Atty General Gonzales Should Resign

QueEx · Mar 11, 2007

<center>The Failed Attorney General 
Bush should dismiss Mr. Gonzales and finally
appoint an attorney general who will use the
job to enforce the law and defend the Constitution</center>

New York Times
Editorial
Published: March 11, 2007

During the hearing on his nomination as attorney general, Alberto Gonzales said he understood the difference between the job he held — President Bush’s in-house lawyer — and the job he wanted, which was to represent all Americans as their chief law enforcement officer and a key defender of the Constitution. Two years later, it is obvious Mr. Gonzales does not have a clue about the difference.

Consigliere to Mr. Bush
He has never stopped being consigliere to Mr. Bush’s imperial presidency. If anyone, outside Mr. Bush’s rapidly shrinking circle of enablers, still had doubts about that, the events of last week should have erased them.

Political Firings of United States Attorneys
First, there was Mr. Gonzales’s lame op-ed article in USA Today trying to defend the obviously politically motivated firing of eight United States attorneys, which he dismissed as an “overblown personnel matter.” Then his inspector general exposed the way the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been abusing yet another unnecessary new power that Mr. Gonzales helped wring out of the Republican-dominated Congress in the name of fighting terrorism.

FBI Violating Patriot Act
The F.B.I. has been using powers it obtained under the Patriot Act to get financial, business and telephone records of Americans by issuing tens of thousands of “national security letters,” a euphemism for warrants that are issued without any judicial review or avenue of appeal. The administration said that, as with many powers it has arrogated since the 9/11 attacks, this radical change was essential to fast and nimble antiterrorism efforts, and it promised to police the use of the letters carefully.

But like so many of the administration’s promises, this one evaporated before the ink on those letters could dry. The F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, admitted Friday that his agency had used the new powers improperly.

Mr. Gonzales does not directly run the F.B.I., but it is part of his department and has clearly gotten the message that promises (and civil rights) are meant to be broken.

Defended use of Warrantless Eavedropping
It was Mr. Gonzales, after all, who repeatedly defended Mr. Bush’s decision to authorize warrantless eavesdropping on Americans’ international calls and e-mail. He was an eager public champion of the absurd notion that as commander in chief during a time of war, Mr. Bush can ignore laws that he thinks get in his way. Mr. Gonzales was disdainful of any attempt by Congress to examine the spying program, let alone control it.

helped Formulate Policies that Repudiated Geneva Conventions
The attorney general helped formulate and later defended the policies that repudiated the Geneva Conventions in the war against terror, and that sanctioned the use of kidnapping, secret detentions, abuse and torture. He has been central to the administration’s assault on the courts, which he recently said had no right to judge national security policies, and on the constitutional separation of powers.

Abandoned His Duty as Guardian of Elections
His Justice Department has abandoned its duties as guardian of election integrity and voting rights. It approved a Georgia photo-ID law that a federal judge later likened to a poll tax, a case in which Mr. Gonzales’s political team overrode the objections of the department’s professional staff.

The Justice Department has been shamefully indifferent to complaints of voter suppression aimed at minority voters. But it has managed to find the time to sue a group of black political leaders in Mississippi for discriminating against white voters.

Gonzales Disdains Separation of Powers
We opposed Mr. Gonzales’s nomination as attorney general. His résumé was weak, centered around producing legal briefs for Mr. Bush that assured him that the law said what he wanted it to say. More than anyone in the administration, except perhaps Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Gonzales symbolizes Mr. Bush’s disdain for the separation of powers, civil liberties and the rule of law.

Republican Arlen Specter Hinted Gonzales' Time is Up
On Thursday, Senator Arlen Specter, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, hinted very obliquely that perhaps Mr. Gonzales’s time was up. We’re not going to be oblique. Mr. Bush should dismiss Mr. Gonzales and finally appoint an attorney general who will use the job to enforce the law and defend the Constitution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/opinion/11sun1.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

QueEx · Mar 11, 2007

<center>Attorney General Gonzales' new problems
add to Bush's continuing ones
Perception is that the Bush administration is unraveling
amid declining public support and trust</center>

RON FOURNIER
Associated Press
March 9, 2007 07:21 PM EST

WASHINGTON — Another day, another scandal. The Justice Department's improper and illegal use of the USA Patriot Act has Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in trouble, an all-too-familiar circumstance for President George W. Bush's inner circle.

The last thing a troubled president needs is another friend in trouble.

"This strikes me as another blow for the administration," said Republican consultant Joe Gaylord.

He was not the only Republican fretting about the Republican president's White House after a Justice Department audit criticized the FBI's use of extraordinary powers, granted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, to obtain personal information secretly.

"This is, regrettably, part of an ongoing process where the federal authorities are not really sensitive to privacy and go far beyond what we have authorized," said Sen. Arlen Specter, ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Lawmakers already were seething at the Justice Department for the firing of eight federal prosecutors and Gonzales' dismissive response to critics.

"One day there will be a new attorney general, maybe sooner rather than later," Specter said Thursday.

It is too soon to tell whether Gonzales, a close Texas friend of Bush, might be forced to leave. Even his ouster, however, would do little to change a perception that the Bush administration is unraveling amid declining public support and trust. Some big names already have had to leave.

Donald H. Rumsfeld was forced to resign after Democrats seized control of Congress in fall elections that were a repudiation of Bush's policies on Iraq.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a powerful adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, left the White House to face perjury charges in the investigation of the exposure of a CIA official. He was convicted Tuesday in a trial that also revealed that top Bush aide Karl Rove and a State Department official played roles in the CIA leak, part of a White House strategy to undermine a critic of the Iraq war.

Jim Nicholson, secretary of Veterans Affairs and former Republican Party chairman, is clinging to his job amid revelations of shoddy treatment for wounded troops from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The latest events are more heavy baggage for a president who already is close to his limit. Re-elected by a comfortable margin in 2004, Bush watched his job approval rating plummet in 2005 with the rise of violence in Iraq and the government's weak response and follow-up after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to huge swaths of the country's southern coastline.

With a rating of just 35 percent, Bush's standing is the weakest of any second-term president at this point in 56 years.

"Gonzales' problems here feed into and build on all of the competence issues that have been dogging the administration since Katrina," said Charles Franklin, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Gonzales, architect of Bush's controversial approach to detaining and interrogating terror suspects, drew the wrath of lawmakers when he dismissed the hubbub over fired prosecutors as an "overblown personnel matter." Critics say the U.S. attorneys were dismissed for refusing to do the administration's political bidding.

Under fire, Gonzales beat an abrupt retreat and agreed to accommodate Democratic-led investigations.

On the wrongdoing regarding the Patriot Act, a spokesman for Gonzales said he was incensed by the allegations.

If nothing else, perhaps Gonzales is displaying a scintilla of accountability, a trait the administration only reluctantly embraced after Katrina and throughout the Iraq war.

Still, some say it may be time for Gonzales to go.

"The president is dealing with Iraq, Afghanistan and a new Congress, and the last thing in the world he needs is this," said Joseph diGenova, who served as U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia in President Ronald Reagan's administration. "At some point, he throws up his hands and says `Get somebody new.' I don't know when that is."

___

EDITOR'S NOTE _ Ron Fournier has covered politics for The Associated Press for nearly 20 years.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070309/na-anl-us-gonzales-another-scandal

QueEx · Mar 15, 2007

A Liberal Point of View ?

<center>Mistakes’ Made on Prosecutors, Gonzales Says</center>

The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JEFF ZELENY
Published: March 14, 2007

WASHINGTON, March 13 — Under criticism from lawmakers of both parties for the dismissals of federal prosecutors, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales insisted Tuesday that he would not resign but said, “I acknowledge that mistakes were made here.”

The mea culpa came as Congressional Democrats, who are investigating whether the White House was meddling in Justice Department affairs for political reasons, demanded that President Bush and his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, explain their roles in the dismissals.

With Mr. Bush traveling in Mexico, the White House insisted that the president’s role had been minimal and laid the blame primarily on Harriet E. Miers, who was White House counsel when the prosecutors lost their jobs and who stepped down in January.

“The White House did not play a specific role in the list of the seven U.S. attorneys,” said Dan Bartlett, Mr. Bush’s counselor, referring to a Justice Department roster of those to be dismissed. But he said the White House, through Ms. Miers’s office, ultimately “signed off on the list.”

Mr. Bartlett said it was “highly unlikely” that Mr. Rove would testify publicly to Congress but added, “That doesn’t mean we won’t find other ways to try to share that information.”

With Democrats vowing to get to the bottom of who ordered the dismissals and why, the White House scrambled to explain the matter by releasing a stream of e-mail messages detailing how Ms. Miers had corresponded with D. Kyle Sampson, the top aide to Mr. Gonzales who drafted the list of those to be dismissed.

Mr. Sampson resigned Monday. On Tuesday afternoon, at a news conference in an ornate chamber adjacent to his office, Mr. Gonzales promised to “find out what went wrong here,” even as he insisted he had had no direct knowledge of how his staff had decided on the dismissals.

He said he had rejected an earlier idea, which the White House attributed to Ms. Miers, to replace all 93 United States attorneys, the top federal prosecutors in their regions. “I felt that was a bad idea,” Mr. Gonzales said, “and it was disruptive.”

With Democrats, including the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, insisting that Mr. Gonzales step down, his appearance underscored what two Republicans close to the Bush administration described as a growing rift between the White House and the attorney general. Mr. Gonzales has long been a confidant of the president but has aroused the ire of lawmakers of both parties on several issues, including the administration’s domestic eavesdropping program.

The two Republicans, who spoke anonymously so they could share private conversations with senior White House officials, said top aides to Mr. Bush, including Fred F. Fielding, the new White House counsel, were concerned that the controversy had so damaged Mr. Gonzales’s credibility that he would be unable to advance the White House agenda on national security matters, including terrorism prosecutions.

“I really think there’s a serious estrangement between the White House and Alberto now,” one of the Republicans said.

Already, Democrats are pressing the case for revoking the president’s authority, gained with the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act last year, to appoint interim federal prosecutors indefinitely, without Senate confirmation. The administration has argued that such appointments are necessary to speed the prosecution of terrorism cases. After the dismissals became a big political issue last week, Mr. Gonzales signaled that the administration would not oppose the changes sought by Democrats.

“We now know that it is very likely that the amendment to the Patriot Act, which was made in March of 2006, might well have been done to facilitate a wholesale replacement of all or part of U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who serves on the Judiciary Committee. “Who authorized all of this? Who asked for that change?”

Questions about whether the dismissals were politically motivated have been swirling since January. But they reached a fever pitch on Tuesday with disclosures by the White House that Mr. Bush had spoken directly with Mr. Gonzales to pass on concerns from Republican lawmakers, among them Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, about the way certain prosecutors were handling cases of voter fraud.

The White House took the unusual step of having Mr. Bartlett conduct a hurried briefing with reporters in Mérida, Mexico. He said the president had “all the confidence in the world” in Mr. Gonzales and traced the idea for the dismissals to Ms. Miers, saying she had raised the question of whether the Justice Department should clean house in Mr. Bush’s second term, as is common when a new president takes office.

“What Harriet Miers was doing was taking a look and floating an idea to say, ‘Hey, should we treat the second term very similar to the way we treat a first term?’ ” Mr. Bartlett said.

White House officials repeated Tuesday that Mr. Bush had not called for the removal of any particular United States attorney and said there was no evidence that the president had been aware that the Justice Department had initiated a process to generate a list of which prosecutors should lose their jobs.

But inside the White House, aides to the president, including Mr. Rove and Joshua B. Bolten, the chief of staff, were said to be increasingly concerned that the controversy could damage Mr. Bush.

“They’re taking it seriously,” said the other of the two Republicans who spoke about the White House’s relationship with Mr. Gonzales. “I think Rove and Bolten believe there is the potential for erosion of the president’s credibility on this issue.”

