Tying Up Loose Ends

This is interesting. In the waning days of the Bush Administration, outside actors - not connected to Obama or his transition team - are threatening accountability and rollback on two key subversions of the rule of law: the US Attorney purges and the retroactive immunity for telecoms involved in the warrantless surveillance program.

First, on the US Attorney probe. Nora Dannehy has been charged with investigating the matter, and she's getting to work.

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey appointed prosecutor Nora R. Dannehy two months ago, after the department's Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility reported that they had hit a roadblock in their lengthy probe into whether political interference prompted the dismissals. Internal investigators said they had been stymied by the refusal of key witnesses, including former presidential adviser Karl Rove and former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers, to cooperate.

By naming a federal prosecutor to determine whether crimes have been committed, the attorney general ensured that authorities would have the power to compel testimony and documents. Dannehy, a longtime assistant U.S. attorney in Connecticut, in recent weeks has met with lawyers and government officials involved in the case. A grand jury in the District has issued subpoenas, the sources said [...]

D. Kyle Sampson, who served as the chief of staff to Gonzales until his March 2007 resignation, recently took a leave from his job as a partner at the law firm Hunton & Williams while the investigation proceeds. A spokeswoman for the law firm said he is on leave "pending admission to the D.C. bar."

The report by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine singled out Sampson for offering testimony that was "not credible" and "unpersuasive." The authorities also concluded that Sampson had committed "misconduct."

Well that's... interesting. Dannehy appears to be making real progress, not just with Sampson, but according to Zachary Roth, with Fredo Gonzales.

In an interview with TPMmuckraker, Bob Bork Jr., who serves as a spokesman for the ex-AG, initially said that although Gonzales' lawyer, George Terwilliger III, had reached out to Dannehy at the start of her investigation, he didn't believe that Dannehy had formally contacted Gonzales or Terwilliger in connection with the probe.

But Bork Jr. called back an hour later to say that he had been mistaken about that. "We won't be able to talk about any interactions with DOJ," he now said.

In other words, it would appear, Dannehy has contacted Gonzo and/or his lawyer.

In the WaPo article Terwilliger is whining that the whole matter should be closed, probably because he wants it shut down before an Obama Administration less sympathetic to his wishes comes into power. I believe the Dannehy investigation has a short shelf life, but if she were to hand out a few indictments there would at least be some measure of accountability.

Speaking of which, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was in court yesterday, seeking to invalidate the Congressional action that immunized the phone companies from prosecution for their role in illegal wiretapping. Marcy Wheeler notes that the judges questions are far more probing than expected, and certainly not befitting someone inclined to rubber stamp the President and the Congress.

But given the questions Judge Walker has posed to the Administration, it looks like it won't be that easy. For example, there's this question, which highlights just how nutty this retroactive immunity is:

"What exactly has Congress created with § 802 (in Pub L No 110-261, 122 Stat 2467, tit II, § 201 (2008))? It does not appear to be an affirmative defense but rather appears to be a retroactive immunity for completed acts that allegedly violated constitutional rights, but one that can only be activated by the executive branch. Is there any precedent for this type of enactment that is analogous in all of these respects: retroactivity; immunity for constitutional violations; and delegation of broad discretion to the executive branch to determine whether to invoke the provision? "

He goes from there to ask several more questions getting at that pesky separation of powers thing. You know--separation of powers, which says that the courts have the ajudicatory function?

"In making the certification called for by section 802(a)(5), is the Attorney General performing an adjudicatory function? That is, is he not making a determination that only a court can make?"

They are all good questions. And they suggest that Walker is not going to simply roll over and abdicate his Article III function. Which probably means this will be appealed beyond the time when the Bush Administration leaves office.

Judges aren't inclined to having their power usurped.

There are still vestiges of the American system left that allow for a modicum of accountability. If it were up to the aristocrats running things, all of this would be shut down. They haven't obliterated the rule of law... yet.

Just One More Unaccountable Appointment Before I Go

The one, and perhaps only, hard piece of accountability that has come out of the widening US Attorney scandal is that the Congress passed legislation striking out the provision in the PATRIOT Act that allowed the Justice Department to appoint replacement federal prosecutors without seeking Senate confirmation. The new law passed in both Houses with expansive, veto-proof majorities (94-2 in the Senate, 306-114 in the House). Any veto would be overridden, so the President has no choice but to sign the bill.

Except he hasn't yet, and the hip-pocket veto has enabled Abu G to strike again - right in my own backyard of Los Angeles.

In a Senate Judiciary Committee business meeting Thursday morning, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) revealed that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales once again used an interim appointment authority at the heart of the US Attorneys controversy that Congress banned in a bill sent to the President for signature on June 4 [...]

Tracy Schmaler, a spokeswoman for Senator Leahy, clarified the situation in an e-mail to RAW STORY.

"It just so happens the committee got notice yesterday, that on June 16, George Cardona's 210 days as Acting U.S. Attorney in the Central District of California will have run out and the Attorney General will appoint him as an interim U.S. Attorney at that time. (i.e. still using the end-run authority because Bush has slow-walked signing the bill)," she wrote.

The Cardona appointment is interesting, to say the least. It was reported in the LA Times just two weeks ago that a new hire for Cardona's position was imminent. The Los Angeles DA Steve Cooley called the pick, Thomas O'Brien, "the most apolitical person selected to that job in quite some time." Remember that the vacancy here was made by Debra Wong Yang's departure to Republican law firm Gibson Dunn, the same firm whose client was Rep. Jerry Lewis, who Yang was investigating at the time.

So Lewis' team had already bought out Yang (allegedly!), and now they were faced with the prospect of a hard-charging independent former DA in the role. That must not have sat well with him. So did Lewis tell the Justice Department to keep their handpicked loyalist in place until he made his way out of Congress (he's rumored to be retiring)?

Marcy Wheeler also sees another angle here.

Finally, the move is especially curious because Gerry Parsky, a bigwig Republican who heads a Commission that picks judicial appointees in CA, has been particularly cranky about being left out of the process of naming USAs. And DOJ already went around him on this position specifically.

Once Yang resigned in November to pursue private law practice, it was up to the commission to make recommendations to the White House and the Justice Department. But Sampson and Goodling tried to generate candidates of their own. Interviews were scheduled with half a dozen people, many of whom had held political appointments in the department.

Parsky did not respond to e-mailed questions about his role in the process.

After word of the interview schedule leaked, Parsky called the White House and the Justice Department to complain, according to a person familiar with the process who requested anonymity because it involves a personnel matter. Goodling was allowed to proceed with the interviews, but was told she had to tell the candidates that they would have to reapply through the commission.

Ultimately, the commission is believed to have recommended two candidates; the only one interviewed by the Justice officials in Washington was a career prosecutor who has headed the criminal division of the Los Angeles office. The White House has not said whom it will nominate for the post.

Some people close to the selection process suspect Goodling and Sampson were attempting an end-run around the commission to install a politically connected Washington insider, possibly by using a law that permitted the attorney general to appoint interim U.S. attorneys without Senate oversight.

Indeed, Parsky was on board with the Thomas O'Brien appointment, according to the recent LA Times article. Until it all fell through.

What the hell's going on here? Why is it so important to keep George Cardona in the Los Angeles USA seat, in defiance of a law passed by over 85% of Congress? Does this have to do with investigations of members of Congress like Lewis (and, potentially, Ken Calvert)? Will there be an effort to suppress the vote in the extremely ethnically diverse region, and must Cardona be the point person for that? It's very, very curious.

