The Good Shit

While today is in general a shitty day, it's not a total crapout. There have been a few victories of the "cleaning up Bush's mess" stripe.

First, Barack Obama signed an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, a fully paid-for bill that will cover an additional 4 million uninsured kids (11 million will be covered under the program in all). And importantly, he called it a first step to providing comprehensive health care reform.

"As I think everybody here will agree, this is only the first step," Obama said of the bill that reauthorizes the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

"Because the way I see it, providing coverage to 11 million children through CHIP is a down payment on my commitment to cover every single American," he said to applause before turning to the economic recovery bill.

"It won't be easy; it won't happen all at once," Obama said. "But this bill that I'm about to sign, that wasn't easy either."

Next, the Justice Department is righting the biggest wrong of the Monica Goodling era:

Remember Leslie Hagan, who last April was dismissed by Monica Goodling from the Justice Department's Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys because she was rumored to be gay?

Well, the Obama administration has righted that wrong, giving Hagen her job back, reports NPR, which broke the original story of her dismissal.

Hagen served as the liaison between DOJ and the U.S. Attorneys' committee on Native American affairs. In her performance evaluation, she received the highest possible ratings -- "outstanding" -- in each of five categories.

But Goodling, a Christian fundamentalist, heard a rumor that Hagen was gay. So it was curtains for her.

That's just the right thing to do as a matter of human decency. And the thing is, Hagen won the job on the merits, as part of a nationwide search and after several interviews. It's good to see "on the merits" in reference to a political job again.

Finally, Ken Salazar, showing an unusual partisan edge, is reversing oil and gas leases on federal land in Utah:

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is canceling oil and gas leases on 77 parcels of federal land in Utah, according to sources familiar with the decision, ending a fierce battle over whether to allow energy exploration in the environmentally sensitive area.

The Bush administration conducted the lease sale in December, but environmental groups went to court to block the winning bids encompassing roughly 110,000 acres near pristine areas such as Nine Mile Canyon, Arches National Park and Dinosaur National Monument [...]

An Interior spokesman declined to comment on the matter, but several sources familiar with the decision said Salazar planned to announce it today, adding that he can reject the winning bids without a penalty because the transactions had not become final and the department has the discretion to accept or reject lease bids that prevail at a public auction.

This was the auction that environmentalist Tim DeChristopher tried to scuttle by buying up millions of dollars' worth of land without the ability to pay for it. Now he won't need to - Salazar cancelled the leases.

These are all all great accomplishments, but they are all backward-looking, fixing mistakes or realizing long-held goals. The forward-looking stuff is finding a much bumpier road.

Rule Of Law Making A Comeback?

I don't know if this is a trend or not, but when I read this:

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals issued an extremely rare order that the case of Canadian rendition victim Maher Arar would be heard en banc by all of the active judges on the Second Circuit on December 9, 2008. For the court to issue the order sua sponte, that is, of its own accord without either party submitting papers requesting a rehearing, is even more rare.

"We are very encouraged," said CCR attorney Maria LaHood. "For the court to take such extraordinary action on its own indicates the importance the judges place on the case and means that Maher may finally see justice in this country. As the dissenting judge noted, the majority’s opinion gave federal officials the license to 'violate constitutional rights with virtual impunity.' Now the court has the opportunity to uphold the law and hold accountable the U.S. officials who sent Maher to be tortured."...

After nearly two weeks in New York, with access to counsel and the court obstructed, he was flown to Jordan on a chartered jet in the middle of the night and taken by land to Syria. Mr. Arar was tortured, interrogated and kept in a 3x6x7-foot underground cell for a year until the Syrian government, finding no connections to terrorism, released him home to Canada.

...followed by this:

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and embattled former White House liaison Monica Goodling are among those newly named as defendants in a private class-action lawsuit against the DOJ.

The suit, Gerlich et al. v. Department of Justice, was orginally filed in response to the Inspector General's report on politicized hiring in the Attorney General's Honors Program. The report found that a number of DOJ officials, namely Esther Slater McDonald and Michael Elston, had broken the law in basing hiring decisions based on political affiliations.

...and then topped off with this:

Federal prosecutors have sent target letters to six Blackwater Worldwide security guards involved in a September shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, indicating a high likelihood the Justice Department will seek to indict at least some of the men, according to three sources close to the case.

The guards, all former U.S. military personnel, were working as security contractors for the State Department, assigned to protect U.S. diplomats and other non-military officials in Iraq. The shooting occurred when their convoy arrived at a busy square in central Baghdad and guards tried to stop traffic [...]

The sources said that any charges against the guards would likely be brought under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which has previously been used to prosecute only the cases referred to the Justice Department by the Defense Department for crimes committed by military personnel and contractors overseas. Legal experts have questioned whether contractors working for the State Department can be prosecuted under its provisions.

It just kind of makes me think that somebody, somewhere, has said "enough," or maybe a collection of folks said it, and decided to reassert the laws of the country instead of allowing executive and corporate power to run rampant.

That'd be nice...

