NJ-Gov: Christie Melts In The Dog Days Of August

At Netroots Nation I saw Gov. Jon Corzine speak on a panel about the 21st century economy. Corzine is a former head of Goldman Sachs, so I'd lose my membership in the Matt Taibbi fan club if I said "go out and support the vampire squid," but you don't see Wall Street types saying "tax policy is completely biased to capital versus labor" and "we need green job-focused unions" and the like. He's one of the better ones. And his opponent in this campaign is truly a piece of work.

It's not just that Chris Christie definitively spoke to Karl Rove about running for the Governor of New Jersey while still holding the job of US Attorney for the state, which is against the law. Corzine, in fact, went ahead and called him a lawbreaker in that instance. But there's much more here. Christie consistently used his perch at the US Attorney's office to punish Democrats for partisan ends, most notably in the case of Robert Menendez, who Christie subpoenaed for no particular reason right before the 2006 Senate race. And at a time when Christie is painting himself as a paragon of ethics and a hammer for law enforcement, stories like this will not help that image:

He billed himself as a corruption fighter, questioned the ethics of those in power and promised to put an end to no-bid contracts for the politically connected. But when Christopher J. Christie was elected and his reform proposal was voted down, he gave up the fight and went on to approve hundreds of such contracts, including more than 50 for contributors to his campaigns [...]

His strategy is vintage Christie: A look at his career shows he has repeatedly used the whiff of corruption as a cudgel against political opponents. But his short-lived attempt to ban no-bid contracts as a freeholder raises questions over whether his zeal for an ethics overhaul is more than just campaign hype and would last if he became governor and met resistance from lawmakers he could not control.

This goes along with subsequent deliveries of no-bid contracts to Bush Administration officials like John Ashcroft.

Worst of all, we have the latest story, broken by NJN News, about a $46,000 loan Christie gave to one of his employees:

Chris Christie, the former U.S. Attorney and current Republican nominee for Governor of New Jersey, is now getting a new headache over a story that was broken last night by New Jersey Public Television -- that in 2007, Christie made a $46,000 personal loan to an assistant of his in the U.S. Attorney's office, which is still being paid off in regular installments:

Christie said he did not view this as an improper financial relationship: "I just believe that if you have friends who are in need, that you help them, whether they work with you or whether they're friends of yours from outside the work realm. We were happy to be able to help, and they've been great about repaying the loan."

Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine's campaign has pounced on the report, saying that a candidate for governor should not have an ongoing financial relationship with someone who is still working in the U.S. Attorney's office. "This raises more significant questions and legal issues for the Christie campaign," said Corzine spokesman Sean Darcy. "Are they still in contact? Have they been discussing this campaign? What impact has their ongoing financial relationship had on the gubernatorial campaign?"

Christie never disclosed this loan, in violation of state and federal laws.

Basically, the default position of New Jersey voters is that their elected officials are horribly corrupt. All things being equal, at the statewide level they go with the Democrat. Christie has tried to cultivate an image of an honest crime-fighter, but these revelations have really made that image fall apart. If this is the typical "we hate all our politicians" New Jersey race, suddenly Corzine looks like he's back in it, especially if the job numbers start turning around there.

Blue Jersey will have the best coverage of this race.

...the AFL-CIO has set up an attack website about Christie detailing his issues on working families. Union membership is relatively high in New Jersey, so if they can be mobilized, Corzine has a better shot.

...The Rove-Christie relationship goes back at least to 2003.

Rove Tries To Wiggle Off The Hook

So you have the Washington Post headlining that E-Mails Show Larger White House Role in Prosecutor Firings and the New York Times stating Rove Says His Role in Prosecutor Firings Was Small. Somehow, I assume they're both right, and it all depends on your angle. I mean, I'm sure Rove said he had just a small role in the US Attorney firings. Rove says a lot of things, most of them untrue. I'd prefer to do as WaPo did, and look at the documentary evidence:

The e-mails and new interviews with key participants reflect contacts among Rove, aides in the Bush political affairs office and White House lawyers about the dismissal of three of the nine U.S. attorneys fired in 2006: New Mexico's David C. Iglesias, the focus of ire from GOP lawmakers; Missouri's Todd Graves, who had clashed with one of Rove's former clients; and Arkansas's Bud Cummins, who was pushed out to make way for a Rove protégé [...]

Complaints about Iglesias began at least a year before he was relieved of his job, according to documents reviewed by The Post. Then- Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), his chief of staff, Steve Bell, and GOP lawyers in the state lobbied aggressively to oust the prosecutor. But the activity accelerated in fall 2006.

Responding to questions about another little-understood event, Rove told reporters in the interview this month that he had not seen a letter that Justice Department officials prepared and sent to the Senate on Feb. 23, 2007. The letter stated that "the department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint [protégé] Mr. Griffin" to a top job in Little Rock.

The Justice Department later retracted the statement, which the inspector general concluded was "misleading." [...]

But internal White House correspondence dating to two years earlier suggests that job prospects for Timothy Griffin, who had worked for Rove in the administration, were a hot topic of conversation. In a Feb. 11, 2005, e-mail, Rove wrote to deputy Sara Taylor: "Give him options. Keep pushing for Justice and let him decide. I want him on the team."

Then-White House counsel Miers e-mailed Taylor a month later, writing, "Sara, Karl asked me to forward you a list of locations where we may consider replacing the USAs."

Rove suggested Little Rock, where Cummins was U.S. attorney, as a post for Griffin, reminding Miers in March 2005 that "that's where he's from." The next day, Sara Taylor forwarded communications about Griffin to then-Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, who wrote, "let me know his reaction," according to the e-mails.

It's interesting that we're just learning that Rove held an interview with the Times and the Post this month, where he tried to spin them both about his role in the scandal.

In an interview with The Post and the New York Times this month, Rove described himself as a "conduit" of grievances from lawmakers and others about the performance of home-state prosecutors. The e-mails and interview were provided on the condition that they not be released until Rove's House testimony concluded. He said he did not recall several events because of his busy job and asserted that he had done nothing to influence criminal cases, an allegation by Democrats that has dogged him for years. Luskin, Rove's attorney, asserted that "there was never any point where Karl was trying to get a particular prosecution advanced or retarded."

"Yes, I was a recipient of complaints, and I passed them on to the counsel's office to be passed onto Justice," Rove said. The complaints about weak enforcement of voter fraud laws and public corruption "had the sound of authenticity to me. If what I'm told is accurate, it's really troublesome."

The NYT article suggests that Rove selectively leaked emails to put himself in a peripheral role in the firings. I don't know how someone peripheral writes something like “Give me a report on what U.S. attorneys slots are vacant or expected to be open soon,” as Rove did in an email in November 2006.

This is classic Rove - pre-empting whatever leaks come out of the House Judiciary Committee with incriminating but less damaging material that he handpicks to send to the press, who dutifully writes it all up. But Rove appears to be so deep in the US Attorney purges that he cannot credibly spin this away.