Pass the Republican Memory Loss Act of 2007

People laugh, but I think we have a real epidemic here. Whether from vitamin deficiency, a chromosomal imbalance, or too much time spent arguing that the estate tax affects small farms, Republicans are losing their memories left and right, and we simlpy have to do something about it.

I propose a landmark mental health initiative, offered in the Congress, called the "Republican Memory Loss Act of 2007," which would provide $50 million dollars of federal funding into research and development for the National Institute for Health, to determine just what happens when Republicans are forced to testify before Congress or a grand jury and suddenly lose all recollection of their work.

Poor Hans von Spakovsky, for example, simply can't remember his entire tenure in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

Another former Justice Department lawyer went before Congress on Wednesday with few answers for his Democratic interrogators and a spotty memory.

Hans von Spakovsky, who's seeking a full six-year term on the Federal Election Commission, deflected questions about whether he undermined voting rights laws, saying, "I was not the decision maker in the front office of the Civil Rights Division."

Time and again during his confirmation hearing, he cited either the attorney-client privilege or a cloudy memory for his purported role in restricting minorities' voting rights.

Von Spakovsky couldn't remember blocking an investigation into complaints that a Minnesota Republican official was discriminating against Native American voters before the 2004 election.

Under oath, he also said he didn't recall seeing data from the state of Georgia that would have undercut a push by senior officials within the Civil Rights Division to approve the state's tough new law requiring photo IDs of all voters. The data showed that 300,000 Georgia voters lacked driver's licenses. A federal judge later threw out the law as unconstitutional.

He just doesn't remember, guys. You wouldn't throw your dear old grandmother in jail just because she doesn't remember anything from her days as a flapper girl in the 1920s. And we shouldn't be doing the same with Republicans. They aren't cynically pretending to forget to wiggle out of their legal troubles. They have a disease.

Like poor Lurita Doan who has searched and searched her memory about a meeting with the GSA exhorting them to use the office to help Republican candidates in 2006, and could only remember that there were cookies at the meeting. Now, if she were Proust, that rememberance of madeleines would have set off a rich tapestry of rememberances of things past. But she's not, she's a Republican afflicted with this scourge of memory loss.

Chairman Waxman: “At our March hearing, you repeatedly claimed you could not recall any information about the January 26, 2007 meeting or the White House political presentation, and you had absolutely no memory of asking GSA employees how they could help Republican candidates in upcoming elections. That’s what you told us. We questioned you over and over again. You remember there were cookies, you remembered you came in late, you remembered that some employees didn’t attend, but beyond that you said you had no further information. Five weeks later you testified before the Office of Special Counsel and suddenly you had a new enriched details about the meeting and your statements. According to your OSC testimony, you said you asked the White House presenter, how can GSA help its cabinet liaison understand that the opening of the San Francisco federal building would be a perfect event for President Bush to attend. Did you say that to the Office of Special Counsel?”

Doan: “Yes, I believe I did.”

Do you see how this kind of memory loss can spread? Sure, Republicans remember things at just the right time, but in the interim they swim in a sea of unconsciousness, just looking for the one trigger that can bring them back to balance. It's not a life, it's a hellscape.

Just ask the FBI.

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

You think they KNEW they were violating the law 1,000 times when they did it? Of course not! They were just following the dictates of their Republican executive branch masters, who don't have the brain capacity to know the law. And we simply must do something about that.

Steve Benen gives his medical diagnosis.

What is it with Republicans and their memories? Giuliani can’t remember being briefed on Bernie Kerik, Alberto Gonzales can’t remember anything, neither can Kyle Sampson, Lurita Doan doesn’t remember important meetings, and John McCain doesn’t remember his policy positions, Karl Rove doesn’t remember talking to Matt Cooper about Valerie Plame. Scooter Libby doesn’t remember how he learned about Plame’s status at the CIA. Condoleezza Rice doesn’t remember Iran reaching out for diplomatic negotiations with the U.S. in 2003.

These poor folks can’t seem to remember much, can they? Aren’t there memory tricks and/or mnemonic techniques that could give them a hand?

No Steve, it's a disease. And it requires a massive public effort to properly understand and treat it. We have done great things in the medical field over the decades. We stopped polio. We fought smallpox and malaria (not in Africa, of course, but here it's pretty much under control). We have constantly moved forward in innovative ways to halt afflictions once thought incurable. Surely we can lick this terrible scourge that affects 1 in 2 Republicans in Washington.

Lurita Doan is forgetting tenses. Forgetting tenses! She's not going to know how to use a fork by next week! We have to do something! We must pass the Republican Memory Loss Act of 2007 and ensure that the GOP has control of their mental faculties from this point forward. Otherwise, how can we trust them in any position of government?

(Run with this one, Rahm Emanuel, you're just the asshole to actually put this to a vote on the House floor)

The Justice Department Clown Show

Monica Goodling's testimony today, as House Judiciary Chair John Conyers notes, was extremely revelatory on a number of different levels. We now know why she was so keen to receive immunity, because within the first five minutes she admitted that she broke the law by taking political considerations into account while hiring career DoJ officials. She even gave an example of when she blocked the hiring of an assistant US Attorney in DC because he was "too liberal." She used the weasel phrase "I don't believe that I intended to commit a crime," what Tbogg calls the Paris Hilton defense, but Bobby Scott (D-VA) eventually worked the truth out of her.



So we have a hiring manager at the Department of Justice basing her hiring and firing on whether or not an applicant was sufficiently Republican. For good measure, that hiring manager had no experience doing any hiring of any kind, except when she was STUDENT BODY PRESIDENT (yes, she actually said that in testimony).

Goodling also tossed Paul McNulty and Kyle Sampson under the bus, claiming McNulty was inaccurate in statements to Congress and that Sampson knows who put the names on the target list (and she all but came out and said the White House was heavily involved in that). But most damaged by her testimony was the famous Abu G. This sequence with Artur Davis shows that Gonzales lied to Congress on several occasions:

Mr. Davis: Ms. Goodling, General Gonzales testified that he never saw the US Attorneys list, the list of terminated US Attorneys. Is that accurate to your knowledge, Ms. Goodling?

Ms. Goodling: I believe he did see a list.

Mr. Davis: So if General Gonzales testified that he didn’t see the list, you believe that would be inaccurate testimony on his part, don’t you?

Ms. Goodling: Um, I believe he saw the list.

Mr. Davis: So therefore you believe it would be inaccurate testimony?

Ms. Goodling: Yes

Mr. Davis: If General Gonzales testified that he had never been briefed about the list, do you believe that would be accurate or inaccurate testimony?

Ms. Goodling: I believe it would be inaccurate.

Mr. Davis: Are there any other inaccuracies in the testimony that General Gonzales gave the Senate that you are able to share with us?

Ms. Goodling: I don’t know that I saw all of it.

Mr. Davis: Let me help you a little bit with on other one. The Attorney General testified that he was not involved with any discussions of the U.S. Attorney firings. Do you believe that to be accurate or inaccurate?

Ms. Goodling: He was certainly at the November 27th meeting.

Mr. Davis: So you believe that to be another piece of inaccurate testimony, don’t you, Ms. Goodling?

Ms. Goodling: Yes.

