.
Jude
Fiore presents: Be careful what you fish for!
03.29.07
Aide: Gonzales Signed Off on Firings
LAURIE KELLMAN, AP
March 29, 2007
Prosecutors Assail Gonzales During Meeting
A day after his frank discussion with prosecutors in Chicago, Alberto R. Gonzales was in Houston on Wednesday.
DAVID JOHNSTON and NEIL A. LEWIS, New York Times
March 29, 2007
Will Alberto Gonzales Take the Fifth?
Brent Budowsky
Mar 30 2007
When we take the dress off the pig, today Kyle Sampson said Alberto Gonzales is a liar.
The attorney general told the Congress and the nation he was not involved in the firings of U.S. attorneys. We can dress this up nine different ways, we can use the weasel words of official Washington, but this is clear:
Alberto Gonzales lied.
Here is the problem for the President:
He wants to replace Gonzales but has extreme problems finding a successor who is both honest and will accept the job.
The president is afraid of an honest attorney general because the trail of wrongdoing would be exposed by an AG who faithfully executes the law.
The president cannot get an AG who will play the cover-up game, because the cover-up AG candidates won’t accept the job for fear of being indicted.
This is an administration full of Scooter Libbys protecting Dick Cheneys.
The Gonzales scandal goes far beyond the U.S. attorneys and reaches into the bowels of the White House, from the days Gonzales was White House counsel.
In those days Alberto Gonzales was giving legal support to policies of torture, and to policies of massive violations of the U.S. Constitution through eavesdropping and other measures, without court order.
Are there internal e-mails, executive orders, memos or legal opinions seeking to legalize what is illegal? What did Alberto Gonzales know, and when did he know it, and what did he write about it, on Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo, and violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act?
The president must faithfully execute the laws. No attorney general or White House counsel can advise otherwise, without advising the president to break the law.
We now know that the secretary of defense and the secretary of state are advising the president to close Guantanamo, while the attorney general leads the fight to keep it open. With all due respect …
Alberto Gonzales is a basically nice man who is in over his head. He is an average attorney elevated to great heights by his sycophantic devotion to one man. Unfortunately that one man has tendencies that Republicans from George Will to Chuck Hagel have labeled as monarchical, and that one man believes he is above the law.
If there ever was a president who desperately needs an attorney general of stature, integrity and legal authority it is George W. Bush. If ever there were an Attorney General who should never be a sycophant or enabler for George W. Bush, it is Alberto Gonzales.
The president should appoint Jack Danforth as the next attorney general. Danforth is a former senator, brilliant lawyer and devout minister of unquestioned integrity and high-stature legal authority.
Otherwise our country may be headed for an endless succession of Scooter Libbys, with the buck finally landing squarely on the desk of the president, with consequences that will be grave indeed. ++
A New Wrinkle in Rove’s Role in DOJ Scandal
Did Karl Rove have a hand in replacing the fired U.S. attorney in New Mexico? An overlooked e-mail may provide a clue.
Michael Isikoff, Newsweek
March 28, 2007
March 28, 2007 - New Mexico Republican Sen. Pete Domenici’s chief of staff sent a cryptic thank-you note to Karl Rove just as the senator was recommending replacements for David Iglesias, the fired U.S. attorney in New Mexico, according to internal White House and Justice Department documents.
“Thanks for everything,” Domenici chief of staff Steve Bell wrote Rove and two other White House officials, including Rove’s political deputy, Scott Jennings, in a Jan. 8, 2007 e-mail that forwarded the name of a candidate to replace Iglesias.
Buried in Justice Department documents released two weeks ago, the Bell e-mail was not initially noticed by congressional investigators because it was sent to Rove’s political e-mail account-not his more clearly recognizable White House e-mail address.
It is not clear from the content of the e-mail what Bell was thanking Rove for. But the thank-you note is the first indication that Rove himself may have been involved in replacing Iglesias. It is the dismissal of Iglesias-fired after Domenici complained about his handling of a local corruption investigation-that has raised the most serious questions of political interference in the U.S. attorney controversy.
“This absolutely corroborates what I’ve been saying all along-this is a political matter, not a performance matter,” Iglesias said when a Newsweek reporter read him the e-mail today. “What is he thanking him [Rove] for? It’s thanking him for getting Dave out of the picture.”
