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.

Fraud

The only "fraud" about the issue of voter fraud is the fraud perpetrated on the people of this country. The New York Times has dug into this issue over the last couple days and hasn't found a damn thing.

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show.

White House officials will tell you that there is a deliberate effort to go after voter fraud. What they won't tell you, which Josh Marshall and the Times will, is that most of these cases are either mistakes my immigrants, a lack of proper purging from the rolls that doesn't lead to multiple votes, or people gathering voter registrations who put in fake names to collect more money, which also never results in multiple votes. This is a massive effort to find a crime that doesn't exist. And the goal is to subvert confidence in elections, and give a pretext to suppress the vote. Here's Josh:

Republican party officials and elected officials use bogus claims of vote fraud to do three things: 1) to stymie voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts in poor and minority neighborhoods, 2) purge voter rolls of legitimate voters and 3) institute voter ID laws aimed at making it harder for low-income and minority voters to vote.

This sounds like hyperbole but it is simply the truth. (A great example of this in microcosm was the 2002 senate election in South Dakota -- Johnson v. Thune -- in which Republicans spent the entire election ranting about a massive voter fraud conspiracy on the state's Indian reservations, charges which turned out to be completely bogus but had the aim of keeping voting down on the reservations.

The power of the Justice Department has been mustered to meet these political goals. Ultimately, this is a large part of why the US Attorneys were fired, and more important, why others were retained. Tom Maguire of Just One Minute commented here about the Steven Biskupic case, saying that the timeline was "way off" and that the US Attorney for Wisconsin did not indict an aide to Gov. Jim Doyle to affect the election. Apparently, you can't time indictments so that the much more impactful conviction and sentencing comes when you want it. But there was more at work here; Biskupic may have been on the edge of getting fired and needed to prove his loyal Bushitude:

Iglesias and Biskupic were the only U.S. attorneys in the country to have launched task forces to investigate voter fraud in the 2004 elections. There's arguably not another U.S. attorney in the country to have so thoroughly investigated such allegations. A review of Biskupic's manifold efforts demonstrates that without a doubt.

Despite that fact, Karl Rove and President Bush himself passed along complaints to Alberto Gonzales in October 2006 about Biskupic's and Iglesias' performance on voter fraud. Iglesias was fired. Biskupic, for some reason, wasn't. But it looks like it was a very close call.

Read the whole thing. It's clear that Biskupic was feeling the heat prior to January 2006, when he indicted Georgia Thompson. He was getting letters demanding voter fraud prosecutions in late 2005.

Voter fraud doesn't exist at any meaningful level. This is being ginned up by Republicans for purely political motives, and the Justice Department is being used as a tool in that political game. In fact, a panel report investigating voter fraud was altered by the administration, changing the text to read that it was "open to debate" instead of infinitesimal in scope. It's like changing the global warming reports. This is an absolute scandal. And you can't understand the US Attorney probe without it.

Subpoena Power

Democrats in the House and Senate have requested additional documents about the US Attorney activities. Did I say requested? I mean demanded. Not only do they want redacted and withheld documents related to the purge, but they want to hear more about the strange case in Wisconsin, where an aide to Gov. Jim Doyle was jailed by the US Attorney in the region right before the 2006 Election, and subsequently hastily dismissed on the basis of "very thin" evidence. Here's part of Leahy and Schumer's letter:

We are concerned whether or not politics may have played a role in a case brought by Stephen Biskupic, the United States attorney based in Milwaukee, against Georgia Thompson, formerly an official in the administration of Wisconsin's Democratic governor. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals was reportedly so troubled by the insufficiency of the evidence against Ms. Thompson that it made the unusual decision to issue an order reversing Ms. Thompson's conviction and releasing her from custody immediately after oral arguments in her appeal.

They also go into the fact that Wisconsin voter fraud cases suddenly shot up right after the counselor to the President claimed that Bush himself complained about a lack of voter fraud cases in the state. The whole myth of voter fraud is well-documented; it's a phantom that allows Republicans to push political cases (by the way, the wheels of this are greased by those fatalists on the Left who believe that every election is doomed because Karl Rove can flip a switch and change the voting outcomes from a master command center. What suffers is electoral confidence, which allows Republicans to make these bullshit claims which have little or no evidentiary basis).

I find it interesting that the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are already looking into the Biskupic situation. It shows that they understand how the real scandal in this case may be the US Attorneys who have NOT been fired, rather than the ones who have (although they shouldn't be neglected either). Indeed, do you know who Alberto Gonzales picked just today to be his new chief of staff? The US Attorney for Connecticut.

It appears that the Justice Department is going to fight the release of these documents. I don't know who'll be doing the fighting, as Gonzales is deeply immersed in "Cover-Yer-Ass-Lie-Telling School" somewhere in a Washington gym, where he's hitting the heavy bag with a picture of Patrick Leahy taped up to the mirror. But you knew that, at some point, the White House would have to stonewall. Something out there is too incriminating. They've been skewering federal law enforcement for years. It's only catching up with them now because of an excess of "D's" on Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, Henry Waxman's going to hold hearings on the disinformation campaigns by the miltary over Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch.