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from both parties expressed anger about the administration’s handling of the matter. While Democrats voiced the loudest criticism, several leading Republicans — among them Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, John Ensign of Nevada, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and George V. Voinovich of Ohio — said Tuesday that they also had concerns.

Mr. Ensign, ordinarily a strong supporter of the White House, said he was “very angry” at how the administration had handled the dismissal of the prosecutors, particularly Dan Bogden, the United States attorney in Nevada. Mr. Ensign said he had been misled or lied to last year when he asked the Justice Department about the dismissal of Mr. Bogden and was told that it had been connected to his job performance.

“I’m not a person who raises his voice very often,” said Mr. Ensign, who is also the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the Senate.

Of his decision to speak out, he said, “I think there are times where you just have to do what you feel is right, and this is one of those times.”

Mr. Coburn called the dismissals “idiocy on the part of the administration.”

Mr. Specter, in a speech on the Senate floor, referred to another of the dismissed prosecutors, Carol C. Lam, who prosecuted Randy Cunningham, the former Republican congressman now serving an eight-year sentence in a corruption case.

Mr. Specter raised the question of whether Ms. Lam had been dismissed because she was “about to investigate other people who were politically powerful,” and he questioned the Justice Department’s initial explanation that those who had lost their jobs had received poor performance evaluations.

“Well,” he said, “I think we may need to do more by way of inquiry to examine what her performance ratings were to see if there was a basis for her being asked to resign.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/washington/14attorneys.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

QueEx · Mar 15, 2007

A Conservative Point of View ?

<center>Playing Politics with Politics
The U.S.-attorneys controversy pits incompetence against hypocrisy</center>

The National Review
By Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review Contributor
March 15, 2007 6:30 AM

“Loyalty to Bush and Gonzales,” blared Wednesday’s ominous headline in the New York Times, “Was Factor in Prosecutors’ Firings[.]”

One would hope so.

Of all the Bush-administration controversies, the tempest over the termination of eight United States attorneys, the top federal prosecutors in their jurisdictions, may ultimately rank as the most damaging. And not because it was the most serious, but because it was the most revealing: about the administration’s ineptitude and Washington’s hypocrisy.

As it does peerlessly, the Times has crafted the template for mainstream-media coverage of this saga. Loyalty to Bush and Gonzales — could anything be more sinister? That’s why, we’re told in yet another breathless dispatch, “Congressional Democrats … are investigating whether the White House was meddling in Justice Department affairs for political reasons.”

The storyline makes great theater. It is also absurd. You might as well ask whether Congress is proposing legislation for political reasons, or whether loyalty to the party leaders might have had a teensy-weensy bit to do with what bills got voted.

PROSECUTION AND POLITICS
Our system is political. It is intended to be. A White House meddling with the Justice Department for political reasons? The Justice Department, including the attorney general and all 93 U.S. attorneys, are high-ranking officers in one of our two political branches. The head of that branch, the executive branch, is the president. Under our Constitution, he is vested with all of the executive power, including the police power. That power is not divided among several players; it is singularly reposed in him. The president chooses all the U.S. attorneys, and, after Senate confirmation, they, like all executive-branch officers, serve at his pleasure. He doesn’t need a reason to fire any of them — he can ax them because he thinks it’s time for a change, or because it’s Thursday and his horoscope says the stars are aligned for pink slips.

What could be more political than that? Politics is a dirty word in our lexicon, but this is politics in the classic sense of accountability to voters. As it should be.

Writ large, prosecution is inherently a political undertaking. However obvious that should be to people of good will, it is necessary to elaborate because not everyone is of good will — they are apt to gasp, “Politics!” (bad), when they spot politics (good).

So let’s be clear. The prosecution of individual cases proceeds in accordance with constitutional and statutory protections for the individual. It is inherently a legal, not a political, process. Politics ought never intrude on it. But the same is decidedly not true of prosecution in the macro sense of setting enforcement priorities.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of potential offenses. But resources are sparse. Choices have to be made. Contrary to some legal systems which purport, impossibly, that the authorities should file charges any time they become aware of a crime, our system has always been based on prosecutorial discretion. We rely on the judgment of the government’s lawyer to decide what is worth pursuing and what isn’t.

That authority, though, doesn’t belong to the government’s lawyer. The U.S. attorney in any federal district exercises it as a delegate. The power belongs to the president.

For these purposes, the president’s chief aide is the attorney general. The president, with the attorney general’s assistance, sets priorities that determine how the nation’s prosecutorial resources will be targeted. When we speak of a U.S. attorney’s “loyalty” to the president and the attorney general, we are talking about fealty to those priorities.

Establishing them is a quintessentially political determination. It happens in every administration, Republican or Democrat. President Clinton and Attorney General Reno, for example, put their stamp on health-care fraud — aggressively prosecuting it and successfully lobbying congress to permit investigators to issue administrative subpoenas without judicial supervision (the same sort of thing now causing press paroxysms over the FBI’s issuance of national security letters — though separation-of-powers didn’t seem to concern the media much in the 1990s). Under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the Bush administration raised eyebrows when it announced in 2005 that a top enforcement objective would be pornography — not just the exploitation of children but smut of consenting adults, by consenting adults, and for consenting adults.

These are political judgments. They reflect what an administration thinks is important and will resonate with the voters who put it in power. They are precisely the type of judgment for which an administration ought to be accountable. Should we be devoting investigative assets to pornography in the middle of a terrorist war? Are we getting the most bang for our federal-enforcement buck if agents who might be tackling violent crime or drug trafficking are instead pouncing on doctors who bill for phony lab tests?

U.S. ATTORNEYS AND LOYALTY
Often, the administration’s judgments are bad. Or, at least, they miss the point that all crime, like all politics, is local. New York City’s backyard features Wall Street — the securities markets will always be a concern there regardless of how much significance Washington places on corporate fraud. The southwest is plagued by metastasizing illegal immigration even if the administration is not, shall we say, focused like a laser on border enforcement. And on it goes. From Washington, broad guidelines can be set, but a U.S. attorney has to be responsive to unique conditions in the jurisdiction. Inevitably, this invites tension between the U.S. attorney and Central Command.

Moreover, while Washington sets policy, the top prosecutor in a district has to worry about proof. The president may have been elected promising, for example, to enforce the death penalty vigorously. His Justice Department may consequently be predisposed to order capital prosecutions. But the U.S. attorney has to try the cases. He will embarrass his office, infuriate the district bench, and compromise his overall effectiveness by seeking death sentences on weak evidence. Programs are fine, but reality is reality.

And then there is political corruption. We have a two-party system. When corruption is alleged, of necessity, the U.S. attorney must investigate a member of either the president’s own party (which, of course, is generally the U.S. attorney’s party) or the president’s opposition. The pat story lines are whitewash or witch-hunt. Too lax, the U.S. attorney is accused of conflict of interest; too aggressive and politics is being criminalized. And all the while, ethics and politics chafe side by side: demanding that the U.S. attorney go wherever the evidence takes him; dictating that the White House assume a pose of hyper-restraint — amid the popular Washington gotcha-game where administration officials are asked a million times a day to comment on the case and condemned if they are foolish enough to oblige.

There are countless points of tension in the dynamic between the president and the U.S. attorneys he chooses. And that is even before we get to ordinary management considerations — the question whether an individual U.S. attorney is a leader who inspires subordinates, earns the respect of the court and the defense bar, and serves the public interest by moving cases efficiently.

It bears repeating that the authority at stake is the president’s. When a high-profile terrorism prosecution in Detroit disintegrates, the president and the Justice Department take the biggest hit. When a decision is made in Texas to indict not only fraudulent accountants but an entire corporation — putting it out of business and its innocent employees out of work — it is the administration that bears the heat. This is entirely appropriate. Nevertheless, it also illuminates what is always implicit: The buck stops with the president, and he must be able to remove those who act in his name for any reason or for no reason.

JUDGMENT VERSUS LEGITIMACY
It is here that the point is missed by actors on both sides of our political divides — partisan between Republicans and Democrats, and constitutional between the executive and legislative branches. Being an act of political discretion, the removal of eight U.S. attorneys can and should be critiqued as wise or unwise. That goes strictly to whether it’s good judgment, and in making that assessment, it’s equally appropriate to ask whether the critics are acting in good faith or opportunistically changing the rules in mid-game. To be legitimate, however, the removal requires no explanation.

Alas, everyone is in politics but no one, it seems, can admit to acting politically. So the Gonzales Justice Department has committed Washington’s worst sin: It has acted like its reasons were noble when in fact they were political, it has misled Congress about that fact, and, when called on it, it has caved … as if the act itself — rather than the dissembling about the act — was illegitimate. In fact, the act, though not the dissembling, was well within the administration’s rights: Its real-world political rights, not some metaphysical calling to do all that is good and just.

Why pretend there needed to be something high-minded about these removals? Why pretend that the White House had nothing to do with what is a presidential decision? That was guaranteed to turn a non-story into a controversy when, inevitably, it proved to be untrue. Why insist that the decision was performance-based? That was guaranteed to enrage the removed U.S. attorneys, which in turn was certain to galvanize their political sponsors and titillate a media on 24/7 scandal-mode. And if it turned out that there wasn’t clear evidence of poor performance, it was sure to feed the impression that something rotten was afoot.

As it happens, that doesn’t appear to be the case. To the extent ousted U.S. attorneys might have been pressured in the handling of particular investigations, that would have been improper, but the only such pressure seems to have come from Capitol Hill, not the White House. By contrast, to the extent ousted U.S. attorneys might have been pressured to be aggressive in moving the administration’s enforcement agenda, that would have been absolutely proper, but the White House and the attorney general don’t seem to have done much in that regard. President Bush evidently groused at some point about neglected voter-fraud investigations, but the attorney general doesn’t seem to remember the conversation and, in any event, there’s no indication that the removals were spurred by recalcitrance in the pursuit of election chicanery or any other administration bugaboo.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Gonzales’s “when do I run out of feet to shoot myself in?” performance has been more than matched by congressional hypocrisy, especially from Democrats. Most jaw-dropping, but hardly unique, is Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Seeking the presidency, she is pandering to her Bush-hating base about the firings. But, when her husband took office in 1993, he terminated virtually all of the sitting U.S. attorneys.

It was an act of sheer political muscle and naked political patronage. It mattered not the slightest bit to the media that many very fine U.S. attorneys — some presiding over very sensitive, politically charged cases (including one in Arkansas involving the Clintons) — lost their jobs. Clinton had the power to do it and he wanted his own people in. Period. And you know what? He was entitled. If a Bush-41 appointee had botched a major case, that would have redounded to Clinton’s detriment. If the administration wanted to focus on health-care fraud or other Democrat enforcement priorities, the president wanted to be sure each U.S. attorney would be, yes, loyal to those objectives. Loyalty — not skill, not ethics — was the difference between staying on or being fired.

So we have classic Washington farce. The politicians on Capitol Hill theatrically castigate the politicians in the administration for making political decisions about political appointees based on political considerations. The politicians in the administration reply, “That would never happen,” before conceding that it precisely happened … without their knowledge, of course. And the political press is aghast.

Perfect.
— Andrew C. McCarthy directs the Center for Law & Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGE1NTRmMDUxNzlmYmM5NjU3OGU3NmJjYTYzY2IzNzI=

GET YOU HOT · Mar 15, 2007

That dirtbag has been doing shady things since day one!

muckraker10021 · Mar 15, 2007

<img src="http://kelticklankirk.com/upside_down_50star_USA_Flag.gif">


Under the leadership of Rove-Cheney-Bush the RepubliKlan have become the most unlawful and corrupt political party in American history.

The crimes and deceit of the Nixon administration (Watergate), or the George H.W. Bush administration (Iran-Contra), or the Johnson Administration (Gulf of Tonkin) almost appear to be minuscule when compared to the monstrous constitutional violations and lawbreaking of the bush camarilla.