Asked about the e-mail today, and why Bell was thanking Rove, Domenici’s press secretary, Chris Gallegos said: “We’re not going to have anything to say about that e-mail.” He added that Bell “did not want to discuss a private communication.” White House press spokesman Tony Fratto said the e-mail was “interpreted” by the three White House officials who recevied it as a thank you for considering the names of Domenici’s candidates for replacing Iglesias-not for their help in removing Iglesias. Did Rove in fact intervene to have Iglesias removed? Fratto replied: “We’re not commenting on that” because of general White House policy not to talk about “internal White House communications.”
In a move that was not publicly announced at the time, Iglesias and six other U.S. attorneys were abruptly fired on Dec. 7, 2006. The prosecutors were given no explanation for why they were being dismissed. But Iglesias has since testified that in October of last year, he got two phone calls from New Mexico GOP lawmakers-Rep. Heather Wilson, who was then in a tight race for re-election, and Domenici-pressing him on whether he was going to bring indictments in a local corruption case that implicated prominent New Mexico Democrats.
According to Iglesias, Wilson asked him whether there were “sealed indictments” in the matter-a question he said he refused to answer. Then Bell, the Domenici staffer, reached the prosecutor at home and immediately put Domenici on the line. “Are these [indictments] going to be filed before November?” the senator asked him, according to Iglesias’s testimony. When Iglesias responded, “I didn’t think so,” Domenici said he was “very sorry to hear that” and, according to Iglesias, “the line went dead.”
“I felt leaned on. I felt pressured to get these matters moving,” Iglesias testified. He described Domenici’s phone call to him at home as “unprecedented.”
On March 7, 2007, the day Iglesisas described the call in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Domenici released a statement acknowledging
the phone call but contending that “neither I nor those who overheard my side of the brief conversation recall my mentioning the November election to him. I did not pressure him.”
Ironically, it was Domenici who first recommended Iglesias, a former Navy lawyer who served as the model for the Tom Cruise character in the movie, “A Few Good Men.” The Justice Department has since confirmed that Domenici had repeatedly complained about Iglesias to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty-mentioning, among other matters, Iglesias’s failure to pursue cases involving voter fraud. In a brief Oct. 4, 2006, phone call to McNulty, Domenici also complained about Iglesias’s record on “public corruption,” according to a Justice Department official, who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters.
Iglesias publicly announced he was resigning for unspecified reasons on Dec. 19, 2006. Domenici then moved quickly to replace him, putting out a press release announcing he had recommended four names to the White House to be the state’s new U.S. attorney. Three days later, Bell sent his e-mail to Candida Wolff (the chief White House lobbyist), Jennings and Rove, alerting them: “a fifth name coming today.”
The e-mail continued: “To repeat [name blanked out] is our overwhelming choice and will take the job .” It was then that Bell added, “Thanks for everything.”
One reason that Iglesias’s firing has been so controversial is that, according to Justice Department records, he was not originally on the internal Justice Department list of prosecutors to be terminated last fall. But after Domenici’s complaints, he was added to the list by Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Gonzales’s chief of staff at the time, who is slated to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. But Sampson may not be able to clear up the mystery as to why Iglesias was fired. As reported this week by NEWSWEEK, Sampson is expected to say, when asked about Iglesisas, that he “doesn’t recall” why the New Mexico rosecutor was suddenly targeted for dismissal, according to a source familiar with his account but who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters. ++
The discovery of a previously unknown treasure chest of e-mails buried by the Bush administration may prove to be as informative as Nixon’s secret White House tapes.
Sidney Blumenthal, Salon
Mar. 29, 2007
The rise and fall of the Bush presidency has had four phases: the befuddled period of steady political decline during the president’s first nine months; the high tide of hubris from Sept. 11, 2001, through the 2004 election; the self-destructive overreaching to consolidate a one-party state from 2005 to 2006, culminating in the repudiation of theRepublican Congress; and, now, the terminal stage, the great unraveling, as the Democratic Congress works to uncover the abuses of the previous six years.
Richard Nixon and George W. Bush both invoked secrecy for national security. Both insisted war — the war in Vietnam, the war on terror — justified impunity. And both offered the reason of secrecy to cover political power grabs.
