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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on the Graves firing here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Days And Nights Of Bradley Schloz

There's great coverage at TPM Muckraker of today's Bradley Schlozman trial. Patrick Leahy in particular got incensed about Schlozman's equivocating about bringing indictments against Democratic registration groups like ACORN (eventually tossed out) right before the 2006 elections. Sheldon Whitehouse just got exasperated. It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. He just listened to an outrageous whopper by Schlozman and sat there staring at him, with a bemused expression on his face, for what seemed like a minute. Then he said "I think I've had enough of you."

Schlozman was raked over the coals, but he didn't give up any new information. Todd Graves is up now; he was the former US Attorney in Missouri who Schlozman replaced. From his opening statement, I can't determine whether or not he'll be willing to offer up any information. He did just use the epithet "Democrat Party," so I don't quite know... I do think that he believes the institution of the Department of Justice has been sullied by this entire mess.

UPDATE: Leahy makes a funny:

You know, I tend to think that perhaps you use this (the US Attorney's Manual) more as a doorstop than as something you actually had to follow. … I think you’re trying to break Attorney General Gonzales’ record of saying you “don’t recall” or you “don’t remember.” I’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve said that.

The Voter Fraud All-Stars

Bradley Schlozman is testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee this afternoon. Schlozman shows up everywhere in the US Attorney scandal. He ended up being the US Attorney for Missouri, after key Republican operatives complained about his predecessor, Todd Graves, who wasn't prosecuting bogus voter fraud cases diligently enough. Schlozman more than made up for that. In fact, he may have AUTHORIZED Graves' firing and his own new hiring.

There's an additional fact which makes this case even more suspicious. Graves was replaced by Bradley Schlozman, a former senior political appointee at the Civil Rights Division who oversaw the voting rights section. According to Waas, Hearne brought his complaints about Graves to "senior officials in Justice’s Civil Rights Division." These were complaints about voting cases, which means the complaints most likely went to Schlozman himself -- or his right hand Hans Von Spakovsky. After Schlozman was installed in Graves' place, he brought an indictment against four ACORN workers days before the election in 2006. So it looks a lot like Hearne got his wish.

Schlozman also turns up in the case of the US Attorney for Minnesota, Thomas Heffelfinger, who was apparently fired for objecting to a new voter ID law within the state. He raised these concerns with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Schlozman ran that.

In response, he said, Bradley Schlozman, a political appointee in the department, told Rich "not to do anything without his approval" because of the "special sensitivity of this matter."

Rich responded by suggesting that more information be gathered from voting officials in the Twin Cities area, which includes Minnesota's two most populous counties.

A message came back from another Republican official in the department, Hans von Spakovsky, saying Rich should not contact the county officials but should instead deal only with the secretary of state's office.

Von Spakovsky indicated, Rich said, that working with Kiffmeyer's office reduced the likelihood of a leak to the news media.

The orders from Schlozman and Von Spakovsky, who wielded unusual power in the civil rights division, effectively ended any department inquiry, Rich said.

They shut down any objection to a Republican Secretary of State's voter ID law, designed to suppress the Native American vote in Minnesota, and then later they orchestrated the ouster of Heffelfinger from his post as US Attorney.

Then, of course, there's the pervasive talk about voter fraud in New Mexico, which may have been a factor in David Iglesias' firing. That word "voter fraud" keeps popping up across the country.

One theme keeps reappearing in the DOJ scandal: The Bush Administration wanted U.S. Attorneys who would push frivolous voting fraud claims that would discourage likely Democratic voters in close races. This is the big story behind the DOJ scandal; it's what the media should focus on.

During Watergate we were told to follow the money. In this scandal, you should follow the voter suppression schemes.

Of course, Schlozman and Von Spakowsky and the others in the Civil Rights Division were just implementing a policy that issued out of the White House. I expect Schlozman to evade and cover for the little cherub named Rove today. But there's a lot of smoke here for the Senate Judiciary Committee to take a look at.