But the absolute most damaging bit in the testimony, previously unrevealed, is that Al Gonzales brought Goodling into a meeting in March, when the US Attorneys scandal had already gone public and after Goodling's testimony was requested, and essentially coached her on what her recollections should be. This is classic witness tampering and obstruction of justice.

Describing it as an “uncomfortable” conversation, Goodling claimed that in a personal meeting with Gonzales, he “laid out for me his general recollection…of some of the process…regarding the replacement of the U.S. attorneys.” After he had “laid out a little bit of it,” Gonzales asked Goodling if she “had any reaction to his iteration.” She then added:

I remember thinking at that point that this was something that we were all going to have to talk about, and I didn’t know that it was — I just — I didn’t know that it was maybe appropriate for us to talk about that at that point.

Rep. Arthur Davis (D-AL) asked her if she felt the Attorney General was trying to “shape your recollection,” to which she replied “no.” But Goodling acknowledged she was “uncomfortable” with the conversation.

This is WHY she quit the department, she said. And Rep. Davis was tipped off to talking about this aspect of the case by Goodling's own lawyer, who wanted him to ask those questions. Just last week Gonzales was saying that he was barring himself from talking with other fact witnesses about the case because he didn't want it to seem like he was getting everyone's story straight. This guy is the most brazen liar I've seen since... OK, since the President, I guess, but Abu G's almost worse.

Gonzales and the Justice Department went to the extraordinary step of responding directly to the testimony:

Brian J. Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement that Mr. Gonzales “has never attempted to influence or shape the testimony or public statements of any witness in this matter, including Ms. Goodling. The statements made by the attorney general during this meeting were intended only to comfort her in a very difficult period.“

I'm sure it was comforting for Goodling to hear her superior tell her "This is what you're going to remember, capiche?"

The clown show at the Justice Department just rolls on and on. These were a group of ideologically rigid thugs that used their positions of power to attack Democrats, shield Republicans and suppress the vote, and they would do absolutely anything to keep this information a secret. Hell, Gonzales was interfering in Congressional investigations even AFTER they had the goods on him. Unbelievable.

UPDATE: Leahy:

“It is curious that yet another senior Justice Department official claims to have limited involvement in compiling the list that led to the firings of several well-performing federal prosecutors. What we have heard today seems to reinforce the mounting evidence that the White House was pulling the strings on this project to target certain prosecutors in different parts of the country.

“It is deeply troubling that the crisis of leadership at the Department allowed the White House to wield undue political influence over key law enforcement decisions and policies. It is unacceptable that a senior Justice Department official was allowed to screen career employees for political loyalty, and it confirms our worst fears about the unprecedented and improper reach of politics into the Department’s professional ranks.

Little Landmines

Big news in the US Attorneys case. The great reporter Murray Waas has uncovered that Abu Gonzales gave Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling the power to hire and fire "most non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department." Gonzales really was an absentee figurehead, delegating the responsibility for hiring and firing to two young movement conservative pups who were clearly interested in politicizing the office.

The existence of the order suggests that a broad effort was under way by the White House to place politically and ideologically loyal appointees throughout the Justice Department, not just at the U.S.-attorney level. Department records show that the personnel authority was delegated to the two aides at about the same time they were working with the White House in planning the firings of a dozen U.S. attorneys, eight of whom were, in fact, later dismissed.

A senior executive branch official familiar with the delegation of authority said in an interview that -- as was the case with the firings of the U.S. attorneys and the selection of their replacements -- the two aides intended to work closely with White House political aides and the White House counsel's office in deciding which senior Justice Department officials to dismiss and whom to appoint to their posts. "It was an attempt to make the department more responsive to the political side of the White House and to do it in such a way that people would not know it was going on," the official said.

This would drop little landmines in the Justice Department that would resonate for decades. The Attorney General himself has said he could not keep track of the 100,000 employees who work under him. That was an important nugget of truth, and clearly what the political shop at the White House was counting on. There would be Goodling and Sampson clones subverting the next President on all kinds of issues, particularly (IMO) voting rights issues. They could work that angle for years and not get caught. But the high-profile nature of firing the USAs brought this all crumbling down.

The evidence mounts...

Sen. Domenici, If We Could Have A Word

The Senate Ethics Committee practically doesn't even exist, but what Sen. Domenici did to David Iglesias was so egregious that even this all-but-defunct body is opening an investigation:

The Senate, thanks a resolution it just adopted, has confirmed that Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) is the subject of "preliminary inquiry" over his involvement in the firing of former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias.

The Senate just adopted a resolution (S. Res. 153) stating that "for matters before the Select Committee on Ethics involving the preliminary inquiry arising in connection with alleged communications by persons within the committee's jurisdiction with and concerning David C. Iglesias, then United States Attorney for the District of New Mexico, and the subsequent action by the committee with respect to that matter, if any, the Senator from Colorado (Mr. Salazar) shall be replaced by the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Brown)."

Salazar is personal friends with Patricia Madrid, who was running for the seat occupied by Rep. Heather Wilson that Domenici attempted to insert himself into by calling Iglesias and pressuring him to bring about Democratic indictments. So that's why he recused himself. Which is a heck of a lot more honorable than what Domenici appears to have done. We'll see what happens here.

Indeed, the Judiciary Committees are moving on a number of fronts with regard to USA-gate. The Justice Department failed to comply with a subpoena from the House for various documents, so now John Conyers is considering legal options. Conyers is also warning the RNC not to let the White House review emails the committee has requested related to the case. And COnyers wants to speak with a variety of sitting USAs, including the infamous Rachel Paulose and Mary Beth Buchanan, USA for Pittsburgh, who may be more deeply involved in the case than anyone suspected:

The Justice Department consulted with U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan in Pittsburgh when it was drawing up a list of prosecutors to be fired, a former top aide to the attorney general told investigators, and now a House committee wants to interview her.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, told Senate investigators Sunday that Buchanan was one of the senior officials he consulted about which U.S. attorneys should be asked to resign, according to a Senate Judiciary Committee aide who read a transcript of the interview. The aide requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

At the time she was consulted, Buchanan was also serving as director of an office that provides administrative support to U.S. attorneys -- a job she had from June 2004 until June 2005.

Buchanan is already under suspicion for prosecuting an inordinate amount of Democrats in her jurisdiction.

There are a lot of phones ringing off a lot of hooks in Republican law firms tonight.

Stop The Insanity

The Gonzales testimony has been moved to Thursday. If the Attorney General had any sense, he'd resign between now and then. Because it's not going to go well. Abu G has clearly lied to Congress, it's going to be nearly impossible for him to unshit the bed.

WASHINGTON, April 16 — The former top aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has told Congressional investigators that Mr. Gonzales was “inaccurate,” or “at least not complete” in asserting that he had no role in the deliberations about individual United States attorneys who were later dismissed, a Democratic senator said Monday [...]

In his interview, Mr. Sampson said under oath that Mr. Gonzales took part in discussions last fall about David C. Iglesias, who was removed as the United States attorney in New Mexico, as well as in a June 2006 meeting that addressed concerns about Carol C. Lam, the United States attorney ousted from her job in San Diego, said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. Mr. Sampson made similar statements in public testimony to the Judiciary Committee on March 29, but appeared to offer more specifics in the interview.

Gonzales' alibi for this, seriously, is that he doesn't remember the conversation and only recalled it "based on what others had told him, not his own memory."

