Domenici On Notice

I think we all thought that the US Attorney scandal would melt away with the end of the Bush regime. But a federal grand jury is looking into Pete Domenici's role in the firing of David Iglesias in New Mexico.

The federal grand jury is investigating whether Domenici and other political figures attempted to improperly press Iglesias to bring a criminal prosecution against New Mexico Democrats just prior to the 2006 congressional midterm elections, according to legal sources close to the investigation and private attorneys representing officials who prosecutors want to question. Investigators appear to be scrutinizing Iglesias' firing in the context of whether he was fired in retaliation because Domenici and others believed that he would not manipulate the timing of prosecutions to help Republicans [...]

The grand jury investigation is currently being led by Nora Dannehy, the acting U.S. attorney in Connecticut. Then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey named Dannehy to "determine whether any prosecutable offense was committed" in the course of the firings following September's report by the Inspector General and OPR on the firings.

The report found that Iglesias was fired largely as a result of complaints made to the White House by Domenici and Bell. But the report also concluded that the probe was severely "hindered" by the refusal by Domenici, Bell, and several senior Bush administration officials to cooperate with the investigation.

If they cannot get cooperation out of the grand jury, I assume this could be an obstruction of justice indictment, but if the grand jury finds that Domenici and others did pressure Iglesias to prosecute Democrats before the midterms, that would also be obstruction of justice in THAT case. So two possible tracks here. No word on whether Heather Wilson, the former Congresswoman who also reportedly called Iglesias during that time, is involved in the case, but Emptywheel wants to know if someone else is involved.

It'll be interesting to see whether Domenici cooperates. That's because--according to an often-ignored story from the Albuquerque Journal--Domenici had to call Bush directly to get Iglesias fired.

"In the spring of 2006, Domenici told Gonzales he wanted Iglesias out.

Gonzales refused. He told Domenici he would fire Iglesias only on orders from the president.

At some point after the election last Nov. 6, Domenici called Bush's senior political adviser, Karl Rove, and told him he wanted Iglesias out and asked Rove to take his request directly to the president.

Domenici and Bush subsequently had a telephone conversation about the issue.

The conversation between Bush and Domenici occurred sometime after the election but before the firings of Iglesias and six other U.S. attorneys were announced on Dec. 7.

Iglesias' name first showed up on a Nov. 15 list of federal prosecutors who would be asked to resign. It was not on a similar list prepared in October.

The Journal confirmed the sequence of events through a variety of sources familiar with the firing of Iglesias, including sources close to Domenici. The senator's office declined comment."

Would the former President be criminally liable in this case? I guess it depends on how far the prosecutor is willing to take the case. From the beginning of the US Attorney scandal, it was clear that the conduct with respect to David Iglesias was egregious. We could really see some arrests in this one.

UPDATE: There's also talk of Karl Rove cooperating with the US Attorney investigation, which I'm finding hard to believe. But maybe by "cooperating" Rove means "lying on the stand and then trying to wiggle out of it," the way he "cooperated" in the CIA leak investigation.

Scandal Overload

I actually think this mad rush to do John McCain's vetting work for him has led to too much information out there about Sarah Palin. It's simply not possible to process it all. There are important issues and not-so-important issues and issues that aren't important but bring up other issues that might be, and the whole thing devolves into a kind of scandal morass not unlike what you see with the Bush Administration, allowing the offending party to emerge relatively unscathed. It's harder for Palin because this is her debut in the national spotlight, but the effect is the same. Like I said, I think she's going to have a great speech tonight and the media will do a complete 180, even though she'll be unchallenged on many fronts and omit key details while defining herself completely on her terms.

She'll call herself a reformer and discuss how she took on the "old boy's club" of backroom politics in Alaska. But there is now documentary evidence that she supported the "Bridge to Nowhere" throughout 2006 until it became a national laughingstock, and she made a career as a small-town mayor out of calling for earmarks, even some that wound up on John McCain's pork-barrel list of unnecessary expenditures. She's even defended the earmarking process while governor:

This year, Palin, who has been governor for nearly 22 months, defended earmarking as a vital part of the legislative system. "The federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship," she wrote in a newspaper column.

(she's not entirely wrong here - earmarks are overrated as a budget-buster - but the success with which Alaska gets their federal projects funded is out of proportion with the rest of the country, and with their petro-dollars that looks even worse.)

