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March 13: General Kevin Kiley, the Army's Surgeon General and the temporary commander of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, abruptly retires under pressure from superior officers. Kiley is the third top Army official forced out in the fallout from revelations of horrendous treatment of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed.
Walter Reed scandal
Kiley's retirement was requested by acting Army Secretary Pete Geren. In a statement released by the Army, Kiley says, "I submitted my retirement because I think it is in the best interest of the Army." Kiley says he wants to allow Army officials to "focus completely on the way ahead." Last week, Kiley said, "We have failed to meet our own standards at Walter Reed. For that, I'm both personally and professionally sorry."
Congressional committees and a number of investigative boards are scrutinizing the treatment of wounded troops and veterans by the military's entire medical system, as well as by the Department of Veterans Affairs, headed by Jim Nicholson. The probes come with the administration already struggling to defend its widely unpopular war policies in Iraq, and the Democratic-led Congress citing poor care for troops as the latest instance of incompetent administration planning for the conflict.
On March 12, Geren told 280 Walter Reed workers, "The events of late -- failures by some, failures in our system -- have tarnished the reputation of us all. The American people expect us to fulfill our obligation to those who have borne the battle" and are angry and disappointed when they see failure. Geren replaced Army Secretary Francis Harvey, who was dismissed two weeks ago. One of Harvey's final acts was to dismiss the former commander of Walter Reed, General George Weightman, and replace him temporarily with Kiley.
Kiley's downfall was predictable after his performance before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 6 (see above item), when he tried to claim that he knew little about the specific problems at Walter Reed, though documents clearly showed that Kiley had been specifically informed of an array of serious problems at the hospital, and Kiley's apparent arrogance towards family members who testified before the committee.
While many lawmakers welcome Kiley's departure, Democrat Ike Skelton, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, notes that Kiley's firing alone will not solve the problems plaguing the Army's medical care system. "With the installation of new leaders, the real test will be making sure that the work fixing problems actually gets done," Skelton says. Tom Davis, the Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, says Kiley "did not seem to understand the scope of his job." Democratic senator Patty Murray adds that Kiley's tenure had been "riddled with serious blunders." Murray says, "We still lack a system that meets the needs of our troops from the battlefield to the local VA and everywhere in between." (AP/St. Petersburg Times)
March 13: Examination of the documents released by the Justice Department about the attorney firings prove that the Justice Department and the White House both lied extensively and systematically about the firings.
US Attorney firings
The examination is conducted by Daily Kos blogger "litigatormom."
An e-mail from Alberto Gonzales's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, to then-White House counsel Harriet Miers proves that, contrary to the assertions of the administration, they knew that Bill Clinton did not, as they have repeatedly insisted, carry out similar firings. Sampson wrote, "...once confirmed by the Senate and appointed, US Attorneys serve for four years and then holdover indefinitely (at the pleasure of the President, of course). In recent memory, during the Reagan and Clinton Administrations, Presidents Reagan and Clinton did not seek to remove and replace the US Attorneys they had appointed whose terms had expired, but instead permitted those US Attorneys to serve indefinitely under the holdover provision. ...There are several likely explanations for this: in some cases Presidents Reagan and Clinton may have been pleased with the work of the U.S. Attorneys, who, after all, they had appointed. In other instances, Presidents Reagan and Clinton may simply have been unwilling to commit the resources necessary to remove the U.S. Attorneys, find suitable replacements (i.e., seek the 'advice' of the home-state Senators), complete background investigations, and secure Senate confirmations."
Sampson's e-mail goes on to discuss the "obstacles" to removing US attorneys, which include, as suggested above, the need to consult with home-state senators, the fact that home-state senators might be unhappy with the termination of sitting US Attorneys they had recommended, and the need to secure Senate confirmations. Sampson then compiles a list of potential "targets" for removal, with the names of those who were not removed whited out. In every case, however, the home-state senators who would have to be consulted about a replacement, and the party affiliations of those senators, was noted on the list. So in determining which US attorneys to target for firing, the DOJ not only considered (and in some cases ignored) their performance rankings but also considered how easy it would be to install a politically acceptable replacement. Several of the targeted attorneys on this list -- Margaret Chiara, Bud Cummins, Carol Lam and Kevin Ryan -- came from states with two Democratic senators.
In an earlier e-mail, Sampson had given Ryan a positive evaluation, and had recommended that David Iglesias be retained as well. Cummins, Chiara and Lam were marked as candidates for termination. A May 11, 2006 e-mail from Sampson to Harriet recommends Tim Griffin for the Cummins spot in Arkansas, and notes: "The real problem we have with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her four year term expires." It is easy to speculate about their "real problem" with Lam, considering she was then spearheading the investigation into the crimes of former Republican House member Randy Cunningham and his Defense Department and CIA cronies. Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall observes, "Lam's firing has always been at the heart of this. ...[T]he truth is that by rights Lam's dismissal should have sounded alarm bells for everyone on day one. What people tend to overlook is that for most White Houses, a US attorney involved in such a politically charged and ground-breaking corruption probe would have been untouchable, even if she'd run her office like a madhouse and was offering free twinkies to every illegal who made it across the border. Indeed, when you view the whole context you see that the idea she was fired for immigration enforcement is just laughable on its face. No decision about her tenure could be made without the main issue being that investigation. It's like hearing that Pat Fitzgerald was fired as Plamegate prosecutor for poor deportment or because he was running up too many air miles flying back and forth from Chicago. Lam's investigation (and allied ones her probe spawned) were uncovering a) serious criminal wrongdoing by major Republican power players on Capitol Hill, b) corruption at the CIA -- which reached back to the Hill, c) and as yet still largely hidden corrupt dealings at the heart of the intelligence operations in the Rumsfeld Pentagon."
Another e-mail shows that the deputy White House political director, Scott Jennings, is excited about the prospect of Tim Griffin succeeding Cummins, but is concerned that Senate confirmation might be difficult due to Griffin's role in a "massive Republican projects in Florida and elsewhere, by which Republicans challenged tens of thousands of absentee votes. Coincidentally, many of those challenged votes were concentrated in black precincts." The pattern is increasingly clear -- to insert Bush loyalists such as Griffin into the attorney slots and to avoid Senate confirmation which might bring up "embarrassing" revelations such as Griffin's involvement with the Florida vote suppression tactics of 2004 (see item above).
On November 15, 2006, Sampson e-mailed the "USA Replacement Plan" to Miers, William Kelley of the White House Counsel's office, and Gonzales's deputy, Paul McNulty. Sampson warned the group that they must be "steeled to withstand" the political blowback, and recommended that "pre-execution" they speak with "Karl's shop." According to subsequent e-mails, Sampson detailed the plan of attack. Targets were to be told only that the president is "grateful for your service," but wanted to "give someone else the chance to serve" for the last two years of the administration. Where there is a Republican senator in the target's state, they got a call -- where both senators are Democrats, they had to call the "Bush political lead" to solicit prompt recommendations for replacements. Sampson then gave Miers, Kelley, and McNulty the talking points "to withstand the political upheaval." Sampson predicted the fired attorneys would try to save their jobs, and that officials receiving appeals from the targets or their senators "must respond identically." Gonzales is explicitly included on the list of the officials who "must respond identically," but is not copied on Sampson's e-mail. However, it is difficult to imagine that Gonzales wasn't aware of what was happening, especially when it was necessary for him "to respond identically."
Sampson's talking points are quite familiar to anyone reading the news. The two most familiar refrains are that US attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and have no right or expectation of continuing in office, and that the administration decided to make the change, not any specific person in the White House or at Justice.
Comfirmation e-mails from Miers to Sampson are included, as noted in earlier items. Interestingly, one of the e-mails from the private "gwb43.com" domain, a private server owned by the Republican National Committee but used, against federal regulations, by White House officials, shows White House official Jane Cherry asking Sampson for the list of anticipated vacancies: "Just following up on Scott's behalf [Scott Jennings, Rove's deputy] to see if we could get the list you discussed this weekend." And on December 7, Sampson received an e-mail reporting on the call to Republican senator Pete Domenici telling him about Iglesias' termination: "Domenici's COS is happy as a clam...." (Daily Kos [multiple sources], Talking Points Memo)
March 13: Democratic senator Charles Schumer says that he will not allow Alberto Gonzales's former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, "to become the next Scooter Libby, the next fall guy," for the administration in regards to the eight US attorneys fired by the Justice Department.
US Attorney firings
Schumer and his colleague, Dianne Feinstein, hold a lengthy press conference about the firings and the recent "document dump" by the Justice Department. "Make no mistake about it: This has become as serious as it gets,"
Schumer says. "Just when we thought our faith could not be shaken any further, it has been. At the very beginning, I was clear that something didn't smell right, but I had no idea how high it went. The latest revelations prove beyond any reasonable doubt that there has been unprecedented breach of trust, abuse of power and misuse of the Justice Department. And that is very serious and very important. The US attorneys are in their own districts the lead enforcer of the rule of law, without fear or favor. When you see the picture, the symbol of the eagle holding the arrows above every Justice Department office throughout the land, it stands for fair, unbiased, nonpolitical justice being rendered. And yet that has been called into question by a series of blunders, missteps and abuse of power in the Justice Department." Schumer says he wants Gonzales to resign, and that Sampson's resignation is not enough: "Today's staff resignation does not take heat off the attorney general. In fact, it raises the temperature. Kyle Sampson will not become the next Scooter Libby, the next fall guy. Either Attorney General Gonzales knew what his chief of staff was doing -- that's a pretty severe indictment -- or he didn't, which means he doesn't have the foggiest idea of what's going on in the Justice Department. We now have direct evidence that Attorney General Gonzales was carrying out the political wishes of the president in at least some of these firings."
Schumer continues, "Attorney General Gonzales' chief of staff withheld information on the White House's role in the Justice Department, in terms of who was preparing to testify to Congress. Attorney Gonzales' chief of staff may well have obstructed justice. Political operatives and elected officials in New Mexico complained about one US attorney's failure to indict Democrats quickly enough. Those complaints were passed on to Karl Rove and to the president himself. The president weighed in with Attorney General Gonzales. And within weeks, that US attorney, David Iglesias, was fired. Indeed, today's reports make clear that Mr. Iglesias was not on the hit list until October, just when he was staving off inappropriate pressure tactics. So if he wasn't on the list when the list was made up, and then you get the phone calls from the White House and from legislators, and then he's added to the list, what conclusion other than political interference can one come to? ...It is now increasingly clear that the only bad actors in this case were top officials in the White House and the Justice Department, not -- not -- the US attorneys, the fine public servants who were fired."
