Guinea Pig

So Mary Beth Buchanan has been drafted to manufacture the first bogus scandal of the Obama Administration.

Mary Beth Buchanan was appointed by President Bush to serve as U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh in Sept. 2001. Buchanan has held several significant posts within the Bush/Ashcroft/Gonzales Justice Department, most notably serving as director the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys.

Just last month, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Buchanan’s reign was expected to end. Indeed, when a new president is elected, U.S. attorneys of both parties generally submit their resignations to make way for the new appointees. But Buchanan has other plans:

Despite a new administration coming into power, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan said she plans to stick around.

“It doesn’t serve justice for all the U.S. attorneys to submit their resignations all at one time,” she said yesterday. […]

More than that, she said she would consider working in the Obama administration. She would not discuss what her future might hold beyond the U.S. attorney’s office.

“I am open to considering further service to the United States,” Ms. Buchanan said.

Well, isn't that nice, she's open to it!

Buchanan, by the way, is one of the US Attorneys Bush kept in power because she was doing the bidding that those federal prosecutors who were fired wouldn't do. She has been implicated in politically motivated prosecutions of Pennsylvania Democrats, in particular Cyril Wecht:

...in 2006, Buchanan raised more than a few eyebrows when she went after former Allegheny County Coroner Dr. Cyril Wecht, indicting him on multiple counts of various federal crimes, including theft from an organization that receives federal funds.

What, exactly, did Wecht do? Apparently, his transgressions included the improper use of the coroner's fax machine for private work. There was no evidence "of a bribe or kickback" and no evidence that Wecht traded on a conflict of interest.

But Wecht's a Democrat, and for a U.S. Attorney anxious to impress her superiors in the Bush administration, apparently that was enough.

This week, a jury mulled over Buchanan's case against Wecht. The case ended, at least in the short term, with a hung jury.

Actually, a judge eliminated more than half of the charges and the trial was stayed indefinitely. The case was criticized by Republican attorney general Dick Thornburgh.

Buchanan has very close ties to the Bush Justice Department - she HIRED Monica Goodling. And so she's going to try and hang on as US Attorney. And Obama will likely fire her in favor of his own selection, and then the right will scream bloody murder. The concept that US Attorneys generally resign at the beginning of a new President's term will be completely forgotten, and instead there will be a false equivalence made between this and the US Attorney purge. It's so patently obvious.

Digby writes:

This is a Republican soldier and if Obama attempts to fire her, she will become a martyr to the cause. And she's not alone. They are all over the Justice Department.

When the US Attorney scandal broke, you'll recall that there was a lot of wingnut chatter saying that because Bill Clinton had asked for the resignations of all US Attorney's at the beginning of his term, Bush had a perfect right to fire US Attorneys who refused to do political dirty work. They set the stage for this at the time. It was entirely predictable that the new administration would be held to a completely new standard --- he would not be allowed to fire any US Attorney who had been appointed by Bush for any reason at all or risk being accused of using the Justice department for partisan gain. It's how they roll.

Digby says that Democrats made this tougher by not pursuing the scandal enough, which I don't agree with up to the point of them not filing inherent contempt and jailing Harriet Miers, Josh Bolten and Karl Rove in the Capitol basement. And not only are they are still seeking investigations inside Congress, but the independent prosecutor probe ordered up by Mukasey looks to actually have some teeth, and just yesterday Main Justice reopened the Don Siegelman trial, responding to a dogged effort by John Conyers.

Siegelman, the Democratic former governor of Alabama, was convicted in 2006 on corruption charges. (He is appealing the conviction). The whistleblower, who works in the US Attorney's office in Alabama, has claimed that, during his trial, there were inappropriate contacts between members of the jury and the prosecution, including messages passed by jurors revealing that some jury members had developed a romantic interest in an FBI agent attached to the prosecution team.

A DOJ investigation of the claims, launched after the whistleblower came forward and carried out by two US Attorneys, concluded that no such contacts had occurred. But in a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey last month, Rep. John Conyers, whose judiciary committee has been looking into the issue, questioned the thoroughness of that probe, noting that investigators had not contacted the jurors themselves, or the federal marshals who allegedly passed notes between the jurors and the prosecution team.

In the recent court filing -- which responds to a filing made previously by Siegelman's defense lawyers in connection with his appeal -- prosecutors referred to that DOJ investigation, then added in a footnote:

"Out of an abundance of caution, the Department of Justice recently reopened the investigation into this matter in response to concerns raised about the completeness of the investigation ... It remains the case that we are not aware of any improper contacts."

In other words, DOJ appears to agree that Conyers' concerns have merit, and has reopened the investigation into whether inappropriate contacts between jurors and the prosecution team did indeed occur. That could be good news for Siegelman as his lawyers seek to have his conviction thrown out on appeal.

So there may be potential consequences at the margins. But what's important right now is that Buchanan will be made a martyr if she's fired. The right wing and talk radio will make her famous. She'll have her own talk show on Fox within a few months. And it will all be based on a lie - a deliberate lie at that.

This is just the beginning of how the right will try to distract and distort right from the beginning of the Obama Administration, at a time of absolute financial crisis. They are still playing a very partisan game - in fact, there's a credible case to be made that they'd favor a deep recession for a variety of reasons. "The good of the country" isn't going to matter to these people. They are in this for the long haul.