In Watergate, “Deep Throat” counseled that the royal road to the scandal’s source was to “follow the money.” In the proliferating scandals of the Bush presidency, Congress is searching down a trail of records that did not exist in the time of Nixon: Follow the e-mails.
The discovery of a hitherto unknown treasure-trove of e-mails buried by the Bush White House may prove to be as informative as Nixon’s secret White House tapes. Last week the National Journal disclosed that Karl Rove does “about 95 percent” of his e-mails outside the White House system, instead using a Republican National Committee account. What’s more, Rove doesn’t tap most of his messages on a White House computer, but rather on a BlackBerry provided by the RNC. By this method, Rove and other White House aides evade the legally required archiving of official e-mails. The first glimmer of this dodge appeared in a small item buried in a January 2004 issue of U.S. News & World Report: “‘I don’t want my E-mail made public,’ said one insider. As a result, many aides have shifted to Internet E-mail instead of the White House system. ‘It’s Yahoo!, baby,’ says a Bushie.”
The offshoring of White House records via RNC e-mails became apparent when an RNC domain, gwb43.com (referring to George W. Bush, 43rd president), turned up in a batch of e-mails the White House gave to House and Senate committees earlier this month. Rove’s deputy, Scott Jennings, former Bush legal counsel Harriet Miers and her deputies strangely had used gwb43.com as an e-mail domain.
The production of these e-mails to Congress was a kind of slip. In its tense negotiations with lawmakers, the White House has steadfastly refused to give Congress e-mails other than those between the White House and the Justice Department or the White House and Congress. E-mails among presidential aides have been withheld under the claim of executive privilege.
When I worked in the Clinton White House, people brought in their personal computers if they were engaged in any campaign work, but all official transactions had to be done within the White House system as stipulated by the Presidential Records Act of 1978. (The PRA requires that “the President shall take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are maintained as Presidential records.”) Having forsaken the use of Executive Office of the President e-mail, executive privilege has been sacrificed. Moreover, Rove’s and the others’ practice may not be legal.
The revelation of the gwb43 e-mails illuminates the widespread exploitation of nongovernmental e-mail by Bush White House officials, which initially surfaced in the investigations and trial of convicted Republican super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Susan Ralston, Abramoff’s former personal assistant and then executive assistant to Rove, who served as the liaison between the two men in their constant dealings, used ” georgewbush.com” and “rnchq.org” e-mail accounts to communicate with Abramoff between 2001 and 2003. In one of her e-mails, Ralston cautioned that “it is better to not put this stuff in writing in [the White House] … email 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 Ralston e-mails were not fully appreciated as a clue to the vast cache of hidden e-mails at the time the Justice Department’s inspector general conducted a probe into whether Abramoff had been involved in the firing of the U.S. attorney in Guam in 2002.
That prosecutor, Frederick Black, who had been appointed by George H.W. Bush and served for 10 years, had opened an investigation into the $324,000 in secret payments Abramoff received from the Guam Superior Court to lobby in Washington against court reform. The day after Black subpoenaed Abramoff’s contract, he was fired. In a 2006 report, the I.G. found no criminal wrongdoing — but he did not have access to the nongovernmental e-mails (i.e., those sent outside the official White House system). Now, the I.G. may have cause to reopen his case.
Under the RNC’s gwb43.com domain a myriad of e-mail accounts flourish, including the ones used by Rove’s office to conduct his business with Abramoff. Among these accounts are ones for Republican Senate campaigns, for RepublicanVictoryTeam.com and the like, and, curiously, for ScooterLibby.com. The latter e-mail account serves the Web site of thedefense fund of Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. ScooterLibby.com amounts to an in-kind contribution from the RNC.
On Monday, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent letters to RNC officials demanding that they preserve the White House e-mails sent on RNC accounts. “The e-mail exchanges reviewed by the Committee provide evidence that in some instances, White House officials were using the nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications,” he wrote. “What assurance can the RNC provide the Committee,” he asked, “that no e-mails involving official White House business have been destroyed or altered?”
Even as the Bush administration withholds evidence that would allow Congress to fulfill its obligation of oversight, administration officials are having difficulty keeping their stories straight. The release of each new batch of e-mails forces them to scramble for new alibis.
On March 12, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had nothing to do with the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys late last year. How they happened to be removed remained a mystery to him. “I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on,” he said. But e-mails released last week show that he was informed of the plan twice in late 2006.