UPDATE: McClatchy:

Saying it was out to combat widespread voter fraud, the Justice Department in recent years has stepped up enforcement of election laws to ease the purging of ineligible voters from state registration rolls.

Since 2005, department civil rights lawyers have sued election officials in seven states - Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Missouri, New Jersey and New York - and sent threatening letters to others, in some cases demanding copies of voter registration data.

Former lawyers in the Civil Rights Division, however, said the voter fraud campaign is a partisan effort to disqualify legitimate voters, as occurred in Florida before the 2000 presidential election.

There appears to be an actual method within the Voting Rights Section for doing this:

Joseph Rich, a former chief of the Justice Department's Voting Rights Section, said that Hans von Spakovsky, a former division counsel, directed him in early 2005 to start what Rich called "an initiative" to enforce the provision requiring states to maintain accurate registration lists.

Department spokeswoman Magnuson said "there was no initiative" and that the agency was merely enforcing the law.

Rich said the department changed priorities under the motor voter law "from expanding registration opportunities - the primary purpose of the statute - to unnecessarily forcing jurisdictions to remove voters from their voter rolls."

Notice the focus on the Justice Department suing Secretaries of State who didn't follow their processes for purging the rolls. One was the Secretary of State of Alabama, and we've also heard that Karl Rove himself may have been involved in the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman (D). Look how this played out:

In Worley's case, the department took the extraordinary step of persuading a federal judge nominated by President Bush to relieve her of her authority to oversee the 2006 election and to give Republican Gov. Bob Riley that authority as a "special master" of the court.

Worley called the suit "incredibly political," noting that it was filed shortly before she was due to face Democratic primary voters in a re-election bid and blaming it for her defeat.

Wow. This is the story of the day.

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.

Gonzales Gets a Friendly Crowd

People seem to forget that the House is more extreme than the Senate. That's changed from the days when Senators were appointed, but it still holds. And wingnuts like Dan Lungren and Elton Gallegly are either patting Abu G on the back or moving on to the illegal immigrant brown menace. Zoe Lofgren had a good line of argument about Todd Graves and Bradley Schlozman, but this House Judiciary hearing will be an alternating good cop/bad cop show.

Meanwhile here's the story out of Seattle.

"I think there will be a criminal case that will come out of this," McKay said during his meeting with Times journalists. "This is going to get worse, not better."...

McKay said he believes obstruction-of-justice charges will be filed if investigators conclude that the dismissal of any of the eight prosecutors was motivated by an attempt to influence ongoing public-corruption or voter-fraud investigations....

McKay said he began to have concerns about politics entering the Justice Department in early 2005, when Gonzales addressed all of the country's U.S. attorneys in Scottsdale, Ariz., shortly after he took over as attorney general.
"His first speech to us was a 'you work for the White House' speech," McKay recalled. " 'I work for the White House, you work for the White House.' "

McKay said he thought at the time, "He couldn't have meant that speech," given the traditional independence of U.S. Attorneys. "It turns out he did."

And here's the story out of Missouri.

Eleven months before seven US Attorneys were fired on December 7th, 2006, former Kansas City US Attorney Todd Graves received a call from an official at the Executive Office for the U.S. Attorney telling him he was fired. Graves announced his resignation less than two months later on March 10.

Justice Department officials would later tell Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) that Graves had been dismissed for "performance" issues, according to Wednesday article in the Kansas City Star. But that's not what Graves was told at the time. According to a source with detailed knowledge of the conversation, Graves was told that his removal was not based on his performance as a prosecutor, but that it was simply time to let someone else have a chance at the job.

This hearing will essentially be a rerun of "I don't remember, I don't recall." It's almost pointless to watch.

Schlozman News

Yes, I'm thrilled that someone named "Schlozman" is in the news so I get to keep writing Schlozman. But the news on him is actually intensifying, as well.

It appears that Todd Graves, the US Attorney in Missouri that Schlozman replaced, was actually fired by DoJ, and that Missouri Senator Kit Bond may have set the whole thing in motion.