Enforce The Laws? Sorry, Not My Job

Ladies and gentlemen, the Rt. Hon. Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

I am well aware that some people have called on me and on the Department to take even more drastic steps than those I have described. For example, some commentators have suggested that we should criminally prosecute the people found in the reports to have committed misconduct. Where there is evidence of criminal wrongdoing, we vigorously investigate it. And where there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we vigorously prosecute. But not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime. In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of the civil service laws.

That does not mean, as some people have suggested, that those officials who were found by the joint reports to have committed misconduct have suffered no consequences. Far from it. The officials most directly implicated in the misconduct left the Department to the accompaniment of substantial negative publicity. Their misconduct has now been laid bare by the Justice Department for all to see. As a general matter in such cases, where disciplinary referrals are appropriate, they are made. To put it in concrete terms, I doubt that anyone in this room would want to trade places with any of those people.

They've been completely humiliated, you see! Never mind the right-wing welfare system hiring them as corporate lawyers or such. They might end up being slightly uncomfortable when food shopping! Isn't that enough? What are you people, sadists?

Of course, since Mukasey entered the DoJ as a wise and independent voice (or so I was told by the high Broderists and serious Democrats like Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer) I'm sure this latest decision to throw the rule of law in the toilet reflects a very considered and superior judgment. In no way can it construed as water-carrying for the Bush Administration. Perish the thought.

...Mukasey offers this on the subject of what to do with all those career attorneys who were hired illegally:

Other critics have suggested that we should summarily fire or reassign all those people who were hired through the flawed processes described in the joint reports. But there is a principle of equity that we all learned in the schoolyard, and that remains as true today as when we first heard it: two wrongs do not make a right. As the Inspector General himself recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee, the people hired in an improper way did not, themselves, do anything wrong. It therefore would be unfair - and quite possibly illegal given their civil service protections - to fire them or to reassign them without individual cause.

It is illegal under civil service protections, but this third-grade logic doesn't mean that the law ought not to be altered for this special case. Otherwise there will be literally no accountability for these illegal activities that continue to have ramifications. The Hatch Act may offer no real punishment outside of expelling offenders from their governmental positions, but surely it follows that if the prepetrators are already out of government, the fruits of their actions must then go through a legal process to remain employed.

Ultimately, this needs to happen. We need a massive landmine search and destroy mission in the Justice Department.

"Not every violation of the law is a crime." If that's not an epitaph for this Administration.

"...as many loyalists as possible."

Today the Justice Department's Inspector General, Glenn Fine, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss Monday's report showing serious violations of the law in the hiring of career Department employees. What the IG revealed today was that the attitude of extreme partisanship inside the DoJ was pervasive. Whether people were actively engaging in politicization or just tacitly accepting it, everyone was at least aware of what was happening... everyone except for Abu Gonzales, of course, who does not recall.

FINE: He said he wasn’t aware of what was going on. He said he did not know Goodling used poltiical factors when assessing candidates for career positions, did not know the search terms Goodling used, did not know even that Goodling’s portfolio including hiring for IJs [immigration judges], and basically said he didn’t have knowledge of the role the office of the Attorney General played in identifying candidates.

It is of course grossly incompetent for Gonzales to be unaware of the goings-on in a department he's supposed to manage. But I don't buy this at all. Gonzales came from the White House counsel's office, and it is beyond clear that the politicized hiring originated at 1600 Penna. Charlie Savage finds evidence inside the IG report.

On May 17, 2005, the White House’s political affairs office sent an e-mail message to agencies throughout the executive branch directing them to find jobs for 108 people on a list of “priority candidates” who had “loyally served the president.”

“We simply want to place as many of our Bush loyalists as possible,” the White House emphasized in a follow-up message, according to a little-noticed passage of an internal Justice Department report released Monday about politicization in the department’s hiring of civil-service prosecutors and immigration officials [...]

The report released on Monday by Justice Department investigators said that the context of the May 17, 2005, message from the White House about its priority-hire list “made plain” that it was seeking politically appointed government jobs, for which it is legal to take politics into account. The report did not say who sent the message.

But the message also urged administration officials to “get creative” in finding the patronage positions — and some political appointees carried out their mission with particular zeal.

“We pledge 7 slots within 40 days and 40 nights. Let the games begin!” Jan Williams, then the White House’s liaison to the Justice Department, responded in an e-mail message on May 19, 2005.

But despite this very clear evidence, the IG only consulted with one White House official, Rove protege Scott Jennings, during the entire investigation. It's this compartmentalization - investigating pieces of the federal bureaucracy in a vacuum and refusing to connect the dot to the overall project directed at the highest levels - that feeds the Beltway mindset that restricts accountability at every turn. As Jonathan Turley said yesterday, if Monica Goodling becomes the next iteration of the "few bad apples" at Abu Ghraib, with accountability and punishment ending with her, it would be pathetic.

And even getting Goodling to pay for this would be a stretch. She was given immunity against self-incrimination at her Congressional hearing, and the crime she committed doesn't appear to have a penalty now that she's no longer employed by the DoJ. This made me want to scream today:

Schumer: On of the most shocking conclusions in your report is that someone like Monica Goodling, who politicized the appointment of Assistant US Attorneys, Immigration Judges, and even Counter-Terrorism positions may not face any consequences for her actions. So let me ask you this, Mr. Fine. Should such blatant politicization and illegal activity be subject to some criminal punishment so there would be some ultimate accountability.