Rove-Cheney-Bush and the RepubliKlan DO NOT, respect, honor or value the Constitution of the United States of America as a document that is to be protected. The oath of office that all elected federal politicians and their staffs take says --<blockquote>
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God. </blockquote>
This fiasco with bush’s servile sycophant Gonzales should surprise no one. Gonzales’ Harvard degree or any aspiration he might have to run the A.G. office following the constitution and the law are meaningless to Rove-Cheney-Bush.
His job security was predicated on following, Rove-Cheney-Bush, orders verbatim, even if it was against the law, or involved him lying to the Congress and the Senate.

When Justice Department officials told Gonzales that bush’s warrantless wiretap program, a program that his predecessor John Ashcroft REFUSED to sign-off-on, was illegal, and that an internal Justice Department inquiry about the program was underway, suddenly the Justice Department officials conducting the inquiry security clearances were removed by president bush.
Talk about obstruction of justice.

Read all about it here – http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0315nj1.htm

In my opinion, Gonzales is toast!


<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="4"></hr>

The Grand Elusion

by Dana Milbank
Wednesday, March 14, 2007

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/13/AR2007031301515.html

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced the cameras for all of nine minutes yesterday, but he managed to contradict himself at least four times as he fought off calls to resign over the firing of U.S. attorneys.

"Mistakes were made," he said in fluent scandalese, but "I think it was the right decision."

"I am responsible for what happens at the Department of Justice," he posited, but "I . . . was not involved in any discussions about what was going on."

"Kyle Sampson" -- Gonzales's chief of staff -- "has resigned," he said, but "he is still at the department."

And, finally, "I believe in the independence of our U.S. attorneys," Gonzales maintained, but "all political appointees can be removed . . . for any reason."

He had the look of a hunted man in his appearance at the Justice Department. He wiggled his toes inside his shoes and shifted his feet. He spoke too loudly into the microphone. He arrived 18 minutes late, gave well-rehearsed answers and appeared intent on getting out as fast as he could, ignoring reporters' shouts of "Sir! Sir!" The child of Mexican immigrants even mentioned his rise from poverty in dismissing calls for his ouster: "I've overcome a lot of obstacles in my life to become attorney general. I am here not because I give up."

The performance did not impress Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who was on the Senate floor within half an hour. "The attorney general has said, quote, 'I will do the best I can to maintain the confidence of the American people,' " Schumer said. "Mr. Attorney General, you've already lost that confidence."

For Schumer, the Democrats' point man in the Valerie Plame investigation, the arrival of the latest imbroglio could not have been better timed. On the very day Scooter Libby was convicted last week, Schumer held a hearing into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys. The White House and the Justice Department have since nurtured it into a full-blown scandal by minimizing the White House's role in firings , then releasing e-mails showing the idea was born there.

Suddenly, the administration is in potentially a bigger flap than the Libby trial ever presented: allegations of political meddling with federal prosecutors at the highest levels of the White House with the complicity of Gonzales, the man Bush dubbed "mi abogado." And Schumer could not quite suppress a smile as he took the stage in the Senate television gallery, proclaiming, "This has become as serious as it gets."

Schumer said he was unsatisfied with Gonzales's sacrifice of his chief of staff. "Kyle Sampson will not become the next Scooter Libby, the next fall guy." Echoing a phrase used in the Libby trial, the senator continued: "The cloud over the Justice Department is getting darker and darker."

Before the day was out, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Sen. Ted Kennedy (Mass.) and other Democrats joined Schumer's call for Gonzales's head. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), giving the news conference with Schumer, was not so bloodthirsty. "I'm more reserved, in general, than my colleague over here is," she said of Schumer, who wore a tie featuring pigs, eggs and turtles.

"Reserved" was not the picture that came to mind on the other side of the Capitol, where House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers called his own news conference to hand out copies of the e-mails the administration had just given him.

"The documents: Ta-da!" Conyers said, waving a sheaf in the air. The event was hastily prepared (aides didn't have a congressional seal, so they improvised by pasting a paper one to the lectern), and Conyers confessed that "we haven't even read all the documents we're releasing yet."

Reporters were happy to help. They besieged a woman carrying a box labeled "Xerox," elbowing one another to grab still-warm bundles of e-mails. It didn't take much searching of them to find evidence of the political nature of the firings and the White House's role.

"WH leg, political, and communications have signed off," deputy White House counsel William Kelley wrote to Sampson and then-White House counsel Harriet Miers in December 2006. Other e-mails, from Sampson, had him "waiting for a green light from the White House" and asking Miers and Kelley to circulate the firing plan to Karl Rove's "shop."

"This is incredible," judged Conyers as he read a few passages to reporters. The chairman seemed torn between gravitas ("we are not trying to create a sideshow") and giddiness ("I don't want this to be my last press conference on the subject").

For Gonzales, the bad news conferences were only beginning. Sen. John Ensign (Nev.), the man in charge of Senate Republicans' 2008 campaigns, went before the cameras with tough words for the attorney general. "I want to see if he's willing to make the changes that are necessary at the Department of Justice because things have been handled poorly up to this point," he warned.

Even. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the administration's most faithful legislator, said "the appearances are troubling" for Gonzales. "I'm concerned," Cornyn said with Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) at his side. "This has not been handled well." The best Cornyn could offer Gonzales: "In Texas, we believe in having a fair trial and then we have the hanging."

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Overblown Personnel Matters

Mar 12, 2007

by Paul Krugman

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.h...7EQ2FQ20R-Q20lxaJalJQ20R-Q3FdZeQ60Q5EJFc@Q60T

Nobody is surprised to learn that the Justice Department was lying when it claimed that recently fired federal prosecutors were dismissed for poor performance. Nor is anyone surprised to learn that White House political operatives were pulling the strings.

What is surprising is how fast the truth is emerging about what Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, dismissed just five days ago as an ''overblown personnel matter.''

Sources told Newsweek that the list of prosecutors to be fired was drawn up by Mr. Gonzales's chief of staff, ''with input from the White House.'' And Allen Weh, the chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party, told McClatchy News that he twice sought Karl Rove's help -- the first time via a liaison, the second time in person -- in getting David Iglesias, the state's U.S. attorney, fired for failing to indict Democrats. ''He's gone,'' he claims Mr. Rove said.

After that story hit the wires, Mr. Weh claimed that his conversation with Mr. Rove took place after the decision to fire Mr. Iglesias had already been taken. Even if that's true, Mr. Rove should have told Mr. Weh that political interference in matters of justice is out of bounds; Mr. Weh's account of what he said sounds instead like the swaggering of a two-bit thug.

And the thuggishness seems to have gone beyond firing prosecutors who didn't deliver the goods for the G.O.P. One of the fired prosecutors was -- as he saw it -- threatened with retaliation by a senior Justice Department official if he discussed his dismissal in public. Another was rejected for a federal judgeship after administration officials, including then-White House counsel Harriet Miers, informed him that he had ''mishandled'' the 2004 governor's race in Washington, won by a Democrat, by failing to pursue vote-fraud charges.

As I said, none of this is surprising. The Bush administration has been purging, politicizing and de-professionalizing federal agencies since the day it came to power. But in the past it was able to do its business with impunity; this time Democrats have subpoena power, and the old slime-and-defend strategy isn't working.

You also have to wonder whether new signs that Mr. Gonzales and other administration officials are willing to cooperate with Congress reflect the verdict in the Libby trial. It probably comes as a shock to realize that even Republicans can face jail time for lying under oath.

Still, a lot of loose ends have yet to be pulled. We now know exactly why Mr. Iglesias was fired, but still have to speculate about some of the other cases -- in particular, that of Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney for Southern California.

Ms. Lam had already successfully prosecuted Representative Randy Cunningham, a Republican. Just two days before leaving office she got a grand jury to indict Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor, and Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the former third-ranking official at the C.I.A. (Mr. Foggo was brought in just after the 2004 election, when, reports said, the administration was trying to purge the C.I.A. of liberals.) And she was investigating Representative Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, the former head of the House Appropriations Committee.

Was Ms. Lam dumped to protect corrupt Republicans? The administration says no, a denial that, in light of past experience, is worth precisely nothing. But how do Congressional investigators plan to get to the bottom of this story?

Another big loose end involves what U.S. attorneys who weren't fired did to please their employers. As I pointed out last week, the numbers show that since the Bush administration came to power, federal prosecutors have investigated far more Democrats than Republicans.

But the numbers can tell only part of the story. What we really need -- and it will take a lot of legwork -- is a portrait of the actual behavior of prosecutors across the country. Did they launch spurious investigations of Democrats, as I suggested last week may have happened in New Jersey? Did they slow-walk investigations of Republican scandals, like the phone-jamming case in New Hampshire?

In other words, the truth about that ''overblown personnel matter'' has only begun to be told. The good news is that for the first time in six years, it's possible to hope that all the facts about a Bush administration scandal will come out in Congressional hearings -- or, if necessary, in the impeachment trial of Alberto Gonzales.
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Department of Injustice

Mar 9th, 2007

by Paul Krugman

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.h...Q26v3SSOvSFvSGv7m-n-7nvSGdQ5D,Q60ryn5_Q26rQ7B

For those of us living in the Garden State, the growing scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors immediately brought to mind the subpoenas that Chris Christie, the former Bush ''Pioneer'' who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, issued two months before the 2006 election -- and the way news of the subpoenas was quickly leaked to local news media.

The subpoenas were issued in connection with allegations of corruption on the part of Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who seemed to be facing a close race at the time. Those allegations appeared, on their face, to be convoluted and unconvincing, and Mr. Menendez claimed that both the investigation and the leaks were politically motivated.

Mr. Christie's actions might have been all aboveboard. But given what we've learned about the pressure placed on federal prosecutors to pursue dubious investigations of Democrats, Mr. Menendez's claims of persecution now seem quite plausible.

In fact, it's becoming clear that the politicization of the Justice Department was a key component of the Bush administration's attempt to create a permanent Republican lock on power. Bear in mind that if Mr. Menendez had lost, the G.O.P. would still control the Senate.

For now, the nation's focus is on the eight federal prosecutors fired by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In January, Mr. Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that he ''would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney for political reasons.'' But it's already clear that he did indeed dismiss all eight prosecutors for political reasons -- some because they wouldn't use their offices to provide electoral help to the G.O.P., and the others probably because they refused to soft-pedal investigations of corrupt Republicans.

In the last few days we've also learned that Republican members of Congress called prosecutors to pressure them on politically charged cases, even though doing so seems unethical and possibly illegal.

The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn't go along with the Bush administration's politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.

How can this have been happening without a national uproar? The authors explain: ''We believe that this tremendous disparity is politically motivated and it occurs because the local (non-statewide and non-Congressional) investigations occur under the radar of a diligent national press. Each instance is treated by a local beat reporter as an isolated case that is only of local interest.''

And let's not forget that Karl Rove's candidates have a history of benefiting from conveniently timed federal investigations. Last year Molly Ivins reminded her readers of a curious pattern during Mr. Rove's time in Texas: ''In election years, there always seemed to be an F.B.I. investigation of some sitting Democrat either announced or leaked to the press. After the election was over, the allegations often vanished.''

Fortunately, Mr. Rove's smear-and-fear tactics fell short last November. I say fortunately, because without Democrats in control of Congress, able to hold hearings and issue subpoenas, the prosecutor purge would probably have become yet another suppressed Bush-era scandal -- a huge abuse of power that somehow never became front-page news.

Before the midterm election, I wrote that what the election was really about could be summed up in two words: subpoena power. Well, the Democrats now have that power, and the hearings on the prosecutor purge look like the shape of things to come.

In the months ahead, we'll hear a lot about what's really been going on these past six years. And I predict that we'll learn about abuses of power that would have made Richard Nixon green with envy.