An aide to Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) urged the White House to replace the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., months before Todd P. Graves's name was included on a Justice Department list of federal prosecutors the Bush administration was thinking of pushing out of their jobs.

A spokeswoman for Bond said yesterday that the senator's former counsel, Jack Bartling, contacted the White House counsel's office in the spring of 2005, without Bond's permission. According to the spokeswoman, Bartling said that Graves's replacement "would be favored," because the prosecutor's wife and brother-in-law had stirred ethics complaints in Missouri [...]

Last night, Graves issued a statement that said: "This would be humorous if we were not talking about the United States Department of Justice. First, you tell me that DOJ staffers were making secret hit lists and my name was on one of them. Then, you tell me that a staffer for Missouri's senior senator had a hit list so secret that not even the senator knew about it."

Josh Marshall points to another story from the Kansas City Star that Bond got re-acquainted with the Graves case in early 2006, around the same time that Graves' name appears on a target list created by Kyle Sampson.

Senator Bond … upon (Graves’) request personally called the White House to gain Todd extra time to wrap up case work before his departure.

A person in Bond’s office who asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the discussions said the White House rejected Bond’s efforts on Graves’ behalf because of “performance” concerns. E-mails from the Justice Department and the White House have used similar language in discussing the other U.S. attorneys who were fired.

It looks like Bond may have been looking out for Graves back in 2005 and didn't want him to get caught up in these ethics scandals, and then in early 2006, Bond tried to get the Justice Department to allow him to stay a little longer so he could finish his pending cases. And the DoJ said no, he had to leave. What cases were they trying to get Graves off of?

Of course, we know what happened next. Graves was replaced with Bradley Schlozman, using the Patriot Act provision that allowed him to escape Senate confirmation, and he went on to push bogus voter fraud cases furiously and generally misuse his office. The House Judiciary Committee has taken notice of that; Schlozman will testify May 15.

It also appears that Schlozman's discriminatory hiring policy was infectious, and he actually began a legacy at the DoJ:

When he was counsel to a House subcommittee in 2005, Jay Apperson resigned after writing a letter to a federal judge in his boss's name, demanding a tougher sentence for a drug courier. As an assistant U.S. attorney in Virginia in the 1990s, he infuriated fellow prosecutors when he facetiously suggested a White History Month to complement Black History Month.

Yet when Apperson was looking for a job recently, four senior Justice Department officials urged Jeffrey A. Taylor, the top federal prosecutor for the District of Columbia, to hire him. Taylor did, and allowed him to skip the rigorous vetting process that the vast majority of career federal prosecutors face.

It used to be that you couldn't hire someone that partisan for a career prosecutor job. But the rules didn't apply to this Justice Department.

US Attorney Update

Too much for paragraphs, I'm going to bullet points:

• McClatchy has confirmed that as many as 12 US Attorneys were targeted in the initial effort to fire federal prosecutors. The others were Steven Biskupic in Wisconsin (who may have saved his job by indicting Georgia L. Thompson), Todd Graves in Missouri (who ended up resigning), Thomas Heffelfinger in Minnesota (resigned) and Thomas Merino in Pennsylvania (still on the job). Both Graves and Heffelfinger were replaced by two of the most partisan operatives in the whole Justice Department.

• James Comey's testimony to the House Judiciary Committee last week was pretty damaging. He called the fired attorneys "some of the best" prosecutors in the system. He also claimed that he didn't know about the firings, despite being the deputy attorney general when discussions were in place. We still don't know who directed this effort.

• But we're getting closer, with this report showing that Karl Rove was involved in coaching Justice Department officials on their testimony to Congressional committees. Oddly, his point in that coaching was that the officials needed to provide a concrete reason for the firing of the various attorneys. This was probably what made the scandal even worse, as the reasons were quickly shown to be bogus. If the Justice Department simply said that the prosecutors lost the confidence of the President, it would be hard to argue. But by giving specifics that could be rebutted, the scandal spun out of control. And Rove's supposed to be the Boy Genius? Dan Froomkin has more.