Fine: I'm not sure it's true to say she escaped any accountability and punishment. As I discussed with Senator Whitehouse earlier, she--people did leave the Department, so they can't be disciplined by the Department, but we've recommended that they never get a job with the Department again and hopefully with the federal government again and that hopefully they consider this report if they ever do reapply. They have been exposed. Their conduct has been exposed in a transparent way for all to see. And then, there may be--I'm not saying there is but there may be appropriate Bar sanctions for--possibly--for attorneys who have committed misconduct and may have violated a Bar rule and so the Bar may look into that [...]

Whitehouse: Um, with respect to the consequences for the violation of federal law. Can you identify what Bar rules might have been broken. ... I did not see OPR making any referrals to the Disciplinary Council as a result, so I'm a little confused about what disciplinary consequences lawyers might face?

Fine: My understanding is, and I've had discussions with OPR about this, that OPR intends to, and we will participate in a notification to the Bars of individuals who are found to have committed misconduct, for them to review the conduct. Now I don't believe OPR has done a lengthy review of this and say which exact rule but it does intend to and I think it is appropriate to notify the Bars of the individuals who were involved and in fact I think some of them have already been notified; I think individuals have provided our reports to various Bars for the Bar to look at. In terms of the rules, I'm not an expert in the area, potentially Rule 8.4 which talks about the administration of justice and acts going to the fitness to practice law. I'm not necessarily saying that does apply but I do think there are things that ought to be review and looked at and I think the experts in this area ought to do that.

Whitehouse then asked about stripping civil service protection for anyone hired during Goodling's reign, and also about John Nowacki, revealed in the IG report to have lied about Goodling's hiring practices, and STILL employed by the Justice Department. And... crickets.

This, in the end, is the problem, as surely as it's the problem with citing Karl Rove for contempt. There are follow-ups and hurdles and gaps within the law that allow these people to pervert the Justice Department, use it as an arm of the RNC, put honorable people into jail, and get away with it. Because there's no understanding of the big picture here. Krugman gets at it today.

As we all know, the Bush administration essentially brushed aside all notion of due process. It locked up and tortured people it said were “enemy combatants”; it engaged in warrantless wiretapping; and so on.

We weren’t supposed to worry our pretty little heads about this, because we were supposed to take it as a given that these were people we could trust not to abuse their power.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department was interviewing job candidates, and asking,

What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?

In other words, there was a combination of power without oversight and a deeply creepy cult of personality (which was obvious long before we got the latest specifics.)

The deeply politicized Justice Department is the firewall against accountability for the crimes of the Administration. They started that project right away to make sure.

It was in a different context and regarding different criminals, but this is what accountability looks like, courtesy (Lord help us) Republican Ted Poe:

Mr. Speaker, it seems to be this is yet another example of incompetence, waste, and possible fraud against America. If crimes have been committed, the Justice Department needs to prosecute anyone that steals money from America during this time of war. Because the long arm of American law even reaches crooked contractors in Iraq. And where shall we send these people? To the well-built Guantanamo Bay prison where we house war criminals. And that’s just the way it is.

Loyalists have a different opinion.

The Goodling Legacy

The DoJ Inspector General released the findings of their investigations into the politicization of hiring at the Department, particularly by Monica Goodling and senior staff. A PDF of the report can be found here. It's everything you expected and more. I mean, Goodling already admitted to Congress that her hiring decisions "may have been influenced in
part based on political considerations." So the report just fills in some of the details. And the details are pretty incredible.

As a routine for hiring both political and career positions in the Department of Justice, Goodling would ask the following questions:

Tell us about your political philosophy. There are different groups of conservatives, by way of example: Social Conservative, Fiscal Conservative, Law & Order Republican.

[W]hat is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?

Aside from the President, give us an example of someone currently or recently in public service who you admire.

We found that this last question often took the form of asking the candidate to identify his or her most admired President, Supreme Court Justice, or legislator. Some candidates were asked to identify a person for all three categories. Williamson told us that sometimes Goodling asked candidates: “Why are you a Republican?”

When someone answered "Condoleezza Rice" to that last question, Goodling mused, “but she’s pro-choice.”

Another candidate for a position, a "top counter-terrorism prosecutor," was denied because his wife was a Democrat.

He was an experienced terrorism prosecutor and had successfully prosecuted a high-profile terrorism case for which he received the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service. … The candidate’s wife was a prominent local Democrat elected official and vice-chairman of a local Democratic Party. […]

[Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA) Michael] Battle, [EOUSA Deputy Director and Cheif of Staff] Kelly, and EOUSA Deputy Director Nowacki all told us that Goodling refused to allow the candidate to be detailed to EOUSA solely on the basis of his wife’s political party affiliation. Battle said he was very upset that Goodling opposed the detail because of political reasons.

Another woman was denied an Assistant US Attorney position because Goodling believed she was a lesbian.

Goodling and her predecessor as the hiring manager, Jan Williams, apparently Googled candidates to determine their professional, political and ideological histories, as it was official White House policy. Check this out.