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Impeachment is an Underblown Personnel Matter

Mar 14, 2007

by Marty Kaplan

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20070314/cm_huffpost/043400

Fresh from his Nixonian press conference at the Justice Department, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has now taken his passive-exculpatory "mistakes were made" show on the road -- the media road. I caught his act on MSNBC, where anchor Alex Witt's follow-up to Gonzales' opening lie was, "How does this differ from President Clinton's mass dismissal of US Attorneys?" -- a journalistically bizarre attempt to elicit a White House talking point whose message (US Attorneys are political appointees) is in blithe contradiction with another White House talking point (these firings weren't political, they're merit-based). I also saw Gonzales interviewed on CNN, where anchor-bobble Tony Harris wrapped by telling viewers that "no one's been accused of criminality," conveniently ignoring charges that Gonzales lied under oath to Congress, or that New Mexico Republicans Pete Domenici (news, bio, voting record) and Heather Wilson (news, bio, voting record) obstructed justice by pressuring US Attorney David Iglesias to trump up a pre-election indictment of a Democrat.

Sooner or later, it will all come out -- not only this Gonzales/Rove/Miers sewer, but all the other depredations visited on us by the Bush Administration. We will run out of -gates to affix to their names long before we will run out of crimes. The cherry-picking of intelligence to drag us into pre-emptive war, the rendition and torture, the wiretapping, the no-bid billions, the rest: it will all, one day, be exposed. Reputations will surely die. How? In the book of the future, it is already written -- who by subpoena, and who by indictment; who by leak, and who by memoir; who by court, and who by committee; who by accusation, and who by confession; who by resignation, and who by impeachment.

Oh, wait. Impeachment is off the table -- I keep forgetting. Lying about a blowjob is a high crime, but lying about Iraq's nukes is merely high Kissinger. The daily actions of Bush, Cheney, Gonzales et al are the very dictionary definition of "impeachable," but because thirty percent of fundamentalists, and a hundred percent of Fox, would scream bloody murder, we will have to wait for this endless Administration to end, wait until after the pardons are inevitably issued, after the Freedom of Information requests are finally honored, after the manacles on the presidential archives are finally broken, after the press finally suffers stenographer's remorse, after the historians at last connect the dots, to learn how really bad it has been, how close we have danced to the brink of a de facto coup.

The other day, I heard Richard Land, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, and Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council, talking on a cable show about the '08 campaign. One of them, I forget which, said that the two biggest issues in the race were going to be the war in Iraq, and America's moral decline. Holy homo! From Dobson to Robertson, O'Reilly to D'Souza, we are being hectored about Good and Bad by an army of apologists for the most morally corrupt, ethically bankrupt, criminally culpable cohort in American history. Listening to these defenders of the faith rationalize the indefensible has long ceased being entertaining; if you have no spine, it is not much of a feat to be a epistemological contortionist.

The right loves to call its opponents "secular progressives," and "moral relativists." The truth is that there is no moral relativism more pernicious than the one -- theirs -- which will justify any abuse of power as a pursuit of divine ends. But as it turns out, our country was founded not on a Gospel, but on a Constitution, one that says that the president has a duty "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." That's the same Constitution, of course, that spells out the right to impeach public officials. Too bad that neither provision is much in use these days.

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muckraker10021 · Mar 15, 2007

<img src="http://kelticklankirk.com/upside_down_50star_USA_Flag.gif">


Under the leadership of Rove-Cheney-Bush the RepubliKlan have become the most unlawful and corrupt political party in American history.

The crimes and deceit of the Nixon administration (Watergate), or the George H.W. Bush administration (Iran-Contra), or the Johnson Administration (Gulf of Tonkin) almost appear to be minuscule when compared to the monstrous constitutional violations and lawbreaking of the bush camarilla.

Rove-Cheney-Bush and the RepubliKlan DO NOT, respect, honor or value the Constitution of the United States of America as a document that is to be protected. The oath of office that all elected federal politicians and their staffs take says --<blockquote>
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God. </blockquote>
This fiasco with bush’s servile sycophant Gonzales should surprise no one. Gonzales’ Harvard degree or any aspiration he might have to run the A.G. office following the constitution and the law are meaningless to Rove-Cheney-Bush.
His job security was predicated on following, Rove-Cheney-Bush, orders verbatim, even if it was against the law, or involved him lying to the Congress and the Senate.

When Justice Department officials told Gonzales that bush’s warrantless wiretap program, a program that his predecessor John Ashcroft REFUSED to sign-off-on, was illegal, and that an internal Justice Department inquiry about the program was underway, suddenly the Justice Department officials conducting the inquiry security clearances were removed by president bush.
Talk about obstruction of justice.

Read all about it here – http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0315nj1.htm

In my opinion, Gonzales is toast!


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The Grand Elusion

by Dana Milbank
Wednesday, March 14, 2007

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/13/AR2007031301515.html

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced the cameras for all of nine minutes yesterday, but he managed to contradict himself at least four times as he fought off calls to resign over the firing of U.S. attorneys.

"Mistakes were made," he said in fluent scandalese, but "I think it was the right decision."

"I am responsible for what happens at the Department of Justice," he posited, but "I . . . was not involved in any discussions about what was going on."

"Kyle Sampson" -- Gonzales's chief of staff -- "has resigned," he said, but "he is still at the department."

And, finally, "I believe in the independence of our U.S. attorneys," Gonzales maintained, but "all political appointees can be removed . . . for any reason."

He had the look of a hunted man in his appearance at the Justice Department. He wiggled his toes inside his shoes and shifted his feet. He spoke too loudly into the microphone. He arrived 18 minutes late, gave well-rehearsed answers and appeared intent on getting out as fast as he could, ignoring reporters' shouts of "Sir! Sir!" The child of Mexican immigrants even mentioned his rise from poverty in dismissing calls for his ouster: "I've overcome a lot of obstacles in my life to become attorney general. I am here not because I give up."

The performance did not impress Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who was on the Senate floor within half an hour. "The attorney general has said, quote, 'I will do the best I can to maintain the confidence of the American people,' " Schumer said. "Mr. Attorney General, you've already lost that confidence."

For Schumer, the Democrats' point man in the Valerie Plame investigation, the arrival of the latest imbroglio could not have been better timed. On the very day Scooter Libby was convicted last week, Schumer held a hearing into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys. The White House and the Justice Department have since nurtured it into a full-blown scandal by minimizing the White House's role in firings , then releasing e-mails showing the idea was born there.

Suddenly, the administration is in potentially a bigger flap than the Libby trial ever presented: allegations of political meddling with federal prosecutors at the highest levels of the White House with the complicity of Gonzales, the man Bush dubbed "mi abogado." And Schumer could not quite suppress a smile as he took the stage in the Senate television gallery, proclaiming, "This has become as serious as it gets."

Schumer said he was unsatisfied with Gonzales's sacrifice of his chief of staff. "Kyle Sampson will not become the next Scooter Libby, the next fall guy." Echoing a phrase used in the Libby trial, the senator continued: "The cloud over the Justice Department is getting darker and darker."

Before the day was out, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Sen. Ted Kennedy (Mass.) and other Democrats joined Schumer's call for Gonzales's head. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), giving the news conference with Schumer, was not so bloodthirsty. "I'm more reserved, in general, than my colleague over here is," she said of Schumer, who wore a tie featuring pigs, eggs and turtles.

"Reserved" was not the picture that came to mind on the other side of the Capitol, where House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers called his own news conference to hand out copies of the e-mails the administration had just given him.

"The documents: Ta-da!" Conyers said, waving a sheaf in the air. The event was hastily prepared (aides didn't have a congressional seal, so they improvised by pasting a paper one to the lectern), and Conyers confessed that "we haven't even read all the documents we're releasing yet."

Reporters were happy to help. They besieged a woman carrying a box labeled "Xerox," elbowing one another to grab still-warm bundles of e-mails. It didn't take much searching of them to find evidence of the political nature of the firings and the White House's role.

"WH leg, political, and communications have signed off," deputy White House counsel William Kelley wrote to Sampson and then-White House counsel Harriet Miers in December 2006. Other e-mails, from Sampson, had him "waiting for a green light from the White House" and asking Miers and Kelley to circulate the firing plan to Karl Rove's "shop."

"This is incredible," judged Conyers as he read a few passages to reporters. The chairman seemed torn between gravitas ("we are not trying to create a sideshow") and giddiness ("I don't want this to be my last press conference on the subject").

For Gonzales, the bad news conferences were only beginning. Sen. John Ensign (Nev.), the man in charge of Senate Republicans' 2008 campaigns, went before the cameras with tough words for the attorney general. "I want to see if he's willing to make the changes that are necessary at the Department of Justice because things have been handled poorly up to this point," he warned.

Even. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the administration's most faithful legislator, said "the appearances are troubling" for Gonzales. "I'm concerned," Cornyn said with Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) at his side. "This has not been handled well." The best Cornyn could offer Gonzales: "In Texas, we believe in having a fair trial and then we have the hanging."

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Overblown Personnel Matters

Mar 12, 2007

by Paul Krugman

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.h...7EQ2FQ20R-Q20lxaJalJQ20R-Q3FdZeQ60Q5EJFc@Q60T

Nobody is surprised to learn that the Justice Department was lying when it claimed that recently fired federal prosecutors were dismissed for poor performance. Nor is anyone surprised to learn that White House political operatives were pulling the strings.

What is surprising is how fast the truth is emerging about what Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, dismissed just five days ago as an ''overblown personnel matter.''

Sources told Newsweek that the list of prosecutors to be fired was drawn up by Mr. Gonzales's chief of staff, ''with input from the White House.'' And Allen Weh, the chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party, told McClatchy News that he twice sought Karl Rove's help -- the first time via a liaison, the second time in person -- in getting David Iglesias, the state's U.S. attorney, fired for failing to indict Democrats. ''He's gone,'' he claims Mr. Rove said.

After that story hit the wires, Mr. Weh claimed that his conversation with Mr. Rove took place after the decision to fire Mr. Iglesias had already been taken. Even if that's true, Mr. Rove should have told Mr. Weh that political interference in matters of justice is out of bounds; Mr. Weh's account of what he said sounds instead like the swaggering of a two-bit thug.

And the thuggishness seems to have gone beyond firing prosecutors who didn't deliver the goods for the G.O.P. One of the fired prosecutors was -- as he saw it -- threatened with retaliation by a senior Justice Department official if he discussed his dismissal in public. Another was rejected for a federal judgeship after administration officials, including then-White House counsel Harriet Miers, informed him that he had ''mishandled'' the 2004 governor's race in Washington, won by a Democrat, by failing to pursue vote-fraud charges.

As I said, none of this is surprising. The Bush administration has been purging, politicizing and de-professionalizing federal agencies since the day it came to power. But in the past it was able to do its business with impunity; this time Democrats have subpoena power, and the old slime-and-defend strategy isn't working.

You also have to wonder whether new signs that Mr. Gonzales and other administration officials are willing to cooperate with Congress reflect the verdict in the Libby trial. It probably comes as a shock to realize that even Republicans can face jail time for lying under oath.

Still, a lot of loose ends have yet to be pulled. We now know exactly why Mr. Iglesias was fired, but still have to speculate about some of the other cases -- in particular, that of Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney for Southern California.

Ms. Lam had already successfully prosecuted Representative Randy Cunningham, a Republican. Just two days before leaving office she got a grand jury to indict Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor, and Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the former third-ranking official at the C.I.A. (Mr. Foggo was brought in just after the 2004 election, when, reports said, the administration was trying to purge the C.I.A. of liberals.) And she was investigating Representative Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, the former head of the House Appropriations Committee.

Was Ms. Lam dumped to protect corrupt Republicans? The administration says no, a denial that, in light of past experience, is worth precisely nothing. But how do Congressional investigators plan to get to the bottom of this story?

Another big loose end involves what U.S. attorneys who weren't fired did to please their employers. As I pointed out last week, the numbers show that since the Bush administration came to power, federal prosecutors have investigated far more Democrats than Republicans.