• Pulitzer Prize winner Charlie Savage has a good rundown of Bradley Schlozman's role in the scandal, his baseless voter fraud investigations in Missouri, his work to suppress voting rights in the Civil Rights Division, etc. Not much of this is new, but for those who want to catch up, it's a great way to understand Schlozman and his importance. He essentially proves the point that the Justice Department had a specific concern to use their power to help ensure Republican electoral successes. Actually this McClatchy article moves the story forward, showing that Congress is investigating Schlozman's hiring practices while in the Civil Rights Division (it appears to be based on how Republican the applicants were). Incidentally, the Civil Rights Division doesn't have any black people in it.

• The US Attorney in Washington State, John McKay, may have been fired because he was investigating the murder of his former colleague Tom Wales. Wales was a major proponent of gun control legislation, and his murder is still unsolved, though two and two can be put together...

The Great Voter Fraud Swindle - Missouri in 2006

The Republican goal of pushing baseless voter fraud investigations as a means to suppress turnout, particularly minority turnout, has a long and ignominious history. They have used intimidation and fear to keep voters away from the polls, voters that have felt the force of justice administrated upon them disproportionately. The idea is to harrass, frighten, and confuse voters so that they will not want to involve themselves in the electoral process, for their own safety and personal liberty more than anything else.

This 40-year history, which includes the participation of a former Supreme Court Chief Justice and thousands of well-connected GOP operatives, have continued in the efforts of the Bush Administration's Justice Department, particularly in Missouri, where the GOP tried to save their Senate majority by using the US Attorney office and legislative arms to prosecute false voter fraud claims, maintain laws devoted to voter suppression, purge voter lists and police perfectly legal GOTV operations.

First, the history. This is from 1964:

John M Baley, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, charged today that "under the guise of setting up an apparatus to protect the sanctity of the ballot, the Republicans are actually creating the machinery for a carefully organized campaign to intimidate voters and to frighten members of minority groups from casing their ballots on November 3rd.

"'Let's get this straight,' Bailey added, 'the Democratic Party is just as much opposed to vote frauds as is the Republican party. We will settle for giving all legally registered voters an opportunity to make their choice on November 3rd. We have enough faith in our Party to be confident that the outcome will be a vote of confience in President Johnson and a mandate for the President and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to continue the programs of the Johnson-Kennedy Administration.

"'But we have evidence that the Republican program is not really what it purports to be. it is an organized effort to prevent the foreign born, to prevent Negroes, to prevent members of ethnic minorities from casting their votes by frightening and intimidating them at the polling place.

"'We intend to see to it that the rights of these people are protected. We will have our people at the polling places--not to frighten or threaten anyone--but to protect the right of any eligible voter to cast a secret ballot without threats or intimidation.'

Bailey said the Republican program, called "Operation Eagle Eye," is really "a program to cut down the vote in predominantly Democratic areas by harassing, frightening, and confusing the voters."

This is from 2006:

Few have endorsed the strategy of pursuing allegations of voter fraud with more enthusiasm than White House political guru Karl Rove. And nowhere has the plan been more apparent than in Missouri.

Before last fall's election:

• (Bradley) Schlozman, while he was acting civil rights chief, authorized a suit accusing the state of failing to eliminate legions of ineligible people from lists of registered voters. A federal judge tossed out the suit this April 13, saying Democratic Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan couldn't police local registration rolls and noting that the government had produced no evidence of fraud.

• The Missouri General Assembly - with the White House's help - narrowly passed a law requiring voters to show photo identification cards, which Carnahan estimated would disenfranchise 200,000 voters. The state Supreme Court voided the law as unconstitutional before the election.

• Two weeks before the election, the St. Louis Board of Elections sent letters threatening to disqualify 5,000 newly registered minority voters if they failed to verify their identities promptly, a move - instigated by a Republican appointee - that may have violated federal law. After an outcry, the board rescinded the threat.