We Can't Let The Smoking Gun Become A Mushroom Cloud

Some days I feel Karl Rove is a liberal Democrat pulling an elaborate trick a la The Yes Men. His Wall Street Journal op-eds have consistently tagged Barack Obama for the sins of George W. Bush. It gets stranger and stranger.

On the campaign trail last year, Barack Obama promised to end the “politics of fear and cynicism.” Yet he is now trying to sell his health-care proposals on fear.

At his news conference last week, he said “Reform is about every American who has ever feared that they may lose their coverage, or lose their job. . . . If we do not reform health care, your premiums and out-of-pocket costs will continue to skyrocket. If we do not act, 14,000 Americans will continue to lose their health insurance every single day. These are the consequences of inaction.”

Karl Rove, ladies and gentlemen, criticizing an opponent for peddling the politics of fear.

Give him a hand.

I think the conclusion to be gained is that you can pretty much call anything "the politics of fear" if you're afraid of the outcome. And it's easy to dismiss conclusions as fearmongering, because then you don't have to concern yourself with whether or not they're true. There's a difference between stating the knowable reality about the current trajectory of health care spending and its impacts, and making up 935 lies to hype an imminent threat from Iraq.

Are We Calling This Victory?

You all probably know by now that Karl Rove was deposed in front of House Judiciary Committee staffers the other day, about the US Attorneys scandal and the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. But what you don't know, and what I don't know, and what nobody knows, is why. At some level, I'm glad that Congress was able to assert a modicum of its authority and at least get Rove (and apparently, Harriet Miers back in June) on the record with a set of questions. But to what end? Certainly not one of precedent, and not an investigative one as well, it seems.

The White House's foot-dragging may have inflicted some measure of political damage. But in terms of the legal repercussions, by coming to a deal while the case was still pending in an appeals court, the Bushies have largely succeeded in one of their goals: ensuring that no clear precedent has been established limiting the president's power to claim executive privilege in such cases. And the Obama White House's role in helping to secure the deal for Rove's testimony suggests that's an outcome they wanted too.

As for the underlying issue -- the quest to learn what really happened in the firings and the Siegelman prosecution, things remain murky at best. There are conflicting reports about whether Rove will sit for another day of testimony. It's also unclear when and how the committee will decide which parts of Rove's testimony, if any, can be made public, and in what form the probe's findings will be released.

Siegelman, quoted later in the piece, thinks John Conyers will continue to investigate until he finds the truth. He must be an eternal optimist. This has reached the point where Republicans can demagogue with the words "old news," and that was precisely the Bush White House's goal. Even if House Judiciary eventually cobbles together a report and makes recommendations, the chances of the Justice Department taking whatever recommendations concern accountability measures are, in a word, remote. They haven't even moved to set aside the verdict on Siegelman, though I did notice that the Justice Department whistleblower in the case has been fired. At least someone is held to account, right?

Rove Meets The Special Prosecutor - Again

Karl Rove had a three and a half hour visit with Nora Dannehy yesterday.

Former Bush administration official Karl Rove was interviewed Friday at the office of his attorney about why nine U.S. attorneys were fired in 2006.

After the meeting, Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, issued a statement: "Mr. Rove was interviewed by prosecutors today and answered all of their questions. He intends to fully cooperate with the investigation."

Rove had no comment for reporters outside Luskin's Georgetown office in northwest Washington, saying only, "Have a nice weekend."

Congress held hearings on the firings amid allegations that the prosecutors were sacked for political reasons. All were political appointees who served at the pleasure of the president, and the Bush Justice Department denied any impropriety.

A Justice Department report last year found that some of the firings were influenced by political considerations. Rove and other Bush officials refused to be interviewed for that investigation, and the Bush administration maintained that it acted properly.

I know that there are so many loose ends from the Bush Administration, but the US Attorneys probe and the perversion of the Justice Department into an adjunct of the Republican National Committee remains important. I expected Dannehy to pretty much have wrapped up by now, so the fact that she's still talking to the principals is reassuring.

Dannehy appeared to have focused in on the firing of David Iglesias, which was the most nakedly political and which includes elements of obstruction of justice. Iglesias was approached by then-Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) about a corruption case in New Mexico, and pressured to hurry up the investigation. When Iglesias refused, Domenici hung up, and later discussed firing Iglesias with White House officials. And after the 2006 elections, that's precisely what happened. Rove, Domenici and even George W. Bush are exposed by this one.

The focus on torture has obscured these additional instances of lawbreaking during the Bush Administration. It was truly a breathtaking time.

Siegelman Convictions Upheld

An appeals court in Atlanta upheld most of the charges against Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, throwing out only two.

A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta struck down two of the seven charges that Siegelman was convicted of and ordered a new sentencing hearing. That means Siegelman's seven-year sentence could be reduced.

He won't get off entirely: The court upheld key bribery, conspiracy and obstruction counts against him in what prosecutors described as a scheme that put Scrushy on a state hospital regulatory board when he was at the helm of HealthSouth. The court upheld all six counts against (Richard) Scrushy and his sentence of almost seven years.

Siegelman, 63, and Scrushy, 56, were convicted in 2006 by a federal court jury in Montgomery, where Siegelman was a prominent Democrat with a political career dating back three decades.

Siegelman has claimed his prosecution was pushed by Republicans, including former White House adviser Karl Rove, a claim career federal prosecutors who handled the case have emphatically denied. Rove, a Texas strategist, was once heavily involved in Alabama politics.

It's important to recognize the context, the way Scott Horton, who maybe knows more about this case than any living human, does. The three-judge panel were all Republicans, two of whom had an "active record of political engagement in G.O.P. causes." They delivered the opinion “per curiam," without putting their name on it. And much of the evidence that would exonerate Siegelman was outside the purview of the judges in this appeal.

Nearly all the disclosures that undermined confidence in the fairness of the Siegelman trial occurred after the trial record was closed–and none of these disclosures were examined by the Court of Appeals. Even though the appeals court looked into jury misconduct, it did not have before it the much more powerful evidence of misconduct that a whistleblowing member of the prosecution team subsequently disclosed to the Justice Department—because the Bush Justice Department, in violation of its plain ethical duties, chose to keep all of that secret. So although an appeal has been taken and resolved, not one of the truly significant issues with the Siegelman case was ever briefed or argued. That remains for the future.

Siegelman has responded to the verdict by saying that the fight will continue. As for Karl Rove, his big sit-down with the House Judiciary Committee, which can include questions about his involvement in the Siegelman case, will now not happen for several weeks, according to his lawyers.

Rove Faces The Music... In Private

After years of wrangling, the House Judiciary Committee will finally receive testimony from Karl Rove and Harriet Miers about their roles in the US Attorneys scandal. Here's the statement:

In an agreement reached today between the former Bush Administration and Congressman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Karl Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers will testify before the House Judiciary Committee in transcribed depositions under penalty of perjury. The Committee has also reserved the right to have public testimony from Rove and Miers. It was agreed that invocations of official privileges would be significantly limited. (emphasis mine)

In addition, if the Committee uncovers information necessitating his testimony, the Committee will also have the right to depose William Kelley, a former White House lawyer who played a role in the U.S. Attorney firings.