At some time during the year Williams served as White House Liaison, she had attended a seminar at the White House Office of Presidential Personnel and received a document entitled “The Thorough Process of Investigation.” The document described methods for screening candidates for political positions and recommended using www.tray.com
and www.opensecrets.org to find information about contributions to political candidates and parties. The document also explained how to find voter registration information. In addition, the document explained how to conduct searches on www.nexis.com, and included an example of a search string that contained political terms such as “republican,” “Bush or Cheney,” “Karl Rove,” “Howard Dean,” “democrat!,” “liberal,” “abortion or pro-choice,” as well as generic terms such as “arrest!” and “bankrupt!”

As the report spells out pretty clearly, this is all completely illegal. John Conyers and Linda Sanchez today considered a criminal referral of these charges.

"Today's report describes ‘systematic’ violations of federal law by several former leaders of the Department of Justice," said Conyers. "Apparently, the political screening was so pervasive that even qualified Republican applicants were rejected from Department positions because they were ‘not Republican enough’ for Monica Goodling and others. The report also makes clear that the cost to our nation of these apparent crimes was severe, as qualified individuals were rejected for key positions in the fight against terrorism and other critical Department jobs for no reason other than political whim. The Report also indicates that Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson, and Alberto Gonzales may have lied to the Congress about these matters. I have directed my staff to closely review this matter and to consider whether a criminal referral for perjury is needed."

Sen. Leahy has a fairly strong statement out as well. The IG will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.

The very familiar question here is, who will be held accountable, if anyone? Under the relevant statutes, much of the punishment concerning Hatch Act violations like this concerns removal from office, and most of those implicated in this report have already left DoJ (though one, EOUSA Deputy Director John Nowacki, who lied to senior DoJ officials about Goodling's politicized hiring practices, remains). Goodling and her pals may get disbarred for illegal hiring and lawbreaking, or maybe not. The IG's recommendations all concern how to prevent illegal hiring practices like this in the future, and have little effect on the sins of the past. More importantly, we don't even know how many career positions throughout the DoJ, particularly those working as immigration judges, are the ones who passed Goodling's loyalty tests and are now permanently installed inside the government. You can say that a new Democratic Administration should immediately fire everyone Goodling hired and start the process over again. I'm not sure that is legal under civil service reform laws dating back to Chester Arthur in the 1880s. What Goodling and her team did was to go around the spoils system that was the impetus for civil service reform, but there would have to be some kind of executive finding that the hiring process was polluted and would need to be reworked. And this would of course be a major undertaking for the DoJ, although I would argue a necessary one.

If this is ignored, you are going to see all kinds of whistleblowers and martyrs coming out of the woodwork in an Obama Administration, telling lurid and probably false tales accusing them of exactly what the Bush Administration put into practice and more. And they will be held up on the right as shining examples of patriots who understand how the rule of law must be respected at all times.

And they will probably have been hired by Monica Goodling.

A Host Of Landmines

I've been saying for some time that the Bush legacy will long outlast January 20, 2009, because there will be midlevel officials, executive orders and the like littered all throughout the government, ready to undermine the efforts of a potential incoming Democratic President. We're starting to learn about that with respect to the Justice Department.

High-ranking political appointees at the Justice Department labored to stock a prestigious hiring program with young conservatives in a five-year-long attempt to reshape the department's ranks, according to an inspector general's report to be released today.

The report will trace the effort to 2002, early in the Bush administration, when key advisers to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft moved to exert more control over the program to hire rookie lawyers and summer interns, according to two people familiar with the probe.

The honors program, which each year places about 150 law school graduates with top credentials in a rotation of Justice jobs, historically had operated under the control of senior career officials. Shifting control of the program to Ashcroft's advisers prompted charges of partisanship from law professors and former government lawyers who had worked under Democratic administrations.

Here's the full report. This was a Monica Goodling special. She directed the candidate selection process and handed it over to Mike Elston, Chief of Staff to Deputy AG Mike McNulty. All of these folks have resigned now, but their legacy remains. And their subordinates, the hands-on people involved in the hiring of these career attorneys, filtered out candidates with any trace of Democratic or liberal politics in their background, and subsequently DESTROYED their applications. Some examples (McDonald refers to Esther McDonald, one of the hiring managers):

[A]n OARM employee ... recalled that one of the [deselected] candidates she raised to DeFalaise's attention was first in his law school class at Georgetown University, had clerked for a federal district court judge, and was currently clerking for a Second Circuit judge. [footnote 41: This candidate also had worked as a law clerk for Senator Russell Feingold, a Democrat, and for Human Rights Watch, but the OARM employee does not recall pointing out the candidate's political or ideological affiliations to DeFalaise at this time.] (59-60)

Elston also told Mercer that he had already scheduled the December 5 meeting to gauge what people's concerns were [with the selection process]. Elston said he intended to explain the process the Committee had followed so the components would have "a clear understanding of what we did, and what we learned, and what the basis for the strikes were." Mercer told us that he later learned from Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, a senior career Department official, that the December 5 meeting had not gone well and that a lot of people had left the meeting "disturbed" and "not satisfied." (64)

The Committee used paper copies of the applications on which Fridman and McDonald made handwritten notations about the applicants, but those documents were destroyed prior to the initiation of our investigation. (68,69)