• Five days before the election, Schlozman, then interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, announced indictments of four voter-registration workers for a Democratic-leaning group on charges of submitting phony applications, despite a Justice Department policy discouraging such action close to an election.

• In an interview with conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt a couple of days before the election, Rove said he'd just visited Missouri and had met with Republican strategists who "are well aware of" the threat of voter fraud. He said the party had "a large number of lawyers that are standing by, trained and ready to intervene" to keep the election clean.

I want to focus in on Bradley Schlozman and his efforts to continue the voter suppression in Missouri that he began in the civil rights department of the DoJ. The indictments of the ACORN recruiters five days before the election is a violation of Justice Department rules, which explicitly state that USAs should not bring election-related cases to an indictment directly preceding an election. The case was about ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) registering minority voters in Kansas City during 2006. There doesn't seem to be much to the allegations that this was in any way wrong, other than the fact that they were registering minority voters. Registering fake voters is a crime, but those fake voters are not in any way able to vote, and there is no evidence that anyone has used any of those names at the polls. And in fact, the lead investigators on any potential fraud was ACORN itself:

According to Elyshya Miller, ACORN's head organizer for Kansas City, ACORN identified certain forms as potentially fraudulent and turned them over to prosecutors in late October; four organizers were responsible. A week later, all four organizers were indicted by a grand jury.

But in their evident haste to indict, the prosecutors made a mistake -- they indicted the wrong person. Three weeks after the election, Schlozman's office dropped the charges against one of the defendants, Stephanie Davis, admitting that her identity was used without her permission. It was not until January of this year that Schlozman's office finally indicted one Caren Davis, who was apparently the person they were really after. Caren Davis' lawyer Dana Altieri told me that Davis is currently undergoing a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether she is competent to stand trial.

But let's look at the indicted crimes themselves. The four defendants were accused of forging the registration forms for a grand total of six voters (Caren Davis was responsible for three). In some cases, the defendants simply made people up; others forged the registrations for real people.

Schlozman claimed this was a "national investigation," but he was the only US Attorney in the country to bring charges in 2006. He was appointed using the Patriot Act provision that circumvented Senate confirmation, replacing a USA that was previously on DoJ purge lists. Schlozman was installed to push voter fraud investigations and intimidate minority voters; but also there's the additional tidbit that his predecessor Todd Graves was investigating Medicare fraud cases, and Schlozman put a stop to that. Elsewhere, attempts to look into a particular Medicare-fraud case, involving Novation LLC, ended with a series of mysterious accidental deaths.

With Schlozman's job done after the election (and unsuccessfully, I might add), he went right back to the DoJ, to become an "attorney in the Counsel to the Director staff at the Executive Office for United States Attorneys." By the way, Schlozman's replacement, John Wood, is a former OMB general counsel, as well as ICE head Julie Myers' husband. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

When we look back at the events in Missouri - especially the mystery USA that swooped into town, investigated all kinds of voter fraud investigations, and then just as quickly swooped out - you can only conclude that this is the continuation of 40 years of suppressing minority voters to dampen the Democratic vote. In Missouri it was the US Attorney's office, but also the entire GOP delegation in the state, who publicized voter fraud allegations, created photo ID laws designed to suppress the vote, and did everything they could to stop minorities from casting a ballot. This is the nub of the entire US Attorneys scandal - it was a political plan to create a Republican majority.

The March of the Loyal Bushies

A couple days ago Josh Marshall put up a cryptic post asking everyone to think about the name Bradley J. Schlozman. Far from just because of the fact that it's a hilarious name, he also happens to be the US Attorney for Western Missouri, appointed in March of 2006, just a few days after the Patriot Act provision was enacted allowing US Attorneys to avoid Senate confirmation.

Today we have news of what Schlozman has been up to in the USA office, and how he has politicized his position on a number of occasions.

Here's Schlozman's bio:

Bradley J. Schlozman was appointed to serve as the United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri under an Attorney General Appointment on March 23, 2006.