She'll call herself someone who rooted out the corruption and impropriety in government, yet she has a clear record of abuse of power, firing public officials not for lapses in their job performance but insufficient loyalty.

She'll call herself someone who held public officials to the standards of all citizens, but in the current "Troopergate" case, where she dismissed Walt Monegan, the Department of Public Safety head who wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law, she's clearly obstructing the investigation.

Gov. Sarah Palin wants a state board to review the circumstances surrounding the dismissal of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan -- taking the unusual step of making an ethics complaint against herself.

Her lawyer sent an "ethics disclosure" Monday night to Attorney General Talis Colberg. The governor asked that it go to the three-person Personnel Board as a complaint. While ethics complaints are usually confidential, Palin wants the matter open [...]

Tom Daniel, an Anchorage labor and employment lawyer hired by the board in the Renkes case, took a quick look at Palin's complaint Tuesday.

"It appears that the Governor has filed an ethics complaint against herself. ... This is very unusual because ethics complaints typically are filed against others," Daniel wrote in an e-mail responding to a Daily News query.

Asked whether the personnel board could take the investigation away from the Legislature -- as Palin wants to do -- Daniel answered: "I've never looked at that issue, but I can't see why filing a complaint with the personnel board would deprive the Legislature of the right to conduct its own investigation."

Aides are also refusing to testify in the probe.

And then there are her many troubling stances on issues like reproductive rights, family planning, science, global warming, book burning (!) and a host of others.

This is actually too much to digest at once. And so it heads down the memory hole. Of course, once the anaesthesia of the speech wears off, there'll be more drip-drip-drip.

...UPDATE: Some speech samples here. It's going to be tough and straight-up Orthogonian politics of resentment. We'll see if she can channel her anger at being called out for ridicule this week; I think she's up to the task, and this backlash stuff is standard Republican politics when they are put up against the wall. Stoller is asking the right question - will this be the right way to introduce yourself to the whole nation, including independents?

You Can't Say They Don't Care About The Environment

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Yesterday’s midnight filing by the White House in CREW v. Executive Office of the President, a lawsuit challenging the failure of the White House to preserve and restore millions of missing emails, raises some very troubling questions that the White House clearly does not want to answer [...]

Even more troubling, the White House has now admitted that until October 2003, the White House recycled its back-up tapes, which contained the only copies of emails deleted prior to that date. What the White House has not explained is why it changed its policy of preserving all back-up tapes -- instituted in March of 2000 when the Clinton administration discovered that its system did not fully preserve all email from the Office of the Vice President -- at the same time it decided to dismantle the existing electronic record-keeping system, with no replacement at hand.

The deletion of millions of email beginning in March 2003 coupled with the White House’s destruction of back-up copies of those deleted email mean that there are no back-up copies of emails deleted during the period March 2003 through October 2003. The significance of this time-period cannot be overstated: the U.S. went to war with Iraq, top White House officials leaked the covert identity of Valerie Plame Wilson and the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into their actions.

Look, if you want to criticize the White House for actually showing bold leadership in controlling our runaway back-up computer tape consumption in this country, fine. But don't turn around and claim that you want to stop global warming then. You know how much carbon is released into the air through the production of back-up computer tapes? Maybe you want to see Florida sink into the Atlantic Ocean, and if so, go ahead and keep using those computer tapes!

We Be Jammin'

A new book out by Allen Raymond, one of the ringleaders of the 2002 New Hampshire phone-jamming case, has led to new scrutiny, and it's about time. This case really does encapsulate the whole Bush Administration: vote fraud, lawbreaking, ruthless partisanship, perversion of justice for political ends, and the arrogant belief that Republicans are above the law.

A former GOP political operative who ran an illegal election-day scheme to jam the phone lines of New Hampshire Democrats during the state's tight 2002 U.S. Senate election said in a new book and an interview that he believes the scandal reaches higher into the Republican Party.

Allen Raymond of Bethesda, Md., whose book Simon & Schuster will publish next month, also accused the Republican Party of trying to hang all the blame for a scandal on him as part of an "old-school cover-up."

Raymond really sounds like a guy who's been reformed by having the Republicans dump the whole scandal on him. He's an insider who is blowing the whistle on the illegal tactics they use to get their people elected.