The Committee will also receive Bush White House documents relevant to this inquiry. Under the agreement, the landmark ruling by Judge John Bates rejecting key Bush White House claims of executive immunity and privilege will be preserved. If the agreement is breached, the Committee can resume the litigation.

I figure that the Obama Justice Department was going to release the documents anyway, so Rove and Miers could either explain them or not. And the limiting of privilege is good. But I'm a little dismayed that this is all happening in private. It's unclear whether or not the public will have access to the transcriptions generated, but my guess is no.

Here's John Conyers' statement:

“I have long said that I would see this matter through to the end and am encouraged that we have finally broken through the Bush Administration’s claims of absolute immunity. This is a victory for the separation of powers and congressional oversight. It is also a vindication of the search for truth. I am determined to have it known whether U.S. Attorneys in the Department of Justice were fired for political reasons, and if so, by whom.”

Symbolically, this is very important, agreed. Whether it means that the truth will actually be uncovered about who authorized the firings of US Attorneys is less clear.

Rove A No-Show

I had a tip that Karl Rove was going to show up at a House Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, but I held off on reporting it because I got a qualified "maybe." Turns out I was right to hesitate:

So today was the day that Karl Rove was supposed to appear before the House Judiciary committee to testify about the US Attorney firings. And of course, Rove didn't show.

That wasn't a surprise. After getting the deadline pushed back, Rove had already publicly indicated he didn't plan on being there, citing President Bush's claim of executive privilege. Rove's lawyer had then asked for a second postponement, a request that Judiciary chair John Conyers had declined to grant.

So Rove is in violation of an issued subpoena. Yet the Obama Administration has until March 4 to deliver an Appeals Court brief over what to do with the sought testimony of Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten. Emptywheel wonders about the connection between the two:

Now, I have no reason (besides noting the coincident dates) to believe that there's a connection between the additional week extension on the Appeals Court brief and any response to Rove's latest contempt for an HJC subpoena.

But I do note that if Rove were immediately held in contempt by HJC and if the House were to act with any dispatch to vote on contempt, Rove might well be in contempt by the time Obama briefs the Appeals Court a week from Wednesday. Mind you, things like that don't usually happen so quickly in the House. But it would make the discussion about the Appeal more interesting.

I think the White House is trying to make a deal acceptable to all sides. It would be good for John Conyers and HJC to force their hands. Eventually, we have to have a framework where executive privilege isn't used as a way to evade accountability.

Make It Stop

I'm getting a little tired of seeing headlines with "sticks with the Bush position" in them.

The Obama administration on Friday told a federal judge it would not deviate from the Bush administration's position that detainees held at a U.S. air base in Afghanistan have no right to sue in U.S. courts.

In one of his first acts in office, President Barack Obama ordered the closure within one year of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, which has been widely criticized by rights groups and foreign governments. About 245 people are currently held at Guantanamo, according to the Pentagon.

However, Obama has not yet decided what to do about the makeshift prison at the U.S. military base in Bagram, where the U.S. government is holding more than 600 prisoners, or whether to continue work on a $60 million prison complex there.
In late January, Obama directed a task force to study the government's overall detainee policy and report back to him in six months.

But the new administration faced a February 20 deadline to tell U.S. District Court Judge John Bates whether it would "refine" the Bush administration's position on four men being held at Bagram who have filed suit against their detention.

In a brief filing with the court on Friday, the Justice Department said it would stick to the previous government's position, which argued the four men -- who have been detained at Bagram for over six years -- had no right to challenge their detention in a U.S. court.

There is little to recommend here. In a substantive sense, Bagram and Guantanamo are hardly different. Many of the detainees have been in both camps. There are just as many stories of human rights abuses at Bagram (including the homicide of Dilawar, the taxi driver whose experience is chronicled in last year's Oscar-winning documentary Taxi To The Dark Side). To separate the two at all is really dastardly. Just because Gitmo is more well-known doesn't make the sins of Bagram acceptable.

And here's another example of the Obama Administration adopting a Bush-era stance on an issue of executive power:

Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush's eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama's Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration's bid to get the lawsuits dismissed.

Recently, the Bush White House said it had located 14 million e-mails that were misplaced and that the White House had restored hundreds of thousands of other e-mails from computer backup tapes.

"The new administration seems no more eager than the last" to deal with the issue, said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the other group that sued the EOP.

The Executive Office of the President includes the president's immediate staff and many White House offices and agencies.

Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government.

The Justice Department "apparently never got the message" from Obama, Blanton said.

I'm sure that some of this is because the Administration doesn't want to get ahead of itself and make the determinations on these cases on their terms, and there are also zombie lawyers arguing these cases, holdovers from the Bush Administration, and we are very early in the new people getting to the job and asserting their will. But we have the previous regime committing very serious crimes and the new team not wanting to deal with them, frankly, so they're trying to dismiss lawsuits or keep practices in place to bury the evidence. It doesn't work that way, however. Eventually, the truth comes out, and by implicating themselves deeper into this mess, they cannot claim to be turning the page on anything or deserving of a new level of respect around the world or at home.

There's another opportunity on this coming Wednesday. A federal judge is setting that deadline for the Administration to weigh in on the subpoenas of Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten in the US Attorneys scandal. Will they back George Bush's claim of executive privilege covering these two aides and preventing them from testimony before Congress, or will they reject it? There are implications for Karl Rove's testimony as well. The new White House counsel is urging Rove's lawyers to work out a deal with Congress, probably so he doesn't have to weigh in himself. This could be good or bad, and since the White House's motion for continuance was denied, we'll know more by Wednesday. I'm tired of being disappointed on these issues.

Psst... Karl

John Conyers would like to have a chat.

Last week, we talked to a number of experts who said that President Obama's executive order on presidential records might well affect the ongoing effort to get information about the Bush White House's role in the US Attorney firings.

And it looks like John Conyers is of the same mind. The House Judiciary chair this afternoon issued a subpoena to Karl Rove to testify before the committee on February 2.

Rove had claimed immunity from an earlier Conyers-issued subpoena, citing executive privilege. (The case is currently on appeal.) As a press release accompanying today's subpoena points out, "[t]hat "absolute immunity" position was supported by then-President Bush, but it has been rejected by U.S. District Judge John Bates and President Obama has previously dismissed the claim as 'completely misguided.'"

Rove's testimony wouldn't necessarily be covered by Obama's executive order, but the principle is basically the same. Obama has argued against blanket coverages of executive privilege, which Rove is operating under.

Rove only has a week to comply. Stay tuned...