In fact, on Nov. 27, 2006, he met with at least five senior Justice Department officials to finalize a “five-step plan for carrying out the firings of the prosecutors.” With the appearance of the incriminating e-mails, Gonzales’ spokespeople have been sent out to tell the press that there is “no inconsistency,” a brazen assertion of the Groucho Marx defense: Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
Despite the resignation of Gonzales’ chief of staff and counselor, Kyle Sampson, on March 12, another fall guy has emerged, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. On Jan. 18, Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, presenting a public explanation that politics had nothing to do with the U.S. attorney firings — “we would never, ever make a change in the U.S. attorney position for political reasons” — and private assurances to Republican senators that they were dismissed for disagreements over policy.
Three weeks later, McNulty appeared before the committee, contradicting his boss, explaining that the U.S. attorneys were fired for “performance-related” reasons. Then he admitted that the U.S. attorney for Arkansas, H.E. “Bud” Cummins, was being replaced by a Rove protégé, Tim Griffin. McNulty’s testimony incited the U.S. attorneys to defend theirreputations, agitated the Democrats to ferret out the underlying political motives and forced the administration to react with a spray of excuses.
On Monday, the administration leaked an e-mail to ABC News in an attempt to blame the entire scandal on McNulty. “McNulty’s testimony directly conflicted with the approach Miers advised, according to an unreleased internal White House e-mail described to ABC News,” it reported. “According to that e-mail, sources said, Miers said the administration should take the firm position that it would not comment on personnel issues.” The leak fit the administration scenario that the U.S. attorneys scandal was nothing but a P.R. mistake — and now McNulty was the one fingered as the culprit. But in trying to shift blame the leaking of the e-mail would seem to undercut the White House’s claim of executive privilege that it cannot give internal communications to Congress.
Also on Monday Gonzales’ senior counselor and White House liaison, Monica Goodling, invoked the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in her refusal to testify before the Senate. (Goodling, who graduated from law school in 1999, is one of the highest-ranking officials in the Department of Justice. Her doctor of jurisprudence degree comes from Regent University, founded by the Rev. Pat Robertson. Its Web site boasts that it has “150 graduates serving in the Bush Administration.” Perhaps not coincidentally,Kay Coles James, a former Regent University dean, was director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 2001 to 2005.)
Goodling’s lawyer’s extraordinarily argumentative letter explaining her silence accused “certain members” of the committee of “already” having “reached conclusions about the affair”; stated that the inquiry is “being used to promote a political party” and that it lacks a “legitimate reason … basic fairness … objectivity”; and stated that an unnamed “seniorDepartment of Justice official” had told Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., that he was “not entirely candid” to the committee because “our client did not inform him of certain pertinent facts.”
McNulty, of course, is that official. As Goodling’s lawyer’s letter reveals, he is refusing to go gently into that good night and declining to cooperate with the latest cover story. Hence, she is taking the Fifth, perhaps more because she doesn’t know what story to tell than because she might face a perjury trap before the committee. So the fall gal blames the fall guy.
As Congress extends its oversight, President Bush stiffens his resistance. He treats the Democratic Congress as basically illegitimate. He reacts to every assertion of oversight as an invasion of presidential prerogative. Not only does he reject compromise and negotiation, but he also transforms every point of difference into a conflict over first principles, even as every new disclosure reveals his purely political motivation.
Bush’s radicalism becomes more fervent as he becomes more embattled, and separates him from presidents past. Richard Nixon compromised regularly with a Democratic Congress, even as he secretly laid the foundation of an imperial presidency, his unfinished project left in ruins after the Watergate scandal. Ronald Reagan, the old union leader, president of the Screen Actors Guild, stood resolutely on his convictions until the better part of political valor led him to cut a deal, as he did when he abandoned his long-held belief in privatizing Social Security, conceding his supposedly inviolate ground to Speaker Tip O’Neill, and happily proclaiming the pact afterward. George H.W. Bush, a former congressman with many friends across the aisle, famously jettisoned his tenuous conservative bona fides as Reagan’s heir, a credo he embraced in his 1988 acceptance speech before the Republican National Convention — “Read my lips: no new taxes” — when, anxious about the expanding deficit, he cut a deal with the Democratic leadership to lower it through tax increases.