McDonald declined to be interviewed during our investigation. When we first contacted her in September 2007 for an interview, she was a Counsel to the Associate Attorney General. She initially agreed to a tentative date for her interview, but she later asked us to postpone the interview while she retained counsel. We agreed. After McDonald retained an attorney, and after allowing time for the attorney to familiarize himself with the matter, a new date for the interview was set, October 25, 2007. However, at 5:15 p.m. on October 24, McDonald's attorney e-mailed our investigators to advise them that his client was canceling the interview. The attorney added that McDonald was no longer employed by the Department. We learned that McDonald had resigned from the Department, effective October 24. On the evening of October 23, she had told her supervisor, Acting Associate Attorney General Katsas, that the next day would be her last day at the Department. Katsas said that her resignation came as a surprise to him. (75)

Elston confirmed that Fridman raised with him early in the review process Fridman's concerns that McDonald was deselecting candidates based on "membership in liberal organizations, or those kind of things," revealed in the candidate's application or from Internet searches she conducted. Elston said he reviewed the applications Fridman noted and saw that McDonald had either circled or written comments about liberal affiliations on the applications and then voted to deselect those candidates. (81)

Elston said he thought he recalled McDonald indicating it was a negative factor if a candidate had worked for a Democrat. (82)

Elston said he did not want to accuse McDonald of doing something inappropriate because he speculated that Goodling may have told McDonald to do what she was doing. (83)

These are, as is known, violations of federal law. Nothing will be done about it because most of those responsible are already out of government and accountability isn't part of the culture of Washington these days. The real impact will be felt when laws from a Democratic President are not implemented, or a staffer leaks information incriminating the executive or his staff, or any of a thousand options that hardcore right-wing DoJ staffers have to damage the opposition party.

When you fail to engage in the most basic oversight and offer even the threat of punishment, a rogue President and his allies can really do just about anything. You can pass laws and they simply don't get followed. You can consider subpoenas for officials who fail to comply with oversight investigations, and the officials just decline. You can take them to court, but the judge doesn't want to get involved and informs the Congress that they could have solved this on their own anyway:

Congress was trying to be diplomatic when it brought an unprecedented lawsuit to settle its subpoena fight against the White House, a lawyer told a federal judge Monday. After all, lawmakers could've just arrested the president's former lawyer for refusing to testify.

The judge's response?

Maybe they should have.

Congress has the authority to hold someone in contempt, U.S. District Judge John Bates said. Did it really need to go to court?

Congress insists on taking most of their bullets out of the chamber and then begging the executive branch to be reasonable, after they have shown no interest in ever doing so. This is how you get the DoJ hiring far-right conservatives and breaking the law with impunity. And getting caught doesn't seem to be an obstacle.

The next four to eight years, should Sen. Obama win, will be littered with "exclusive" stories from inside the DoJ of corruption and politicization and all sorts of malfeasance. These "honor" students are who those charges will be coming from. It'll be a total reversal and somebody had better recognize it.

UPDATE: The more you read this DoJ report, the crazier it gets. They actually denied someone a job because he liked wolves.

Mercer responded by e-mail that he was inquiring with a reference the candidate listed whom Mercer knew to find out "the scoop on intellect, personality, etc." Mercer added:

My initial reaction is that the guy is probably quite liberal. He is clerking for a very activist, ATLA-oriented justice. His law review article appears to favor reintroduction of wolves on federal lands, a very controversial issue here which pits environmentalists against lots of other interests, including virtually all conservative and moderate thinkers. I know of better candidates through our internship and clerkship programs who have applied to the honors program.

There are copious charts and graphs showing the "deselection" process and how liberals (or maybe conservatives who liked wolves, who knows?) were filtered out. The Attorney General says he's accepted all the recommendations in the IG report. Of course he will NOW, the landmines have already been set.

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.

Cheney In Charge

The Justice Department dumped some more documents on the Congress last night, and one of them must have made it through the filter. This is very damning for Monica Goodling.

New Justice Department communications released tonight include an email from Monica Goodling, former counsel to Alberto Gonzales, directing another official to draw up a directive giving her unprecedented authority to hire and fire political staffers. Goodling tells the official, assistant attorney general Paul Corts, to “send [it] directly up to me, outside the system.”

Remember when Goodling said that she "crossed the line" in taking political considerations into account when hiring, but she "didn't mean to"? I think that referred to her not meaning anyone to figure it out.

And Monica isn't the only one who was politicizing the Justice Department. Big Time made time for it as well:

Separately, in written answers to questions from Sen. Leahy (D-VT), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, (James) Comey confirmed that Vice President Cheney blocked a subsequent promotion for a Justice Department official, Patrick Philbin, who played a key role in blocking the recertification of the NSA warrantless wiretap program.

In a telling detail about Gonzales, the Attorney General apparently planned to promote Philbin to be principal deputy solicitor general. In other words, it would appear that for all the rest we have learned about Mr. Gonzales, he was not inclined to punish Philbin for his role in the Ashcroft-Comey recertification incident. However, Cheney intervened. In Comey's words: "I understood that someone at the White House communicated to Attorney General Gonzales that the vice president would oppose the appointment if the attorney general pursued the matter. The attorney general chose not to pursue it."