Hortonization

Karl Rove issued a prediction last week that sounded a bit more like a warning:

The “campaign architect,” as he is commonly called, built a case against President Barack Obama’s order to close Guantanamo, an overseas CIA detention center where terrorists and other “enemy combatants” are held. Obama’s order could enable terrorists to be tried in U.S. courts, to be given undeserved rights afforded American citizens and could cause damaging long-term effects, Rove said.

“One year from now, Gitmo won’t be closed,” Rove said. “If it is, there will be an uproar in the U.S. about where to put these people.”

Interrogation tactics used by the CIA during Bush’s term in office were not torturous, Rove said, but he did not deny that the CIA strongly pressed terrorists for vital information.

“You bet we squeeze them for information,” Rove said. “If we hadn’t, those same terrorists could have executed their plans to kill, and [people] would be asking why Bush didn’t protect American soldiers’ lives.”

That's going to be the strategy going forward. If Obama closes Guantanamo, terrorists will be shopping next to you at the Pic 'n' Save. Before long, there will be a TV ad with a revolving door at the gates of a prison, and a closeup on a bearded Muslim face while the voice-over intones "America can't afford that risk."

Actually, I didn't have to wait for the ad.



Note the "There Goes The Neighborhood" caption. And the doofus offering Alcatraz, a MUSEUM, as an alternative.

Of course, terrorists are already housed in federal prisons on US soil. But the above piece doesn't really mention prisons all that much. It asks residents if they want scaaary Mooslims living next to them.

We have, then, the outliines of a political strategy for the next election. President Obama and the librul Congress want terrorists to work in your office while tough daddy Republicans want to keep you safe. Never mind that it's the height of weakness to think that maximum security prisons aren't sufficient, or that our security can only be bought with a loss of liberty.

Another part of this narrative is that nasty libruls want to spend taxpayer money on condoms for your kids while heartland Murcan Republicans are the paragons of virtue and values.

You'll note that the lie quotient since Republicans have lost power has, if anything, been raised. But these kinds of appeals to emotion, to safety and protection and xenophobia, have a resonance in the lizard brain. I wouldn't discount them, nor would I combat them solely with an appeal to reason. There has to be an emotional counterpart.

They Don't Know Halfway

After shrugging off Republican caterwauling about the Holder nomination, the only one the right seems to have any interest in making a stink over, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy is pushing back the hearing date a week, a kind of compromise.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will delay confirmation hearings for Attorney General nominee Eric Holder after all -- accommodating Republican concerns that the appointment was being rushed and more vetting of Holder's resume was needed.

In an announcement from his Senate office on Monday afternoon, committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said the hearings would be moved back from January 9 to January 15, giving Republicans more than "30 days from today" to consider Holder's qualifications.

I sincerely hope that Leahy doesn't think this will calm anybody on the other side of the aisle. In fact, there will be some talk that this "proves" the "bipartisan concern" with the nomination, and the perception that it's in trouble, and that Holder will have to endure even more scrutiny, perhaps a request for multiple confirmation hearings, etc. This is not necessarily about blocking Holder from becoming the Attorney General but elongating the process and throwing up doubt. They've de-mothballed Karl Rove to lead the effort:

On Dec. 1, just one day after Holder’s nomination, Karl Rove told the Today Show that Holder’s record “will be examined” because he was the “one controversial nominee“:

ROVE: He was deeply involved as the Deputy Attorney General in the controversial pardon of Marc Rich. … I think it’s going to be clearly examined, if for no other reason that people want to lay down markers that that kind of behavior is inappropriate. … But again, there will be some attention paid to this [...]

Today on MSNBC’s Chris Matthews Show, Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly revealed that Rove is indeed “helping lead” the effort against Holder:

CONNOLLY: Word on the street is that Karl Rove is going to be helping lead the fight against Eric Holder when his nomination for Attorney General heads up to the Senate.

This is a textbook partisan ploy, designed to engender anger throughout the base and a whiff of illegitimacy to the Justice Department. Of course, that agency is already hopelessly compromised, so any effort to improve it or, ye gods, fire those burrowed deep inside the Department who are responsible for the politicization of the past few years, will then have a counterpoint in the figure of Holder, no matter how ridiculous it may appear.

It shouldn't be any surprise that the one cabinet post Rove is being tapped to sully and turn into a partisan brawl is the one that happens to be investigating him. There may or may not be merit to the idea that Rove wants to provide cover for Bush's pardons, but the Siegelman case threatens Rove where he lives, and he desperately needs to paint it as the rantings of a partisan liberal Justice Department. In fact, painting justice itself as partisan, putting it into the political arena, serves Republican needs in a variety of ways, devaluing the rule of law as just another he-said/she-said situation.

I think Leahy did the wrong thing by listening to these jackals. They have no interest in being mollified.

The Great Restoration

It's a good thing that the Bush team is working hard with unusual focus and competence on what matters the most right now - making sure that reporters properly spin his legacy.

President Bush’s interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson this week was the “first of several planned ‘exit interviews.’” According to White House press secretary Dana Perino, Bush’s next interview will be with ABC’s Cynthia McFadden on the topic of the faith-based initiative. It will air on Nightline next week. If the first interview with Gibson provides any clue as to what we can expect from these interviews, Bush will paint a rosy picture of his legacy and “refuse to take responsibility for a single thing that went wrong on his watch.” Heather at Crooks and Liars catches the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes revealing that Karl Rove is currently orchestrating the Bush legacy project:

[T]here’s an ongoing Bush legacy project that’s been meeting in the White House, really, with senior advisers, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes has been involved, current senior Bush administration advisers and they are looking at how to sort of roll out the President’s legacy.

Why, there almost seems to be more planning going into restoring the legacy than has gone into prewar planning in Iraq, planning for the TARP program, planning after Katrina, etc., etc. How curious!

By the way, this isn't the "Bush legacy project" at all - I'm sure he's content to go back to Texas and get the hell away from that fake ranch and start getting down to the business of drinking cocktails out of the public spotlight. He could give a damn about his legacy - that's been very clear.

BUSH: I'll be frank with you. I don't spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history. I guess I don't worry about long-term history, either, since I'm not going to be around to read it -- (laughter) -- but, look, in this job you just do what you can. The thing that's important for me is to get home and look in that mirror and say, I did not compromise my principles. And I didn't. I made tough calls. And some presidencies have got a lot of tough decisions to make--

No, this is the Karl Rove legacy project. He's the one concerned about his place in history. And his future power resides in everyone still considering him a genius and not a complete failure responsible for bringing the worst President in American history to the attention of the country. Similarly, blurring the lines on conservative extremism is the one way to lull the country into forgetting how destructive those policies truly were. So this isn't about making Bush look good in the past, it's about making Republicans look good in the future. This is why he's trying to restore his own credibility by claiming that the United States wouldn't have invaded Iraq if they had known there were no WMD, going much further than the President ever has.