Schumer says of Gonzales, "[He] has either forgotten the oath he took to uphold the Constitution or just doesn't understand that his duty to protect the law is greater than his duty to protect the president. He's a nice man. You meet the attorney general, and you say, 'He is not one of these sort of, you know, political warriors.' But there's too much at stake here. And to have somebody who is going to let this happen or be part of it happening is just no longer -- we can't countenance it any longer. US attorneys have always been above politics. And this administration has blatantly manipulated the US attorney system to serve its political needs. Years from now, when someone's indicted and they claim political interference, it's going to have new truth, even if that person was justifiably indicted -- new resonance. That's the problem here. And we've been fed one story after another. That's why Senator Feinstein and I are so upset, as all of us on the Judiciary Committee are, from Chairman Leahy on down."
Schumer lists "some of the falsehoods we've been told that are now unraveling. First, we were told that the seven of the eight US attorneys were fired for performance reasons. It It now turns out this was a falsehood, as the glowing performance evaluations attest. Second, we were told by the attorney general that he would, quote, 'never, ever make a change for political reasons.' It now turns out that this was a falsehood, as all the evidence makes clear that this purge was based purely on politics, to punish prosecutors who were perceived to be too light on Democrats or too tough on Republicans. Third, we were told by the attorney general that this was just an overblown personnel matter. It now turns out that far from being a low-level personnel matter, this was a longstanding plan to exact political vendettas or to make political pay-offs. Fourth, we were told that the White House was not really involved in the plan to fire U.S. attorneys. This, too, turns out to be false. Harriet Miers was one of the masterminds of this plan, as demonstrated by numerous e-mails made public today. She communicated extensively with Kyle Sampson about the firings of the US attorneys. In fact, she originally wanted to fire and replace the top prosecutors in all 93 districts across the country. Fifth, we were told that Karl Rove had no involvement in getting his protege appointed US attorney in Arkansas. In fact, here is a letter from the Department of Justice. Quote: 'The department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin.' It now turns out that this was a falsehood, as demonstrated by Mr. Sampson's own e-mail. Quote: 'Getting him, Griffin, appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, et cetera.' Sixth, we were told to change the Patriot Act was an innocent attempt to fix a legal loophole, not a cynical strategy to bypass the Senate's role in serving as a check and balance. It was Senator Feinstein who discovered that issue. She'll talk more about it. So there has been misleading statement after misleading statement -- deliberate misleading statements. And we haven't gotten to the bottom of this yet, but believe me, we will pursue it."
Schumer says that three things must happen to clear the air and restore public confidence. First, Gonzales must resign. Second, White House officials involved in the scandal, particularly Rove and Miers, must testify before Congress, as must Sampson. Third, and most important, Bush must clarify -- truthfully -- his own role in the matter. "It appears he weighed in directly with the attorney general about at least one US attorney, who was then fired a few weeks later. The sooner he explains this to the American people, the better. The cloud over the US attorneys, the cloud over the Justice Department is getting darker and darker, and only the president and dispel it."
Feinstein says that she began looking into the forced resignations of the attorneys in early January. She says that from the outset, she encountered heavy resistance from Gonzales: "I didn't know my facts, I didn't know what we were doing, that this was all being done for performance reasons. And then, as we got the performance reports, I was told, Well -- and the performance reports were all good. I was told, 'Well, it was done for policy reasons;' they didn't follow policy of the main Justice in one way or another. And then finally, in an op-ed done by the attorney general in USA Today, the rationale was given, 'Well, we lost confidence in them.' 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 US attorneys without Senate confirmation." That provision will soon be eliminated by Congressional legislation, she says, but, "[W]e really need to know whether this amendment in March of '06 was orchestrated by the White House. Who asked for the change? We've also learned that there was a target list prepared, that the idea for these firings began some two years ago, that the White House counsel at the time had suggested that all 93 attorneys be replaced. And the dismissals were orchestrated by the chief of staff of the attorney general. Now, were these dismissals orchestrated then without the knowledge of the attorney general? I think that's a question we have to know."
One, Arkansas's Bud Cummins, was removed to make way for a Karl Rove aide with little civilian prosecutorial experience, she notes. Five more "were involved in some form of public corruption investigation or case." All of this would have, if the White House had had its way, slipped underneath the public -- and Congressional -- radar. "Well, I've always looked at the Office of Attorney General and the attorney general himself as not being the attorney general for the White House, but being the attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer, for all of the people of America; and that the attorney general's office stood apart from the White House, was objective, was honest, and issued opinions and made prosecutions as they saw them, that there was no strategy or organization to it. And now, I learn that much of what I had believed, at least about this attorney general's office, is in fact not the case. ...I guess what really incenses me somewhat is the fact that the attorney general called me and said, you know, I really didn't have my facts right; that none of this was correct. And now we see it's a much bigger and grander strategy. And I think a very dangerous strategy: dangerous for objectivity, dangerous for proper law enforcement and proper prosecution."
Schumer says that the Judiciary Committee will consider whether or not to call for a special prosecutor to investigate the case. As for testimony before Congress, one reporter notes that the White House has a long track record of not allowing its officials to testify; Schumer says that subpoenas will force testimony. Additionally, several Justice Department officials, including Gonzales's deputy, Paul McNulty, have already testified and thereby waived any privilege they might have had. He also notes that Gonzales has said that Congress could speak with any DOJ officials they like. "So I think privilege -- you can't turn privilege on and off. For the Justice Department, it's out the window. That includes Kyle Sampson, although he may have other privileges if there's criminal. As for the White House, let me say this: I think that the White House should not invoke [executive] privilege here. There's too much damage already being done to the Justice Department, to the Office of the U.S. Attorneys, and they have an obligation to come clean and let people know exactly what we went on. To invoke privilege and have a lengthy court proceeding will only delay, not prevent, the facts from getting out. It'll keep the cloud that's hanging over the Justice Department -- and, frankly, over the president himself right now -- out there."
Schumer says of Gonzales that his calls for Gonzales's resignation "is not just limited to the US attorney situation. It's just been on issue after issue after issue he seems to see his role as a rubber stamp for the president, as president's counsel. And as Senator Feinstein has said, as I have said, as so many others have said, being attorney general is the one Cabinet officer where, when the president says, 'Jump,' you don't necessarily say, 'How high?' But that's what Attorney General Gonzales has done over and over again." (TPM Muckraker [link to video])
March 13: Former US attorney John McKay says he is "stunned" to learn that Bush had received complaints from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about McKay and others who, in the view of many state Republicans, were not pursuing voter-fraud allegations against Democratic rivals hard enough.
US Attorney firings
McKay says he doesn't know if such complaints cost him his job as the US attorney for western Washington state. However, he says, "[h]Had anyone at the Justice Department or the White House ordered me to pursue any matter criminally in the 2004 [Washington] governor's election, I would have resigned. There was no evidence, and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury." Washington state Republicans wanted McKay to pursue baseless charges of voter fraud surrounding the 2004 election of Democrat Christine Gregoire to the governor's office. "I am disappointed with the president," he says. "I am disappointed with the attorney general. ...I asked for the reasons that I was being asked to resign and I was given no reasons." When Gonzales said McKay was fired for performance reasons, he was livid. "I knew that was false and I felt obligated to speak up," McKay says
The conversation between Bush and Gonzales, along with e-mails and documents that the White House plans to turn over to Congress today, suggests the firings of McKay and seven other US attorneys last year may have been politically motivated, despite the denials from Justice Department and White House officials, including Gonzales himself.
McKay says that the top prosecutors in his office, along with FBI agents, conducted a "very active" review of allegations of fraud during the election but filed no charges and did not convene a federal grand jury because "we never found any evidence of criminal conduct." McKay says that Republican supporters of Gregoire's opponent Dino Rossi, still bitter over his narrow loss to Gregoire, continue to falsely portray him and his office as indifferent to allegations of electoral fraud. "There should be no controversy at the Department of Justice, or anywhere else in the federal government, about how the 2004 election was reviewed," McKay says. McKay has already revealed that in late 2004 or early 2005 he received a phone call from Ed Cassidy, the chief of staff for Representative Doc Hastings, a Washington state Republican, asking about the status of the voter fraud investigations. McKay says he refused to discuss the matter with Cassidy because it would be improper to do so. He has also revealed that during a meeting last summer with former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and Deputy Counsel William Kelley, to discuss McKay's candidacy to become a federal judge, he was asked to explain why some Washington state Republicans believed he "mishandled" the 2004 governor's race. "Any individual prosecutor is replaceable," he says. "What's not replaceable is our reputation for fairness and our reputation for independence from political influences."
The Gregoire-Rossi election was undoubtedly controversial. Two suspect machine counts showed Rossi the winner, but Gregoire forced a hand recount, which gave her the governorship by a mere 129 votes. Republicans sued in Chelan County Superior Court to have the vote declared invalid because of tabulation errors, improper ballots and alleged fraud. From the time Republicans filed the case in January until it went to trial in Wenatchee in late May 2005, several prominent Republicans, including former senator Slade Gorton and state Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance, publicly called on McKay and the Justice Department to launch a criminal probe. McKay says he and four attorneys in his office worked closely with the FBI and the Department of Justice to monitor complaints of criminal wrongdoing. Neither McKay or his top assistants found a shred of evidence to back up the Republicans' complaints. Tom McCabe, executive vice president of the Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW) and a powerful Republican supporter, contacted McKay's office in late 2004 or early 2005, alleging he had evidence of forged signatures on absentee ballots cast for Gregoire. McKay says his officials, and the FBI, found nothing in McCabe's supposed evidence to warrant further inquiry. But instead of accepting the findings, McCabe complained to several White House officials, and demanded that McKay be fired.
The controversy continued nevertheless, and McKay and the FBI took notice when Republican attorney Dale Foreman said during his opening statement in the Chelan County trial that he had evidence of fraud in King County. "I was shocked to see him use the words 'ballot-stuffing' because that is a crime," McKay says. "If you say that, you are ethically bound to prove that." No such proof was ever presented, and the charges of voter fraud were dismissed. After the conclusion of the trial, neither the US attorney's office nor the FBI received other credible evidence of federal crimes during the 2004 race. Consequently, McKay says, "I moved on to other things."
Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal's hard-right editorial staff misrepresents McKay's decision not to pursue the bogus voter fraud charges in 2004. The Journal, which falsely calls McKay a Democrat, alleges that McKay "declined" to investigate allegations of voter fraud "apparently on the grounds that he had better things to do." As McKay testified, he did not convene a grand jury to investigate the matter because "there was no evidence of voter fraud." It is plain that the Journal's editorial page staffers are lining up with Bush on the US attorney firings, and that the truth will not stand in its path. (Seattle Times, CBS News, Wall Street Journal/Media Matters)
March 13: Democratic senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is outraged by the revelations included in the Justice Department's "document dump" about the eight US attorney firings, and by the lies told to him and his committee by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales regarding the White House's involvement in the erupting scandal.
US Attorney firings
Leahy says he intends to get to the bottom of it one way or the other. He says to NPR's Michele Norris, "I was outraged. I remember walking out on the dock to pick up the paper about a quarter to 5 this morning; I walk into the kitchen; I looked at that, and I just -- I just blew my stack. It was outrageous, because we had given the administration, the Department of Justice, every chance to come forward and tell us everything that happened. They assured us that they had told us everything that happened, and yet they left out some very, very key points. I saw the attorney general this morning in a meeting at the Supreme Court, and I told him that I was very, very unhappy with this -- actually quite angry about it. ...He said that he would be happy to come up and brief us some more. I said, 'No, I've had enough of these briefings where ostensibly we're told everything; it turns out we weren't. The next time you come up will be before the full committee; it will be an open session; and you will be under oath."
Leahy is also angered that Gonzales's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, is still working at the Justice Department after he and the DOJ announced his resignation. The DOJ says Sampson will remain at the DOJ while he goes "job hunting." "Come on; if you did something wrong and you're out, you should be out," Leahy says.
Leahy acknowledges that the administration has the right to hire and fire US attorneys as it sees fit. But, "What I quarrel with is the fact that they did not tell us the truth about what happened. What I quarrel with is the fact that even though they were under oath, they withheld information. That is unacceptable. I realize that they were used to having six years of a complacent rubber-stamp Congress controlled by their party. That changed in last year's election. We're going to ask questions. I would ask these same questions if it was a Democratic administration. I'm not going to accept half-answers and I'm not going to accept misleading answers. I want full answers; I want them under oath." He says he will subpoena whoever is necessary to find the answers. Sampson will testify, as will Gonzales, though subpoenaing any DOJ official is probably not required. Leahy will, if needed, compel the testimony of Karl Rove and Harriet Miers with subpoenas, if they will not testify willingly. As to why this investigation is so important: "I think it's extremely important if somebody is trying to manipulate how prosecution is done in this country. It's hard to think of many things that are more important than that. After all, that affects your liberties, my liberties, and it affects the safety of all Americans."
A day later, Leahy responds tartly to indications that the White House may resist having its officials testify under oath to Leahy's committee. He tells CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "Frankly, I don't care whether [White House Counsel Fred Fielding] says he's going to allow people or not. We'll subpoena the people we want. If they want to defy the subpoena, then you get into a stonewall situation I suspect they don't want to have. [Rove] can appear voluntarily if he wants. If he doesn't, I will subpoena him." And, asked whether he believes any Bush officials have committed perjury in regard to the firings, he says, "We'll find that out." (NPR, CNN/Think Progress [link to video])
March 13: The government watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is demanding the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate potential criminal violations related to the recent dismissals of eight US attorneys in light of recent revelations that a top-ranking Department of Justice official, Kyle Sampson, knew that statements made by top Department officials were lies.
US Attorney firings
CREW's Melanie Sloan says, "Given the murky nature of this situation and the unresolved questions of what top level Justice officials knew, when they knew it and whether they deliberately withheld information from Congress, Attorney General [Alberto] Gonzales should immediately appoint a special prosecutor. Both Congress and the American people deserve a full accounting of the truth behind the firings of the US attorneys. If the attorney general doesn't want to see the truth come out, perhaps the Inspector General will." A letter from CREW to Gonzales reads in part, "The firing of the US attorneys now appears to have implicated wrongdoing in the Executive Branch. Three members of Congress have already become enmeshed in the scandal for improperly contacting sitting U.S. Attorneys about pending cases. CREW has already sought ethics investigations of Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), Representative Heather Wilson (R-NM) and Representative Doc Hasting (R-WA) in this same matter." (CREW)
March 13: In a December 19, 2006 e-mail to then-White House counsel Harriet Miers, Kyle Sampson, then the chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the DOJ's point man in the US attorney firings, wrote,
US Attorney firings
"The only thing really at risk here is a repeal of the AG's appointment authority. We intend to have DOJ leg affairs people on notice to work hard to preserve this (House members won't care about this; all we really need, is for one Senator to object to language being added to legislative vehicles that are moving through). There is some risk that we'll lose the authority, but if we don't ever exercise it then what's the point of having it? (I'm not 100 percent sure that Tim was the guy on which to test drive this authority but know that getting him appointed...was important to Harriet, Karl, etc.)"
Apparently that "one senator" is Republican Jon Kyl. An attempt was made on February 16, 2007 to pass a bill in the Senate reversing the changes that were made to the US Attorney appointment process in the Patriot Reauthorization Act in March 2006. Kyl successfully blocked the bill, in the process echoing the objections of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty: Democrats "are trying to create a scandal where none exists. There's a lot of politics to this. ...Let's sit down and work out a [deal] that allows three or four amendments." Kyl's objection centered around the bill's provision that if a permanent nominee isn't named within 120 days, the courts can name the new attorney. Kyl suggested, "If it's important to make sure the president's got to send a nominee forward, one might also agree we should set a limit for the Senate to act on that nominee."
The point of this is simple: Sampson sent an e-mail outlining the strategy by which the Bush administration can look cooperative, but still block actual reinstitution of the senate confirmation process of US attorneys as it was before the Patriot Act reauthorization. As per the strategy, Kyl blocks the Senate's consideration of repealing the provision about "permanent interim" appointments. As EPluribus Media notes, "The Dec. 19th email explains Senator Kyl's objection on February 15th, 2007. The Bush administration gets to look like it is being cooperative, but Kyl still stalls the process." Now the question is, was Kyl a deliberate shill for the White House and the Department of Justice? (EPluribus Media)
March 13: One of the thousands of bloggers poring over the Justice Department's "document dump" of e-mails and other documents surrounding the firing of eight US attorneys begins wondering why the "forgotten" attorney, Northern California's Kevin Ryan, was suddenly pushed out when he was.
US Attorney firings
Ryan is not considered a "problem" firing, because, according to Justice Department officials and other, less problematic sources, Ryan's performance was indeed an issue -- the only one of the eight whose performance is actually questionable. But, as Daily Kos researcher "sfluke" demonstrates, there may be far more to Ryan's ouster than poor managerial skills.
The documents list the attorneys being considered for firing; all of the others were blotted out before the documents were made public. On a document titled "Plan for Replacing Certain United States Attorneys," dated November 15, 2006, Step One lists the following US attorneys: Paul Charlton, Carol Lam, Margaret Chiara, Dan Bogden, John McKay, and David Iglesias. Ryan's name is conspicuously absent. The document was modified on December 4, 2006, to include Ryan. On November 7, the Democrats retook Congress; the political motivations subsequent to that event are obvious. But, as "sfluke" asks, "What happened between 11-7-06 and 12-4-06 that caused Kevin Ryan to be added to the list?"
On November 30, 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, "Kevin Ryan, the US attorney for the Northern District of California who in July created a task force to pursue potential criminal charges against companies embroiled in the stock option backdating scandal, told a securities litigation conference on Thursday that the way a company responds to such allegations could be crucial to whether it will be indicted. According to the Associated Press, Ryan said prosecutors would 'look at whether the corporation has impeded the investigation while purporting to cooperate.' Ryan has said in the past that he would rely on the Thompson memo, written after the scandals involving Enron Corp. and WorldCom Corp. by former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, which directs prosecutors to consider whether a company cooperates with an investigation."
Few have heard of the Thompson memo. It was written in 2003 by Thompson, now the general counsel of PepsiCo, who on March 12, 2007, told a Heritage Foundation conference that the principles of the memo dictate that the instances in which a prosecutor should ask a company to waive the attorney-client privilege should be "extremely limited." The Justice Department revised the memo weeks after Ryan's November 30 statement to the press -- in part because a federal judge ruled in July 2006 that its instructions were unconstitutional. Now the revised memo, which is standard operating procedure at DOJ, requires US attorneys to get approval from the deputy attorney general when moving forward with the techniques specified for these kinds of investigations.
Ryan's name was added to the list of attorneys considered for firing on December 2. On December 12, the Wall Street Journal reported on the new McNulty/Thompson memo, highlighting the key changes: "The McNulty Memo requires that when federal prosecutors seek privileged attorney-client communications or legal advice from a company, the US Attorney must obtain written approval from the Deputy Attorney General. The new memorandum also instructs prosecutors that they cannot consider a corporation's advancement of attorneys' fees to employees when making a charging decision. An exception is created for those extraordinary instances where the advancement of fees, combined with other significant facts, shows that it was intended to impede the government's investigation."
On December 24, 2006, Ryan was asked by a Chronicle reporter, "There is the perception that you are more reluctant to go after some individuals and companies than others. Does the prominence or the importance of a person to an industry or a company factor into the investigation and your decision to take action?" Ryan's response: "I have been in law enforcement my entire career. My position is that if someone has violated the law and there is sufficient evidence to bring forth charges under our guidelines then that's what's going to happen. As long as I'm US attorney, that's what's going to happen. Sometimes we have to make difficult calls involving prominent people, powerful people."
It seems that Ryan was about to secure grand jury indictments in the stock option backdating scandal when he was targeted for firing. Ryan has not yet discussed his firing, but the question of whether he was fired for poor performance, or because he was about to bring some uncomfortable indictments, remains. (Daily Kos [multiple sources])
March 13: Intelligence sources provide more information to ABC News about the Iraqi defector known as "Curveball," who ABC describes as "the defector whose lies led to war."
Prewar intelligence on Iraq
Curveball's tales about Iraq's "mobile biological weapons labs" -- labs that did not exist -- helped the Bush administration justify its push to go to war with Iraq. Curveball is still being protected by German intelligence. ABC, who publishes the first known photo of Curveball on its Web site, has found that Curveball has been resettled in a small town near the Munich headquarters of German intelligence. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell used Curveball's false claims in his fabulously erroneous presentation to the UN in February 2003 even though the CIA considered Curveball "unstable, immature and unreliable." Powell says he is "angry and disappointed" that he was never told the CIA had doubts about the reliability of the source. "I spent four days at CIA headquarters, and they told me they had this nailed," Powell recalls.