But the numbers can tell only part of the story. What we really need -- and it will take a lot of legwork -- is a portrait of the actual behavior of prosecutors across the country. Did they launch spurious investigations of Democrats, as I suggested last week may have happened in New Jersey? Did they slow-walk investigations of Republican scandals, like the phone-jamming case in New Hampshire?

In other words, the truth about that ''overblown personnel matter'' has only begun to be told. The good news is that for the first time in six years, it's possible to hope that all the facts about a Bush administration scandal will come out in Congressional hearings -- or, if necessary, in the impeachment trial of Alberto Gonzales.
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Department of Injustice

Mar 12, 2007

by Paul Krugman

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.h...Q26v3SSOvSFvSGv7m-n-7nvSGdQ5D,Q60ryn5_Q26rQ7B

For those of us living in the Garden State, the growing scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors immediately brought to mind the subpoenas that Chris Christie, the former Bush ''Pioneer'' who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, issued two months before the 2006 election -- and the way news of the subpoenas was quickly leaked to local news media.

The subpoenas were issued in connection with allegations of corruption on the part of Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who seemed to be facing a close race at the time. Those allegations appeared, on their face, to be convoluted and unconvincing, and Mr. Menendez claimed that both the investigation and the leaks were politically motivated.

Mr. Christie's actions might have been all aboveboard. But given what we've learned about the pressure placed on federal prosecutors to pursue dubious investigations of Democrats, Mr. Menendez's claims of persecution now seem quite plausible.

In fact, it's becoming clear that the politicization of the Justice Department was a key component of the Bush administration's attempt to create a permanent Republican lock on power. Bear in mind that if Mr. Menendez had lost, the G.O.P. would still control the Senate.

For now, the nation's focus is on the eight federal prosecutors fired by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In January, Mr. Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that he ''would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney for political reasons.'' But it's already clear that he did indeed dismiss all eight prosecutors for political reasons -- some because they wouldn't use their offices to provide electoral help to the G.O.P., and the others probably because they refused to soft-pedal investigations of corrupt Republicans.

In the last few days we've also learned that Republican members of Congress called prosecutors to pressure them on politically charged cases, even though doing so seems unethical and possibly illegal.

The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn't go along with the Bush administration's politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.

How can this have been happening without a national uproar? The authors explain: ''We believe that this tremendous disparity is politically motivated and it occurs because the local (non-statewide and non-Congressional) investigations occur under the radar of a diligent national press. Each instance is treated by a local beat reporter as an isolated case that is only of local interest.''

And let's not forget that Karl Rove's candidates have a history of benefiting from conveniently timed federal investigations. Last year Molly Ivins reminded her readers of a curious pattern during Mr. Rove's time in Texas: ''In election years, there always seemed to be an F.B.I. investigation of some sitting Democrat either announced or leaked to the press. After the election was over, the allegations often vanished.''

Fortunately, Mr. Rove's smear-and-fear tactics fell short last November. I say fortunately, because without Democrats in control of Congress, able to hold hearings and issue subpoenas, the prosecutor purge would probably have become yet another suppressed Bush-era scandal -- a huge abuse of power that somehow never became front-page news.

Before the midterm election, I wrote that what the election was really about could be summed up in two words: subpoena power. Well, the Democrats now have that power, and the hearings on the prosecutor purge look like the shape of things to come.

In the months ahead, we'll hear a lot about what's really been going on these past six years. And I predict that we'll learn about abuses of power that would have made Richard Nixon green with envy.

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Impeachment is an Underblown Personnel Matter

Mar 14, 2007

by Marty Kaplan

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20070314/cm_huffpost/043400

Fresh from his Nixonian press conference at the Justice Department, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has now taken his passive-exculpatory "mistakes were made" show on the road -- the media road. I caught his act on MSNBC, where anchor Alex Witt's follow-up to Gonzales' opening lie was, "How does this differ from President Clinton's mass dismissal of US Attorneys?" -- a journalistically bizarre attempt to elicit a White House talking point whose message (US Attorneys are political appointees) is in blithe contradiction with another White House talking point (these firings weren't political, they're merit-based). I also saw Gonzales interviewed on CNN, where anchor-bobble Tony Harris wrapped by telling viewers that "no one's been accused of criminality," conveniently ignoring charges that Gonzales lied under oath to Congress, or that New Mexico Republicans Pete Domenici (news, bio, voting record) and Heather Wilson (news, bio, voting record) obstructed justice by pressuring US Attorney David Iglesias to trump up a pre-election indictment of a Democrat.

Sooner or later, it will all come out -- not only this Gonzales/Rove/Miers sewer, but all the other depredations visited on us by the Bush Administration. We will run out of -gates to affix to their names long before we will run out of crimes. The cherry-picking of intelligence to drag us into pre-emptive war, the rendition and torture, the wiretapping, the no-bid billions, the rest: it will all, one day, be exposed. Reputations will surely die. How? In the book of the future, it is already written -- who by subpoena, and who by indictment; who by leak, and who by memoir; who by court, and who by committee; who by accusation, and who by confession; who by resignation, and who by impeachment.

Oh, wait. Impeachment is off the table -- I keep forgetting. Lying about a blowjob is a high crime, but lying about Iraq's nukes is merely high Kissinger. The daily actions of Bush, Cheney, Gonzales et al are the very dictionary definition of "impeachable," but because thirty percent of fundamentalists, and a hundred percent of Fox, would scream bloody murder, we will have to wait for this endless Administration to end, wait until after the pardons are inevitably issued, after the Freedom of Information requests are finally honored, after the manacles on the presidential archives are finally broken, after the press finally suffers stenographer's remorse, after the historians at last connect the dots, to learn how really bad it has been, how close we have danced to the brink of a de facto coup.

The other day, I heard Richard Land, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, and Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council, talking on a cable show about the '08 campaign. One of them, I forget which, said that the two biggest issues in the race were going to be the war in Iraq, and America's moral decline. Holy homo! From Dobson to Robertson, O'Reilly to D'Souza, we are being hectored about Good and Bad by an army of apologists for the most morally corrupt, ethically bankrupt, criminally culpable cohort in American history. Listening to these defenders of the faith rationalize the indefensible has long ceased being entertaining; if you have no spine, it is not much of a feat to be a epistemological contortionist.

The right loves to call its opponents "secular progressives," and "moral relativists." The truth is that there is no moral relativism more pernicious than the one -- theirs -- which will justify any abuse of power as a pursuit of divine ends. But as it turns out, our country was founded not on a Gospel, but on a Constitution, one that says that the president has a duty "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." That's the same Constitution, of course, that spells out the right to impeach public officials. Too bad that neither provision is much in use these days.

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modified · Mar 16, 2007

Yet another tough call. Fire the willing servant or watch your approval ratings and perceived competency level :rolleyes:

decrease. With this and the VA nightmare(s) [Walter Reed included] I would be surprised if they don't reshuffle the deck. Also I think he wants to replace him but he has to figure out who?

muckraker10021 · Mar 19, 2007

White House Seeking Gonzales Replacements

by Mike Allen

March 19, 2007 07:24 PM EST

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0307/3202.html

Republican officials operating at the behest of the White House have begun seeking a possible successor to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, whose support among GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill has collapsed, according to party sources familiar with the discussions.

Among the names floated Monday by administration officials are Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and White House anti-terrorism coordinator Frances Townsend. Former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson is a White House prospect. So is former solicitor general Theodore B. Olson, but sources were unsure whether he would want the job.

Republican sources also disclosed that it is now a virtual certainty that Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, whose incomplete and inaccurate congressional testimony about the prosecutors helped precipitate the crisis, will also resign shortly. Officials were debating whether Gonzales and McNulty should depart at the same time or whether McNulty should go a day or two after Gonzales. Still known as "The Judge" for his service on the Texas Supreme Court, Gonzales is one of the few remaining original Texans who came to Washington with President Bush.

In a sign of Republican despair, GOP political strategists on Capitol Hill said that it is too late for Gonzales' departure to head off a full-scale Democratic investigation into the motives and timing behind the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

"Democrats smell blood in the water, and (Gonzales') resignation won't stop them," said a well-connected Republican Senate aide. "And on our side, no one's going to defend him. All we can do is warn Democrats against overreaching."

A main reason Gonzales is finding few friends even among Republicans is that he has long been regarded with suspicion by conservatives who have questioned his ideological purity. In the past, these conservatives warned the White House against nominating him for the Supreme Court. Now they're using the controversy over the firing of eight federal prosecutors to take out their pent-up frustrations with how he has handled his leadership at Justice and how the White House has treated Congress.

Complaints range from his handling of immigration cases to his alleged ceding of power in the department to career officials instead of movement conservatives.

Without embracing Gonzales, Republicans pointed out that presidents are free to replace U.S. attorneys at will. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) noted on MSNBC that some of those who were replaced "haven't whined or complained about it" and added, "I think that there's a lot of politics, but I don't think it's just on one side."

But officials on Capitol Hill said that after the Justice Department failed to turn over a batch of e-mails about the prosecutors on Friday as expected, Republican senators became less likely to defend Gonzales or the White House. They feared the delay signaled more damaging information was in the pipeline.

"We have a crisis where there doesn't need to be one, and now Democrats have an issue where they can open up the subpoena floodgates," said an exasperated Republican aide. "Once these investigations start, there always ends up being a lot of messy collateral damage."

Now the White House is girding for a confirmation battle at the same time it is coping with Democrats' threats to subpoena aides to Bush, including senior adviser Karl Rove.

Among the contenders to replace Gonzales, Chertoff is a former U.S. circuit judge for the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Philadelphia. Before that, he was confirmed by the Senate in 2003 as assistant attorney general for the criminal division.

Under this scenario, Chertoff's successor at the Department of Homeland Security might be Townsend, who now works in the White House as assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism. Townsend held senior Justice Department posts under Attorney General Janet Reno during the Clinton administration and is also a potential nominee for attorney general.

Republican sources said other widely respected Republican lawyers have been considered for attorney general, although some of them may not be interested in taking the job. These names include:

--Former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, the "Law & Order" star who is now considering seeking the Republican presidential nomination.

--Olson, who was Bush's first solicitor general and now is a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington.

--Larry Thompson, who has been general counsel of PepsiCo Inc. since leaving his first-term job as deputy to Attorney General John Ashcroft.

--Retired federal judge Laurence H. Silberman, who was named by Bush to be co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.

--George J. Terwilliger III, a former deputy attorney general and acting attorney general who was a leader of Bush's legal team during the Florida election recount.

Asked if Gonzales will stay, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said Monday: "We hope so. He has the confidence of the president." But Snow also revealed that the president had not talked to Gonzales since a conversation the two had when Bush was in Mexico last week.


 
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Makkonnen · Mar 21, 2007

The latest is Bush is "warning" Dems to accept his proposal to allow Rove and Miers etc to testify not under oath in closed session :lol:

GW is funny as hell

With that they said lets get the subpoenas ready. Bush is fuckin hilarious. He's riding this mothafuckin nation til the wheels fall off, or someone shoots him.

The Lam firing details are going to be real interesting since she was about to execute a search warrant on CIA managers when they put the call in to have her fired.

QueEx · Mar 21, 2007

<center>House panel approves subpoenas
for top Bush aides in prosecutor flap</center>

LAURIE KELLMAN
Associated Press
March 21, 2007 11:17 AM EST

WASHINGTON — A House panel on Wednesday approved subpoenas for President Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove and other top White House aides, setting up a constitutional showdown over the firings of eight federal prosecutors.

By voice vote, the House Judiciary subcommittee on commercial and administrative law decided to compel the president's top aides to testify publicly and under oath about their roles in the firings.

The White House has refused to budge in the controversy, standing by embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and insisting that the firings were appropriate. White House spokesman Tony Snow said that in offering aides to talk to the committees privately, Bush had sought to avoid the "media spectacle" that would result from public hearings with Rove and others at the witness table.