If this is the kind of crackerjack logic we can expect on Thursday, honestly we should just dispense with the hearing and move right on to the confirmation for the new Attorney General. Top conservatives have abandoned Abu G. Dick Cheney won't even go to bat for him. Paul McNulty, one of his senior deputies, is putting out job feelers. The guy in charge of all the US Attorneys, the one who actually executed the firings, Michael Battle, told Congress that there were no performance problems which motivated the firings.

I mean, if this was a fight, it'd be called.

And the most damning bit of information that's come out recently is today's McClatchy article, because it again implicates the President as being involved in the decision-making process:

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Gonzales' former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, told congressional investigators on Sunday that Gonzales remembered talking to Bush last October about concerns with then-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico.

Iglesias was forced out last December. While the White House has said Bush passed along complaints to Gonzales last October about voter fraud in three states, including New Mexico, the White House cast it as a broad conversation, not a discussion about an individual.

Gonzales has maintained that he doesn't recall the conversation with Bush - a position contradicted by Sampson's statement to congressional staff.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Monday she knew of no conversation between the president and Gonzales about Iglesias. "The president has a vague recollection" of passing on to the attorney general "complaints he'd been hearing about prosecution of voter fraud cases, including in New Mexico," she said.

And with Monica Goodling likely to get immunity in this case, Gonzales' fate is even more sealed. Of course, he's slowly being turned into a fall guy here, when this appeared to be a policy coming out of Karl Rove's office and not the Justice Department. Alberto Gonzales is a cipher. But he's a lying cipher, and you can't have that person be the nation's top law enforcement official.

US Attorney Scandal Going Faster Than The Speed of Light

The revelations in the past 24 hours have been considerable. To wit:

• According to NPR (via JMM), Karl Rove's plan from the very beginning of the second term was to fire all 93 US Attorneys as a cover for getting rid of the ones he really wanted. I think he could have gotten away with that, too, despite its unprecedented nature. It was the selective firing that raised red flags for me. The plan was dismissed as impractical, and given all of the cases being pursued it probably would be, but to go ahead and fire the ones he wanted anyway without a cover story has led the White House to the mess they are in today.

• As I mentioned briefly yesterday, Kyle Sampson suggested replacements for US Attorneys a full year before they were fired. This is a direct contradiction to his sworn testimony, when he said that the prosecutors were fired without concern for who would succeed them. Gonzales comes out looking bad on this too, as his chief of staff was talking about this for a year, and it's not credible that he wouldn't have known something about it, despite his repeated claim that he was kept in the dark.

• It turns out that Steven Biskupic, the US Attorney for Wisconsin who prosecuted the bogus case against a top aide to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle during the past election year, was indeed targeted for removal by the DoJ at some point, but then was saved for some reason.

Congressional investigators looking into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys saw Wisconsin prosecutor Steven M. Biskupic's name on a list of lawyers targeted for removal when they were inspecting a Justice Department document not yet made public, according to an attorney for a lawmaker involved in the investigation. The attorney asked for anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the investigation.

It wasn't clear when Biskupic was added to a Justice Department hit list of prosecutors, or when he was taken off, or whether those developments were connected to the just-overturned corruption case.

Nevertheless, the disclosure aroused investigators' suspicion that Biskupic might have been retained in his job because he agreed to prosecute Democrats, though the evidence was slight. Such politicization of the administration of justice is at the heart of congressional Democrats' concerns over the Bush administration's firings of the U.S. attorneys.

It's clear that the narrative that Rove and the Republicans have been developing about voter fraud centered on Milwaukee, and Biskupic's reluctance to prosecute those cases clearly left him vulnerable. So it appears he ramped up the Georgia Thompson case as a means to prove he could play ball.

• The Justice Department included membership in the far-right Federalist Society as a criterion for evaluating the US Attorneys. Those with membership in the Society remained in place.

• Regarding the amazing vanishing emails, the White House will let the Senate send in a cleaner to find them, but has not yet agreed to let the Senate see any of the emails once they're found. Meanwhile Karl Rove's lawyer is admitting that some of the lost emails include those written by Rove in 2003 which would have been central to the CIA Leak Investigation. Emptywheel has much more on that. And Henry Waxman wants documents and missing emails related to the Bush Administration's financial deals with MZM, the company that bribed Duke Cunningham (bringing this full circle, since Carol Lam was the former USA who prosecuted that case).

That's a LOT for 24 hours. I think this missing email thing set off a real firestorm within the press, at least. It was such a demonstrably lame excuse, so redolent of the 18-minute gap in the Watergate tapes, that it simply didn't pass the smell test. And this document dump has already revealed a lot. Under every rock there's some more dirt. It's nuts.

Ooh, Alberto

One thing you gotta give to Abu Gonzales: he's a fighter.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has retreated from public view this week in an intensive effort to save his job, spending hours practicing testimony and phoning lawmakers for support in preparation for pivotal appearances in the Senate this month, according to administration officials.

After struggling for weeks to explain the extent of his involvement in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, Gonzales and his aides are viewing the Senate testimony on April 12 and April 17 as seriously as if it were a confirmation proceeding for a Supreme Court or a Cabinet appointment, officials said.

Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, and Timothy E. Flanigan, who worked for Gonzales at the White House, have met with the attorney general to plot strategy. The department has scheduled three days of rigorous mock testimony sessions next week and Gonzales has placed phone calls to more than a dozen GOP lawmakers seeking support, officials said.

I would suggest that this kind of intense lobbying and preparation is kind of a disqualification in and of itself. If you have to take off time from your job and spend weeks coming up with an explanation of why you should keep it, you probably shouldn't have it in the first place.

Of course, Abu G didn't want it this way. He wanted to testify immediately... I mean, as soon as Kyle Sampson did, anyway:

The White House said Monday that Gonzales' testimony cannot come too fast for the besieged attorney general to explain his explanations about the firings that Democrats contend were politically motivated.

"Look, the attorney general thinks it's in everyone's best interest — and we agree with him — that he be able to get up and talk to Congress sooner than later," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

"I think the American people would like to see us resolve this, so that we can move on and work on other things. So we'd like to see the hearing moved up to next week," Perino said.

Of course, the Attorney General stonewalled the committee for weeks until he had some discrepancies to clean up from the Sampson hearing. And if the White House and the Justice Department really wanted this to go away, they'd compel Monica Goodling to testify instead of pleading the Fifth, which apparently is happening because of Goodling's role at the DoJ:

As White House liaison, Goodling was part of a small cadre of senior Justice officials responsible for vetting U.S. Attorneys, a position that became far more significant after the 2006 reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, which gave Justice authority to install interim U.S. Attorneys without congressional approval. She played a central role in the appointment of her one-time boss J. Timothy Griffin, who replaced ousted U.S. Attorney H.E. "Bud" Cummins III in Arkansas. Beyond that, she wielded significant power in determining which U.S. Attorneys would go -- or stay [...]

Interviews for U.S. Attorney replacements took place with only a handful of people: David Margolis, the department's top-ranking career official and a 40-plus year veteran; a member of the White House Counsel's Office; the head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys; and Goodling.

Charles Miller, whom Gonzales appointed as interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, interviewed with the panel in the fall of 2005. "They asked me what I'd done to support the president," Miller says. It wasn't a question Miller expected. He told them he'd voted for Bush.

But a former prosecutor who did not get a U.S. Attorney post was left with a sour feeling after his interview in 2006. "Monica was in charge, in essence, of the interview," recalls the former supervisory assistant U.S. Attorney. "I walked out of that room and thought, 'Wow, I've just run into a buzz saw.'"

