Lawyer Up!

Abu G is a lawyer himself, but of course if I was Abu G, I wouldn't trust the imminent investigation to someone like me.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has hired a high-powered Washington lawyer to represent him in investigations of mismanagement of the Justice Department. George Terwilliger, a white-collar crime defense attorney and the second-ranking Justice official in the early 1990s, was on the White House's short list last month to replace Gonzales.

Investigators are look into allegations that Gonzales lied to lawmakers and illegally allowed politics to influence hiring and firing at the department.

Terwilliger said Gonzales, a close friend of the president's and a former Texas Supreme Court justice, maintains he did nothing wrong or illegal, and that hiring an attorney should not signal any guilt.

It shouldn't exactly signal innocence, either. Unless Abu G is going into real estate and needs some probate advice.

Some have wondered if this has anything to do with the latest revelations in the Don Siegelman case, but they appear to have more to do with Karl Rove (who's probably lawyered to the gills, too, if anyone would bother to check):

A Republican lawyer claims she was told that Karl Rove — while serving as President Bush's top political adviser — had intervened in the Justice Department's prosecution of Alabama's most prominent Democrat. Longtime Alabama G.O.P. activist Dana Jill Simpson first made the allegation in June, but has now provided new details in a lengthy sworn statement to the House Judiciary Committee. The Committee is expected to hold public hearings on the Alabama case next week as part of its investigation of possible political interference by the Bush Administration in the activities of the Department of Justice.

Simpson said in June that she heard a close associate of Rove say that the White House political adviser "had spoken with the Department of Justice" about "pursuing" Don Siegelman, a former Democratic governor of Alabama, with help from two of Alabama's U.S. attorneys. Siegelman was later indicted on 32 counts of corruption, convicted on seven of them, and is currently serving an 88-month sentence in Federal prison.

If Simpson's version of events is accurate, it would show direct political involvement by the White House in federal prosecutions — a charge leveled by Administration critics in connection with the U.S. attorney scandal that led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. But her account is disputed; those who she alleges told her about Rove's involvement during a G.O.P. campaign conference call claim that no such conversation took place. Rove himself has not responded to Simpson's allegations, which are clearly based on second-hand information, and the White House has refused to comment while Siegelman's case remains on appeal.

"No partisan gunslinger," in the words of Novakula. I do see how the Siegelman case is part of a pattern, and could bring down anyone in the Justice Department, including the, you know, HEAD of the Justice Department at the time.

Of course, the real problem with Justice may not be subject to conviction. It's the kind of thinking like this displayed by the head of the Civil Rights Division, claiming that voter ID laws actually discriminate against white people:

It's probably true that among those who don't [have photo ID], it's primarily elderly persons. And that's a shame. You know, creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstance. Of course...that also ties in to the racial aspect, because our society is such that minorities don't become elderly. The way white people do. They die first.

That's not only misleading, and contrary to statistical analysis, as Krugman notes ("Blacks’ low life expectancy is largely due to high death rates in childhood and young adulthood"), it's downright racist. From the head of the CIVIL RIGHTS division.

That's kind of the problem.