It's actually more than that. The Vice President also was involved in urging passage of the warrantless wiretapping program as Comey and his allies were trying to block it. Literally everything that's rampantly illegal about this Administration can be traced back to Cheney. I mean, Gonzales is stupid enough to lie to Congress, and Goodling is just a functionary. But Cheney is the man with the plan, the one pushing an imperial, praetorian executive branch. Digby's right that we have to get a handle on this. Cheney is running the show, and because he's not the President, the accountability is almost nil. The next time, we need to elect a President that's actually in charge.

Gonzogate Update

Josh Marshall gives a nice rundown of what's ahead in the US Attorney scandal. The President amusingly complained that the investigation is being dragged out for "political reasons." To which I say: exactly. For political reasons, the Justice Department is hiding what they know and resisting all efforts to obtain documents to finish the process.

But onward it goes. The Inspector General of the Justice Department is expanding its investigation to include those political, illegal hiring practices that Monica Goodling discussed in her testimony. But it's actually bigger than Goodling.

Goodling admitted last week to improperly taking poltiical considerations into account in the hiring of assistant U.S. attorneys, immigration judges and appointments to the Board of Immigration Appeals. But the IG and OPR's investigation appears to go far beyond Goodling.

Allegations concerning political hiring for the Honors Program -- the Department's historically rigorous program for hiring entry-level lawyers -- have centered on Michael Elston, the chief of staff to the deputy attorney general. A group of anonymous Justice Department employees raised alarms with Congress last month, complaining that Elston rejected hundreds of potential applicants to the program last year seemingly based on their political backgrounds.

And Goodling also hasn't been implicated in allegedly political hiring practices in the Department's Civil Rights Division. Those allegations have centered on Bradley Schlozman, the former #2 at the division, who has been accused of recruiting Republicans for career spots and then asking them to scrub mentions of their GOP bona fides from their resumes. Schlozman subsequently was appointed as an interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City -- and returned to main Justice to work in the Executive Office of United States Attorneys after he was replaced by a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney. He's scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee this coming Tuesday.

On June 5, Bradley Schlozman and his predecessor in the USA for Missouri slot, Todd Graves, will be testifying to Congress, which should be very interesting. Schlozman is the Zelig of this scandal, appearing at virtually every spot, particularly where voter fraud cases are concerned. We know that the central rationale for firing these federal prosecutors, and for politicizing the Justice Department in general, was to push bogus voter fraud investigations in order to inavalidate and intimidate potential voters, and suppress turnout. We know that this hue and cry served to curb legitimate voting:

During four years as a Justice Department civil rights lawyer, Hans von Spakovsky went so far in a crusade against voter fraud as to warn of its dangers under a pseudonym in a law journal article [...]

Now, amid a scandal over politicization of the Justice Department, Congress is beginning to examine allegations that von Spakovsky was a key player in a Republican campaign to hang onto power in Washington by suppressing the votes of minority voters.

"Mr. von Spakovsky was central to the administration's pursuit of strategies that had the effect of suppressing the minority vote," charged Joseph Rich, a former Justice Department voting rights chief who worked under him.

He and other former career department lawyers say that von Spakovsky steered the agency toward voting rights policies not seen before, pushing to curb minor instances of election fraud by imposing sweeping restrictions that would make it harder, not easier, for Democratic-leaning poor and minority voters to cast ballots.

Those four paragraphs tell pretty much the entire story of this scandal. The idea was to use voter fraud cases as a pretext to impose draconian voting laws that would suppress Democratic turnout. This is an ongoing, decades-long project, where fake grassroots "voting rights" groups just appear and disappear at opportune moments, when it's useful to powerful interests to have a cabal yelling from the outside.

The American Center for Voting Rights... has literally just disappeared as an organization... With no notice and little comment, ACVR—the only prominent nongovernmental organization claiming that voter fraud is a major problem, a problem warranting strict rules such as voter-ID laws—simply stopped appearing at government panels and conferences. Its Web domain name has suddenly expired, its reports are all gone (except where they have been preserved by its opponents), and its general counsel, Mark "Thor" Hearne, has cleansed his résumé of affiliation with the group. Hearne won't speak to the press about ACVR's demise. No other group has taken up the "voter fraud" mantra.

The death of ACVR says a lot about the Republican strategy of raising voter fraud as a crisis in American elections. Presidential adviser Karl Rove and his allies, who have been ghostbusting illusory dead and fictional voters since the contested 2000 election, apparently mounted a two-pronged attack. One part of that attack, at the heart of the current Justice Department scandals, involved getting the DoJ and various U.S. attorneys in battleground states to vigorously prosecute cases of voter fraud. That prong has failed. After exhaustive effort, the Department of Justice discovered virtually no polling-place voter fraud, and its efforts to fire the U.S. attorneys in battleground states who did not push the voter-fraud line enough has backfired.

And this is why the investigations will be as slow as molasses. The Republicans do not want this criminal enterprise to really get into the consciousness of the electorate. They would rather it remain the stuff of he said-she said, the sturm und drang of modern politics. The truth is that this was a systematic effort to disenfranchise Democrats.

UPDATE: President Pissypants, on Rove:

Q How central a role did Rove play in the U.S. attorney business? That's what everybody wants to know. Was he the main guy drawing up the list?