If Goodling was using political tests for jobs at the Justice Department, she was violating federal law. The House Judiciary Committee has looked at her request to take the Fifth and deemed it without merit.

"We are concerned that several of the asserted grounds for refusing to testify do not satisfy the well-established bases for a proper invocation of the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination," the two Democrats on the Judiciary Committee wrote. "The Fifth Amendment privilege, under long-standing Supreme Court precedents, does not provide a reason to fail to appear to testify; the privilege must be invoked by the witness on a question-by-question basis." [...]

"The fact that a few Senators and Members of the House have expressed publicly their doubts about the credibility of the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General in their representations to Congress about the U.S. Attorneys' termination does not in any way excuse your client from answering questions honestly and to the best of her ability," Conyers and Sánchez explained.

The more information that the respective Judiciary Committees can get from Goodling and the several other DoJ officials who testified behind closed doors late last week, the more informed they can be in hearings with Gonzales. Emptywheel thinks that Abu G was trying to move up his testimony before the Congress got any of this information. But there's little chance of that now (except for holding off Goodling), and so he's going to war with the evidence they have. And despite his lobbying efforts, Gonzales doesn't even have the support of his own party:

Several House Republicans are scoffing at Justice Department assertions that a principal reason for several of the dismissals was that the lawyers were not aggressively prosecuting immigration violations.

"It stretches anybody's credibility to suggest that this administration would have retaliated against U.S. attorneys for not enforcing immigration laws," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican, told The Washington Times. "This administration itself is so lax in its attitude towards immigration laws and controlling the border."

Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, said he didn't think immigration cases had "a single thing to do with" the firings.

"I really just think it was political -- filling political jobs with political appointees," said Mr. Tancredo, who is running for president mostly on his stand against illegal aliens.

An aide to House Republican leadership agreed that the Justice Department's explanation for the firings is hard to believe.

"I don't think Republicans buy that," said the aide.

In the meantime, with everyone against him, Gonzales trains... and waits. As Paul Kiel said, you can almost hear "Eye of the Tiger" playing in the background.

Sampson Wrap-Up

Other Senators beyond the Whitehouse got some excellent information out of Kyle Sampson in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee today. Here's a wrap-up:

• Sampson admitted to Sen. Durbin that he brought up firing Patrick Fitzgerald, and was met with cold stares by the principals.

"On one occasion in 2006, in discussing the removal of U.S. attorneys... that I was speaking with Harriet Miers and Bill Kelley and I raised Pat Fitzgerald, and immediately after I did it, I regretted it. I thought, I knew it was the wrong thing to do, I knew it was inappropriate. And I remember at the time that Harriet Miers and Bill Kelley just looked at me.... I said, "Patrick Fitzgerald could be added to this list."... They just looked at me."

Ya gotta admit, this guy's honest. This almost implicates Gonzales and Miers and Rove MORE, because it's clear that they knew there was a line they couldn't cross, that Fitzgerald was the gold standard and eliminating him in the middle of the Libby trial would set off a firestorm. You can credibly inference, then, the fact that they did essentially the same thing to those who had a lower profile than Fitz.

• Carol Lam was so bad at proseucting immigration cases that she received a special commendation from US Customs and Border Protection for her work on the issue. What's more, Sampson admitted that nobody at DoJ talked to Lam about her relative success or failure on border issues:



Are they so incompetent at DoJ that they'd just fire someone without giving them a chance to reverse what they considered a troubling trend? Or is this a complete red herring, initiated by a planted story from Rep. Darrell Issa that appears to have violated House ethics rules.

(Meanwhile, this didn't come out in the hearing, but the FBI station chief in San Diego, who publicly stated that Lam's firing would jeopardized ongoing investigations and received a rebuke from Kyle Sampson for those remarks, announced his retirement today.)

• Sampson also essentially called the entire mess a PR problem and really only admitted that the wrongdoing was not the firing itself, but how it was handled. This was expected, but Sen. Cardin's look of incredulity at this was priceless.

Overall, I think that today's testimony was more revelatory than I expected, as well as more harmful. Sampson came off as a true believer, and of course he evaded here and there, but I honestly saw him as fairly sincere when talking about discussions with other staff. He's drank the Kool-Aid on this thing and obviously put up the firewall (a self-immolating one) on whether or not these attorneys were fired for purely political reasons, but on other subjects I think he came off as somewhat credible. And that spells doom for Gonzales.

Shut 'Er Down

Wow, I stepped offline for a few, and apparently this happened.

2:25 Update: Sen. Leahy interrupts Grassley to say, "we've just recevied word that the Republicans have objected under the Senate rules to this meeting continuing. I think that's unfortunate, but I will follow the rules of the Senate... The Republicans are the ones who don't want to have the hearings, the Republicans have the right under the rules to do that.... we will stand in recess until the Senate recesses."

And then it was almost immediately reversed. But clearly the instinct was to shut 'er down, that Sampson was killing the cover story, that he was sealing Gonzales' fate, that he was giving up too much.

Democrats probably straightened them out with a simple "Do you really want to go to bat for this White House?"

And they fell in line.

Kudos to the Whitehouse

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has not been a major figure in the US Attorney scandal, but he did the best job today in the Judiciary Committee hearing with former Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson. In fact, he was the only one that got any news out of him:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and President Bush's former counsel approved the firings of eight federal prosecutors, Gonzales' one-time chief of staff told the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday.

"I and others made staff recommendations but they were approved and signed off on by the principals," Kyle Sampson said, referring to Gonzales and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers.

Responding to questions from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., Sampson rejected the notion that the dismissals were ordered by young or inexperienced Justice Department officials.

"The decision makers in this case were the attorney general and the counsel to the president," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And the way in which Whitehouse got this information out was great.

He started by asking if there was a file about this plan to fire these federal prosecutors (this is a rough transcript):

SW: When you were in charge of this project, did you keep a file, on this project?

KS: I think it would be too much to say that I kept a file. In my lower right hand desk drawer I kept the charts that I referred to in answering Senator's Harden's question. It was just sort of a drop file that was changed in and out. I think in looking back and reviewing the documents in preparation for this testimony, I see there were a lots of lists at different times, but as I say to Seantory Cronyrn, I didn't keep one list.

SW: But, did you keep one file where you kept information related to this project?

KS: Again, just sort of a drop file in my lower right hand desk drawer.

SW: Did somebody else keep it for you?

KS: Uh, no. Uh, There really was no file...there really was no documation of this, it was an aggregation of views. Various lists and notes at different points in time. AS the process finalized in the fall of 2006, it became a little more formalized, but only in the sense that we were working in the SR. leadership of the Dept to finalize the list.

SW: So, this was a project that you were in charge of...this was a project that lasted for 2 years....this was a project that would end the careers of 8 United States Attorneys and neither you nor anybody reporting to you kept a specific file in your office about it?

Sampson fought back on that, claiming that it didn't end the careers of the USAs, but the damage was done. He was put on the defensive. And Whitehouse was building the case of giving Sampson two bad choices: either there was a file that investigators maybe haven't seen, or this situation was done with such a cavalier attitude that they didn't even bother to make it in any way official. Sampson went with the half-answer "drop file." But it looked evasive, and was a disappointing answer on both counts.