But, as reported elsewhere in this site, former CIA chief of European operations Tyler Drumheller says he tried, and failed, to keep the Curveball information out of the Powell speech. Drumheller has written about it in his book, On the Brink. "People died because of this," he says. "All off this one little guy who all he wanted to do was stay in Germany." Drumheller says he personally redacted all references to Curveball material in an advance draft of the Powell speech. "We said, 'This is from Curveball. Don't use this,'" Drumheller recalls. But Powell says neither he nor his chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, were ever told of any doubts about Curveball. "In fact, it was the exact opposite," Wilkerson says. "Never from anyone did we even hear the word 'Curveball,' let alone any expression of doubt in what Secretary Powell was presenting with regard to the biological labs." Drumheller says he met personally with the then-deputy director of the CIA, John McLaughlin, to raise questions about the reliability of Curveball, well before the Powell speech. "And John said, 'Oh my, I hope not. You know this is all we have,' and I said, 'This can't be all we have.' I said, 'There must be another, there must be something else.' And he said, 'No, this is really the only tangible thing we have.'" McLaughlin, who is now an analyst for CNN and a strong defender of the Iraq policies, says he doesn't recall any such meeting with Drumheller, nor does he recall any attempts by Drumheller to redact the Curveball portions of Powell's speech. The CIA has since issued an official "burn notice" formally retracting more than 100 intelligence reports based on his information. (ABC News)
March 13: Salon columnist Greg Kamiya writes that, though many on the left and even the right are outraged by Ann Coulter's characterization of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards as a "faggot" (see above items), nothing will be done to curb her outbursts.
Conservative hate speech and intolerance
"Nothing's going to happen. This is old and profitable hat for the shameless buffoon...." he writes. "We all know that Coulter will emerge from this episode selling even more books, appearing on even more right-wing talk shows and being even more fanatically worshipped by her legions of fans. A few newspapers have dropped her column, and some GOP presidential candidates condemned her statement -- who cares? As should be amply clear by now, there is virtually nothing that Ann Coulter can do that will cause her to be cast out of the bosom of the American right. And even if she was to lose her head and cross a line that even she can't cross -- calling Obama a 'n*gger' is about the only thing that would do the trick -- a thousand hissing Coulters would spring up to take her place." However, Kamiya observes, the Ann Coulters of the right are the harbingers of doom for that political and social movement.
"For this isn't really about Coulter at all," Kamiya writes. "This is about a pact the American right made with the devil, a pact the devil is now coming to collect on. American conservatism sold its soul to the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world to gain power, and now that its ideology has been exposed as empty and its leadership incompetent and corrupt, free-floating hatred is the only thing it has to offer. ...They need the bigoted and reactionary base they helped create, but the very fanaticism that made the True Believers such potent shock troops will prevent the Republicans from achieving Karl Rove's dream of long-term GOP domination." Kamiya says that many dismiss Coulter, along with Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and the like as merely "the lunatic fringe of a respectable movement." However, "in what passes for conservatism today, the lunatic fringe is respectable. In the surreal parade of Bush administration follies and sins, one singularly telling one has gone almost entirely unremarked: Vice President Dick Cheney has appeared several times on Rush Limbaugh's radio show. Think about this: The holder of the second-highest office in the land has repeatedly chummed it up with a factually challenged right-wing hack, a pathetic figure only marginally less creepy than Coulter. Imagine the reaction if Al Gore, when he was vice president, had routinely appeared on a radio show hosted by, say, Ward Churchill. (The comparison is feeble: There really is no left-wing equivalent of Limbaugh, just as there is no left-wing equivalent of Father Coughlin or Joe McCarthy.) The entire American political system would melt down. Beltway wise men would trip on their penny loafers in their haste to demand Gore's head. Robert Bork would come out of retirement to call for a coup to restore the caliphate, I mean the Judeo-Christian moral law in America. Yet the grotesque Cheney-Limbaugh love-in doesn't raise an eyebrow. We're so inured to the complete convergence of 'respectable' conservatism and reactionary talk-radio ravings that we don't even deem it worthy of comment."
Kamiya says that the right's love affair with what he calls "various forms of gutter populism" is not new, but in recent years the right has sunk to new and unprecedently hateful depths. He looks back to 1994, when Newt Gingrich, like the Pied Piper, led his willing colleagues directly into the gutter. Add to Gingrich's carefully orchestrated hatefests the "Christo-jihadists" of the evangelical right, which includes Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, James Dobson, and so forth, to lead their armies in the right's culture wars. Then add what David Brock calls "the Republican noise machine," the endlessly funded and endlessly broadcast rightist propaganda, using the bully platforms of talk radio and cable news networks to rage against what they see, or claim to see, as the moral collapse of America.
Kamiya writes, "This vicious culture war played on the fear and confusion of traditional Americans confronting massive societal and cultural changes.... In fact, the right's culture war was -- and is -- mostly bogus. Most of the deep societal changes it decried -- the decline of community, the loss of religious faith, economic insecurity, selfishness, social atomization, anomie -- cannot be blamed on liberalism: They are products of modernity itself and of the modern world's triumphant economic system, capitalism. ...And those changes have been greatly exacerbated by the monopolistic, heck-of-a-job-Brownie, corporate-crony version of capitalism -- one loudly championed by, naturally, the GOP. Other aspects of the right's culture war are simply reactionary and/or unconstitutional, like its attack on science and its outrageous attempt to tear down the wall between church and state. There are some culture-war issues, like the fight over abortion, that are genuine moral cruxes and difficult to resolve. But even these have been made far more toxic and destructive than necessary by the right's hysterical use of them as a bludgeon to attack its enemies."
As fraudulent as the right's culture war is, it has paid off with big political dividends, Kamiya notes. "The right's embrace of 'values' allowed it to stave off what should have been its inexorable decline. If the price is obeisance to an increasingly vulgar, bigoted, nativist, know-nothing and theocratic ideology -- well, apparently it is better to survive as a slimy Gollum hungering after the Ring of Power than not to survive at all."
American conservatism, in its present form, should have long since fractured by now. Kamiya calls its ideology "incoherent, deeply divided between its libertarian, free-market wing and its traditionalist, 'values' wing." The anti-communism that papered over these differences has evaporated, last channeled by Ronald Reagan. "...Reagan's anti-communism, and his sunny personality, allowed free-market conservatives to overlook the fact that government actually grew enormously on his watch," Kamiya observes. "With a majority of Americans continuing to believe in Democratic social policies and programs, and demographic trends running in the Democrats' favor, the right was facing disaster after Reagan's exit and the fall of communism. It desperately needed a boogeyman to unify its unruly factions. Fortunately, conjuring up boogeymen has been a right-wing specialty since the days of the Know-Nothing movement."
The anti-Clinton fervor, and the war against modernity that underlied the demonization of the Clintons, paved the way for the December 2000 debacle, where a conservative Supreme Court defied the Constitution to place George W. Bush in the White House. But Bush quickly proved that he was not only ideologically extreme and unpalatable to mainstream America, but he was incompetent. His approval ratings were tanking, and Americans were looking forward to 2004, when they could fire him and replace him with someone -- Democrat or moderate, sensible Republican -- who could handle the burdens of 21st-century leadership. "And then," Kamiya writes, "a miracle literally fell from the skies: 9/11. The terror attacks were just what the right needed. It allowed it to fold 'national security' into its culture war portfolio -- a potent mixture, especially with Congress and the mainstream media drugged by patriotic fervor. Islamic terrorism was hastily dressed up as the new Red Menace, liberals were painted as Chamberlain-like appeasers, and all was well for a while. In 2004, Bush's strategy of appealing to his base proved successful, despite his disastrous war on Iraq, and inspired GOP hopes that Rove's dream of a decades-long realignment might prove true."
But even that strategy, though it "earned" Bush a second term, is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions and inaccuracies. Republican traditionalists, capitalist free-marketers, and libertarians "seethed as Bush busted the budget and squandered trillions of dollars on his war of choice. As for the neoconservatives, who dominated Bush's administration, they never established themselves as a dominant political force to begin with, and they lost all credibility after the Iraq debacle. That left only the base -- the culture warriors for whom the battle over 'values' trumps everything else, the zealots who brook no compromise. The problem is, no political movement led by its most extreme elements can win. The right's culture warriors are too manifestly unhinged; their obsessive mean-spiritedness, more than their actual positions, leaves them out of the American mainstream, even out of the mainstream of the Republican Party. A movement figuratively led by the likes of Ann Coulter (or literally by Newt Gingrich, who is lurking on the sidelines, ready to run) cannot win a general election in this country. A red, white and blue banner inscribed with 'Faggot!' may rally the hardcore, but most Americans will reject a politics based on hate and fear."
What Kamiya calls Bush's "primal appeals to fear, revenge, and patriotism" are running out of steam. "[L]ike the boy who cried 'wolf' -- or, in this case, 'terrorism!' -- once too often, it has used up its fearmongering capital. Episodes like the Coulter debacle make it all too clear, especially to the swing and independent voters and pragmatic Republicans who will decide the election, that the GOP's base...is a rather scary group. The GOP is reaping what it has sown. It preached hatred, fear and resentment for years, it whipped up the troops with apocalyptic rhetoric, and now it has created a core constituency that only too obviously reflects that negativity. Indeed, the Republican base increasingly defines itself not by positive values, which a true conservatism would affirm and which could hold broad appeal, but only by its partisan hatreds."
Kamiya continues, "The sorry state of contemporary conservatism shows that there is an innate danger to civil society in letting loose the dogs of 'values' -- especially right-wing values. Because conservatives tend to believe more than liberals in good and evil, in a clear-cut, transcendental morality, a values-based politics for them quickly acquires not just an authoritarian cast, but an almost religious one. As we learned on 9/11, and observe every day in Iraq, religious zealotry is not conducive to reasoned discussions. When you have God, right and patriarchal authority on your side, anything goes. The result, among other things, is ugly psychosexual mudslinging like Coulter's." And because she is so good at what she does, the right will never let Coulter go.