THE PRESIDENT: Just look at the facts as they've come out.

Q It's unclear.

THE PRESIDENT: There has been plenty of testimony, plenty of hearings, plenty of statements. And one thing is for certain, that there was no wrongdoing done. And --

I believe it's cut off because the interviewer's head exploded and Bush was unsure of whether or not to continue.

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.

I'm Just a Liaison, It's Not Like I'm The Go-Between!

From what I'm reading, to believe Monica Goodling's testimony today, you have to believe that, in her position as the Justice Department liaison to the White House, she never talked to anyone in the White House.

By the way, this LA Times story about Goodling is enough to make you wonder how these people ever got into government at all, let alone the very top echelon of the DoJ:

How a 33-year-old graduate of a little-known law school that teaches courses on the philosophy of punishing and controlling "sin" became such a powerful figure in the Justice Department is a key question for congressional investigators looking into charges that the department has been turned into a political tool of the Republican Party [...]

Some of Goodling's former co-workers insist that she has been vilified.

Mark Corallo, a former Justice Department spokesman, said Goodling was trying to bring balance to the department, and he ridiculed those who criticized her for trying to screen potential hires based on their political beliefs. The civil rights division, he argued, has long been populated by "some of the most radical Democrats in the law."

Certainly 27 years of hiring by Republican Administrations and one Third Way Administration brought us radical Democrat after radical Democrat, right? And look at this:

After law school and a stint during the 2000 election doing opposition research for the GOP, Goodling landed in the public affairs office at the Justice Department. She did a six-month tour at the U.S. attorney's office in Alexandria, Va., that was designed to give nonprosecutors a taste of the courtroom. In spring 2005, she became deputy director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys — a Justice Department arm that provides support, personnel and policy guidance to prosecutors around the country.

Her tenure at that office appears to have been crucial to facilitating the plan to fire U.S. attorneys. Former colleagues said that she prevailed upon the head of the office, Michael A. Battle, to replace two long-serving officials who probably would have viewed the firing of prosecutors without cause as highly suspicious, and helped install a fellow Regent law school graduate as a replacement.

She was tasked with getting rid of the naysayers. That was her whole raison d'etre.

Also, shorter Goodling's testimony, I dunno. And it was everyone's fault who's already resigned (Sampson, McNulty).

...she just said "I don't believe I intended to commit a crime" when I based my hiring practices on political affiliation. I don't believe I intended to commit a crime. Priceless.

Goodling Day Sunshine

OK, let's stop obsessing about Iraq (though Rep. Waxman, expect a call later today) and mention that Monica Goodling just started her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. You can stream it live here. And there's a liveblog at Kos here.

Goodling was the liaison between the Justice Department and the White House, so we may finally be able to figure out who put together the list of US Attorneys to be fired. She has immunity for her testimony today.

Today's Washington Post goes into more detail about Monica's insistence that anyone who wasn't a dyed-in-the-wool Federalist Society Republican not be hired for any DoJ job whatsoever. She appears to be a true believer, so it's unclear how much she'll be willing to divulge today.

Updates as they come in, though I'm not by a TV and can't stream...

The Ladies Are Talking

Monica Goodling, America's most partisan Justice Department hack, will testify next Wednesday about the US Attorneys scandal and the politicization of her office and the Justice Department. Now we learn that Susan Ralston is likely to testify before Henry Waxman's committee in the House. Ralston is Karl Rove's former assistant, and she also had ties to Jack Abramoff. She was apparently something of a go-between, the liaison between Abramoff and the White House. Goodling was the liaison between the DoJ and the White House.

Those are some dangerous liaisons.

By the way, if you're wondering why the oversight committee in the Senate doesn't seem to be doing anything relative to the complement in the House, that's because Joe Lieberman chairs the Senate committee and he doesn't think his job is worth his time, which could be better spent raising money for Republicans like Susan Collins.

Gonzales The Stone Golem

My guess is that Monica Goodling's testimony will bring the US Attorney scandal right back to the front pages. There are certainly enough threads that deserve to be pulled out there. There's the continued absence of any explanation for how those fired attorneys ended up on a target list. (my favorite part of yesterday's Abu G hearing was when Wexler was grilling him on this question, and Abu G says "You'd know that better than I would," and Wexler asks "Are you the Attorney General? Do you run the Justice Department?" Priceless.) There's the emergence of a 9th fired prosecutor, Todd Graves in Missouri. There's the continuing revelations that this all goes back to electing Republicans in 2006 (sorry, but you F'ed up so bad not even a bunch of lawyers could fix it for you):

Only weeks before last year's pivotal midterm elections, the White House urged the Justice Department to pursue voter-fraud allegations against Democrats in three battleground states, a high-ranking Justice official has told congressional investigators.

In two instances in October 2006, President Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, or his deputies passed the allegations on to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' then-chief of staff, Kyle Sampson.

Sampson tapped Gonzales aide Matthew Friedrich, who'd just left his post as chief of staff of the criminal division. In the first case, Friedrich agreed to find out whether Justice officials knew of "rampant" voter fraud or "lax" enforcement in parts of New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and report back.