Prior to assuming his current post, Mr. Schlozman served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the United States Department of Justice. In this capacity, Mr. Schlozman supervised all activities of the Civil Rights Division, which is comprised of over 700 employees, including 356 attorneys. The Civil Rights Division is responsible for enforcing federal civil rights statutes, including those statutes that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, sex, disability, religion, and national origin in education, employment, credit, housing, public accommodations and facilities, voting, and certain federally funded and conducted programs.

Mr. Schlozman served for five months as the Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division. Before that, he had served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General since May 2003, directly supervising the Criminal, Voting, Employment, and Special Litigation Sections of the Civil Rights Division. Mr. Schlozman began his service in the Bush Administration as Counsel to then-Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson.

So Scholzman was the head of the Civil Rights Division at DoJ before getting the appointment. Well, the Civil Rights Division was maybe the most politicized division in the entire Justice Department, as Paul Kiel related in a very detailed article.

Many career analysts and attorneys have either been transferred or driven out; their replacements are long on conservative credentials and short on civil rights experience.

Here's an inside account of what it's like inside from Toby Moore, a redistricting expert with the division's voting section until the spring of 2006. Like many of his colleagues, he left due to the hostile atmosphere in the section, where he says there was a pattern of selective intimidation towards career staff.

According to Moore, his supervisor and the political appointees in the section consistently criticized his work because it didn't jibe with their pre-drawn conclusions. That was bad enough, he said, but the real trouble came after he and three colleagues recommended opposing a Georgia voter I.D. law pushed by Republicans. After the recommendation, which clashed with the views of Moore's superiors, they reprimanded him for not adequately analyzing the evidence and accused him of mistreating his Republican colleague, with whom he'd had frequent disagreements. But it got worse. Moore said that his Republican superiors even monitored his emails, eventually filing a complaint against him with the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility for allegedly disclosing privileged information in one email (he was cleared of wrongdoing). Fed up, and worried that it was too dangerous to his professional future to remain there, he left.

Remember that the DoJ went against the advice of its own career lawyers by allowing the Texas redistricting plan to go forward even though it was concluded that it violated the Voting Rights Act (and the Supreme Court at least partially agreed). In fact, it was SCHLOZMAN who implemented that overruling.

By the way, who was monitoring Toby Moore's emails? The Schloz.

Moore said that there was persistent gossip in the section that the political appointees who supervised the division had been monitoring staff's emails.

This suspicion was confirmed, he said, when Bradley J. Schlozman, the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division (now an unconfirmed U.S. Attorney installed after the revision to the Patriot Act) and Hans von Spakovsy, Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights (now a commissioner with the Federal Election Commission), filed a complaint against him with the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR).

The charge, Moore said, was that he had violated department rules by discussing one of the section's cases in an email to a friend who used to work in the Civil Rights Division. He was interviewed by investigators. According to an April, 2006 letter from OPR reviewed by TPMmuckraker, Moore was cleared of any wrongdoing.

So clearly, Schlozman was one of the point men on ensuring that voter intimidation and suppression could go forward with the full support of the Justice Department. Having been burnished in that cauldron, the DoJ sent Schlozman out into the world - specifically into Missouri, where he replaced US Attorney Todd Graves, who resigned in March 2006. Via Fired Up Missouri, here are a couple examples of what Schlozman did in Missouri to push corruption cases against Democrats:

ACORN Prosecutions for Fraudulent Voter Registrations- During his tenure as U.S. Attorney for Missouri's Western District, Schlozman broke with long-standing precedent among Federal law enforcement by bringing indictments against 5 voter-registration workers paid by community group ACORN just days before a high-profile and tightly contested election. Schlozman, as the first U.S. Attorney appointed under a then-little-noted provision added to the Patriot Act that allowed interim U.S. Attorney's to be picked by the President without Senate confirmation, aggressively and unorthodoxly pushed the voter registration fraud prosecutions forward in a manner intended to provide "verification" for the GOP "voter fraud" claims that had flourished in Missouri --even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary-- since November 2000.