"The question they've got to ask themselves is, are you more interested in a political spectacle than getting the truth?" Snow said of the overture Tuesday by the White House via its top lawyer, Fred Fielding.

"There must be accountability," countered subcommittee Chairwoman Linda Sanchez, D-Calif.

The panel approved, but has not issued, subpoenas for Rove, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers, their deputies and Kyle Sampson, Gonzales' chief of staff, who resigned over the uproar last week.

The panel also voted to compel the production of documents related to the firings from those officials and Gonzales, Fielding and White House chief of staff Joshua Bolton. Fielding a day earlier refused to provide Congress internal White House communications on the subject.

The full Judiciary Committee would authorize the subpoenas if Chairman John Conyers of Michigan chose to do so.

The committee rejected Bush's offer a day earlier to have his aides talk privately to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, but not under oath and not on the record.

Authorizing the subopenas "does provide this body the leverage needed to negotiate from a position of strenghth," said Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass.

Republicans called the authorization premature, though some GOP members said they would consider voting to approve the subpoenas if Conyers promises to issue them only if he has evidence of wrongdoing.

Conyers agreed. "This (authority) will not be used in a way that will make you regret your vote."

Several Republicans said, "No" during the voice vote, but no roll call was taken.

For his part, Bush remained resolute.

Would he fight Democrats in court to protect his aides against congressional subpoenas?

"Absolutely," Bush declared Tuesday.

Democrats promptly rejected the threat. The Senate Judiciary Committee planned to approve subpoenas for the same officials on Thursday.

"Testimony should be on the record and under oath. That's the formula for true ccountability," said Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Bush said he worried that allowing testimony under oath would set a precedent on the separation of powers that would harm the presidency as an institution.

If neither side blinks, the dispute could end in court _ ultimately the Supreme Court _ in a politically messy development that would prolong what Bush called the "public spectacle" of the Justice Department's firings, and public trashings, of the eight U.S. attorneys.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the Senate panel's former chairman, appealed for pragmatism.

"It is more important to get the information promptly than to have months or years of litigation," Specter said.

Bush, in a late-afternoon statement at the White House, decried any attempts by Democrats to engage in "a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants."

"It will be regrettable if they choose to head down the partisan road of issuing subpoenas and demanding show trials when I have agreed to make key White House officials and documents available," the president said.

Bush defended Gonzales against demands from congressional Democrats and a handful of Republicans that Gonzales resign over his handling of the U.S. attorneys' firings over the past year.

"He's got support with me," Bush said. "I support the attorney general."

Democrats say the prosecutors' dismissals were politically motivated. Gonzales initially had asserted the firings were performance-related, not based on political considerations.

But e-mails released earlier this month between the Justice Department and the White House contradicted that assertion and led to a public apology from Gonzales over the handling of the matter.

The e-mails showed that Rove, as early as Jan. 6, 2005, questioned whether the U.S. attorneys should all be replaced at the start of Bush's second term, and to some degree worked with former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and former Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson to get some prosecutors dismissed.

In his remarks Tuesday, Bush emphasized that he appoints federal prosecutors and it is natural to consider replacing them. While saying he disapproved of how the decisions were explained to Congress, he insisted "there is no indication that anybody did anything improper."

Nonetheless, the Senate on Tuesday voted 94-2 to strip Gonzales of his authority to fill U.S. attorney vacancies without Senate confirmation. Democrats contend the Justice Department and White House purged the eight federal prosecutors, some of whom were leading political corruption investigations, after a change in the USA Patriot Act gave Gonzales the new authority.

"What happened in this case sends a signal really through intimidation by purge: 'Don't quarrel with us any longer,'" said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a former U.S. attorney.

The White House had signaled last week that it would not oppose the legislation if it also passed the House and reached Bush's desk.

In an op-ed in Wednesday's editions of The New York Times, one of the eight, David Iglesias of New Mexico, responded to the president: "I appreciate his gratitude for my service _ this marks the first time I have been thanked. But only a written retraction by the Justice Department setting the record straight regarding my performance would settle the issue for me."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070321/fired-prosecutors

VegasGuy · Mar 21, 2007

What did Gonzales do wrong?

-VG

Temujin · Mar 21, 2007

VegasGuy said:
What did Gonzales do wrong?

-VG

Fired eight U.S. attorneys because they weren't bushie enough. They were not fired because of job performance but strictly because of their political affiliations. U.S. attorneys are supposed to enforce the federal laws of this country and that the enforcement of these laws should be totally non-partisan. Gonzalez by being the good bush bitch he is disregarded everything he knows about the judicial system and seperation of powers by firing individuals whose capacity is 99% judicial.

If they let this shit fly every punk ass district court or circuit court judge or prosecutor looking to move up to U.S. attorney now knows that they will not be judged by their legal abilities/decisions but instead will be judged by their political leanings. Political leanings which ethically as a lawyer should have zero to do with enforcement and adherence to the law.

This is shocking to me for any attorney general but for an attorney general who is now chief justice of the supreme court it amazes me that they let a man with this little ethical backbone reach the pinnacle of juris prudence. If you though clarence thomas was bush 1 and reagans bitch this Gonzalez guy takes being a political flunky to a whole new level.

Makkonnen · Mar 21, 2007

Temujin - Did you peep the guy they fired for prosecuting child molesters on indian reservations? It was something about the FBI being pissed he made them tape confessions and interrogations which isnt their normal policy. :smh:

VegasGuy · Mar 21, 2007

Temujin said:
Fired eight U.S. attorneys because they weren't bushie enough. They were not fired because of job performance but strictly because of their political affiliations.

Were they not all republican lawyers that got canned? I thought I read that / heard that somewhere.

U.S. attorneys are supposed to enforce the federal laws of this country and that the enforcement of these laws should be totally non-partisan. Gonzalez by being the good bush bitch he is disregarded everything he knows about the judicial system and seperation of powers by firing individuals whose capacity is 99% judicial.

All presidential appointments right? What I don't understand is, Clinton fired them all but one. Like 93 of 'em. What was different then?

If they let this shit fly every punk ass district court or circuit court judge or prosecutor looking to move up to U.S. attorney now knows that they will not be judged by their legal abilities/decisions but instead will be judged by their political leanings. Political leanings which ethically as a lawyer should have zero to do with enforcement and adherence to the law.

I still don't get it. Clinton got rid of 93 and Hillary got rid of all those in the travel office. They were doing a good job too. So I still don't get what gonzalas did so different. I'm just trying to understand what is so important about this when I thought the major thrust of the new congress was to pay attention to the needs of the people. So far all I see is more of the same. Lawyers defending other lawyers and preping to have hearings for the next scandal.

-VG

Temujin · Mar 21, 2007

Makkonnen said:
Temujin - Did you peep the guy they fired for prosecuting child molesters on indian reservations? It was something about the FBI being pissed he made them tape confessions and interrogations which isnt their normal policy.

Yes I was thoroughly disgusted. U.S. attorneys have a responsiblity to the public to prosecute crimes but to also make sure that the police, fbi etc are adhering to the law in their enforcement capacity.

I hope the country finally sees how political our criminal justice system is and how the politics force people at the end of the day to be more concerned about their jobs or their paychecks then about justice. The ones that are more concerned about justice don't last to long. The ones that kiss administration ass make it all the way to the top. Soon the most important court in the land will be full of political flunky's. Experts at kissing ass.

Temujin · Mar 21, 2007

VegasGuy said:
Were they not all republican lawyers that got canned? I thought I read that / heard that somewhere.

All presidential appointments right? What I don't understand is, Clinton fired them all but one. Like 93 of 'em. What was different then?

I still don't get it. Clinton got rid of 93 and Hillary got rid of all those in the travel office. They were doing a good job too. So I still don't get what gonzalas did so different. I'm just trying to understand what is so important about this when I thought the major thrust of the new congress was to pay attention to the needs of the people. So far all I see is more of the same. Lawyers defending other lawyers and preping to have hearings for the next scandal.

-VG

I don't know wheter or not they were republican but the reports and the emails from Gonzales aide indicate that they were not friends of the administration.

I don't know where you got that from. Clinton did not fire every U.S. attorney in the country but one I'm sure I would of heard of that.

There is a huge difference between an administrative aide and a U.S. ATTORNEY. Administrative aides are supposed to be political that is their job. U.S. Attorneys are supposed to enforce the federal laws of the United States. Laws inacted by congress. Firing for reasons outside of their job performance is unethical and dangerous to the entire judicial system. When you make the enforcement of laws a political decision you take all credibility away from the system.

QueEx · Mar 21, 2007

The president has the the power to relieve U.S. Attorneys, with or without cause. That is, president can give em walking papers because he feels like giving out walkiing papers.

But, terminating a U.S. Attorney because he/she won't perform political hatchet jobs is a different story. Why, because U.S. Attorneys re forbidden, by law and the canons of ethics, from doing political hatchet jobs.

Who should have been terminated, disciplined or charged? - those who insisted that U.S. Attorneys prosecute their or their party's political enemies.

QueEx

Makkonnen · Mar 21, 2007

VegasGuy said:
All presidential appointments right? What I don't understand is, Clinton fired them all but one. Like 93 of 'em. What was different then?

The difference is Clinton fired all the Reagan/GBush I appointees who were there in place before his election, so he got rid of them like Presidents always do when an administration changes especially along party lines.

I saw you make this point on the main board and I replied in detail but you never came back to the thread.

Bush fired those people midterm which is a very rare thing and all of those who were fired or resigned were asked to leave because they did not fulfill some want of other Republican politicos in pursuing frivolous legal action against Democratic opponents. Those are not the same circumstances as Clinton's dismissals or Reagan's etc.

Add to all that the fact that he dismissed people approved by congress to replace them with congressionally unapproved individuals using a detail snuck into the Patriot Act by a Republican Senator who claims he never knew it was put into the law by his own staff. The White House and Justice Dept also claim that didn't know about it.

That is hardly status quo operation in regard to US Attorney appointments and dismissals.

VegasGuy · Mar 21, 2007

Makkonnen said:
The difference is Clinton fired all the Reagan/GBush I appointees who were there in place before his election, so he got rid of them like Presidents always do when an administration changes especially along party lines.

I saw you make this point on the main board and I replied in detail but you never came back to the thread.

Bush fired those people midterm which is a very rare thing and all of those who were fired or resigned were asked to leave because they did not fulfill some want of other Republican politicos in pursuing frivolous legal action against Democratic opponents. Those are not the same circumstances as Clinton's dismissals or Reagan's etc.

Add to all that the fact that he dismissed people approved by congress to replace them with congressionally unapproved individuals using a detail snuck into the Patriot Act by a Republican Senator who claims he never knew it was put into the law by his own staff. The White House and Justice Dept also claim that didn't know about it.

That is hardly status quo operation in regard to US Attorney appointments and dismissals.

I might have missed the reply because generally I click the NEW POSTS link when I show up but it doesn't always get everying. Crappy ass, overrated vBulletin message board systems suck 3 at once.

At any rate, I appreciate the response and I'll go do some diggin'.

I'm trying not to give a shit about what this rag tag white house political idiots do but it's the latest bullshit story in the press the democrat majority is pushing as more important shit than what they campaigned on to fix. namely Gas Prices, ending the war, Minimum wage and having the most ethical congress ever. And since Al Gore was there talking about his video, that is more cover for that do nothing congress.

I'll get back to it. Thanks.

-VG

muckraker10021 · Mar 21, 2007

I posted most of the below on March 15th in this thread http://www.bgol.us/board/showthread.php?t=1607819


It’s always a sad commentary when people who if you asked them if they were smart, would answer yes, engage in the willful neutering of their own intelligence.

The RepubliKlan US attorneys that Clinton removed had been in their positions for as long as 12 years. 8 years of Reagan and 4 years of Papa Bush. Removal of US attorneys after a different party takes control of the white house is typical, common and makes sense.