So there's a lot going on, and Goodling may advertently or inadvertently plug some holes and reveal some more. What's clear is that talking to Alberto Gonzales is like talking to a stone wall, and it's something of a practiced art:

Alberto Gonzales is in his happy place. He enters the hearing room in the Rayburn Building for his testimony before the House judiciary committee smiling the smile of a man who sleeps well each night, in the warm glow of the president's love. Gone is the testy, defensive Gonzales who testified last month before the Senate. Today's attorney general breezes into the chamber with the certain knowledge that having bottomed out in April, he has nothing left to prove. His only role in this scandal is as decoy: He's the guy who runs out in front of the hunters and draws their fire so nobody pays any attention to what's happening at the White House.

Gonzales seems to have made his peace with this. No more angry outbursts, no bitter attempts at self-justification. Instead, the AG answers some questions with a giggle and most others with the same old catchphrases we've heard so often: He has consistently failed to investigate any wrongdoing at the Justice Department out of "deference to the integrity of the ongoing investigations." The decisions about which U.S. attorneys made Kyle Sampson's magic list were the "consensus recommendations of the senior leadership of the department." Over and again, ever in identical language, Gonzales "accepts full responsibility for the decision" just as he insists that he played only a "limited role" in the decision-making. The fact that the attorney general can't even be bothered to pull out a thesaurus after all these weeks—even if only to create the illusion that these nonanswers come from him as opposed to a list of pre-approved talking points—reveals just how little he cares about what Congress and the public think of him anymore.

Many have made this point recently, that it used to be that when a cabinet official failed this badly, he'd simply have to resign to protect the President. But the unwritten rules simply don't apply to the Bush Administration. They're quaint traditions which are made to be broken. Like I've said, Gonzales is nothing but a firewall. He should be shunned at this point. There are others, like Goodling, and Brad Schlozman (testifying next Tuesday, I think), who can shed some more light on the situation and get at the ultimate source of this politicization.

UPDATE: Shorter LA Times - "US Attorneys don't actually DO anything, what did you think that they were in charge or something? Honest! Unnamed sources told us so!"

Goodling Bad

(blog title stolen from FrankensteinBlog)

Monica Goodling clearly used ideology in the hiring decisions of entry-level assistant US Attorneys, and now the Inspector General is looking into it.

The Justice Department has launched an internal investigation into whether Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s former White House liaison illegally took party affiliation into account in hiring career federal prosecutors, officials said yesterday.

The allegations against Monica M. Goodling represent a potential violation of federal law and signal that a joint probe begun in March by the department’s inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility has expanded beyond the controversial dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys last year.

Of course, the House Judiciary Committee offered immunity to Goodling, so if she's under investigation at the same time, she may not be able to testify. And we all know that Goodling's testimony may be crucial to understanding just what went on in the prosecutor firing; after all, she was the liaison between the DoJ and the White House.

I'm not sure where that impasse will lead. But it's clear that Goodling broke the law and deserves to be held accountable. As does practically the entire top staff of the Justice Department. I mean, there's a US Attorney in Montana who's also an associate deputy attorney general, and he changed the law to allow him to to run the Montana office from Washington while never setting foot in there.

It's a tough call to decide whether it's worth it to let Goodling have immunity to testify, or not.

UPDATE: Balkinization brings up a great point, whether or not immunity will be placed upon Goodling is up to the DoJ:

So let's get this straight: It is up to the DOJ to decide whether Congress will be able to give immunity to Ms. Goodling. Whom, if anyone, would "we" trust in the current DOJ to make that decision? I can imagine that the Inspector General would be reluctant to grant immunity, but why should his decision control? Even those of us who are rabidly partisan shouldn't really be consumed by a desire to see Ms. Goodling go to jail (unlike others I could name). It will be more than enough to see her testify, under oath, in public before the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, and to use her testimony to nail others who are for more important than the 33-year-old graduate of Regent '99.

Isn't it clear that an independent prosecutor should be appointed (but by whom and under what authority) since everyone in the DOJ is hopelessly conflicted out?

I agree. Immunity for the lesser lights if they turn on those up the ladder is commonplace. And the independent prosecutor is a no-brainer.

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...

Goodling's In

It's annoying that they had to give her immunity, but it looks like Monica Goodling will testify to the House Judiciary Committee, although when is another matter:

Update: It is likely to be weeks before the committee actually gets to interview Goodling. That's because the law requires that the Justice Department be allowed an opportunity to provide its views on immunity -- i.e. whether it might interfere with an existing or possible investigation. If the DoJ objects to giving Goodling immunity, then the committee would be forced to consider whether to defer or delay conferring immunity. And regardless of what the DoJ says, the local federal court has to approve giving Goodling immunity. All this is likely to take several weeks.

Got that? The Justice Department gets to decide on whether Goodling should be granted immunity, which is the only way she'll testify. So her testimony is in the DoJ's hands.

Is there any way we can get the entire Main Justice to recuse themselves for the rest of Bush's term? Because there's a clear conflict of interest.

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.

Bye Monica

Monica Goodling is resigning from the Department of Justice. Yet another shoe drops in the one big scandal that is the Bush Administration. She probably thinks that Congressional Democrats will leave her alone now, but to do so would short-circuit the investigation. She's not done by a long shot.

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.