The Republican right’s excoriation of the elder Bush’s betrayal, rather than his overriding sense of responsibility, was the lesson learned by the son. His imperative to avoid making enemies on the right is compounded into his larger notion of an unfettered presidency.
For six years, Bush had a Republican Congress whipped into obedience — and it provided him his only experience in legislative affairs. The rise of the Democratic Congress, reviving the powers of oversight and investigation, is a shock to his system. But he is not without an understanding of his changed circumstances. Bush sees the new Congress as the same beast that ensnared his father in fatal compromise and as a monstrous threat to the imperial presidency he has spent six years carefully building.
As the return of oversight suddenly exposes pervasive corruption throughout the executive branch, Bush struggles against Congress as though it were an alien force. Bush has no sense that the Framers, wary of the concentration of power in the executive, deliberately established the powers of the Congress in Article I of the Constitution and those of the president in Article II. Once again he straps on his armor and clasps his shield. His defense of secrecy, executive fiat and one-party rule has become his battle of Thermopylae. ++
Records-Breaking Emails
Center for American Progress
March 30, 2007
President Bush has consistently attempted to weaken the Presidential Records Act, hich was intended to open presidential documents to the public after a period of no more than 12 years. In 2001, Bush issued a decree that now allows “former presidents and their heirs to bar the release of documents for almost any reason.” Recent revelations in the Bush administration’s firing of eight U.S. attorneys shed new light on another way the White House has been deliberately evading the PRA — by using political, non-government email addresses to correspond with one another. Since the White House system automatically keeps records of all emails, Bush administration officials — including Karl Rove — are using accounts provided by the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign to dodge public oversight. Unfortunately, after Waxman notified these groups to begin preserving all emails by and from White House officials, administration staffers have started looking for new ways to hide presidential records from public scrutiny.
*Administration officials have been using political email addresses to evade White House record-keeping requirements. Rove does “about 95 percent” of his emailing using his RNC-based account. Susan Ralston, Rove’s former assistant, used not only an RNC account, but also accounts at georgebush.com and aol.com to communicate White House information with lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Emails show that Rove’s deputy, J. Scott Jennings, used a political email address — SJennings@gwb43.com — to help orchestrate the prosecutor purge. Even former President George H.W. Bush said his son, the current president, spurns emailing because the records could be subpoenaed. But the White House email system has been crafted to comply with the PRA. It “automatically copies all messages created by staff and sends them to the White House Office of Records Management for archiving.” By avoiding the White House email system, the Bush administration has raised serious questions about “whether it is taking all necessary steps to maintain presidential records to provide a full accounting of all activities” during Bush’s tenure.
*By using private email, White House officials are blurring the lines between politics and official White House duties. Ralston invited two lobbyists working for Jack Abramoff to use her RNC email account to avoid “security issues” with the White House email system, writing, “I now have an RNC blackberry which you can use to email me at any time. No security issues like my WH email.” Ralston resigned in Oct. 2006, after receiving tickets to concerts and sporting events from Abramoff and his team. Jennings used his gwb43.com address to push Rove protege and former RNC research director Tim Griffin into place as U.S. attorney in Arkansas. Former deputy to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Kyle Sampson admitted in a December email that Griffin’s appointment was largely political and “important to Harriet [Miers], Karl, etc.” While the Bush administration has repeatedly “denied any political motives” in its prosecutor purge, the repeated use of political accounts for communication casts doubt on this assertion. As RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt noted, “As a matter of course, the RNC provides server space and equipment to certain White House personnel in order to assist them with their political efforts.”
*Executive privilege may not extend to private email accounts provided by the RNC. The Bush administration has repeatedly invoked executive privilege as a reason to withhold information on the prosecutor purge. But by using outside political email addresses, White House officials have lost the presumption of executive privilege. As The Washington Monthly’s Kevin Drum noted, staffers “using private accounts specifically to evade legitimate congressional oversight” might lose their claims to executive privilege. If they were “primarily discussing the U.S. Attorney firings on personal and RNC accounts, that implicitly means that they themselves weren’t treating it as the kind of official business that would be protected by executive privilege,” he added. ++
DOJ Emails Illustrate Plan to Mislead Congress
Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report
Thursday 29 March 2007
Embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his closest advisers have stated repeatedly over the past two months that the selective firings of eight United States attorneys last year were justified because President Bush has the authority to purge federal prosecutors at will, a fact that is not under dispute.