In what was a remarkable admission that contradicted - to a large extent - the past statements from his onetime boss, former Bush strategist Karl Rove said on Tuesday evening that had the President known Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, the United States would not have gone to war.

"In the aftermath of 9/11 the concern was about a tyrant accused of enormous human rights abuses," but who also possessed weapons of mass destruction, said Rove. "Absent that, I suspect that the administration's course of action would have been to work to find more creative ways to constrain him like in the 90s."

The remarks, delivered at a debate in New York on Bush's legacy, came amidst a vigorous defense by Rove on behalf of the war's purpose and outcome.

Preposterous, yes, but you'll notice that the word "Bush" is absent in Rove's remarks. Having already lied their way into invading - and yes, distorting that intelligence which was apparently so "faulty" that it would have changed the very outcome of the invasion - the spinmeisters are now lying about the events of just five years ago, and making Bush disappear in the process. And it's working with a media that has always been too willing to accept whatever version of history they're spoonfed from on high.

The big news orgs seem eager to help Bush do this. Not a single one of their reports on the interview that we can find bothered to tell readers that there was plenty of good intel -- ignored by the Bush administration -- saying that Saddam wasn't the threat Bush was claiming he was. Nor did any of them bother mentioning that the weapons inspectors in Iraq were saying the same thing -- something that also went ignored.

These facts are absolutely central to understanding Bush's efforts to falsify history in yesterday's interview. Yet they went unmentioned in reports by Reuters, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN, and The New York Times.

Worse, at least one news org pretended that Bush was making some kind of admission or concession here. WaPo hailed Bush's "candor" and said he was being "unusually blunt."

Let's go over this very slowly. For Bush to blame the failure of intel for his decision to invade is not a concession at all, and it is not an admission of failure on his part. Rather, it is the opposite of these things. It is an evasion of responsibility for what happened.

Obama's campaign ran on stepping away from Bush policies and toward change. The whole time there was this assumption that everyone knew what those Bush policies were, and therefore there was no need to delineate very specifically. That was a healthy assumption when 4/5 of the country thinks we're on the wrong track, but with the passage of time, that failure to specifically target Bush and Republicans will lead to convenient amnesia. And with another Bush ready to step in and make everyone forget about ol' W., the whitewash project will be complete.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — the younger brother of the president — is weighing a run for the Senate seat currently held by Republican Mel Martinez.

Martinez announced Tuesday that he will not seek reelection in 2010. Asked whether he was interested in running for the seat then, Bush told Politico by e-mail Tuesday night: “I am considering it.”

Jeb is popular enough in Florida that he could prevail despite the surname, and we've all been told over and over that he's really the smart one and Poppy wanted him to be President first and all that.

When conservative governments get away with their crimes, when they are given sanction to set the terms of their own legacy, the consequences for the future, when the same band of thieves returns to Washington to plunder, are grave.

The Guy Has Some Stones

I seriously hope that nobody is trying to rehabilitate Roger Stone as he attempts to repent over what he helped impose on the world. The guy was actively pushing the 'Whitey' tape as recently as this year's Republican convention, for crying out loud.

The capstone of Stone’s career, at least in terms of results, was the “Brooks Brothers riot” of the 2000 election recount. This was when a Stone-led squad of pro-Bush protestors stormed the Miami-Dade County election board, stopping the recount and advancing then-Governor George W. Bush one step closer to the White House. Though he is quick to rebut GOP operatives who seek to minimize his role in the recount, Stone lately has been having second thoughts about what happened in Florida.

"There have been many times I've regretted it,” Stone told me over pizza at Grand Central Station. “When I look at those double-page New York Times spreads of all the individual pictures of people who have been killed [in Iraq], I got to think, 'Maybe there wouldn't have been a war if I hadn't gone to Miami-Dade. Maybe there hadn't have been, in my view, an unjustified war if Bush hadn't become president.' It's very disturbing to me."

He doesn't regret crap. He's looking to disappear Bush like the rest of the GOP. Stone saw the opportunity to increase his power as a prize GOP ratfucker and fixer and he took it. Now their golden boy, the man the party establishment plucked from the Governor's mansion in Austin and lined up behind en masse for years, revealed himself to be an incompetent dullard with a knack for ruining everything he gets his hands on. And we're supposed to let that stain, the blot on the records of all these willing dupes who backed him, to be washed out? Hell no.

Stone voted for Bush in 2004 as well (“John Kerry was an elitist buffoon”) but he pulled no punches in his assessment of the last eight years. Stone's own political philosophy is libertarian, and he says it conflicts with Bush's penchant for expanded executive power.

“I think across the board he's led the party to its current position, which means losing both houses of congress and now the White House,” Stone said. “How can you be conservative and justify wiretapping people without a warrant? We're supposed to be the party of personal freedom and civil liberties. Big brother listening in on your phone calls—I got a problem with that.”

Give me a break. Not one Republican member of the House or Senate raised an objection to the illegal wiretapping program ever. Not one time. And neither did scummy operatives like Stone. Hell, Stone bragged about doing his own surveillance during the Brooks Brothers riot:

“We set up a Winnebago trailer, right over here,” Stone said when we got out of the Jaguar and walked about a block away from the Clark center, on First Street. “I set up my command center there. I had walkie-talkies and cell phones, and I was in touch with our people in the building. Our whole idea was to shut the recount down. That was why we were there. We had the frequency to the Democrats’ walkie-talkies and were listening to their communications, but they were so disorganized that we didn’t learn much that was useful.”

Oh, by the way, Stone was apparently a reluctant warrior in the recount fight. He was just paying off debts:

That Stone joins Matthew Dowd, Scott McClellan, and Colin Powell in the group of disaffected ex-Bushies shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. Stone advised Donald Trump on his prospective bid for the presidency in 2000. According to Stone, he didn't even want to get involved in the 2000 race at all until the GOP's recount head, James Baker III, called him up and asked him for his help. Stone said that Baker had helped him out in 1981 by getting Reagan and Bush to lend support to New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, whose campaign Stone ran. He owed him a favor.

“In this business, if you don't pay your debts you're finished,” Stone said.

This is horseshit. And really dangerous horseshit besides. These people are running away as fast as they can from a legacy they helped create, and there is absolutely no reason to allow them to do so. Those dead American soldiers and Iraq children are YOUR children, Mr. Stone. You helped cause them, you helped send them to their deaths, and there is no way anyone should allow you to airbrush your own conscience. And in 5 or 10 or 15 years when you and the whole dirty cabal is back with some other empty suit, the REAL vessel of conservatism, we're all going to remember who you backed the last time. George W. Bush is yours. You bought him and you own him. And you can't take him to the return window.

...here's Karl Rove terribly concerned about illegal political activities inside the Obama White House, extreme use of executive power, replacing US Attorneys like Patrick Fitzgerald (!) and overly political Administration appointments.

Karl Rove is concerned about that.