Raymond said those who've tried to make him the fall guy for the New Hampshire scheme failed to recognize that e-mails, phone records and other evidence documented the complicity of a top state GOP official and the Republican National Committee's northeast regional director [...]

"Any tactic that didn't pass the smell test would never see the light of day without, — at the very least, the approval of an RNC attorney," he wrote.

Paul Twomey, a lawyer for the New Hampshire Democratic party, said that phone records obtained in the civil suit showed that Tobin made 22 calls to the White House political office in the 24 hours before and after the jamming.

John Sununu ended up winning this race by only 19,000 votes (ironically, we could see a rematch between him and Jeanne Shaheen next November). Obviously the phone-jamming had an impact. And today McClatchy writes that the Justice Department interfered to slow down the case so it wouldn't coincide with the 2004 elections.

While there were guilty pleas in the New Hampshire investigation prior to the 2004 presidential election, involvement of the national GOP wasn't confirmed. A Manchester, N.H., policeman quickly traced the jamming to Republican political operatives in 2003 and forwarded the evidence to the Justice Department for what ordinarily would be a straightforward case.

However, the official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, told McClatchy that senior Justice Department officials slowed the inquiry. The official didn't know whether top department officials ordered the delays or what motivated those decisions.

The official said that Terry O'Donnell, a former Pentagon general counsel who was representing Tobin, was in contact with senior department officials before Tobin was indicted.

In October, the House Judiciary Committee opened an investigation to determine whether partisan politics undermined the federal probe.

The official said that department officials rejected prosecutor Todd Hinnen's push to bring criminal charges against the New Hampshire Republican Party.

Weeks before the 2004 election, Hinnen's supervisors directed him to ask a judge to halt action temporarily in a Democratic Party civil suit against the GOP so that it wouldn't hurt the investigation, although Hinnen had expressed no concerns that it would, the official said.

Read that whole thing, it's a window into how the Bush Justice Department has always operated.

Republicans have won elections in the past in part because they are more willing to push the boundaries of the law and stop and nothing to get their people elected. We need eternal vigilance and continued investigations to bring them to heel.

WH Lawyers Discussed Torture Tapes, Including Abu Gonzales And David Addington!

The latest bombshell in the torture tapes case shows once again that the first explanation from the Bush Administration is never, ever the correct one.

At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

We knew about Harriet Miers, but the article also names John Bellinger (the senior lawyer for the NSC at the time), Alberto Gonzales and Cheney's brain David Addington. While the reporters don't exactly know what was said, they strongly imply that the White House lawyers, and by association the White House, wanted the tapes dumped in the Potomac.

It was previously reported that some administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews, several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Some other officials assert that no one at the White House advocated destroying the tapes. Those officials acknowledged, however, that no White House lawyer gave a direct order to preserve the tapes or advised that destroying them would be illegal.

Let me have one wild guess who wanted the tapes destroyed: Addington. He's not too interested in constraints on his own power. And Gonzales would go along with whatever his minders told him. This also means that the top official at the Justice Department was privy to discussions about the destruction of physical evidence implicating the federal government in major violations of international law, and said nothing. Because of course, he was knee-deep in it himself.

Keep in mind that the Justice Department is now the agency investigating this.

The sources in the story also throw a couple other CIA lawyers under the bus.

The current and former officials also provided new details about the role played in November 2005 by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the agency’s clandestine branch, who ultimately ordered the destruction of the tapes.

The officials said that before he issued a secret cable directing that the tapes be destroyed, Mr. Rodriguez received legal guidance from two C.I.A. lawyers, Steven Hermes and Robert Eatinger. The officials said that those lawyers gave written guidance to Mr. Rodriguez that he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that the destruction would violate no laws.

The agency did not make either Mr. Hermes or Mr. Eatinger available for comment.

This lines up perfectly with Rodriguez' defense as stated later in the article by his lawyer Robert Bennett. What it means for the purposes of the investigation is that there is even more of a paper trail than at first believed. Add it on to this known communication.

Newsweek reported this week that John D. Negroponte, who was director of national intelligence at the time the tapes were destroyed, sent a memorandum in the summer of 2005 to Mr. Goss, the C.I.A. director, advising him against destroying the tapes. Mr. Negroponte left the job this year to become deputy secretary of state, and a spokesman for the director of national intelligence declined to comment on the Newsweek article.