However, the common thread in the thousands of pages of documents released by the Department of Justice in conjunction with a Congressional probe into the US attorney dismissals is that top officials in the DOJ who worked behind the scenes believed that they were doing something improper in selectively dismissing the attorneys and acted with a clear intent to deceive lawmakers if any questions into reasons for the firings arose.
Instead of pointing to the president’s broad discretion to fire the prosecutors, Justice officials conceived a plan that they would execute on a specific date and time, and then cooked up a story that they all agreed upon in the event that their actions were scrutinized. Simply put, some former US attorneys argue, the emails and other documents released last week demonstrate that prior to the day the firings took place, officials in the Justice Department appeared to be acting under a guilty state of mind.
The state of mind of officials involved in the firings is part of the reason the US attorney purge has turned into a full-blown political scandal and has led to Congressional hearings.
There “seems to be an awareness that the various officials involved in the process knew they were putting out misinformation in large measure; that is, this is evidence of an intent to deceive,” said Michael E. Clark, a former US attorney for the Southern District of Texas. “It may not be criminally actionable, but arguably there could be a civil remedy available to those who were on the receiving end - such as for defamation of character. This episode has gained traction in my eyes for the same reason that spelled the fate of former President Nixon during Watergate. The deception is inexcusable, and particularly so when it wasn’t necessary; instead, had Gonzales and others been more forthright, then this could have been a tempest in a teapot.”
Other former federal prosecutors said the fact that Justice Department officials drafted a document titled “Plan for Replacing Certain U.S. Attorneys” and then allegedly fabricated a set of talking points for the media and lawmakers in the form of employment evaluations showing that the eight US attorneys in question were performing poorly is a clear indicator that DOJ officials knew what they were doing was questionable at best.
The emails demonstrated that “some of [the Justice Department officials] were uncomfortable with the “plan” to dismiss the US attorneys because they realized how unprecedented, disruptive and controversial their actions would be,” said Laurie Levenson, a former assistant federal prosecutor in Los Angeles. Levenson recently testified before the House Judiciary Committee regarding the firings. “As for legal consequences of their actions, intent would be important if it could be shown that any of these dismissals were [...] an effort to disrupt or influence a particular criminal investigation.”
Several lawmakers, including Senator Dianne Feinstein, (D-Calif.), have questioned whether the eight US attorney firings constituted an attempt to derail corruption investigations involving Republican officials, which the US attorneys who were fired were still working on.
However, Levenson, who now works as a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, stressed that it is still a bit “premature” to draw that conclusion “because we still don’t know if [the Justice Department was] playing politics or playing with particular criminal investigations.”
Dan Richman, a former US attorney in New York, doesn’t necessarily see deception at play based on the email traffic of the Justice Department officials, but rather awareness that the firings would touch a nerve among some members Congress and a discussion among the DOJ in dealing with the political blowback.
Even if “the staffers had simply been engaged in a plan to make room for new blood or to cull out [US attorneys] not aligned with the administration’s enforcement priorities, they might still have worried about the fallout in Congress or within the DOJ community,” Richman said. “The allocation of authority between Main Justice and the Districts [US attorneys are assigned to] has always been a sensitive issue.”
On Tuesday, during a news conference in Chicago, Gonzales said he wanted to “reassure the American people that nothing improper happened here.”
But it’s the appearance of impropriety that has angered Congress and members of the legal community.
Indeed, some of the emails into the activities that predated the firings show that White House officials communicated with DOJ staffers about the attorney purge, using email accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee.
Using alternative email accounts also creates the appearance of impropriety, lawmakers charged Monday, because it allows White House officials to avoid the usual archival process and the automatic paper trail that is established when they use White House email servers to conduct business. Emails sent through the RNC server can be destroyed.
In letters sent Monday to the RNC and the Bush/Cheney 2004 Campaign, Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, urged the two groups to preserve all emails sent by White House officials from their servers, because of their relevance to the US attorney scandal.
One email the Justice Department released Friday to a Congressional committee shows that J. Scott Jennings, special assistant to President Bush and deputy director for political affairs, used an sjennings@gwb43.com email account to query a DOJ official about the pending US attorney vacancies.