NVRA Lawsuit Against Robin Carnahan and the State of Missouri- In late October of 2005, while serving as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, Schlozman authorized suit by the United States against Democratic Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, alleging that she had not purged enough voters from county rolls to fulfill her duty under the National Voting Rights Act. With the suit, Schlozman aimed not only to absolve current GOP Governor Matt Blunt of any voting issues for which he may have been responsible in the past (Blunt preceded Carnahan as Secretary of State) by shifting the defensive onus to the new Democratic Secretary of State, but also to put obstacles before Carahan --who many viewed as an up-and-coming elected official who could pose a huge threat to Blunt in the future. The suit additionally gave Missouri GOPers a platform from which they could continue to make unfounded claims about unregistered voters and the "stealing" of elections. Just weeks ago, a federal judge ruled in Carnahan's favor on the suit, going so far as to suggest that the Civil Rights Division had made up its theories of the suit as it went along.

There are more examples in that great post, including moving to raid the Missouri home of an Islamic activist right before the 2006 election. But the voter fraud cases are of the greatest interest, since they are the very same claims that Bush Administration officials are using as the basis for firing US Attorneys who wouldn't prosecute these cases. This led to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch calling Schlozman's efforts a "snipe hunt," as they ended up in the same way most voter fraud cases end; with little or no evidence.

Voter fraud is about as rare as snipe in most parts of the country, including Missouri. As evidence of that we have the testimony of (a) a five-year study by the federal Election Assistance Commission; (b) a report from the Missouri Secretary of State showing nobody in the state tried to vote with a fake I.D. in 2006; (c) Department of Justice statistics showing only 86 people were convicted of voter fraud-related crimes in the last five years, many of them on trivial errors; and (d) a federal judge's ruling last week that the justice department had failed to demonstrate that voter fraud had occurred in Missouri last year.

Undaunted by these facts, Republicans in the Legislature lurk about like Elmer Fudd with their gunny sacks and sticks, promoting bills to require voters to present photo identification before they're allowed to cast a ballot. They passed such a bill last year, but the courts threw it out as unfair to those who couldn't afford the cost and hassle involved in getting a photo I.D. card.

It's important to backtrack for a moment and take a look at who Schlozman replaced. Todd Graves was the original US Attorney for Western Missouri, and he was forced to recuse himself in a political corruption case involving Missouri Governor Matt Blunt because his wife was caught up in it up to her eyeballs. After he recused himself, the case went to... Bud Cummins, former USA for Arkansas who is one of the Gonzales 8.

BradBlog picks this up in a great post:

In May of 2006, media reports surfaced that Missouri Governor Matt Blunt was under investigation by Cummins's office in connection with a franchising scheme for satellite state licensing fee offices as carried out by (Mark) Hearne's law firm, Lathrop & Gage.

In June of 2006, Cummins was fired without explanation. His firing came prior to the other 7 attorneys who would be dismissed in December of 2006.

Hearne had been both Blunt's right-hand legal man for some time; as well as a GOP point man in Florida in 2000 (but who wasn't?); as well as the Bush/Cheney '04 general counsel in Missouri (at the specific, personal request of Dubya's uncle, Bucky Bush, according to Thor himself in Missouri Lawyer's Weekly); before he then became the Bush/Cheney '04 national general counsel; and after the election, he became the founder of the scam "non-partisan" GOP front group calling itself "American Center for Voting Rights" (ACVR); which was, in turn, behind virtually every report, initiative, claim, piece of legislation, Congressional testimony, legal case, "official commission," or public statement concerning the cooked-up case for the mythical epidemic of Democratic "voter fraud" that has been at the heart of the GOP/White House/DoJ attempts at vote-shaving via politicization and suppression at the ballot box since at least 2004.