However removing your own Republican US attorneys that your own administration (baby bush) selected, who all had excellent performance reviews, in the middle of a second term, because they were prosecuting and locking up crooks in your own party like (Randy “Duke” Cunningham) violates the core credo of the relationship a White House is supposed to have vis-à-vis US attorneys.

Read the article below WASHINGTON BABYLON and tell me why you would fire US attorney Carol Lam. The ONLY reason you fire attorney Lam is because, even though she is a REPUBLICAN she's indicting and sending to jail RepubliKlan scum.

Furthermore READ - Was Carol Lam Targeting The White House Prior To Her Firing? ............
.........And you will understand why Cheney-Rove-bush told Gonzo to ax Lamb.

Instead of acting as a political flunky, following the orders of Cheney-Rove-bush to only indict Democrats even if the cases were weak, Lamb did her job by-the-book. If the evidence adds up, you indict; regardless of party affiliation.

One of the eight fired US attorneys Gozo fired, DAVID C. IGLESIAS, who the Tom Cruise character portrayed in the movie "A FEW GOOD MEN" tells us why he was fired here:
READ - Why I Was Fired

The Randy "Duke" Cunningham bribery & corruption trail was headed directly into Darth Cheney's office.

READ – Washington Babylon

READ -Bush Falsely Claims His Prosecutor Purge Is ‘A Customary Practice By Presidents’

READ – Current situation is distinct from Clinton firings of U.S. attorneys

Makkonnen · Mar 22, 2007

VegasGuy said:
I might have missed the reply because generally I click the NEW POSTS link when I show up but it doesn't always get everying. Crappy ass, overrated vBulletin message board systems suck 3 at once.

At any rate, I appreciate the response and I'll go do some diggin'.

I'm trying not to give a shit about what this rag tag white house political idiots do but it's the latest bullshit story in the press the democrat majority is pushing as more important shit than what they campaigned on to fix. namely Gas Prices, ending the war, Minimum wage and having the most ethical congress ever. And since Al Gore was there talking about his video, that is more cover for that do nothing congress.

I'll get back to it. Thanks.

-VG

I look at it more like a way to deal with the assholes who are fucking up the important shit.

Firing a US Attorney because she was bringing charges against corrupt CIA officials seems pretty important to me.

It won't be too hard to prosecute or impeach Cheney with his Energy Plan fiasco either. The true test of how corrupt all these politicians are is whether or not they throw these criminals in jail for this shit.

John Conyers is investigating this shit too- someone is going to jail. Alberto V05 perjured himself already.

Makkonnen · Mar 22, 2007

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070321/NEWS08/703210440

Six of the eight U.S. attorneys fired by the Justice Department ranked in the top third among their peers for the number of prosecutions filed last year, according to an analysis of federal records.

In addition, five of the eight were among the government's top performers in winning convictions.

------------

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/21/AR2007032102713.html

The leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said yesterday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government's racketeering case.

Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's office began micromanaging the team's strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government's claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.

Makkonnen · Mar 23, 2007

The Latest..........
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002851.php

House Dems to White House: Let's Talk
By Paul Kiel - March 22, 2007, 6:33 PM

With subpoenas at the ready, House Democrats wrote White House counsel Fred Fielding today to tell him that they "remain committed to seeking a cooperative resolution."

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and subcommittee chairwoman Linda Sanchez (D-CA), who oversaw a vote yesterday to authorize the issuance of subpoenas for Karl Rove and other White House officials, signed the letter. You can read it here.

Under the solution Fielding laid out in a letter sent Tuesday, Rove and others would be offered to the committee in closed meetings, with a limited number of participants, with no oath and with no transcript. The letter also said that the White House would not turn over any internal White House communications.

Democrats have said no deal. "[W]e cannot accept your proposal for a number of reasons, and would sincerely hope that your office will work with us," says the letter sent today.

The letter concludes with a request that the White House not dispose of any relevant documents: "In the meantime, we also ask that you ensure the preservation of relevant White House documents, as defined in our March 9 letter."

------------

A Great explanation of what's going on
-------

To all those who are claiming that Democrats are moving too fast:

The issue isn't that it was illegal for the president to completely turn the justice department into another extension of the right wing party. Obviously it is terrible, but most of the followers of this case realize it is legal.

What the subpoenas are necessary for, but can not yet be uttered by congressional officials since they will be called partisan witch hunters is:

1. They almost certainly lied to congress about the reasons for firings. Almost, all of the administration's explanations for the firings came after the scandal erupted and they were playing catch up. If you are following the e-mails, some of the USA's performance wasn't even reviewed prior to the purge. Lying to congress is a felony lest we forget.

2. The reasons for the firings was to either punish USA's that weren't prosecuting trumped up charges against Dems (Iglesias) or for investigating corruptions that would go too deep (Lam). This is obstruction of justice and is also a felony. The White House almost certainly played a role in the firings (16 day gap)and my guess is the missing puzzle piece almost certainly rests within this gap.

3. It forces Bush to admit that he played a role in the firings, which he has thus far denied. If he did, then he was lying but he could assert executive privilege. If he didn't have a role, there can be no assertion of executive privilege since there wasn't advice being given.

Right now the "smoking gun" doesn't exist in public, but the administration knows it exists in what they are hiding. That is why they are refusing to allow Rove and Miers to testify. It is either Perjury, impeachment, or both if they do. Subpoenas are the only way to get to the truth.

Unless there is, at the very least, an oath and a transcript, there is no accountability and Bush knows it. Public perception will be irrelevant once the truth emerges and Bush is shown for what he is. That is why Democrats must fight with all they have. Some press members are catching on (Ed Henry). Just because the rest of the MSM hasn't caught on yet, doesn't mean they won't eventually. I may only be 22 but I am sure there was initial skepticism when Watergate initially broke. The good fight must be fought.

taken from tpm
---------------------

Makkonnen · Mar 23, 2007

I read this on a political site and it seems pretty damning. Not sure how accurate this is since Im not an attorney- maybe Que or another lawyer can chime in on how true this is

You're a little too cautious about saying there's no impeachable offense in the matter of the US attorneys. If anyone in the WH had took part in trying to influence, pressure, or threaten a US attorney with regard to their actions in a case, then they committed the crime of misprision of felony, that felony being obstruction of justice. This is about the most serious offense, short of treason, that one could commit, because it strikes at the most fundamental requirement of governance- to uphold the rule of law. This is so serious, that any involvement, be it conspiring to commit or abetting this crime, or even having knowledge of it, is prosecutable as a felony. If it is proved the president even knew about, much less participated in the firing of these US attorneys, or in suborning them to undertake prosecutions for political ends, he's done, and it'll happen so fast it'll make Nixon's exit look like a marathon dance contest.

muckraker10021 · Mar 24, 2007

Makkonnen said:
------------

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/21/AR2007032102713.html

The leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said yesterday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government's racketeering case.

Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's office began micromanaging the team's strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government's claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.

Peeps if your are still confused :confused:

about the methodology of - "the bush crime family" - and are like most Americans, too lazy to read the empirical evidence documented in dozens of books and articles, watch attorney Sharon Eubanks in the video below. Is she another witness that will appear before the senate judiciary committee??? Will this bodacious criminal gang ever be forced to respect the US constitution?????? We'll see. 
-

Former federal prosecutor Sharon Eubanks says she was pressured by bush political appointees. "They actually drafted for me for a position to take on a smoking-cessation remedy, which would reduce what the government had been seeking in the case from $130 billion to $10 billion, without any explanation,"
<div align="right">
<img src="http://www.cbsnews.com/images/2005/08/09/image768196g.jpg" width="170" height="127" align="right"></div>Sharon Eubanks Tells Bob Schieffer
That Political Appointees Interfered With Tobacco Ruling

Video Link if player below fails : rtsp://real.cbsig.net/cbsnews/2007/03/23/video2603626.rm

[RM]rtsp://real.cbsig.net/cbsnews/2007/03/23/video2603626.rm[/RM]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/23/eveningnews/main2602549.shtml

Makkonnen · Mar 24, 2007

I'm just wondering if this nation has always been this bad or what?

Muck- do you have any information the supposed coup attempt during FDR's time in office? I've seen stuff with names of one general about a page long but nothing else.

QueEx · Mar 24, 2007

U.S. ATTORNEYS

<center>New U.S. attorneys seem to have partisan records
The replacement of the U.S. attorneys, the voter-fraud
campaign and the changes in Justice Department voting
rights policies suggest that the Bush administration may
have been using its law enforcement powers for partisan
political purposes</center>

McClatchy Newspapers
By Greg Gordon, Margaret Talev and Marisa Taylor
Posted on Fri, Mar. 23, 2007

WASHINGTON - 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.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the four U.S. attorneys weren't chosen only because of their backgrounds in election issues, but "we would expect any U.S. attorney to prosecute voting fraud."

Taken together, critics say, the replacement of the U.S. attorneys, the voter-fraud campaign and the changes in Justice Department voting rights policies suggest that the Bush administration may have been using its law enforcement powers for partisan political purposes.

The Bush administration's emphasis on voter fraud is drawing scrutiny from the Democratic Congress, which has begun investigating the firings of eight U.S. attorneys - two of whom say that their ousters may have been prompted by the Bush administration's dissatisfaction with their investigations of alleged Democratic voter fraud.

Bush has said he's heard complaints from Republicans about some U.S. attorneys' "lack of vigorous prosecution of election fraud cases," and administration e-mails have shown that Rove and other White House officials were involved in the dismissals and in selecting a Rove aide to replace one of the U.S. attorneys. Nonetheless, Bush has refused to permit congressional investigators to question Rove and others under oath.

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."

The department's civil rights division, for example, supported a Georgia voter identification law that a court later said discriminated against poor, minority voters. It also declined to oppose an unusual Texas redistricting plan that helped expand the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. That plan was partially reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Frank DiMarino, a former federal prosecutor who served six U.S. attorneys in Florida and Georgia during an 18-year Justice Department career, said that too much emphasis on voter fraud investigations "smacks of trying to use prosecutorial power to investigate and potentially indict political enemies."

Several former voting rights lawyers, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of antagonizing the administration, said the division's political appointees reversed the recommendations of career lawyers in key cases and transferred or drove out most of the unit's veteran attorneys.

Bradley Schlozman, who was the civil rights division's deputy chief, agreed in 2005 to reverse the career staff's recommendations to challenge a Georgia law that would have required voters to pay $20 for photo IDs and in some cases travel as far as 30 miles to obtain the ID card.

A federal judge threw out the Georgia law, calling it an unconstitutional, Jim Crow-era poll tax.

In an interview, Schlozman, who was named interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City in November 2005, said he merely affirmed a subordinate's decision to overturn the career staff's recommendations.

He said it was "absolutely not true" that he drove out career lawyers. "What I tried to do was to depoliticize the hiring process," Schlozman said. "We hired people across the political spectrum."

Former voting rights section chief Joseph Rich, however, said longtime career lawyers whose views differed from those of political appointees were routinely "reassigned or stripped of major responsibilities."

In testimony to a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing this week, Rich said that 20 of the 35 attorneys in the voting rights section have been transferred to other jobs or have left their jobs since April 2005 and a staff of 26 civil rights analysts who reviewed state laws for discrimination has been slashed to 10.

He said he has yet to see evidence of voter fraud on a scale that warrants voter ID laws, which he said are "without exception ... supported and pushed by Republicans and objected to by Democrats. I believe it is clear that this kind of law tends to suppress the vote of lower-income and minority voters."

Other former voting-rights section lawyers said that during the tenure of Alex Acosta, who served as the division chief from the fall of 2003 until he was named interim U.S. attorney in Miami in the summer of 2005, the department didn't file a single suit alleging that local or state laws or election rules diluted the votes of African-Americans. In a similar time period, the Clinton administration filed six such cases.

Those kinds of cases, Rich said, are "the guts of the Voting Rights Act."