Isn't the majority just DIFFERENT?

You Go To Court With The Loyal Bushies You Have

Steve Benen finds more evidence that the real scandal with the fired US Attorneys were the ones who were allowed to stay.

Federal judges Thursday ruled that former state purchasing supervisor Georgia L. Thompson was wrongly convicted of making sure a state travel contract went to a firm linked to Gov. Jim Doyle’s re-election campaign and freed her from an Illinois prison.

The three-judge panel in Chicago acted with unusual speed, ruling after oral arguments by Thompson’s attorney and the U.S. attorney’s office.

During 26 minutes of oral arguments, all three judges assailed the government’s case, with Judge Diane Wood saying at one point that “the evidence is beyond thin.”

During a news conference later Thursday, Doyle, a former state attorney general, said the three judges did an “extraordinary thing” by entering an order finding Thompson innocent and ordering her immediate release.(emphasis added)

The man who wrongly convicted Ms. Thompson on the basis of such thin evidence was U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic. This indictment of Thompson occurred a few days after Jim Doyle's unsuccessful Republican opponent Mark Green jumped into the race and won the GOP nomination. Here's Benen's summary of the case:

I’ll spare you the minutiae of the case, but here’s the story in a nutshell: Thompson, who was originally hired under Doyle’s Republican predecessor, awarded a state contract to Adelman Travel, which became controversial because two of the company’s officers had donated the state maximum to Doyle’s re-election campaign.

There was no evidence that Thompson personally profited from the contract and nothing to suggest she approved the contract for political reasons. Biskupic brought charges anyway and managed to win a conviction, which was thrown out swiftly yesterday.

Steven Biskupic is obviously not the only sitting US Attorney with a cloud over him. We know that New Jersey's USA Chris Christie has investigated Democrats at a rate 3-4 times higher than Republicans, and that he stepped into the Menendez-Kean Senate race last year to push investigations into Sen. Menendez that were dubious. And today we hear about US Attorney for Minnesota Rachel Paulose, four of whose staff voluntarily quit:

It’s a major shakeup at the offices of new U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose.
Four of her top staff voluntarily demoted themselves Thursday, fed up with Paulose, who, after just months on the job, has earned a reputation for quoting Bible verses and dressing down underlings.

Paulose was appointed before the 8 U.S. Attorneys were given their pink slips, but she has deep connections to the scandal.

She was a special assistant to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, worked as a senior counsel for deputy attorney general Paul McNulty and is best buds with Monica Goodling – the assistant U.S. Attorney who recently took the Fifth rather than testify before Congress.

Add to the suspicions the fact that Minnesota’s former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger stepped down just as the White House was developing its hit list.

And Steve Benen mentions a few more cases that are more than a little odd:

* In New Hampshire, Democrats want Congress to investigate whether prosecution of a Republican phone-jamming scheme on Election Day 2002 was intentionally delayed until after the presidential election two years later.

* Did the U.S. Attorney’s office in Pennsylvania intentionally target Bob Casey allies to undermine his Senate campaign against Rick Santorum?

* Why was the career U.S. Attorney in Guam removed in 2002 after he started investigating disgraced GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff?

* Why has Western Pennsylvania’s U.S. attorney, Mary Beth Buchanan, spent a disproportionate amount of her time launching public-corruption investigations against Democrats, while overlooking Republicans?

* In July 2005, the U.S. Attorney in Denver decided not to pursue a matter in which bouncers at a Bush event impersonated Secret Service agents to throw out three law-abiding ticket-holders because of their bumper sticker (the Denver Three controversy). Did politics dictate the decision?

I would add the case of Debra Wong Yang, who, after opening an investigation into Rep. Jerry Lewis, was bought out for $1.5 million dollars and hired by... the law firm representing Rep. Lewis.

Now, Alberto Gonzales is hemhorraging support on Capitol Hill, and his initial testimony to clear his name has been delayed to twist the knife even more and give the Senate Judiciary Committee more time to investigate all these threads.
But the real result of this scandal is that it has irreparably damaged the credibility of the Justice Department and its field offices, both in the public eye and potentially in court cases. Nobody can look at US Attorney indictments without a jaundiced eye; this latest case in Wisconsin proves it. And a record is now being built of politically motivated corruption cases, so that when an actual corrupt Democrat comes before a court, his lawyers can credibly argue that this was a political witch hunt and as a result the case should be dropped.

This is a cancer to the legal system that will be difficult to wash out, even with a Democrat in the White House and the Justice Department. You know that you can see freshly-scrubbed Federalist Society lawyers arguing in court that all corruption cases they defend are political witch hunts. Of course, we see that already. But now there's evidence that this was the case. Having politics creep into the administration of justice is terribly damaging for the future of the country.