The Thugs Are Out

Kudos to Raw Story for an incredible piece of journalism detailing the lengths to which the Administration's goons are trying to shut down any investigations into the perversion of the Justice Department. Jeers to the traditional media for its near-total blackout on these incidents. We're talking about serious business here.

These crimes raise serious questions about possible use of deliberate intimidation tactics not only because of who the victims are and the already wide criticism of the prosecutions to begin with, but also because of the suspicious nature of each incident individually as well as the pattern collectively. Typically burglars do not break-into an office or private residence only to rummage through documents, for example, as is the case with most of the burglaries in these two federal cases.

In Alabama, for instance, the home of former Democratic Governor Don Siegelman was burglarized twice during the period of his first indictment. Nothing of value was taken, however, and according to the Siegelman family, the only items of interest to the burglars were the files in Siegelman's home office.

Siegelman's attorney experienced the same type of break-in at her office.

In neighboring Mississippi, a case brought against a trial lawyer and three judges raises even more disturbing questions. Of the four individuals in the same case, three of the US Attorney’s targets were the victims of crimes during their indictment or trial. This case, like that of Governor Siegelman, has been widely criticized as a politically motivated prosecution by a Bush US Attorney.

It's more than just a bunch of Watergate-style burglaries, too.

The incidents are not limited to burglaries. In Mississippi, former Judge John Whitfield was the victim of arson at his office. In Alabama, the whistleblower in the Don Siegelman case, Dana Jill Simpson, had her home burned down, and shortly thereafter her car was allegedly forced off the road.

While there is no direct evidence linking these crimes to the US Attorneys’ office targeting these individuals, or to the Bush administration, there is a distinct pattern that makes it highly unlikely that these incidents are isolated and unrelated.

All of these crimes remain unsolved.

Read the whole thing. You'd think there was some kind of Nixon's plumbers' reunion tour or something.

For a really good look into the Siegelman story in case you haven't kept up, Thom Hartmann interviewed the former Alabama governor last week. Here's the audio.



I wasn't aware of this part:

[Thom Hartmann]: And, in fact, if I understand this correctly, you were being prosecuted by a woman whose husband was the campaign manager for the Republican who ran against you for governor and in the middle of the night in one county because of a voting machine malfunction after the election had apparently already been called in your favor, suddenly in the middle of the night when there were nobody expect Republicans standing around, they discovered a couple thousand more votes and said 'Oh, yeah, no no, Don Siegelman actually lost'. Do I have that right?

[cross talk]

[Don Siegelman]: You have it right. They electronically shifted votes from my column to my Republican's column.

[Thom Hartmann]: To Bob Riley's column.

[Don Siegelman]: I believe, yes, to Bob Riley's column. And oddly enough, it didn't effect a single down-ballot race. They took five thousand or six thousand votes of mine and shifted it over to Bob Riley and when they counted everybody else's votes, the shift at the top which logically would have made a difference at the bottom...

[Thom Hartmann]: Sure.

[Don Siegelman]: You know, had no impact whatsoever.

[Thom Hartmann]: So the people running for the lesser state offices, the folks who voted Democratic right down the ticket all of a sudden at the very top of the ticket were 'Oh, I'm going to vote for every Democrat except Don Siegelman, I'll put that over to Riley ' and only in this one area in this one county on this one set of machines that was discovered in the middle of the night. by the Republicans.

[Don Siegelman]: Yes, a couple of other interesting things, Thom, since you brought this up, but the two people who either were given credit or who gave themselves credit for stealing the election and swinging the election to my Republican opponent for catching this 'electronic glitch' as they called it, one was Karl Rove's partner, business partner, her name was Kitty McCullough also known as Kelly, oh gosh, I can't remember what her second name was but she had a different married name.

[Thom Hartmann]: But she's the one who discovered the extra votes that caused you to lose and caused Bob Riley to won, OK.

[Don Siegelman]: And the other person was a guy named Dan Gans who right after that went to work for an Abramoff/Tom Delay related company, a group called the Alexander Strategies Group. And he claimed credit on his web site that he was responsible for this, because he had an expertese in electronic ballot security.

That 2002 election, in places like Alabama and Georgia, was as dirty as the day is long.

You've got election theft, destruction of evidence (5 million emails), violation of subpoenas, perversion of the instruments of justice, railroading Democratic officials into jail, and now intimidation of witnesses, arson and burglary. It's all wrapped up with a nice little bow if any Woodwards and Bernsteins want to take a whack at it. Even, you know, Woodward, or Bernstein.

Do We Need Another One Of These?

I really don't think America is going to be willing to again choose a President who can be credibly described as dumb as hell.

Fred Thompson gained an image as a tough-minded investigative counsel for the Senate Watergate committee. Yet President Nixon and his top aides viewed the fellow Republican as a willing, if not too bright, ally, according to White House tapes [...]

Thompson, then 30, was appointed counsel by his political mentor, Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker, the top Republican on the Senate investigative committee. Thompson had been an assistant U.S. attorney in Nashville, Tenn., and had managed Baker's re-election campaign. Thompson later was a senator himself.