Whitehouse then asked some basic facts about how the Justice Department handles witnesses who take the 5th Amendment, things you would expect senior officials in the DoJ to know, and Sampson had no clue about any of them. Again, he was building to his ultimate question.

And then, Whitehouse asked how many cases Sampson and Monica Goodling have ever worked on. Sampson mentioned a couple cases he helped with, and didn't know about Goodling. Whitehouse then cut to the chase; he expressed his concern that these major decisions about firings were being made by people with such inexperience. This set Sampson right on his heels, put him on the defensive, and forced him to defend the process and get himself out of repsonsibility at the same time. So he extracted the answer from Sampson, that this was Gonzales and Miers' deal, without having to say it himself, which was much more powerful.

And on follow-up, Sampson said, "You'll have to ask the principals." Which includes the White House counsel, who the WH won't allow to testify. So Sampson's essentially agreed that invoking executive privilege will obstruct the investigation.

A masterful performance. One I would expect from a former prosecutor.

Sampson's Up

Specter is questioning him right now. He's now claiming that Iglesias was added "to the list" in mid-October even though nothing pops up in the documents until November 7.

This guy is a true believer, and he's sinking the whole boat here.

Specter is now asking about the provision in the Patriot Act that his deputy slipped in! No mention of that, however, just the DoJ's use of it. "That was a bad idea by the staff that was not adopted by the principals. I made that recommendation at one point, but it was rejected by the Attorney General." There's no record of this, of course, and indeed the provision was adopted. I guess the staff runs the show.

Schumer's up now. This is too fun.

UPDATE: Did you know that they're running attack ads against David Iglesias in New Mexico? And that they're funded by top funders of Heather Wilson, it appears? Wow, these guys will slander anyone to keep power.

UPDATE II: Sampson just got caught big-time. He just essentially admitted that Gonzales lied to Congress, to add to the admissions that he lied to the press and to the public.

UPDATE III: Feinstein is going to be ruthless here. She's going after Sampson on the Dusty Foggo/Brent Wilkes/Carol Lam issue. Sampson's still claiming that "the real problem we have right now" with Carol Lam is her failure to prosecute immigration cases. And yet Feinstein read the Moschella letter right to him moments before. He's saying that the California House Republicans were critical of Carol Lam. No kidding, they included Duke Cunningham and Jerry Lewis!!!

Now Sampson's admitting that he tried to keep an FBI agent quiet about Carol Lam's resignation and her impact in ongoing investgations. Wow, he's just a true believer.

Rush on Popcorn in Liberal Enclaves

Kyle Sampson is tesifying tomorrow in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he's going to tell the Senators, essentially, yeah, the US Attorneys were fired for political reasons, what's it to you?"

Eight federal prosecutors were fired last year because they did not sufficiently support President Bush's priorities, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' former chief of staff says in remarks prepared for delivery Thursday to Congress.

"The distinction between 'political' and 'performance-related' reasons for removing a United States attorney is, in my view, largely artificial," said Kyle Sampson.

The aide, who quit because of the furor over the firings, is to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. A copy of his prepared remarks was obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.

"A U.S. attorney who is unsuccessful from a political perspective … is unsuccessful," Sampson said.

I think I know what Sampson is trying to get at, but this is just terrible spin. He's peddling a viewpoint that has been totally discredited by everybody in government. You can't use the Justice Department as a proxy for the Republican National Committee, period. US Attorneys serve the President but they also serve the law, and when they're asked to investigate bogus claims of voter fraud to specifically target Democrats, or when they're asked to prosecute more Democrats and shield Republicans, that's simply territory which is forbidden.

Of course, Sampson has apparently already lied to Congress once, so why should he care about peddling this nonsense on his return trip?

The Justice Department turned over yet more documents to Congress today -- documents which seem to show that Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson was responsible for misleading Congress about Karl Rove's role in replacing a U.S. attorney.

On February 23, acting Assistant Attorney General wrote Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and other senators in response to questions about the appointment of Timothy Griffin, a former aide to Rove. In the letter, Hertling stated "The Department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin."

But emails subsequently released by the Justice Department showed that wasn't the case. Last December, for example, Sampson wrote in an email that Griffin's appointment was "important to Harriet, Karl, etc." Other emails showed that Rove's deputy had been intimately involved in the effort to get Griffin installed as the U.S. Attorney in Eastern Arkansas.

There's another email where Sampson suggests that a letter which references Rove "to [the White House Counsel's Office] today for their review," further implicating their involvement.

And in a related story, Rove is mentioned in a curious thank-you note from Sen. Pete Domenici's chief of staff:

“Thanks for everything,” Domenici chief of staff Steve Bell wrote Rove and two other White House officials, including Rove’s political deputy, Scott Jennings, in a Jan. 8, 2007 e-mail that forwarded the name of a candidate to replace Iglesias.

It's more than curious that new documents came out TODAY impeaching Sampson's prior testimony, the day before he is set to testify again. Clearly there's a siege mentality at the Department of Justice right now. Steve Benen says "it's open warfare over there" with all the top staffers turning on one another. Paul McNulty is blaming Monica "I plead the Fifth because I was intimately involved with this whole thing and I'd have to lie to you if I testified" Goodling. Gonzales is trying to blame Sampson, and he's running away from reporters who seek to ask him about the scandal. This document dump is of a piece of the open warfare. And Sampson appears to be less pissed off with Gonzales than just thick-headed about what is allowable and unethical in the Justice Department. But his obstinacy is about to blow the whole cover story.

Tomorrow's gonna be FUN.

More Soft Underbelly in the USA Scandal

Josh Marshall delivers some knowledge about Mitchell Wade, a defense contractor and Duke Cunningham briber whose first contract in government was to screen the President's mail for anthrax, despite having no real expertise in that arena.

This is a known briber receiving a sweetheart contract from the Executive Office of the President. And who's in the middle of it? John Doolittle and his wife. Mitchell Wade and Brent Wilkes worked closely together to bribe or otherwise give recompense to Duke Cunningham in exchange for contracts. They appear to have done something similar with Doolittle.

Julie Doolittle was working at (Ed) Buckham's offices in 2002 when Buckham introduced Brent Wilkes to her husband. Federal contracts for his flagship company, ADCS Inc., were drying up, partly because the Pentagon had been telling Congress it had little need for the company's document-scanning technology. So Wilkes was trying to get funding for two new businesses.

One was tied to the 2002 anthrax scare, when tainted letters were sent to Capitol Hill. Wilkes' idea was to have all Capitol Hill mail rerouted to a site in the Midwest, where ADCS employees wearing protective suits would scan it into computers and then e-mail it back to Washington.

He called his proposed solution MailSafe – similar to the names of several anti-anthrax companies launched at that time – and began vying for federal contracts, even though the company had little to its name other than a rudimentary Web site.

The House Administration Committee, on which Doolittle sat, oversees the congressional mail system. Doolittle told his colleagues about MailSafe and introduced them to Wilkes, but the project never got off the ground.

The project failed in the House Administration Committee but succeeded in the White House. The question is, did Doolittle have a role in introducing executive staffers to Wade and Wilkes? Did he receive any financial reward?

And the larger question, of course, is the fact that there are documented instances of Doolittle receiving money in contributions from Brent Wilkes, if not Wade. When Carol Lam opened her investigation into Wilkes and Dusty Foggo in May 2006, Doolittle was clearly likely to be implicated in that chain if the matter was investigated closely enough. And right at that time, the Justice Department made a deal to deny Lam resources and keep her on "a short leash." While she was able to indict Wilkes and Foggo, the investigation never went any further, and Lam was fired.