During this week's House judiciary subcommittee hearing, critics recounted lapses in the division's enforcement. A Citizens Commission on Civil Rights study found that "the enforcement record of the voting section during the Bush administration indicates this traditional priority has been downgraded significantly, if not effectively ignored."

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who chaired the hearing, said, "The more stringent requirements you put on voting in order to get rid of alleged voter fraud, the more you're cutting down on legitimate people voting."

Acosta, the first Hispanic to head the civil rights division, said he emphasized helping non-English speaking voters cast ballots. In 2005, he told a House committee that he made an unprecedented effort to monitor balloting in 2004 to watch for discrimination against minorities.

Justice spokesman Roehrkasse said Acosta "has an impressive legal background, including extensive experience in government and the private sector" and as a federal appeals court clerk.

A third former civil rights division employee, Matt Dummermuth, 33, was nominated to be U.S. attorney in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last December. Before his appointment, he was counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights. He was a special assistant to the civil rights chief from 2002 to 2004.

Details of his involvement in reviewing voter rights couldn't be determined, and Dummermuth, a Harvard Law School graduate, didn't return calls seeking comment.

Bush administration officials have said that no single reason led to the firings of the eight U.S. attorneys. But two of those who were forced to resign said they thought they might have been punished for failing to prosecute Democrats prior to the 2006 congressional elections or for not vigorously pursuing Republican allegations of voter irregularities in Washington state and New Mexico.

Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico has said he thought that "the voter fraud issue was the foundation" for his firing and that complaints about his failure to pursue corruption matters involving Democrats were "the icing on the cake."

John McKay, the ousted U.S. attorney for western Washington state, looked into allegations of voter fraud against Democrats during the hotly contested governor's race in 2004. He said that later, when top Bush aides interviewed him for a federal judgeship, he was asked to respond to criticism of his inquiry in which no charges were brought. He didn't get the judgeship.

Rove talked about the Northwest region in his speech last spring to the Republican lawyers and voiced concern about the trend toward mail-in ballots and online voting. He also questioned the legitimacy of voter rolls in Philadelphia and Milwaukee.

One audience member asked Rove whether he'd "thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive."

"Yes, it's an interesting idea," Rove responded.

Despite the GOP concerns, Bud Cummins, the Republican-appointed U.S. attorney in Arkansas who was fired, said he had "serious doubts" that any U.S. attorney was failing to aggressively pursue voter fraud.

"What they're responding to is party chairmen and activists who from the beginning of time go around paranoid that the other party is stealing the election," Cummins said. "It sounds like to me that they were merely responding to a lot of general carping from the party, who had higher expectations once the Republican appointees filled these posts that there would be a lot of voting fraud investigations. Their expectations were unrealistic."

Griffin, the interim U.S. attorney in Arkansas who's replaced Cummins, was a Rove protege and a former Republican National Committee research director. He was accused of being part of an attempt to wipe likely Democratic voters off the rolls in Florida in 2004 if they were homeless or military personnel.

Griffin couldn't be reached for comment.

Ed Gillespie, then the RNC chairman, said the Republican Party was following election laws and trying to investigate voter fraud by sending out mailers to addresses of registered voters. If the notices came back, he said, the names were entered into a database and checked to see if the voters were listing actual residences.

"The Republican National Committee does not engage in voter suppression," he said. "The fact that someone was trying to prevent voter fraud should not disqualify someone from being U.S. attorney."

McClatchy Newspapers correspondents Tish Wells and Ron Hutcheson contributed to this report.

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/16962753.htm

VegasGuy · Mar 26, 2007

Makkonnen said:
I look at it more like a way to deal with the assholes who are fucking up the important shit.

Firing a US Attorney because she was bringing charges against corrupt CIA officials seems pretty important to me.

It won't be too hard to prosecute or impeach Cheney with his Energy Plan fiasco either. The true test of how corrupt all these politicians are is whether or not they throw these criminals in jail for this shit.

John Conyers is investigating this shit too- someone is going to jail. Alberto V05 perjured himself already.

So is that why these attorneys were canned? These 8 were working on somethng that would have hurt the Bush administration if allowed to finish?

-VG

QueEx · Mar 26, 2007

<center>Ex-Prosecutor Says
He Faced Partisan Questions Before Firing</center>

Washington Post
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 26, 2007; Page A03

One of the eight former U.S. attorneys fired by the Bush administration said yesterday that White House officials questioned his performance in highly partisan political terms at a meeting in Washington in September, three months before his dismissal.

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 said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the question -- which he took as a challenge to his 2004 decision -- surprised him because the issue had been carefully reviewed by his office and the decision was supported by the FBI's office in Seattle. "We expected to be supported by people in Washington, D.C., when we make tough decisions like that," McKay said.

He added that he took umbrage at the idea that he had other responsibilities beyond focusing "on the evidence and not allow[ing] politics into the work that we do in criminal prosecutions." Those involved in the scandal over the firings who acted unprofessionally "or even illegally" must be held accountable for what they did, he said.

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.

The use of the word "mishandled" left open the possibility that White House officials -- who in September were weighing whether to recommend McKay for a federal judgeship -- merely disputed McKay's professional judgment. But his statement yesterday lent new credence to suspicions that partisan political concerns weighed heavily in his firing.

Iglesias
Former prosecutor David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, asked on "Meet the Press" if he believes he was removed for political reasons, said, "Absolutely, yes." Iglesias, a Republican, also said that "right now, I've got serious doubts" about the integrity and leadership of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

Iglesias also challenged a recent statement by White House counselor Dan Bartlett that Iglesias was fired in part because of frustration that his prosecution of a former New Mexico state treasurer had produced a conviction on only one of 23 counts.

Iglesias said Bartlett is "out of touch" and "looking at talking points" because "he doesn't know the facts underlying what we do as U.S. attorneys." He said that the former state treasurer was sentenced to three years in prison and that "had he been convicted of 10 out of 23 counts, I doubt he would have done a lot more time."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/24/AR2007032401122.html

QueEx · Mar 26, 2007

<center>Aide to Gonzales Won't Testify
Counselor Cites Fifth Amendment Right in Refusal</center>

Washington Post
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 27, 2007; Page A03

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's senior counselor yesterday refused to testify in the Senate about her involvement in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Monica M. Goodling, who has taken an indefinite leave of absence, said in a sworn affidavit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that she will "decline to answer any and all questions" about the firings because she faces "a perilous environment in which to testify."

Goodling, who was also Justice's liaison to the White House, and her lawyers alleged that Democratic lawmakers have already concluded that improper motives were at play in Justice's dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys last year. Goodling also pointed to indications that Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty blames her and others for not fully briefing him, leading to inaccurate testimony to Congress.

Goodling's refusal to testify illustrates the rising political and legal stakes surrounding the removal of the federal prosecutors, and underscores the fissures developing among Gonzales and his current and former senior aides as the attorney general struggles to keep his job.

Goodling's decision contrasts sharply with the approach of her onetime colleague D. Kyle Sampson, Gonzales's former chief of staff, who resigned March 12: He has agreed to testify before the same Senate committee. Sampson has also disputed allegations by Gonzales and others that he withheld information about White House involvement in the firings, which were initially portrayed as a routine Justice Department personnel matter undertaken without significant White House involvement.

Sampson is expected to testify that "the fact that the White House and Justice Department had been discussing this subject for several years was well known" to many senior Justice officials, including Goodling and others who had briefed department witnesses, according to a statement issued by his attorney March 16 .

"Hearings in a highly politicized environment like this can sometimes become a game of 'gotcha,' " the lawyer, Bradford A. Berenson, added yesterday, "but Kyle has decided to trust the Congress and the process."

But one of Goodling's lawyers, John Dowd, said in a statement yesterday that "the potential for legal jeopardy for Ms. Goodling from even her most truthful and accurate testimony under these circumstances is very real."

Goodling and Sampson are among six current or former Justice officials who have been listed as potential witnesses by the Senate and House judiciary panels, which are conducting separate investigations of the coordinated firings of the U.S. attorneys.

The others are William Mercer, acting associate attorney general; William Moschella, principal associate deputy attorney general; Michael Elston, McNulty's chief of staff; and Michael A. Battle, the now-departed head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, who called the prosecutors to fire them.

House and Senate Democrats said they were disappointed that Goodling would not testify, and several raised questions about her motives.

Goodling contended in her affidavit yesterday that Leahy and other lawmakers, including Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Linda T. Sanchez (D-Calif.), had already "drawn conclusions" about the prosecutors' firings.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/26/AR2007032600935.html

Sango · Mar 27, 2007

And to think that i was following the tobacco case and it now paints a bigger
picture for me with this new information......All of Qs along the way..

Makkonnen · Mar 27, 2007

VegasGuy said:
So is that why these attorneys were canned? These 8 were working on somethng that would have hurt the Bush administration if allowed to finish?

-VG

Lam from San Diego was going to serve search warrants on CIA personnel the day after someone hit up Bush and Co to fire her. She prosecuted Cunningham the Repub in prison now. They said she needed to spend more time investigating illegal immigrants instead of corruption. Its in the emails bruh.

So the answer is YES. Not all of them but some. Many did NOT follow fake voter fraud cases for repubs during elections or other democrat harassment shit and various Repub politicians and activists called the White House to have them fired including Senators.
-----------------

That Goodling chick is going to have to explain to a judge why she cant testify. You can't not testify because you might lie and be prosecuted.

So if people are appointed by the President to be US Attorneys and fired on his say so, HOW can the AG and the PRESIDENT not know what is going on? Do they fire US Attorneys regularly without knowing?

The lies and bullshit have finally begun to catch up.

:lol:

Its only March :lol:

Imagine the shitstorm by December.

muckraker10021 · Mar 27, 2007

Makkonnen said:
I'm just wondering if this nation has always been this bad or what?

Muck- do you have any information the supposed coup attempt during FDR's time in office? I've seen stuff with names of one general about a page long but nothing else.

<hr hoshade color="#0000ff" size="6"></hr>
 
<div align="left"> <table border="0" width="350" height="450" align="left">
<tr><td height="450"><img src="http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/1602390363.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg" align="left" width="350" height="350"></td></tr><tr><td><center>The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR (Paperback) by Jules Archer</center></td></tr></table></div>
Absolutely!!
Outside of graduate level university history courses this failed attempt to make the US a fascist state, this “American Coup D'état” is never covered.

Some of the richest and most powerful American citizens attempted to implement the removal of an elected President of the United States (Franklin D. Roosevelt) via a military Coup D'état. The plotters attempted to recruit General Smedley Butler to lead the coup.

The “bush crime family” neo-cons who come out of PNAC (Project for the New American Century) are the successors to the group that plotted to implement fascism in the US by removing Roosevelt. The American Liberty League which was preceded by the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment was the organization that spawned the Roosevelt coup plotters.

If you are interested in all the details, you can read all about it in the links provided below. There are many more links out there if you do the research.

An American Coup d'État?

THE BUSINESS PLOT TO OVERTHROW ROOSEVELT

The Fourth Coup D’etat

One Hour Radio Show (podcast) which covers in detail the Coup d'État against Roosevelt. Click real player Link below to hear the audio-

<h2>The Coup Attempt of 1934</h2>

[rm]http://wfmu.org/listen.ram?show=10938[/rm]

muckraker10021 · Mar 27, 2007

New U.S. attorneys seem to have partisan records


By Greg Gordon, Margaret Talev and Marisa Taylor

March 24th 2007

McClatchy Newspapers

....Since 2005, 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...


Read entire article Here - http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003633792_attorneys24.html

The McClactchy Newspapers are the second largest newspaper chain in America. They are excellent. They were the only major media establishment that told it's readers that the whole Iraq fiasco was based on unprovable assertions- lies. Go to their Washinton Bureau page for excellent fact-based stories.
Link - http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/

Atty General Gonzales Should Resign

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