Kamiya concludes, "Yet despite their supposed beliefs, a kind of nihilism, an intellectual sterility, emanates from the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world. This is in part due to the fact that they are, at bottom, entertainers, stand-up comedians of resentment. Their riffs are so facile and endless that they devour whatever actual beliefs supposedly stand behind them. Incapable of compromise or nuance, lashing out robotically, never finding common ground or examining their own ideas, they are shills of negativity, forever battling cartoonish monsters in a lurid, increasingly unrecognizable world. And most Americans, even conservative ones who may share some of their putative positions, are tired of their glib, empty paranoia. If these are the messengers, there must be something wrong with the message. The GOP brain trust presumably knows this -- but it doesn't have any other cards to play. And as the feebleness of the right's agenda becomes more and more apparent, we can expect the noise from figures like Coulter and Limbaugh to get louder and louder. But the tactic will not work -- in fact, it is likely to backfire. And if the Republicans go down big in 2008, conservatives will finally be forced to confront the Frankenstein monster they created -- and decide whether they dare get rid of it before it consigns their movement to oblivion. Based on their recent history, I don't think they have the common sense to take out the garbage." (Salon)

"Mr. President, you're leading us off a cliff. Stop!" -- Senator Joseph Biden, March 14

March 14: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says he will not resign, as scores of newly released documents detail a two-year campaign by the Justice Department and White House to purge federal prosecutors.
US Attorney firings
Gonzales admits that "mistakes were made" in the attorney firings, and says he is the one ultimately to blame, but stands by the firings. He promises not to do it again. However, he continues to insist that he wasn't aware of the details of the scheme to fire the attorneys, saying, "Like every CEO of a major organization, I am responsible for what happens at the Department of Justice. I acknowledge that mistakes were made here. I accept that responsibility. And my pledge to the American people is to find out what went wrong here. As we can all imagine, in an organization of 110,000 people, I am not aware of every bit of information that passes through the halls of justice, nor am I aware of all decisions."
Reaction to Gonzales's statement is swift and unrelenting. "The Justice Department is different from other agencies because it's devoted to the rule of law," says Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official under Nixon and Reagan. He adds that the Bush administration is tampering with that principle in a way that is "worrisome, because the rule of law is the cement that holds the country together. ...Gonzales is basically an echo chamber of the White House. If he had any stature, he would have quit long ago.'" Loyola law professor and former federal prosecutor Laurie Levenson says, "What comes to everybody's mind is the Saturday Night Massacre, the president not liking what an independent prosecutor is supposed to do and firing him." But in contrast to the decisions of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, to resign rather than carry out Nixon's order, "here you have toadies, just people doing the White House's bidding." Former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, author of the pro-impeachment book United States v. George W. Bush et al, says of Gonzales, "It's clear he considers himself to be the attorney of President Bush. His paramount interest is supposed to be the people of the United States." Law professor Carl Tobias notes that Gonzales, Bush's longtime personal attorney, was White House counsel before becoming attorney general in 2005. "The understanding has been traditional that the White House counsel has been almost completely loyal to the president," he says. "The attorney general is supposed to be independent." Another former federal prosecutor, law professor Rory Little, says, "[T]he idea that they [the White House] could direct the substantive contents of an investigation is new and dangerous."
The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus, in a column entitled, "Time to Go, Mr. Gonzales," calls his statement "a self-serving masterpiece of passive voice and unpersuasive platitudes," and asks, "Is there anyone left -- seriously, is there a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- who has confidence in Gonzales's capacity to fix this mess? Is there anyone who accepts Gonzales's CEO analogy -- and thinks that a sentient board of directors wouldn't have fired him long ago?" A post on the liberal blog The Carpetbagger Report observes, "Gonzales may not be 'aware of every bit of information that passes through the halls of justice,' but in this case, he can't just pass this off on underlings who subverted the legal process. Gonzales personally chatted with Bush in October about complaints the White House had received from Republicans about prosecutors who resisted efforts to politicize their offices. Gonzales personally approved the idea of firing a small group of US attorneys, instead of all 93. It was Gonzales' chief of staff who had coordinated the purge with the White House. 'Passes through the halls of justice'? How about 'passes his desk'?"
Gonzales says that although he and Justice Department officials have tried to comply truthfully and completely with Congressional demands for information about the firings, "I am very dismayed that that may not have occurred here." Gonzales's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, has resigned over the debacle. Sampson and then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers had begun discussing possible firings of US attorneys in early 2005, according to the newly released e-mails. Miers replaced Gonzales as Bush's chief counsel.
White House communications director Dan Bartlett acknowledges that White House officials had heard complaints from members of Congress regarding prosecutors, and Bush had raised the subject during an October 2006 meeting with Gonzales. He describes the exchange as "offhand" and says Bush did not name any specific prosecutors but did identify their states. "This briefly came up and the president said, 'I've been hearing about this election fraud issue from members of Congress and want to be sure you're on top of it as well,'" Bartlett says.
Congressional Democrats are calling for Gonzales to step aside. Some Republicans say they are outraged at being misled over the circumstances of the firings. Republican James Sensenbrenner, a House Judiciary Committee member, says the situation could cause Gonzales to "die by a thousand cuts."
Some of the details of the e-mails are included in the March 12 item above. Sampson also asked Miers and Deputy Counsel William Kelley to "circulate [the plans for firing the attorneys] to Karl's shop," referring to Karl Rove. White House approval came a month later. "We're a go for the US Atty plan," Kelley wrote in a December 4, 2006, e-mail to Sampson and Miers. "WH leg, political, communications have signed off and acknowledged that we have to be committed to following through once the pressure comes." The term "WH leg" refers to the White House office of legislative affairs, which deals with Congress.
The White House's "document dump" also includes documents from J. Scott Jennings, the White House deputy political director, who e-mailed Sampson about the Little Rock prosecutor's replacement from an address with a "gwb43.com" domain name. That domain is registered to the Republican National Committee, according to a Network Solutions tracking system. The use of the "gwb43.com" e-mail address was apparently to make it easier to keep communications secret, although federal regulations state that all government e-mails go through official channels and not private networks.
Former US attorney Bud Cummins, fired so he could be replaced by Rove crony Tim Griffin, says, "It's a serious mistake to allow the political people from the White House and other parts of government to get inside the doors of the Department of Justice. There are huge issues at stake there and I'm afraid it's happened now and the damage is done."
Democrats say they will subpoena Miers, Rove, and other White House and Justice Department officials if necessary to have them testify about the reasons for the firings. One Democrat, Charles Schumer, says, "This purge was based purely on politics, to punish prosecutors who were perceived to be too light on Democrats or too tough on Republicans. Attorney General Gonzales has either forgotten the oath he took to uphold the Constitution or just doesn't understand that his duty to protect the law is greater than his duty to protect the president." Schumer, who is calling for Gonzales to resign or be fired, is joined by fellow senator and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. "The buck should stop somewhere," she says. Republican senator John Ensign calls the firings "completely mishandled by the United States attorney general." And Sensenbrenner adds that the Justice Department is "going to have to come up with some answers" in explaining the firings. "If they don't, they're going to lose everyone's confidence," he says. "What I'd like to hear is the truth."
Marcus isn't having any. She writes, "Let's assume Gonzales's good faith: that he truly is upset about what happened on his watch, just as he was upset last week about the FBI's cavalier mishandling of its authority to issue 'national security letters,' and wants to make things right. There is no reason to believe that he is capable of making a change. The portrait of the Gonzales Justice Department that emerges from the e-mails released yesterday, and from the attorney general's own comments, is of an agency overseen by an absentee landlord, chronically clueless about what's happening around him. This is a man whose memory is so foggy that George W. Bush -- not exactly Mr. Detail -- has a sharper recollection of their conversations than the attorney general does. The president, according to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, told Gonzales that Republicans were complaining about prosecutors failing to aggressively pursue voter fraud. Gonzales doesn't recall the conversation. I'm sorry, is there somebody he's paying more attention to than the president of the United States?
"At his I'm-accountable-but-I-didn't-know-anything news conference yesterday, Gonzales said he knew the White House had suggested canning all 93 U.S. attorneys, rejected that idea and then left things to his chief of staff. 'I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on,' he said. 'That's basically what I knew as the attorney general.' How reassuring. But, a reporter asked, how could it be that his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, was figuring out 'which US attorneys to...let go and you not know?' Answer: 'Well, again as -- I accept responsibility for whatever happens here in this department. But I have 110,000 working in the department. Obviously, there are going to be decisions made that I'm not aware of all the time.' Translation: 'I'm going to tell you I'm responsible, because that's what they tell me I have to say. But of course I'm not. It's all Kyle Sampson's fault. I'm hoping that if I say I'm accountable often enough, no one will actually hold me accountable.' Ousting a group of top federal prosecutors isn't some minor, inconsequential act. It's the sort of thing that a responsible attorney general would be deeply immersed in. Gonzales's depiction of his own marginality is the most damning evidence of his unfitness for the job."
It is obvious that Marcus's patience with Gonzales's raft of lies and dodges has worn out. She continues, "The precise non-mistake mistake that Gonzales copped to yesterday was sharing 'incomplete' -- this is Gonzales-speak for wrong -- information with Congress. Think about this: Gonzales first testified about the US attorney firings on Jan. 19. His No. 2, Paul McNulty, testified on Feb. 6. Assistant Attorney General William Moschella testified March 6. And it wasn't until this week that Justice finally figured out it hadn't figured out the whole story? If that's true -- and I'm not sure which would be worse -- why should anyone believe this crowd is capable of getting its congressional story straight in the future? Meantime, the pages of e-mails released yesterday show how -- while Gonzales hummed happily above the fray -- his lieutenants carefully choreographed the firings, down to making sure that the relevant senators were called at precisely the same time the ousted prosecutors were to be informed of their fates, and delaying the moment of truth until they left a meeting of federal prosecutors 'to reduce chatter.' When Arkansas senators balked at installing Karl Rove protege Tim Griffin in the US attorney's job there, Sampson recommended that the department 'gum this to death.' If the senators ultimately balk, he said, 'then we can tell them we'll look for other candidates...and otherwise run out the clock. All of this should be done in "good faith" of course.' Of course."
In his now famous 'overblown personnel matter' column in USA Today last week, Gonzales wrote, 'While I am grateful for the public service of these seven US attorneys, they simply lost my confidence.' (Or did he mean Kyle Sampson's confidence?) It's time -- past time -- for the president to say the same, perhaps more quietly and more politely, about his friend, his counselor and his failed attorney general."