“Does a list of vacant, or about-to-be-vacant, US attorney slots exist anywhere?” Jennings wrote in a December 3, 2006 email to Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Gonzales. Gonzales is said to have approved the firings of eight US attorneys in what appears to be a politically motivated plot. Jennings’ immediate boss is Karl Rove, White House political adviser, who, according to a report Friday in the National Journal, conducts 95 percent of White House business using an email account maintained by the RNC.
“My office. Want me to sent [sic] to you tomorrow?” Sampson replied to Jennings’ private sjennings@gwb43.com account. Four days after the email was sent, the DOJ fired seven US attorneys. Earlier another US attorney had been fired. The firings have since been revealed as part of a plan that had been in the making for more than two years and was executed with the knowledge of White House officials, including Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers. Both Rove and Miers have been asked to testify under oath before Congress about the firings, whether the action was politically motivated, and the roles they played in the firings.
Waxman said that in certain cases White House officials were using alternative email accounts to avoid creating an automatic paper trail of their communications about hot-button political issues.
Taken as a whole, Jennings’ use of an outside email account to query Sampson on the status of the purge, and the creation of a five-point plan which stated that if pushed by lawmakers to justify the dismissals, DOJ officials should mislead lawmakers and say that each termination “is based on a thorough review of US attorneys’ performance,” would seem to suggest there were other reasons behind the firings. That is what Congress is trying to determine. ++
Republican On Paper
by digby, Hullabaloo
3/28/07
David Iglesias gave an interview with GQ today. He’s obviously quite disillusioned by what happened and is pulling no punches. Here’s one little bit I thought was interesting:
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Are you at all interested in running for office some day?
No.
Had you ever been?
I was interested. Now, I cast a jaundiced eye towards the political process.
Because of the firing?
Oh sure. Yeah. Because if running for office means you’re willing to cheat, you’re willing to lie, you’re willing to slander people, then I’m not interested. And, frankly, I’ve got a practical matter. I’ve got four kids-all girls-so I’m going to have four weddings and four college educations in the next 15 years, and based on what members of Congress make.just do the math! It’s not very encouraging.
That’s a bit of a cop-out. It doesn’t have to be that way and usually isn’t — unless you are a modern Republican. He even says, in another part of the interview:
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I’d heard that things had gotten more political under Bush from career people in Justice. My first assistant has been around since the Carter administration, and he told me that he’s never seen anything like this, that politics historically don’t play any role in our prosecutive decision-making.
But it hasn’t really sunk in yet.
Do you still consider yourself a Republican?
Yes.
Do you consider the people in the White House to be Republicans?
I think they’ve lost their way. They’ve lost their moral compass. On paper, we would probably be in agreement on most of the major issues, but in terms of actual practice and treating people fairly and respectfully and decently, I’ve lost my faith in our leadership.
In the interview he says that he’s against torture and that the justice department is the most political anyone can remember. He complains that the executive branch overreached because there was one party rule. But while this stuff was going on, the entire Republican establishment as well as a large number of the press and the entire base were not just supportive, they were ecstatically enthusiastically supportive. Bush was being lauded as a new Winston Churchill. Not everyone agreed, of course, but we were called traitors.
At some point you have to look past the leadership and ask why people were so willing to follow them over the cliff. It wasn’t the system that failed — it was every single Republican (like Iglesias) who looked the other way because their boy was on top and they wanted to be in the winners circle. Many of them knew that something was very wrong and yet they said nothing. They need to think about that.
It’s kind of sweet that he’s lost his faith in Bush and the boys, but it’s an illness that goes all the way to the bottom. All he has to do is look at those local fellow Republicans who proudly swiftboated him today to know that the Republican party is rotten to the core. And the “philosophy” itself,such as it is, is part of the problem — all that talk about responsibility and independence and rule of law are just talking points. This is about loyalty to a party which, when you strip all the marketing away, really exists solely as opposition to its enemy. They hate liberalism. Everything is in service to that single animating idea and has been for a long, long time.
When Iglesias failed to go after the enemy regardless of the evidence, he became that enemy. It didn’t matter how much he agreed with the party “onpaper.” All that mattered was that he wasn’t loyal, period. ++
New Mexico Swift Boats
by digby, Hullabloo
3/28/07
Well it looks like the Rovian character assassins have decided it’s time to go after the US Attorneys. Here’s a new attack ad playing on New Mexico radio stations:
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Former US Attorney David Iglesias wonders why he was fired. He says it was politics. Well, let’s look at the facts.