Two weeks after then-U.S. Attorney Carol Lam ordered a raid on the home and offices of a former CIA official last year – a search prompted by her investigation of now-imprisoned former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham – higher-ups at the Justice Department privately questioned whether they should give her more money and manpower.

“There are good reasons not to provide extensive resources to (Lam),” Bill Mercer, acting associate attorney general, wrote to Kyle Sampson, who was chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales until he resigned a couple of weeks ago [...]

The day after this Mercer missive, Sampson directed Mercer in an e-mail to have a “heart-to-heart” with Lam about “the urgent need to improve immigration enforcement in San Diego.”

“Put her on a very short leash,” Sampson wrote. “If she balks – or otherwise does not perform in a measurable way by July 15, remove her.”

A month later, Justice Department higher-ups were referring to Lam derisively, saying she “can't meet a deadline” that her production was “hideous” and that she was “sad.”

Five months later, Lam was told she was being fired.

There's good reason to believe that the resources were withheld somewhat deliberately, to make a plausible case that Lam couldn't handle her immigration workload. This is nonsense, and Paul Kiel does an excellent job of calling it nonsense. The truth is that immigration was a red herring; Lam was fired because of her investigations, which (if unchecked) would lead not only into the FBI but into the Executive Office of the President himself, and which would have picked up a lot of Congressional flotsam along the way.

And one of the chief pieces of flotsam was John Doolittle. He has disqualified himself for any future holding of public office. We need to continue to drain this swamp of corrupt sleazebags who view government as their own personal feedbag. Charlie Brown is a man of extreme integrity who would restore honor to that seat in Congress. He deserves our support.

Donate to him.

OK, Time For Abu To Go

Caught in another lie.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales approved plans to fire several U.S. attorneys in a November meeting, according to documents released Friday that contradict earlier claims that he was not closely involved in the dismissals.

The Nov. 27 meeting, in which the attorney general and at least five top Justice Department officials participated, focused on a five-step plan for carrying out the firings of the prosecutors, Justice Department officials said late Friday.

There, Gonzales signed off on the plan, which was crafted by his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson. Sampson resigned last week amid a political firestorm surrounding the firings.

This was sure to come up in Sampson's testimony, which will happen next Thursday. But there probably won't be an Attorney General Gonzales to rat on by then. It's a matter of days for ol' Alberto VO5.

These new emails were in tonight's document dump of emails that fill the 18-day gap, which the DoJ deliberately withheld at first (though they claim it to be an oversight).

With this new information, it's time to stop the negotiating and demand that the White House and the Justice Department come clean. If Karl Rove can talk about the Purged Prosecutors in a public speech, there's no reason he can't talk about them to Congress.

Abu G is gone; if this wasn't a mortal blow, selling out his boss and claiming he shut down the wiretap investigation did him in. Just like a cornered animal, turning on his friends.

Now the attention turns to Karl Rove, who undoubtedly played a major role in this whole thing. The very odea of politicizing the Justice Department, of using the federal prosecutors as a means to shield Republicans and attack Democrats, the idea of turning policy into politics, emanates perfectly from Rove's lips. So do the after-the-fact accusations that the fired prosecutors weren't doing enough to investigate bogus voter fraud issues, something that anyone who reads Digby knows that Rover's been pushing for a while. And McClatchy pushes this angle too, and uncovering this rock reveals something extremely unseemly underneath.

Bush, his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, and other Republican political advisers have highlighted voting rights issues and what Rove has called the "growing problem" of election fraud by Democrats since Bush took power in the tumultuous election of 2000, a race ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Since 2005, McClatchy Newspapers has found, Bush has appointed at least three U.S. attorneys who had worked in the Justice Department's civil rights division when it was rolling back longstanding voting-rights policies aimed at protecting predominantly poor, minority voters.

Another newly installed U.S. attorney, Tim Griffin in Little Rock, Ark., was accused of participating in efforts to suppress Democratic votes in Florida during the 2004 presidential election while he was a research director for the Republican National Committee. He's denied any wrongdoing [...]

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

Last April, while the Justice Department and the White House were planning the firings, Rove gave a speech in Washington to the Republican National Lawyers Association. He ticked off 11 states that he said could be pivotal in the 2008 elections. Bush has appointed new U.S. attorneys in nine of them since 2005: Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico. U.S. attorneys in the latter four were among those fired.

Rove thanked the audience for "all that you are doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the integrity of the ballot is protected." He added, "A lot in American politics is up for grabs." [...]

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

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

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

This is about more than firing a few US Attorneys. This is about subverting American democracy in a very precise way. It's all crumbling down now, but Democrats must not waver, must overturn every single rock to find the truth. Abu G's already a goner. It's time to get to the bottom of the real scandal.

Prosecutor Purge Update

I'm a little disappointed that my moniker of "Iglesiasgate" didn't take off - put then, the US Attorney scandal ended up moving past just David Iglesias, so it was not in the cards. But nevertheless, I'll soldier on and report developments in the scandal:

• Three of the fired prosecutors - David Iglesias, Carol Lam, and Paul Charlton - were ranked in the top 10 of all US Attorneys in number of convictions. Not surprisingly, these are arguably the three most controversial firings.

• While the Senate approved subpoenas for Karl Rove and other White House officials, Patrick Leahy has just about nailed down Kyle Sampson to voluntarily testify next week. This would be a very big hearing to follow, because Sampson is none too happy with being made the fall guy by the Justice Department. I would imagine he will lash out if given the opportunity. Chuck Schumer gave a preview of this last Sunday on Meet The Press, so it's not a big surprise.

• The D-Trip has run its first ad of 2008, and it's about Iglesiasgate, slamming Rep. Heather Wilson for her role in calling Iglesias and pressuring him to indict local Democrats before Election Day. There's plenty of time, but my sense is that Wilson is toast next year.

• One interesting thing about this scandal is how it has highlighted the continuing politicization of the Justice Department under Bush. These things were all happening in an obvious fashion anyway, but seeing that the DoJ would fire prosecutors who wouldn't play ball has put this in stark relief. And it's allowed journalists to view the DoJ's activities through this frame. There's the mysterious downgrading of the landmark class action lawsuit against tobacco companies, where the cash award sought suddenly went from $130 billion to $10 billion. And there's federal prosecutors seeking to reduce Jack Abramoff's prison sentence because of his cooperation with ongoing corruption cases, allegedly. The Abramoff story is the perfect example, because normally that wouldn't raise an eyebrow at all. If someone's being that cooperative, you tend to give leniency. But if and when nothing comes from his "assistance," then you know that the DoJ was giving a political favor instead of tracking down further corruption. And frankly, they don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore.

• Great writing about PurgeGate: Josh Marshall:

Okay, enough. The president fired US Attorneys to stymie investigations of Republicans and punish US Attorneys who didn't harass Democrats with bogus voter fraud prosecutions. In the former instance, the evidence remains circumstantial. But in the latter the evidence is clear, overwhelming and undeniable.

Indeed, it is so undeniable the president hismelf does not deny it [...]

Back up a bit from the sparks flying over executive privilege and congressional testimony and you realize that these are textbook cases of the party in power interfering or obstructing the administration of justice for narrowly partisan purposes. It's a direct attack on the rule of law.