Carpetbagger adds, "On a tangential point, I can't resist mentioning the oddity of Gonzales using the phrase 'mistakes were made.' After all the times that infamous passive voice phrase has been uttered, you'd think Republicans would know to avoid it. ...And now Gonzales is taking it for a whirl. The problem with the phrase isn't just the passivity or the historical repetition; it's the underlying motivation that makes the passive voice necessary in the first place. In active voice, the phrase needs a proper noun. Someone made a mistake, Reagan, Bush, and Gonzales suggest [after quoting Reagan and Bush in their earlier spin on earlier scandals], but they won't say who. They're willing to acknowledge that a mistake occurred, but they'll go no farther. The phenomenon seems to fit nicely into the way in which modern Republicans use language. Active voice demonstrates responsibility; passive voice admits errors without assigning blame. It's an accountability-free admission, which is just the way too many Republicans like it. In fact, it's worth remembering that it was George Orwell in 'Politics and the English Language' who explained that 'the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active' by those who hope to obscure the truth. A half-century later, it's still true."
The Justice Department documents can be accessed here. (ABC News, CNN/Carpetbagger Report, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle)
March 14: White House officials admit that complaints by top New Mexico Republicans about then-US attorney David Iglesias, including his refusal to pursue voter fraud charges in 2004 and his handling of corruption cases, played a part in his dismissal, and that Bush discussed the planned firings of eight politically unreliable attorneys with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in October.
US Attorney firings
Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, says that by October, a number of Republicans, including Senator Pete Domenici, Representative Heather Wilson, state Republican Party Chairman Allan Weh, lobbyist Mickey Barnett, and Albuquerque lawyer Pat Rogers all had lodged complaints about Iglesias with White House or Justice Department officials.
Bartlett also admits that Iglesias's less-than-successful prosecution of former state treasurer Robert Vigil, a Democrat, on extortion charges was one of the reasons for his dismissal. Vigil's initial trial ended in a hung jury; he was later convicted on a single count of attempted extortion, but acquitted on 23 other charges. Bartlett says Justice officials "took into consideration the complaints they were fielding from local officials about the lack of prosecution of cases, and the fact that he had lost a high-profile case, when I think 24 or 25 counts were thrown out by a jury against the government. It was a devastating loss for the government." Asked why Iglesias was dismissed after receiving a positive job evaluation in 2005, Bartlett says, "Well, he was fired two years later than 2005, and there was a series of issues that they [Justice officials] looked at. They looked at his managerial responsibilities, and...they felt that he was not managing the office as well as it should be."
Bartlett says that in Bush's conversation with Gonzales, he specifically mentioned problems with US attorneys and voter fraud cases in New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but "he did not mention any prosecutor by name." (Albuquerque Tribune)
March 14: Senator John Sununu becomes the first Republican in Congress to call for the firing of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, on the heels of Bush's endorsement of Gonzales.
US Attorney firings
"I think the president should replace him," Sununu tells the press. "I think the attorney general should be fired." Bush has tried to spin the controversy over Gonzales and the firing of eight US attorneys as miscommunication between Gonzales and Congress, saying, "Mistakes were made. And I'm frankly not happy about them. ...What Al did and what the Justice Department did was appropriate. What was mishandled was the explanation of the cases to the Congress. And Al's got work to do up there."
Part of the "work to do up there" apparently doesn't involve White House officials, particularly Karl Rove, testifying before Congress, at least in the White House's view. White House counsel Fred Fielding is talking to Democratic leaders on Capital Hill to "negotiate" terms of any testimony by any White House aides. The White House is resisting any calls for testimony and is reportedly considering whether to invoke executive privilege to prevent Rove, former White House counsel Harriet Miers, or anyone else from testifying under oath to Congress. Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy and other Democrats say that testifying under oath is a necessity, because of the White House's track record of lying to Congress otherwise. (See above items.)
Sununu has long been a muted critic of the Bush administration's disregard for civil liberties, and the US attorney firings have apparently tried his patience. He says that the new revelations of Gonzales's dishonesty to Congress, and the evidence of extensive White House involvement in the firings and the apparent politicization of the process, has shattered his confidence in Gonzales. "We need to have a strong, credible attorney general that has the confidence of Congress and the American people," he says. "Alberto Gonzales can't fill that role."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid predicts that Gonzales is on his way out. "I think he is gone. I don't think he'll last long," the Democrat says to the press. Asked how long, Reid responded: "Days."
Fielding, the White House counsel negotiating with lawmakers over possible administration testimony, is a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan administrations. He was hired by Bush this year to handle the expected demands for testimony and full disclosure by the Democratic-controlled Congress. But Gonzales hints that he will allow his own people to testify before Congress: "We want Congress to know, to understand what happened here. We'll work it out." Gonzales has already promised that five of his aides, including former chief of staff Kyle Sampson, will testify. As for White House officials, Democratic senator Chuck Schumer tells reporters after the meeting with Fielding that the counsel promised a yes-or-no answer by tomorrow. "He said it was his goal to get us both the documents and the witnesses that we seek to question," Schumer says. The White House is expected to issue some conditions, but Fielding "said his intention was not to stonewall," Schumer says.
Other Republicans are hesitant to join Sununu in calling for Gonzales' firing. Senator Judd Gregg attempts to spin the controversy into yet another instance where Americans should simply pile in behind Bush because of the war on terror. "I don't believe the attorney general should resign over this," Gregg says. "I don't believe his ability to pursue the terrorist threat has been compromised to the extent that he should resign." (AP/Standard Times)
March 14: Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein says she is certain that US attorney Carol Lam was fired in part because of her prosecution of former Republican congressman Randy Cunningham, despite denials from the Bush administration.
US Attorney firings
"In my heart of hearts I do, no matter what they say," she says. "The fact is there are additional investigations that have come from that. The fact is that the day before she left office she filed two additional indictments," she says, referring to charges Lam filed last month against an ex-CIA official and a defense contractor tied to Cunningham. (See item below for more about Lam's investigations.) "Now they weren't of members of Congress," she adds. "But whether this has had a chilling effect over that investigation I don't know. But I'm concerned about it." Lam says she has never been told the reason behind her firing. Lam's office began investigating Cunningham and his associates on bribery allegations in July 2005. Cunningham pleaded guilty and was sentenced in March 2006 to more than eight years in federal prison for taking more than $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors. White House adviser Karl Rove has said Lam was removed for failing to file immigration cases. William Moschella, an associate deputy attorney general, has said she was let go because her prosecution of gun crimes and immigration violations "just didn't stack up." Feinstein wrote to Gonzales last June questioning border prosecution guidelines in Lam's district, but received a reply from Moschella in which he described Lam's immigration smuggling caseload as rising "favorably" in 2006. (AP/KGTV-TV)
March 14: Investigative reporter Robert Parry discusses the double-edged rationale behind the US attorney firings.
US Attorney firings
He writes, "In 2005, when the White House launched a plan to oust US attorneys who showed insufficient political loyalty, George W. Bush was hoping to solidify one-party Republican control of American political life, in part, through aggressive prosecution of Democrats for alleged 'voter fraud.'" Partisan GOP prosecutors were assigned to go after Democrats trying to get more voters to go to the polls with bogus charges of "voter fraud." The second part was to deflect and thwart Democrats' real charges of voter suppression aimed at frightening minority citizens away from the polls. The failure of the strategy put Democrats in charge of Congress, and is resulting in the kind of oversight that Bush and his political strategists, most prominently Karl Rove, do not want to face. Parry writes, "Ultimately, the refusal of US attorneys in New Mexico and elsewhere to fast-track the pre-election indictments of Democrats denied the Republicans a last-minute boost that might have kept one or both congressional chambers in GOP hands." As a result, some of the recalcitrant attorneys have now been canned, at the behest of the White House.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, was the first Justice Department casualty, forced to resign after e-mails between the White House and Sampson proved the extent of the White House's involvement. White House spokespersons have admitted that they were keenly interested in the pursuit of "voter fraud" cases in New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. New Mexico's US attorney, David Iglesias, was fired, as was John McKay, the Washington state prosecutor who has testified about then-White House counsel Harriet Miers's grilling of him over his "mishandling" of the state's 2004 gubernatorial race, that Democrat Christine Gregoire won by less than 150 votes. McKay's "mishandling" cost him not only his job, but his chance at a federal judgeship.
As Parry notes, and this site exhaustively documents, Bush won in both 2000 and 2004 through widespread Republican efforts to suppress and "purge" voting rolls of prospective Democratic voters.
The prosecutors' purge also roadblocked US attorney Carol Lam's investigation of corruption among several Republican congressmen and an array of defense contractors and lobbyists, though the reason given for Lam's firing is officially over her "failure" to aggressively pursue illegal immigration cases. That excuse is in the process of being disproven.
Parry gives a much more solid reason for the firings: in early 2005, "the Republican thinking was focused on how to solidify GOP control of national politics and perpetuate what some conservatives hoped would be effectively a one-party state, with the Democrats consigned to a weak minority status. Leaders on the Right boasted of Bush's 'transformational' role in bringing about this permanent realignment in American politics, giving conservatives control of all branches of the US government as well as consolidating their strong bond with major corporations and expanding their influence within right-wing and mainstream news organizations. By pulling these various levers of power, Republican victories in the future supposedly would be a foregone conclusion. The idea had traces of the 'managed democracy' that President Vladimir Putin has built in Russia, with his opposition kept around to maintain the appearance of democracy but never within reach of real power.
Parry quotes right-wing activist Grover Norquist as saying after the 2004 elections, the way for the Democrats to fit in to Republican-run Washington was to accept their permanent lot as a marginalized minority party: "Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans," Norquist told the Washington Post. "Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don't go around peeing on the furniture and such." Norquist, who routinely advises Rove on political matters, added that he was only calling for the "psychological" neutering of Democrats.
The "neutering" strategy also involved what Parry calls "starving Democrats of political resources through operations like the 'K Street Project,' which pressed industry associations and lobbying firms to hire only Republicans." One of the long-term goals of Bush and Rove, as reported in early 2005 by the Post, was "the long-term enfeeblement of the Democratic Party." The Post article added that "a recurring theme of many items on Bush's second-term domestic agenda is that if enacted, they would weaken political and financial pillars that have propped up Democrats for years, political strategists from both parties say." Norquist said he felt that Bush's proposals were to win passage, "there will be a continued growth in the percentage of Americans who consider themselves Republicans, both in terms of self-identified party ID and in terms of their [economic] interests."