Iglesias brags he won a huge corruption case but he cut sweetheart deals with those involved and then lost 23 of 24 counts at trial (voices: NOT GUILTY!)
In 2004 3000 suspect voter registration forms turned up. But Iglesias did nothing even when a crack dealer was busted with them and even when political operatives took the fifth and refused to testify about their fraud. David Iglesias just looked the other way.
No wonder a criminal defense lawyer just praised him. He let her client walk.
While he looked the other way on fraud, Iglesias did prosecute a girl for putting bubble gum on a speeding ticket and he did find time to take dozens of taxpayer funded junkets around the world.
Meanwhile his own prosecutors criticized him and a former state supreme court judge publicly called him an ingrate.
Now Iglesias is even trying to play the race card.
David Iglesias. He still can’t figure out why he was fired.
C’mon David, isn’t it obvious?
This was put together by a group called New Mexicans For Honest Courts. (You can hear the ad at the web site.) They appear to have been around since 2004 and look to be one of those rightwing groups that have sprung up in statesall over the country to protest “activist judges.” It’s hard to know where they got the money for this ad since it looks like they didn’t file a PAC report since July of 2006. Maybe some “angel” just came to town.
The message is clear. If you speak out against the family, you’ll get whacked. ++
Bush, Rove Joke About White House Felonies. Reporters Laugh
R.J. Eskow, HuffPo
3/29/07
I have a lot of sympathy for David Gregory, who was pressed into a bad “comedy” routine with Karl Rove at the Radio & Correspondents’ Dinner tonight. Rove had already cracked a lame joke about Patrick Fitzgerald, while mangling his first name as “Peter.” Then he and Gregory went on to “rap” with the bad comedian hosting the event.
Video here, courtesy Atrios.
Bear in mind that the real subject of Rove’s humor was the conviction of a senior White House official for committing a felony while serving this Administration. Make that three felonies. Proven, beyond a reasonable doubt. That would be three felonies committed by someone on Rove’s team.
Three felonies that involved using journalists to destroy a woman’s career, to hurt her husband for telling the truth.
Ha-ha, laughed the reporters.
Meanwhile, new evidence is emerging that Rove was directly involved in the firing of Federal prosecutors. That directly contradicts what this same Administration told this same group of correspondents.
David Gregory’s a fine reporter, but his uncomfortable routine doesn’t just illustrate the impropriety of joking around with people who may have committed serious crimes. It also demonstrates how inappropriate it is to hold these events with an Administration that deceived a nation into war - a deception that was enabled in large part by the same chatty familiarity being displayed at tonight’s dinner.
Here’s the bottom line: The widespread loss of life in Iraq is due in no small part to the slipshod workmanship of many of the journalists at this event, and their coziness with the those now in power. Displaying that coziness while our fighting men and women are still dying over there is in bad taste. (And let’s not forget the loss of innocent Iraqi lives, either.)
I know I wrote recently about Tony Snow’s illness and the need for reconciliation. I meant it. We can wish them the best as individuals and still oppose misdeeds and deception.
And where crimes are committed, we can wish for justice to be served. Justice must prevail before reconciliation can begin. And as I wrote then, reconciliation involves an honest admission of one’s own mistakes. There was none of that in evidence tonight, either from the Administration or the reporters.
Later, President Bush “made a funny” about the firing of Federal prosecutors - firings that may involve multiple felonies (including obstruction of justice, giving false testimony, and misleading another to give false testimony.)
“You know you’ve really botched things when you have people siding with lawyers,” said the President.
Ha-ha, said the reporters.
My advice for David Gregory, who seems like a really good guy, is this: Next time you’re asked, just say “Thanks, but I think I’ll sit this one out.”
Joking about the Administration’s proven (as with Libby) or suspected criminal behavior is highly inappropriate, especially since the media’s job is to investigate that behavior.
You don’t kid around with people you’re supposing to be probing for felonies and malfeasance. You especially don’t kid around about the potential felonies themselves - certainly not on the very day that new emails and other information about them is becoming available for your review. Maybe that’s one reason why these routines were so horribly unfunny.
In comedy, timing is everything. ++
“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
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Add comment March 30th, 2007