More Misconduct In The Siegelman Case

I didn't get to this on Friday, but there was a major revelation in the Don Siegelman investigation, involving interventions with the US Attorney who had recused herself and contacts between state prosecutors and jurors:

The USAtty, Leura Canary, supposedly recused herself from the case due to substantial conflicts of interest involving her husband, a GOP political strategist running the political campaign for Siegelman's gubernatorial rival. In subsequent emails (PDF), Canary specifically gives directives and strategy to the AUSAs in her office handling -- on multiple occasions [...]

AUSAs in the case had multiple ex parte communications with jurors, while the jury was deliberating on its verdict -- passed through US Marshalls at the courthouse -- which were never disclosed to either the judge or opposing counsel. Via Time:

Grimes last year also gave DoJ additional e-mails detailing previously undisclosed contacts between prosecutors and members of the Siegelman jury....

The DoJ conducted its own inquiry into some of Grimes' claims, and wrote a report dismissing them as inconsequential. But the report shows that investigators did not question U.S. marshals or jurors who had allegedly been in touch with the prosecution.

A key prosecution e-mail describes how jurors repeatedly contacted the government's legal team during the trial to express, among other things, one juror's romantic interest in a member of the prosecution team. "The jurors kept sending out messages" via U.S. marshals, the e-mail says, identifying a particular juror as "very interested" in a person who had sat at the prosecution table in court. The same juror was later described reaching out to members of the prosecution team for personal advice about her career and educational plans. Conyers commented that the "risk of [jury] bias ... is obvious".

This is really incredible, and grounds for disbarment if not indictment. Siegelman called these revelations "more frightening than anything that has come before." The fingerprints of GOP operatives are all over this case, and the fact that these revelations came out of John Conyers' office makes me think that he knows it as well. Karl Rove still needs to be compelled to testify in this case.

And Siegelman, a Democrat, left no doubt that he believes that the apparent politicization of his prosecution was just one example of many such cases. "If this were isolated to just the middle district of Alabama, it would be shocking enough. But I guarantee this kind of misbehavior has been going on all over the country."

He added: "Whoever is the new Attorney General has to be strong enough to weed out the Karl Rove clones who have been embedded in US Attorneys' offices throughout the United States. If not, it is going to eat at our system for years to come."

At one point, Siegelman turned philosophical: "If I've been put through this for a reason, it's to expose the fact that this is not an isolated incident. I am prayerful that Congress will dig in and demand the truth. These folks have got to be weeded out."

Emptywheel has a lot more.

He Lost 3 of 5.

Hopefully, the events unfolding today will put a swift end to this notion of Karl Rove as an evil genius. He lost in 2000. Flat-out lost, lost the popular Presidential vote, lost 4 seats in the Senate, lost 2 seats in the House, lost. He won in 2002 and 2004 in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the homeland. 2004 was not a clean victory, and was very possibly quite dirty, and 2002, particularly in Georgia and New Hampshire, has some suspect results of its own. Rove lost badly in 2006, and this campaign, run on the Rove model, is predicted to be a blowout by even Rove himself.

That's 3 losses in 5 tries, and the 2 wins were not all that expansive. In 2000, before Rove's first election, Republicans had 223 seats in the House of Representatives. By the end of this election, I'm projecting they have 171. In the Senate, Republicans held 54 seats prior to 2000. By the end of the night it could be as low as 40.

That's an historic collapse. And the main reason for that is because of how Bush and Rove and Cheney ended up governing. As Glenn Smith says:

As many have noted, Rove turned the White House into a Republican campaign war room. Dick Cheney's belief in the imperial presidency provided the philosophical grounding. Rove provided the dirty tricks.

But the universe will always have its way. Rove seems truly to have believed he could create reality, that weapons of mass instructions could be made to exist because he said they existed, that the globe wasn't warming because he said it wasn't. Then, for Karl Rove, waking life became a nightmare. His dreams were insufficient.

Successful political strategists don't create reality like Karl Rove claimed. They surf it. Rove guided George W. Bush to the presidency on a wave created by his elders, by three decades of right wing agitating and power-grabbing. Rove should be judged by the reality of 2008. Any way you look at it, Rove's been a miserable failure.

The big question is whether or not this will change. Will the Republican Party move past Rove-ism? I'm with Paul Krugman - I don't think so. The "Republican rump," as he calls it, will be very extreme and even further to the right, convinced of their own brilliance and that the American people want strong conservative leadership, the evidence be damned. The media will certainly help them (more on that in a minute), but these people are deluded and they aren't likely to see the light.

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.

This is definitely the end of the Republican era. But these things are cyclical, and that narrow window of governing majorities needs to be filled with a solid progressive agenda that does right for working families and lets them remember who helped them.

CA-46: Debate Fireworks and Ratfuckers for Rohrabacher

So Debbie Cook and Dana Rohrabacher debated yesterday afternoon. I could write 1000 words about it, but I could also just provide you with this picture, which says it all:



As in, "I can't believe I actually have to run for my seat."

But if you want to know about the substance, Todd Beeton, who was there, has a writeup.

But even though crazy Dana is always likely to say some crazy shit, and he did, what I took away from the debate most of all was how unabashedly progressive Debbie Cook is and how lucky we would be to have her in Congress. This is a fairly red (albeit getting bluer every day) district, one where you might expect the Democratic challenger to moderate her views for the electorate. Nope, not Debbie. I'll write about the debate more later, hopefully with video, but here are just three of the issues where Debbie shined today:

• On global warming, Cook, who is an energy expert, in response to Rohrabacher's global warming denier nonsense, asserted "The debate is over. I can't get into a discussion over climate change, to me it's just a fact, we need to move on to solving our oil depletion problems."

• On Proposition 8: "I strongly oppose Proposition 8, I am in favor of full marriage equality."

• And on healthcare reform, Cook advocated for a single-payer Medicare for all model. "Health care is a right every American should enjoy."

Yes, Crazy Dana denied global warming. Again. Not sure if he attributed it to dinosaur flatulence this time. But here's the actual discussion:

Rohrabacher went on to accuse those "who claim that humankind is changing the climate," including Cook and his other opponents, of fear mongering.

"[They are] trying to stampede us into policies that will take us towards technologies that just deal with carbon dioxide and have nothing to do with personal health," Rohrabacher said.

Cook, who led Huntington Beach in joining the U.S. Mayor's Agreement on Global Warming, dismissed Rohrabacher's claims, stating that the scientific debate over climate change had ended.

"Debating climate change is just a distraction from the real work that we all need to do," Cook said. "Humans are overtaking the ability of the planet to sustain itself. Now, we need to move toward a green future because that's the only thing that can save us."

Apparently, Rohrabacher's plan was to relate everything back to illegal immigration and the Wall Street bailout package, which he would have replaced with capital gains tax cuts and more deregulation, so I'm not seeing Mr. Populism in there.

Cook stayed on message and did not take the bait. Here was her explanation.

After the debate, Cook explained why she refused to go after the incumbent.