In February 2005, a mere two months into Bush's second term, Miers suggested that all 93 US attorneys be fired and replaced with Bush loyalists. Instead, the plan became to fire a smaller number of prosecutors who had "chafed against Administration initiatives," according to a March 2, 2005, e-mail from Sampson to Miers. The purge was delayed as lists of targeted prosecutors kept changing and Miers underwent a failed nomination to become a Supreme Court justice, but many of the attorneys, Parry writes, surely knew they were under the gun. Iglesias testified that two powerful New Mexico Republicans, Senator Pete Domenici and Representative Heather Wilson, phoned him about the possibility of bringing indictments against Democrats before the November 2006 elections. Around the same time Domenici and Wilson were pressuring Iglesias, in October 2006, Bush complained personally to Gonzales about the pace of the voter-fraud investigations, and Iglesias was added to the list of prosecutors to be fired.
Seven prosecutors were fired on December 7. The eighth, Arkansas Bud Cummins, had been fired to make way for former Karl Rove aide and RNC "opposition researcher" Tim Griffin.
But, as Parry concludes, "The larger problem for the Republicans now...is that the Democrats control both chambers of Congress and can no longer be simply ignored. Finally, President Bush may get a taste of what the Founders meant by 'checks and balances.'" (Consortium News)
March 14: The investigation that was derailed by US attorney Carol Lam's firing into Republican corruption extended far beyond what has been previously reported.
US Attorney firings
Lam was digging into the huge, multilayered scandal that has already resulted in one Republican congressman, Randy Cunningham, earning eight years in jail. She brought indictments against former CIA senior official Kyle Foggo and defense contractor Brent Wilkes. But, according to research compiled by Democratic Underground posters, the corruption investigation threatened to engulf Cunningham's Republican House cohort Jerry Lewis, former CIA director Porter Goss, and many Republican members of the House Defense Appropriations Committee. Research shows that perhaps 15 to 20 Republican congressmen may have been tagged by the investigation and perhaps indicted, along with Cunningham, Lewis, and a myriad of lobbyists and defense contractors for taking part in the criminal "earmarks" of millions of taxpayer dollars. However, the investigation was stalled, and perhaps ended, by Lam's sudden firing.
These are serious charges, and the somewhat perfervid and overblown rhetoric of the DU researcher gives one pause. However, the proof is beginning to come out. A May 11, 2006 e-mail from Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and a key figure in the attorney firings, urges then-White House counsel Harriet Miers to phone him regarding "the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam." That same day, the Los Angeles Times reported that Lam's corruption investigation of Cunningham had expanded to include another California Republican, Lewis. It seems reasonable to conclude that Lam's firing was, in part or in whole, to block the investigation, which could have in essence brought down the Republican Party as a viable political entity for years if fully disclosed.
The scandal is of truly epic proportions: perhaps as much as $700 million in phony defense contract company contracts handed out to Republican cronies in the defense industry over the last ten years. As the Cunningham case showed, much of that money was given back to the Republican lawmakers who made the contracts possible: "so in essence, the Republicans robbed the US Treasury to buy themselves not only hookers, mansions and yachts, they also bought millions of dollars worth of GOP TV ads," the DU posters observe. "Brent Wilkes and Mitchell Wade had several of those companies, many of them using the same fax number, even though each one had huge contracts from DoD through the Dukester's earmarks." Wilkes and Wade were both convicted of multiple counts of fraud and corruption.
A more reliable source, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, lays out the timeline of events leading up to Lam's firing.
- April 28th, 2006 -- Cunningham-Wilkes-Foggo "Hookergate" scandal breaks open. Probe grows out of San Diego US Attorney's Office's Cunningham investigation. CIA Director Goss denies involvement.
- April 29th, 2006 -- Washington Post reports that Hookergate's Shirlington Limo Service had $21 million contract with Department of Homeland Security.
- May 2nd, 2006 -- Kyle "Dusty" Foggo confirms attendence at Wilkes/Cunningham Hookergate parties.
- May 4th, 2006 -- Watergate Hotel subpoenaed in San Diego/Cunningham/Hookergate probe.
- May 5th, 2006 -- The Wall Street Journal reports that Foggo, who Goss installed as #3 at CIA, is under criminal investigation as part of the San Diego/Cunningham investigation.
- May 5th, 2006 -- Porter Goss resigns as Director of Central Intelligence.
- May 6th, 2006 -- The Washington Post reports on questionable DHS contract awarded to Shirlington Limo, the "hookergate" limousine service under scrutiny as part of the San Diego/Cunningham investigation. Similar report in the Los Angeles Times.
- May 7th, 2006 -- House Committee to investigate DHS contract with Hookergate's Shirlington Limo.
- May 8th, 2006 -- Foggo resigns at CIA.
- May 11th, 2006 -- Los Angeles Times reports that Cunningham investigation has expanded into the dealings of Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), House Appropriations Committee Chairman.
- May 12th, 2006 -- Federal agents working on the San Diego/Cunningham investigation execute search warrants on the home and CIA office of Foggo.
The amount of money that Wilkes's phony defense firms received may have reached $700 million, though the mainstream media reported lower figures. But Wilkes's firms were not the only ones involved. One document shows an address in San Diego registered to a defense firm called Mirror Labs, supposedly a leading firm in the field of testing military equipment. They are referenced in an edition of the Homeland Defense Journal. Their Web site cannot be found, and there is no Google cache of any pages. The Web site was active from 2001 through 2004, when it apparently shut down. (According to Internet Archive's own records, the last page, which can be viewed here, was cached on their servers from June 2004.) The web site boasts of a company with branches in Virginia and Panama, but no evidence that Mirror Labs ever did any defense-related work, or that any branches of its firm ever existed in either place. The Mirror Labs' URL was registered Group W Media, Wilkes' fake ad agency. The listed administrative contact is PerfectWave Techonologies, another fake company. So, if Mirror Labs never existed as a defense contractor, where did the defense contract money go? The organization that did exist at the San Diego address was the political action committee of Wilkes's ADCS. The DU researcher writes, "Apparently, Wilkes felt queasy about housing his PAC at the same address as ADCS proper, so he set up a small office in a San Diego business park. Someone must have put down the wrong address on one of the applications. Another blogger, Joe Cannon of Cannonfire, lists the candidates who received ADCS PAC money: Henry Bonilla, Roy Brown, Rick Clayburgh, Duke Cunningham, John T. Doolittle, Maria Guadalupe Garcia, George W. Gekas, Lindsay Graham, Duncan Hunter, Darrell Issa, Samuel Johnson, Jerry Lewis, Thaddeus G. McCotter, Constance Morella, Devin Nune, Steve Pearce, Bill Van de Weghe Jr., and Jerry Weller. All Republicans. The donations were relatively small, running around $5,000 apiece. But Wilkes was proven in court to have used a number of other shell companies to distribute taxpayer funds, including Perfect Wave Technologies, Pure Aqua Technologies, Group W. Advisors and others. Wilkes also contributed to the campaigns of George W. Bush, Katherine Harris, Tom Delay, Virgil Goode Jr. and Elizabeth Dole.
Lewis, of course, ordered continued funding of ADCS even after the Defense Department raised objections.
The real scandal is not just that millions of taxpayer dollars appropriated for national security and defense went to finance Republican political campaigns, but in the nature of the device itself: using "false front" companies to turn IRS-collected revenues into Republican campaign commercials. (Democratic Underground [multiple sources])
March 14: Former Republican senator Peter Fitzgerald says that Karl Rove tried to unduly, and perhaps improperly, influence his choice of a US attorney for Illinois, the state that Fitzgerald once represented.
US Attorney firings
In the spring of 2001, Fitzgerald recalls, Rove told him to limit his choice of a new US attorney to the state of Illinois; Fitzgerald wanted to bring in someone from out of state. Fitzgerald says he believes Rove was trying to influence the selection in reaction to pressure from Dennis Hastert, then Speaker of the House, and allies of then-Governor George Ryan, who knew Fitzgerald was seeking someone from outside Illinois to attack political corruption. Fitzgerald refused to cave in to the pressure and named Patrick Fitzgerald (no relation), a New York prosecutor, to the post on May 13, 2001. A year later, Fitzgerald says that Rove "said to me that [the Patrick] Fitzgerald appointment got great headlines for you, but it ticked off the base." The former senator says he believes the "base" was Illinois Republican insiders upset at the prosecutor's assault on corruption. Both aides to Hastert and the White House say that no one tried to influence Fitzgerald's decision. (Chicago Tribune)
March 14: Democratic senator Joseph Biden, a longshot presidential candidate for 2008, gives what may be the most emotional speech of his career.
Congressional Democrats
Biden, letting his anger and frustration at the Bush policies for the Middle East spill over, excoriates Bush for his failure to lead and the GOP for enabling him.
Saying "our troops don't lose wars, bad polices, bad leadership loses wars," Biden says the Senate has its own responsibility to the troops: "They [the troops] should have the courage to stand up and tell the administration, they have had a God-awful policy, they have put our troops in a position that, in fact, has made it virtually impossible for them to succeed at the outset. They deserve a policy. They deserve a plan. There is no plan. We went to war with too few troops, we went to war unnecessarily. We went to war with these men and women ill-equipped, they're coming home ill-served. It's about time we have the courage to stand up and say to the president, 'Mr. President, you have not only put us in harm's way, you have harmed us! You have no policy, Mr. President'"
Biden continues, "I'm so tired of hearing on this floor about courage. Have the courage to tell the administration, 'stop this ridiculous policy you have.'" On the troop escalation: "This is a cycle of self-sustaining sectarian violence that 20,000, 30,000, 50,000, 100,000 Americans will not be able to stop. This is ridiculous. There is no plan. I ask the president and everyone else who comes forward with a plan, whether it's 'capping' or 'surging' or whatever they have, what will answer the two-word test? Then what? Then what? Then what? What happens after we surge these women and men? And by the way, you say General Patraeus is one who believes.... He may be the only one who believes this is a good idea! Virtually nobody else thinks it's a good idea."
Biden says Bush is destroying the US military: "So as long as the president keeps us on this ridiculous path, taking us off a cliff -- I ask my colleagues, does anybody think they're going to be able to sustain keeping American forces in Iraq, at 160,000, for another year and a half? What do you think? What do you think is going to happen in Tennessee, in Delaware, in Illinois? Are we gonna break this man and woman's army? What are we gonna do here? How many times are we going to ask those 175,000 to rotate, three, four, five, six, seven times? And he ends with what every person in Congress should be saying right now: 'Mr. President, you're leading us off a cliff. Stop!'" (Bob Geiger [link to video], Crooks and Liars [link to video])
March 14: The "vast right-wing conspiracy" Hillary Clinton made famous in her comments during her husband's administration not only can be seen in operation today, she says, it never left.