Further, Hearne has been publicly recognized (though usually in only the RNC-friendliest of locations) for his efforts on behalf of GOP elections by his friend Rove, as well as both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. See this Lathrop & Gage PDF two-pager including quotes from both Rove and Bush singing Thor's praises. (Don't worry. If that PDF, like so much else of late concerning Thor's activities, including the ACVR website as we reported a few weeks ago, gets scrubbed from the Internets, we've already got a copy saved, along with much of the other Thor-stuff that's been disappearing since the U.S. Attorney scandal broke.)

In sum, when news of a criminal investigation into both MO's Governor Blunt (the son of the powerful GOP House Whip, Roy) and Lathrop & Gage surfaced, alarm bells would have gone off from Missouri to D.C. According to several media reports, and a few tips, it would appear they did just that. Quite loudly, in fact...

So.

We have a US Attorney (Cummins) who appears to have been fired for pursuing a corruption case in Missouri, not to mention to step aside for a Karl Rove-trained operative named Tim Griffin. We have a USA in Western Missouri (Todd Graves) who was originally on purge lists inside the Justice Department before he resigned in March 2006. And we have his replacement (Bradley J. Schlozman) who has a long history of politicizing the administration of justice, from the Civil Rights Division to the USA office in Missouri. He wouldn't even hire people who weren't activist movement conservatives.

When Ty Clevenger, a line attorney in the Civil Rights Division, forwarded a friend's resume to deputy division chief Bradley Schlozman, he was expecting questions about his friend's experience as a lawyer. But what Schlozman wanted to know, according to Clevenger, was whether his friend was a Republican.

Clevenger, a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association, told Schlozman that his friend was conservative. He just wasn't sure how active his friend was politically. The friend was never got an interview.

By the way, Schlozman is no longer the US Attorney for Western Missouri. John Wood was sworn in a couple weeks ago. Schlozman, who was never confirmed by the Senate, spent a year in that US Attorney position, pushing bogus voter fraud cases and using the office as a club to punish the opposition party.

I found this interesting:

Kansas City, MO 04/16/07 - Novation LLC a hospital supplier in Irving, Texas admitted in a Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals filing dated April 9th, 2007 that it was identified as a co-conspirator in a 2002 scheme to use US Bancorp’s trust division to prevent Medical Supply Chain from entering the market for hospital supplies by withholding escrow accounts and misusing the USA PATRIOT act as a pretext [...]

In an April 18, 2005 affidavit, Medical Supply Chain founder Samuel Lipari complained about FBI misuse of USA PATRIOT Act surveillance powers. The affidavit described interception of electronic communications and searches by law enforcement officials being used to interfere with and obstruct Lipari’s civil prosecution of the Novation defendants in Medical Supply Chain, Inc., v. Novation LLC et al, US District Court for the W.D. of Missouri No. 05-0210-CV-W-ODS

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales confirmed the existence of the program for warrantless surveillance, first reported in The New York Times, on December 19, 2005. However on January 25, 2006 Gonzales wrote that “there has not been a single verified abuse of any of the provisions” of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Samuel Lipari again complained on October 12, 2006 in the US Court of Appeals for the Eight Circuit in St. Louis, Missouri that US District Attorney Bradley J. Schlozman failed to investigate evidence of public corruption brought to his office and permitted obstruction of justice to continue despite the injuries to Samuel Lipari, his family and associates.

On January 16, 2007 Attorney General Gonzales responded to criticism of his misuse of the USA PATRIOT Act by announcing John Wood would be taking Bradley Schlozman's place in Kansas City two days before he gave his previous testimony to Congress.

On March 22, 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales met in St. Louis with U.S. Attorneys Catherine L. Hanaway and Bradley J. Schlozman of Missouri districts to conduct an undisclosed discussion related to the conduct of US Attorney Bradley J. Schlozman.

Disappointed with the continuing US Department of Justice cover up, on April 9, 2007 Samuel Lipari publicly disclosed Medical Supply discovery revealing the US Attorneys targeted by Karl Rove and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that resulted in Todd Graves being replaced by Bradley J. Schlozman a year earlier. John Wood was finally sworn in as the US Attorney for the Western District of Missouri on April 11, 2007.

This came out last week. I'm going to keep digging.