Nixon was disappointed with the selection of Thompson, whom he called "dumb as hell." The president did not think Thompson was skilled enough to interrogate unfriendly witnesses and would be outsmarted by the committee's Democratic counsel.

This assessment comes from audio tapes of White House conversations recently reviewed by The Associated Press at the National Archives in College Park, Md., and transcripts of those discussions that are published in "Abuse of Power: The New Watergate Tapes," by historian Stanley Kutler.

"Oh s---, that kid," Nixon said when told by his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, of Thompson's appointment on Feb. 22, 1973.

"Well, we're stuck with him," Haldeman said.

This story is a kind of follow-up to this week's revelation that Thompson was a mole inside the Senate Judiciary Committee, leaking to the White House what the committee knew about Nixon's wrongdoing. Nixon's lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt was helping Thompson interrogate and discredit witnesses. So he was a spy but an exceedingly stupid one. Maybe that's why he was unsuccessful in saving Nixon's butt.

"We've got a pretty good rapport with Fred Thompson," Buzhardt told Nixon in an Oval Office meeting on June 6, 1973. The meeting included a discussion of former White House counsel John Dean's upcoming testimony before the committee.

Dean, the committee's star witness, had agreed to tell what he knew about the break-in and cover-up if he was granted immunity against anything incriminating he might say.

Nixon expressed concern that Thompson was not "very smart."

"Not extremely so," Buzhardt agreed.

"But he's friendly," Nixon said.

Seeing the lengths to which Thompson was willing to carry water for Tricky Dick, maybe paid Nixon apologist Hugh Hewitt will dump Multiple Choice Mitt Romney and stroll over to Frederick's of Hollywood.

The portrait in this article is of Thompson, at 30, as a partisan hack of the highest order, with no mind of his own whatsoever. And that tracks with this account of Thompson's appearance at a Young Republicans conference this weekend. Would anyone with half a brain, who's been paying any kind of attention over the past 6 years, ever say anything like this?

In his speech, Thompson fired up the crowded when he said he was the top target of The New York Times and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. He said the United States was the greatest country, and that set the audience off, too.

"I'm getting tired of having to apologize for the United States of America around the world," Thompson said. "I'm tired of other people's perceptions that we need to apologize."

You know, I'm tried of apologizing for the United States myself, but considering we haven't done so once in the past six years, despite secret prisons, botched invasions, warrantless wiretapping, torture, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, denial of habeas corpus, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, alienating allies by calling them "Old Europe," lying America into war, lying to the world at the UN, 50 years of illegal covert actions on behalf of American empire, etc., maybe we should practice a little humility for a change.

But that wouldn't mean anything to Thompson because he's too dumb as hell to look beyond his narrow partisan worldview. Like Ezra Klein said earlier this week, it'd be like electing Limbaugh. And the last thing we need in the White House is another dim partisan.

(P.S. I've been slamming Thompson this week because the information is starting to leak out, no doubt by other Republican candidates. You got a problem with it, blame them)

Team Thompson

So Tim Griffin, the Karl Rove protege and caging expert, is officially resigning as the US Attorney for Arkansas, announcing this on the same day that Fred Thompson announces his exploratory committee. Thompson has been rumored to be in touch with Griffin over hiring him as a campaign manager. We already know that his campaign-manager-in-waiting is a former tobacco industry executive. Now from Rick Perlstein comes news about another Thompson staffer:

I've been reading up on the latest Republican presidential candidate, and in an article in the new Weekly Standard when the following line caught my eye:

The conference call began around 2:00 pm. Ken Rietz, a top executive with Burson Marsteller and a close adviser to Thompson, welcomed the participants."

Kenneth Rietz. I knew I'd heard of that name before.

I used my MacIntosh's function that lets you search for any string of characters that's on your hard drive. I found what I was looking for in my "Watergate" file. The following is a quote from my favorite book about the Nixon presidency, Jonathan Schell's The Time of Illusion (page 221):

In Washington, a taxi-driver was hired by the Nixon reelection committee to join the Muskie campaign. He was taken on as a volunteer, and was eventually assigned the task of carrying the Senator's's mail between his Senate office and his campaign headquarters. On the way he would give the Senator's's campaign documents, including internal memoranda and drafts of speeches and position papers, to a Republican operative whose code name was Fat Jack and who held a post in the Office of Economic Oportunity. Fat Jack would photograph the papers in a downtown office rented for that purpose, and would pass the film along; for the first few months...to Kenneth Rietz, director of the youth division...and then, after Rietz withdrew...to E. Howard Hunt on a Washington Street corner.

A current Republican presidential contender has a Watergate spy as a "close advisor": surely interesting, and perhaps even relevant to the character of the candidate.

I'm telling you, the moment that anybody finds anything out about Thompson, the 20-year lobbyist, whose last two high-profile political jobs were running Scooter Libby's Legal Defense Fund and shepherding John Roberts and Sam Alito through their Supreme Court confirmations, they're going to see that he's the same old Republican, with ties to every low-down dirty trickster in the business.