"Vast right-wing conspiracy"
For proof, the Democratic senator and leading presidential candidate says, just look around you. She calls past Republican political malfeasance in New Hampshire as evidence of just such a conspiracy, reviving the term she coined for the partisan plotting during her husband's presidential tenure. She says that one key piece of proof is the Election Day 2002 case of phone jamming in New Hampshire, a case in which two Republican operatives pleaded guilty to criminal charges, and a third was convicted. "To the New Hampshire Democratic Party's credit, they sued and the trail led all the way to the Republican National Committee," she tells a Democratic audience in the state. "So if anybody tells you there is no vast, right-wing conspiracy, tell them that New Hampshire has proven it in court." Former RNC operative James Tobin was convicted of telephone harassment and appealed his conviction. The investigation arose after Democratic organizers' phones were overwhelmed by annoying hang-up calls hindering their get-out-the-vote efforts.
She accuses the GOP of a number of other anti-voter actions, including intimidating phone calls during the 2006 congressional elections, accusations endorsed by New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Kathy Sullivan. "People think we're paranoid when we talk about the vast, right-wing conspiracy, but there is a real connection of these groups -- the same names keep popping up," she says. "They are the most disgusting group of political thugs that I have ever seen."
Clinton's remarks come in light of her proposed bill that would make Election Day a federal holiday, and make it a crime to send misleading or fraudulent information to voters. She also says the government should do more to end unusually long lines at certain polling places. "It just so happens that many of those places where people are waiting for hours are places where people of color are voting or young people are voting. That is un-American, and we're going to end it," she tells her audience.
In January 1998, as the investigation into her husband's affair with intern Monica Lewinsky probe engulfed the White House, Clinton appeared on NBC's Today show and dismissed the allegations as part of a broader effort to smear her husband with groundless investigations. "The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast, right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president," she said. After evidence that Clinton indeed had had an affair with Lewinsky, her comments were ridiculed. But many Democrats have since insisted that Clinton was correct, pointing to the well-documented efforts by conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife to fund a network of anti-Clinton investigations. (See this site for plenty of evidence to back Clinton's characterizations.) In 2003, Clinton augmented her remarks, saying, "My only regret was using the word conspiracy, because there's absolutely nothing secret about it." (Guardian)
March 14: Editorial pages from around the country are demanding the resignation, or the firing, of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Alberto Gonzales
The New York Times led the charge on March 12, and is followed in the next two days by editorials from coast to coast. "We haven't seen a renegade US Justice Department like this since John Mitchell ran it for President Nixon," says the Sacramento Bee. "With a new Congress beginning to exercise serious oversight, the problems at the Justice Department and with its leader, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, are becoming clearer by the day. And what is becoming most clear is that Gonzales must go." The Washington Post expresses similar sentiments, as does the Los Angeles Times, which goes farther by placing much of the blame directly on Bush. The Philadephia Inquirer demands, "US Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales should resign. If he ever does, the nation could take it as a clear sign that President Bush finally grasps the need to preserve core civil liberties while guarding against terrorism." The Buffalo News says bluntly, "He should go. The country needs an attorney general who wants to uphold the law, not subvert it." And Melbourne's Florida Today adds, "He should be removed and replaced with someone willing to protect the Constitution. Chances are Bush won't do that."
London's staidly conservative Financial Times observes, "Mr. Gonzales had every right to sack prosecutors, who are political appointees. But he had no right to mislead Congress about why he did so -- even though he is now blaming lower officals for the misinformation. Mr. Gonzales has shown a disdain for Congress and the rights of the American people. He has amply proved that he will never be anything other than Mr. Bush's lawyer -- a mere apologist for the imperial presidency. The affair has already claimed one top scalp at the Justice Department. It is high time Mr. Gonzales stepped down too." The Louisville Courier-Journal says Bush should do two things. "First, he should fire Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Whether Mr. Gonzales is the instigator of this travesty or merely the unprincipled executor of White House political demands, this debacle is further evidence of his insuitability for his critically sensitive post. Then, the president can answer this question: If the eight prosecutors were dismissed for failing to respond to Republican political concerns, can Americans assume that his other US attorneys do fulfill a partisan agenda?" The San Francisco Chronicle: "These latest incidents underscore the obvious: Gonzales must resign. The nation needs an attorney general who can restore confidence in the administration of justice."
The Bush-friendly Dallas Morning News is edging towards calling for Gonzales's resignation, but more for the abuse of the Patriot Act revealed in the recent revelations about the FBI. The Morning News quotes Republican senator John Cornyn as saying that he is "disappointed" in Gonzales's performance, adding that there's a perception that Gonzales has not drawn an adequate firewall between his office and the White House. "Frankly, we think the problem is real, not a perception," the newspaper says. "It demands much more than apologies from FBI Director Robert Mueller and Mr. Gonzales -- starting with tough questioning from the Senate Judiciary Committee. The nation's two top cops should know that aggressive law enforcement and due process aren't mutually exclusive. If they think otherwise, then they're not the right individuals for these jobs." The equally conservative Chicago Times also stops short of demanding Gonzales's removal, but says, "This is a fast-evolving story, with crucial events and motives still to be probed and explained, by the administration and the Congress. As the facts of this disturbing but still incomplete narrative come together, we're likely as a nation to learn if the answer to the question that opens this editorial is yes or no. If it's yes, Gonzales should resign." That opening question: "Did the attorney general of the United States, Alberto Gonzales, engineer the dismissals of several federal prosecutors for partisan political reasons?"
The Washington Post editorial concludes: "Now that the political costs are higher than the administration could have imagined, now that senior officials have squandered their claim to credibility, it is imperative that the entire story of the firings be uncovered. As we have said previously, the administration is entitled to prosecutors who reflect its policies and carry out its priorities. It is not entitled to treat federal prosecutors like political pawns -- nor is it entitled, any longer, to the benefit of the doubt about the propriety of its conduct. Mr. Gonzales can make self-serving declarations about his belief in 'accountability,' as he did at a news conference yesterday; he can proclaim his plans to 'ascertain what happened here...and take corrective actions.' Nothing in his record gives any reason for confidence that anything will change in a department under his leadership."
The Los Angeles Times weighs in, writing, "It should surprise no one that Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales finds himself in the middle of a growing scandal. But don't blame him for the lack of principled leadership at the Justice Department. Blame his boss. President Bush appointed a man clearly unqualified for the job. We opposed Gonzales' nomination to be attorney general two years ago, arguing that the nation's top law enforcement job should go to someone who understands the limits as well as the power of the law, and someone who understands that his loyalty is to the Constitution as much as it is to the president. Gonzales' atrocious performance as White House counsel, when he enabled far too many shortcuts in the war on terror, was ample reason to disqualify him for attorney general. This attorney general is loyal to a fault to Bush. He is too loyal to be an effective lawyer, causing the president harm both when he worked at the White House and now that he oversees the Justice Department. The administration's broader disdain for legal niceties underlies recent revelations about the abuse of Patriot Act powers to secretly obtain private data about US citizens, as well as the dismissal of US attorneys. In the case of these prosecutors, Gonzales was apparently driven by his desire to continue making himself useful to the president and the party. That's why his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, resigned Monday. He was working a little too closely with the White House in orchestrating the ouster of several federal prosecutors late last year.... The fact that the White House was complaining to the Justice Department that David Iglesias, the well-regarded federal prosecutor in New Mexico, was insufficiently committed to taking up voter fraud cases that Republicans cared deeply about is rather alarming. Alarming, but not surprising -- not so long as Gonzales is attorney general."
Many of these editorials are quoted elsewhere on this page. (Editor and Publisher)
March 14: MSNBC's Howard Fineman writes, that "it is revealing, if not shocking, to see vivid evidence of George Bush's contempt for (or, at best, willful ignorance of) the idea that justice should be administered impartially, even by political appointees.
Bush administration's contempt for democracy
Most presidents pay lip service to the concept of independence, even in private discussions. The Bush administration didn't bother. Having covered Bush for years, I know where that dismissive attitude comes from: his family, Texas, his inner circle and his own experience -- or lack of it." Fineman writes that Bush loyalists "see themselves as men of action and profit. As a rule, they tend to loathe or dismiss people who monitor and measure thought and behavior: reporters, shrinks, accountants and lawyers. Bushes go into business (sometimes with MBAs), never law." In Texas, the law is little more than "a money-powered blood sport. Judges are elected in Texas. Karl Rove made his fortune not by running George W. Bush for office, but by training, building and running slates of conservative Republican judges. If the judges are purely political, what does that make the lawyers who practice in front of them? Surely not just 'officers of the court.' The Austin Gang -- Bush, Rove, Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers -- saw the legal world as something to control, if for no other reason than if they did not, the Trial Lawyers -- the backbone of the modern Texas Democratic Party -- would."
Gonzales proved his loyalty when he kept then-Governor Bush out of jury duty, which would have exposed his drunk driving record shortly before the 2000 presidential election. Miers kept the press out of Bush's finances. "This was the crew -- Bush, Rove, Miers and Gonzales -- that returned to the White House after the 2004 election and saw a cookie jar on the kitchen counter -- a cookie jar, they realized, that had 93 tasty cookies (US attorneys) in it," Fineman writes. "These would be wonderful political prizes for Bush and Rove to distribute -- even though all of the current US attorneys were first-term Bush appointees."
It is true that Clinton asked for the resignations of all 93 US attorneys at the beginning of his first term. While Republicans squawked and accused Clinton of trying to cover up his "crimes" surrounding the Whitewater land deal, in reality, Clinton wanted to get rid of 12 years' worth of unrepentant, uncooperative Republican loyalists who made up the US attorneys. But Bush's "Austin gang," spearheaded by Miers, wanted to do something completely unprecedented -- fire all 93 attorneys that he had appointed during his first term. "It was a hare-brained idea," says a prominent GOP lawyer told me, and was promptly shot down by Rove as just too over the top. Instead, the Bush political team decided to rank the 93 attorneys by their loyalty to the White House, and get rid of the ones who didn't measure up. "The fact that they were casual and cocky enough to put this on paper and in emails shows just how little they understood -- or cared about -- the traditions of law they are supposed to guard," Fineman writes. "The fact that Gonzales initially told Congress that the White House had nothing to do with the process shows something else: he forgot who holds the subpoena power now." (MSNBC)

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THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy

Written and Compiled by Black Max

March 2007, Week Two

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