"It's not my style," she said. "You don't want to make the same mistake that the Republicans have made with McCain in going negative, negative, negative. I think it's quite apparent that he's done nothing for this district in 20 years. And if people don't understand that, me telling them isn't going to change anything."

"He's an a**," Cook continued. "I can't respond to him. He's a liar."

Meanwhile, I noticed something very interesting in Rohrabacher's latest fundraising report:

Donald Segretti
self
09/27/2008
250.00
attorney

Yes, that Donald Segretti. The head of the "dirty tricks" division of the Nixon campaign, the guy who stole stationery from Ed Muskie and wrote all kinds of lies about possible Nixon opponents in 1972, alleging Scoop Jackson had an illegitimate child and Hubert Humphrey was guilty of sexual misconduct and Muskie had insulted Franch-Canadians. By the way, Segretti was a co-chair of John McCain's Presidential campaign in 2000. And he was Karl Rove's mentor in ratfucking.

Donald Segretti offered J. Timothy Gratz $100.00 per month, plus expenses, to co-ordinate these projects. Gratz agreed to work on the project and he was given an advance payment of $50.00. Gratz later told Anthony Ulasewicz that "although the whole incident seemed strange" he agreed to help "as most of the ideas he suggested seemed like they were worth doing anyway". However, Gratz claimed he told Karl Rove, Chairman of the College Republican National Committee, about this dirty tricks campaign. We now know that Rove himself was part of Segretti's campaign. In fact, he probably played a leading role in this dirty tricks operation. Rove had become friends with CIA asset, Robert F. Bennett in 1968. According to one report, Bennett became a "mentor of Rove's".

In 1970, Karl Rove used a false identity to enter the campaign office of Democrat Alan J. Dixon, who was running for Illinois State Treasurer, and stole 1000 sheets of paper with campaign letterhead. Rove then printed fake campaign rally fliers promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing," and distributed them at rock concerts and homeless shelters, with the effect of disrupting Dixon's rally.

Nice company that Rohrabacher attracts.

Donate to Debbie Cook: Having the money to get her message out is all that stands between her and victory.

NE-Sen: Johanns Making With The Hatch Act Violations

Earlier this week, Henry Waxman's team at the House Oversight Committee detailed, in a scathing report, multiple instances of the Bush White House organizing taxpayer-funded trips for government officials into swing districts to seemingly help threatened Republican incumbents. In 2006, Department Secretaries and agency heads were all of a sudden jetsetting all over the country, giving grants or talking up the positive effects of policies in regions that just happened to coincide with the swing district lists.

One of those department heads was Mike Johanns, who in 2006 was the Secretary of Agriculture. He jaunted along to appear at 38 separate stops that year, with such upstanding public servants as:

4/21/06 Marilyn Musgrave, Colorado, Taxpayer Expense for Official Event
7/7/06 John Doolittle, Auburn CA, Taxpayer Expense for Official Event
7/7/06 Richard Pombo, Elk Grove CA, Political Event
11/1/06 Heather Wilson, Albuquerque, NM, Taxpayer Expense for Official Event
11/2/06 Rick Renzi, Casa Grande, AZ, Taxpayer Expense for Official Event

Doolittle and Renzi have been indicted, Wilson is under questioning in the US Attorneys scandal, and Pombo was as corrupt as they come. In short, a pretty ignominious list.

Now, this would mean little, considering that the penalty for violating the Hatch Act (engaging in political activity as part of official government business) is removal from office, and Johanns is no longer the AgSecretary. However, he is running for the US Senate in Nebraska this year, against Democrat and netroots favorite Scott Kleeb.

Last night, Johanns was confronted with these charges at a debate, and he admitted to the wrongdoing.

Last night's Senate debate in Grand Island gave Mike Johanns his first opportunity to defend himself from devastating new allegations that he used taxpayer funds in 2006 to travel across the country campaigning for Republican candidates.

The Lincoln Journal-Star reports on Johanns' response:

As U.S. secretary of agriculture, Johanns attended 38 events recommended by the White House Office of Political Affairs headed by Karl Rove, according to the committee report.

Most of the travel costs for Rove-generated events were paid with federal funds, the report stated.

Answering a question posed by a panelist.., Johanns said he believes it would be "a great idea" to ban the use of taxpayer funds by the White House for such activities.

In case it isn't clear, this still-erupting scandal has the potential to remake Nebraska's 2008 Senate race.

Yes, it's quite clear. Johanns is basically calling himself guilty of participating in an illegal Rovian scheme. If there's one person you don't want to be tied to in this election, it's George Bush. And if there's another, it's Karl Rove. Scott Kleeb has a real opening.

I like Scott a lot. I've had the opportunity to meet him at a couple events, and he has some of the best Internet people around working for him. I really hope he can pull this off, especially because his race could mean a filibuster-proof majority for the Democrats in the United States Senate.

You Don't Get Your Oversight - DC Circuit Puts Off Miers/Bolten Subpoenas Until Bush Leaves Office

Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten won't be testifying to Congress anytime soon. Not until their Dear Leader is on an island somewhere:

Time will run out on this year's congressional session before the battle between two branches of government can be resolved, according to the ruling by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The ruling essentially pushes any resolution on the politically charged case until next year.

"The present dispute is of potentially great significance for the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches," wrote the panel of judges, two of whom were appointed by Republicans.

Still, the judges wrote, "Even if expedited, this controversy will not be fully and finally resolved by the judicial branch ... before the 110th Congress ends on January 3, 2009. At that time, the 110th House of Representatives will cease to exist as a legal entity, and the subpoenas it has issued will expire."

There you have it, folks. The White House has basically altered the relationship between the executive and legislative branch permanently. Future Presidents now know that if they push aggressively enough, if they evade oversight and subpoenas and dare the Congress to stop them, nothing will come of their actions, no matter how illegal they are.

It's worth going back and understanding what the White House actually did in this case, a series of events now illuminated by the recent OIG report on Justice Department politicization, the facts of which did nothing to persuade the circuit court that decisive action needed to be taken. We now know that the executive branch, led by Karl Rove, absolutely played a role in the firing of US Attorneys in 2006. There are emails between Rove and officials in New Mexico proving his role in the firing of David Iglesias, for example, because of Iglesias' refusal to swiftly prosecute Democrats and bogus voter fraud cases. They made room for a political friend of Rove's, Tim Griffin, at the US Attorney's office in Arkansas by firing Bud Cummins. And they conspired with Senator Kit Bond to remove the federal prosecutor in Missouri:

In Missouri, evidently, Republican politics are exceptionally bloody, with clans fighting like rival mobs whose carnage spreads to other locales and sweeps in innocent civilians.

This is what former U.S. attorney Todd P. Graves discovered when he was ousted in January 2006 by the Justice Department. He got his first inkling of trouble in 2004 not from the department, but from an aide to Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), whose office was then embroiled in a bitter dispute with Graves's brother, a U.S. congressman.