This much is already clear in the record. And we're now having a big public debate about the politics for each side if the president tries to obstruct the investigation and keep the truth from coming out. The contours and scope of executive privilege is one issue, and certainly an important one. But in this case it is being used as no more than a shield to keep the full extent of the president's perversion of the rule of law from becoming known.

• More great writing: Sidney Blumenthal in Salon.

The man Bush has nicknamed "Fredo," the weak and betraying brother of the Corleone family, is, unlike Fredo, a blind loyalist, and will not be dispatched with a shot to the back of the head in a rowboat on the lake while reciting his Ave Maria. (Is Bush aware that Colin Powell refers to him as "Sonny," after the hothead oldest son?) But saving "Fredo" doesn't explain why Bush is willing to risk a constitutional crisis. Why is Bush going to the mattresses against the Congress? What doesn't he want known?

In the U.S. attorneys scandal, Gonzales was an active though second-level perpetrator. While he gave orders, he also took orders. Just as his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, has resigned as a fall guy, so Gonzales would be yet another fall guy if he were to resign. He was assigned responsibility for the purge of U.S. attorneys but did not conceive it. The plot to transform the U.S. attorneys and ipso facto the federal criminal justice system into the Republican Holy Office of the Inquisition had its origin in Karl Rove's fertile mind.

How little self-respect do you have to have to allow yourself to be nicknamed "Fredo"?

• Tony Snow continued his reign of embarrassment as White House press secretary by claiming, on numerous occasions today, that Congress "doesn't have oversight ability over the White House," which came as news to the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. This is the kind of argument that's so much bullshit that you almost start clapping at the audacity of it all.

• And finally: this may be the craziest aspect of this entire story. Brett Tolman, then a staffer for Sen. Arlen Specter, was apparently responsible for slipping the provision into the PATRIOT Act that allowed the Justice Department to appoint replacement US Attorneys without Senate confirmation. Funny story... turns out that he's now the US Attorney for Utah.

Schumer twists the knife

Chuck Schumer did a very smart thing on Meet The Press this morning. I wish I had the transcript, but essentially he intimated that Kyle Sampson was ready to come forward voluntarily to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee. That has to be freaking out everybody in the White House.

We know that Sampson "resigned" his post as Abu G.'s chief of staff but was given a new office and basically hidden away on the Justice Department payroll, in what I would term a kind of witness protection program. The problem was that Abu G and the other DoJ officials were all too willing to let him be the fall guy for this entire episode. Not only did Gonzales say that Sampson gave incomplete information to the Congress, but today Newsweek reports deputies Paul McNulty and William Moschella laying the blame at Sampson's feet.

...a pair of senior Justice officials gave accounts to lawmakers that were, at best, incomplete. At a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, William Moschella, a top aide to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, vigorously defended the firings of the U.S. attorneys as a purely managerial move that had originated within the Justice Department. He said nothing about any nudging from the White House. McNulty had earlier given similar testimony, saying the attorneys had been let go for "job performance" reasons, an assertion that infuriated the fired prosecutors. But the two Justice officials have told colleagues that when they saw the e-mail accounts showing the attorney-purge idea had originated in the White House, they were surprised and appalled. "I felt sick," Moschella told NEWSWEEK. "I basically saw my professional life flash before my eyes." Moschella and McNulty blamed [Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle] Sampson. The attorney general's chief of staff had sat in as they prepped for their testimony and "never said a word," according to a Justice Department official who wished to remain anonymous discussing a private meeting.

Sampson, the guy who was being groomed for Karl Rove's job, isn't about to be outflanked. And so he has fought back with statements of his own that distribute the blame right back to Moschella and McNulty and Abu G.

Schumer is smartly inserting himself into what blueness termed a "ratfight." By stating publicly that Sampson has contacted the Senate Judiciary committee and may be willing to come forward, he sends an ominous message to both DoJ and the White House. Sampson testifying to Moschella and McNulty's role in lying to Congress will be devastating for them and for their boss, as it suggests that there was deliberate intent to mislead Congress about the true nature of the USA firings. But Sampson was also the liaison, going back two years, between the DoJ and the White House. He's involved in emails with Miers. He's involved in emails with Rove. He wrote the White House about the strategy to "gum to death" the process for finding a replacement for USA of Arkansas Bud Cummins, so that former Rove oppo research guy Tim Griffin could stay in the position without Senate confirmation, presumably throughout the rest of Bush's term. (As a side note, while Griffin has stated publicly he would step down, he's offered to remain on until a replacement is found, and the DoJ is dragging their feet in doing so).

This puts a lot of pressure on the White House to let Miers and Rove testify, and for them to release more potentially incriminating documents. They'd rather not have Sampson set the agenda for the Judiciary Committee and the nation. He would be very likely to assign blame to Justice Department officials and the key White House figures as well. And if Rove, Miers et al. continued to refuse to testify, he'd have the platform all to himself.

By subtly putting out this information on Meet the Press, Schumer is indirectly compelling Miers and Rove to testify, as a pre-emptive strike to defend themselves against Kyle Sampson. I suspect that Sampson does want to testify, as he seems ambitious and probably feels scapegoated and wants to pull an Ollie North. It's the way in which Schumer let this information out that really adds to the pressure on everyone involved in this scandal.

Shorter Right-Wing Blogosphere

"Rotation in office is the same as firing people for refusing to use their power to shield Republicans and indict Democrats."

Lemme 'splain. No, let Kyle Sampson 'splain, after all, he's the one that orchestrated this purge:

...once confirmed by the Senate and appointed,U.S. 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 U.S. Attorneys they had appointed whose terms had expired, but instead permitted those U.S. Attorneys to serve indefinitely under the holdover provision. (Underscoring in original.)

Clinton removed all the US Attorneys and replaced them with his own because that's kind of what you do when you're the President. He didn't keep on Dick Cheney as Secretary of Defense either. And I might add, Clinton got Senate confirmation for each and every one of those prosecutors.

Removing all of the attorneys at the close of the first term would have been unprecedented, but fine. Writing up an enemies list, and picking off those attorneys who aren't sufficiently perverting justice by using their offices as an arm of the Republican Party, that's a whole other kettle of fish.

(Incidentally, good for Jay Carney for admitting that he was completely wrong about this scandal from the beginning and that the blogosphere "was the engine on this story." Unlike the pundit class in Washington, we don't give the team who has systematically trashed the Constitution and destroyed any sense of justice and fairness in the political system the benefit of the doubt)

Funniest Line Of The Day

It's a tie between the unintentional irony of Chuck Schumer:

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.

Harriet Miers couldn't mastermind a game of Mastermind. She was doing her boss' bidding.

The other line of the day, as a corollary to above, is from Thers:

I think it's horrible how these lower-level flunkies keep ruining the administration's reputation through their reckless carrying out of orders.

Heh indeedy.

By the way, here's one of the more damning documents to be dumped today, detailing the attorneys who are "in the process of being pushed out," Sampson's words.

I am only in favor of executing on a plan to push some USAs out if we really are ready and willing to put in the time necessary to select candidates and get them appointed -- it will be counterproductive to DOJ operations if we push USAs out and then don't have replacements ready to roll immediately. In addition, I strongly recommend that, as a matter of policy, we utilize the new statutory provisions that authorize the AG to make USA appointments. [...] By not going the PAS route, we can give far less deference to home-State Senators and thereby get (1) are preferred person appointed and (2) do it far faster and more efficiently, at least cost to the White House.