In a telephone call, the aide angrily warned Graves that if he did not intervene on Bond's behalf -- against his brother's chief of staff -- the senator "could no longer protect [his] job." Graves refused, and a little over a year later, he was bounced from his Kansas City office after Bond's staff made repeated complaints to the White House counsel's office.

More on the Graves firing here.

This is all out in the open despite pervasive, continuous stonewalling on the part of White House officials, refusing to comply with any and all investigations into their conduct, including the OIG report put together by their own Justice Department. But the evidence is nonetheless clear and thorough.

The White House's active involvement in the firings, as depicted in the report, can be divided into two broad categories: First, its role in initiating and promoting the overall plan to remove an unspecified number of U.S. attorneys -- traditionally treated as apolitical prosecutors who operate independently from the political agenda of the administration -- deemed insufficiently committed to the Bush agenda. And second, its apparent work in pushing specifically for several of the most high-profile dismissals.

You can see the wealth of evidence at the handy link from TPM Muckraker. It need not be repeated here.

What must be repeated is how easily the White House has evaded any accountability for these clear crimes of politicization of the Justice Department. They took advantage of the lack of teeth in such federal statutes like the Hatch Act, which offers remedies only to the firing of those responsible, by having the perpetrators resign. They allowed an investigation to be released but only one coming from an internal monitor, not an independent investigation from Congress or a special counsel. The report was so damning that the Attorney General was forced to name a prosecutor to investigate the crimes further, but he refused to make her independent from the DoJ, and he gave her a 60 day mandate so that the investigation could not spread beyond the current Presidential term in office, after the election and before the new President begins his term. And now, as that investigation will be wrapped up before Miers, Bolten or anyone else would ever have to testify, their testimony will not factor into this accelerated timeline.

Indeed, in order to get Miers and Bolten on the record, the House Judiciary Committee would have to file subpoenas all over again, as they will have expired, and go through the exact same stonewalling. Thus far absolutely nobody has paid even the smallest price for the US Attorney purges, other than moving from their cushy jobs to some other cushy wingnut welfare sinecure.

This is the crisis of accountability we are facing due to the expansiveness of executive power over decades and consistent enabling from the Congress as they fail time and again to enact basic oversight in real time. This scandal represents the failure of our system, a loophole in the Constitution that extremists have successfully exploited.

The Post-Bush Investigation Era Begins

Obviously the bailout bill is the order of the day (and I hear enough Congresscritters saying they "have to do something" and "we are all Murcans" that the ship has pretty much sailed) but there's another very interesting report out today, a long-awaited Justice Department Inspector General summary of the US Attorney firings.

In 2007 I was fairly obsessed with these prosecutor purges, and it became clear that the affected US Attorneys were singled out for nakedly political reasons and in most cases for failing to indict Democrats or insert themselves into the electoral process. The actions of the prosecutors who remained made the actions taken to fire those who failed to comply more pronounced. The ugly underbelly of Karl Rove politics was really ripped open for all to see, and no amount of denials would change that.

The report is about as thorough as it can be, given that key Republicans in the Justice Department, as well as elected officials caught up in the probe like New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, simply stonewalled the investigation. This is particularly the case in the firing of New Mexico US Attorney David Iglesias.

The report concludes that Iglesias was removed as a result of complaints brought to DOJ by New Mexico GOP members of Congress and party activists, and shows that Karl Rove knew in advance of the decision. It reveals that at a meeting on November 15, 2006, Rep. Heather Wilson told Rove: "Mr. Rove, for what it's worth, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico is a waste of breath." Rove's response: ""That decision has already been made. He's gone."

But it states that IG investigators were unable to determine how Rove knew this (Iglesias wasn't notifed until December 7), and what his possible role in the decision was, because Rove and White House counsel Harriet Miers refused to cooperate with the investigation.

Similarly, it notes that Kyle Sampson, who as chief of staff to Alberto Gonzales took the lead in bringing about the firings, gave "misleading after-the-fact explanations for why Iglesias was placed on the list." The report concludes: "[W]e question whether Sampson provided us the full story about Iglesias's placement on the list, as well as the reasons for other U.S. Attorney removals."

And: "Our investigation was also hindered by the refusal of Senator Domenici and his Chief of Staff to agree to an interview by us." (In April, Domenici, who is retiring this year, received a "qualified admonition" from the Senate ethics committee for his role in the firing.)

The report is a monster, but it can be boiled down to "the DoJ broke the law in spirit and probably in letter, but they won't give us enough information to figure out precisely how they broke the law, so... somebody else should figure that out." While it certainly appears that Fredo Gonzales and some of his top deputies perjured themselves before Congress, the report does not recommend criminal charges (it merely says that Fredo et al "failed to provide accurate and truthful statements about the removals and their role in the process,” which is... something different entirely?). However, it does clearly state that Gonzales and his lead deputy Paul McNulty turned a blind eye to the firings, essentially outsourcing personnel decisions to the White House political office, and that Kyle Sampson was largely responsible for the haphazard process both during and after the firings. And it asks for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate this further. And wouldn't you know it, Michael Mukasey went along with it:

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey appointed a special prosecutor on Monday to investigate whether criminal charges should be brought against former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and other officials in connection with the firings of nine of United States attorneys in 2006.

“The report makes plain that, at a minimum, the process by which nine U.S. attorneys were removed in 2006 was haphazard, arbitrary and unprofessional, and the way in which the Justice Department handled those removals and the resulting public controversy was profoundly lacking,” Mr. Mukasey said in a statement. The report called for further investigation to determine whether prosecutable offenses were committed either in the firings or in subsequent testimony about them.

Nora Dannehy, acting United States Attorney in Connecticut, will lead the investigation, Mr. Mukasey said. A graduate of Harvard Law School, she has served as a prosecutor for 17 years and specializes in white-collar and public corruption cases. She led the prosecution of the former governor of Connecticut, John Rowland, who pleaded guilty in 2004 to accepting $107,000 in gifts.Mr. Gonzales, who resigned last year after coming under criticism because of the firings, has been the main focus of interest, in part because several members of Congress charged that he may have perjured himself in his testimony through his memory lapses and misstatements about the firings.

Here's Mukasey's statement. I was a little surprised that he went ahead and did this. Sure, appointing a prosecutor inside the DoJ affords a little more control than an independent counsel, but Mukasey's team will be gone soon enough, and so this investigation certainly will carry over into the next Presidency. Which is as it should be. There is no way that these charlatans should be able to manage oversight over themselves.

The question, obviously, is how far the next President would be willing to go. And not just with the US Attorney purges, but a host of other topics (Murray Waas had additional information late last week about Fredo's trip to the hospital to bully John Ashcroft into signing off on the illegal wiretapping program - looks like Bush personally directed it). The mechanisms are now in place, at least in this case, to continue serious investigations into White House crimes without meddling or stonewalling from Bush and his cronies. That's an opprtunity we can't afford to pass up.