There's going to be a federal court hearing this week about the destruction of the tapes, so the timing of this article is pretty clear. As much as Mukasey wants to obstruct judicial or Congressional review over this situation, he cannot dictate the terms by which other branches of government conduct themselves, nor can he stop the drip-drip-drip of revelations that sink the White House further and further into complicity.

This is the second demonstrable lie from the Bush Administration this week, and it's only Tuesday night. Yesterday we learned that Bush knew about the Iran NIE intel months before he claimed he did. Tonight, it's that the White House was heavily involved in the discussions over whether to destroy these tapes and obstruct justice.

Friday Afternoon Erosion Of Democracy Dump

Michael Mukasey has revealed his true colors about who he works for.

Last week, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and ranking member Arlen Specter (R-PA) sent Attorney General Michael Mukasey a detailed list of questions about the Justice Department's knowledge of the CIA's torture tapes' destruction. What did DoJ officials know about the tapes while they existed? When did they learn they were to be destroyed? What communications did they have with the White House about it? [...]

Today, Mukasey gave his reply: no. The Department "has a long-standing policy of declining to provide non-public information about pending matters," he wrote, in order to avoid "any perception that our law enforcement decisions are subject to political influence. Accordingly, I will not at this time provide further information in response to your letter, but appreciate the Committee's interests in this matter." You can read that letter here.

He went even further with the House, telling CIA officials not to cooperate with the House investigation, including John Rizzo and Jose Rodriguez, who were the prime movers in the destruction of the torture tapes. Mukasey is just another hack, working for Fourthbranch Cheney (who apparently still thinks he exists in a fourth branch of government, by the way). He wants to have the Justice Department investigate itself, again, and claim that there will be any impartiality in the matter.

And to top it off, Senate Republicans, who incidentally love torture, have said so out loud:

Senate Republicans blocked a bill Friday that would restrict the interrogation methods the CIA can use against terrorism suspects.

The legislation, part of a measure authorizing the government's intelligence activities for 2008, had been approved a day earlier by the House and sent to the Senate for what was supposed to be final action. The bill would require the CIA to adhere to the Army's field manual on interrogation, which bans waterboarding, mock executions and other harsh interrogation methods.

By the way, they're doing this on Parliamentary grounds, saying that the rider was improperly inserted into the bill. Well, Republicans oughta know. That's all they did while in the majority.

I'm going to turn into water and slink down the drain now...

They Destroyed The Tapes To Cover Up The Crime

Not only have federal courts ordered preservation of all relevant documents AFTER the revelation of the destroyed CIA torture tapes, apparently the same orders were in place before.

The Bush administration was under court order not to discard evidence of detainee torture and abuse months before the CIA destroyed videotapes that revealed some of its harshest interrogation tactics.

Normally, that would force the government to defend itself against obstruction allegations. But the CIA may have an out: its clandestine network of overseas prisons.

While judges focused on the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and tried to guarantee that any evidence of detainee abuse would be preserved, the CIA was performing its toughest questioning half a world away. And by the time President Bush publicly acknowledged the secret prison system, interrogation videotapes of two terrorism suspects had been destroyed.

That certainly fits with the torture timeline of the tapes being destroyed soon after Dana Priest uncovered the CIA black sites on the pages of the Washington Post. Now the ACLU is asking that the CIA be held in contempt for destroying the tapes. I'm not sure what that means (are you going to throw the whole CIA in jail), but clearly this controversy is spinning out of control. And more and more detainees and suspects are revealing that their interrogations were videotaped and audiotaped, long after the CIA claims it ended the practice. Michael Hayden has now admitted that the agency failed to disclose to Congress what the hell was going on. This all points to the failure of intelligence oversight, which has been going on more some time (although I don't think David Ignatius has a clue about what to do about that). Destruction of evidence and lack of disclosure is a persistent problem, not a brand new thing. We have to determine a way to oversee the intelligence collection meaningfully and with due haste. Part of that comes from getting leaders in those oversight committees who are committed to the rule of law. The other part may come in the form of legal liability, which always tends to button things up for a while.

The 18-Minute Torture Gap: Dems Complicit?

As more information spills out about the CIA's destruction of torture tapes sometime in 2005, it is becoming clear that many people, in Congress, in the executive branch, and in the Justice Department had knowledge of the tapes, and urged the Agency not to destroy them, advice they never took.

White House and Justice Department officials, along with senior members of Congress, advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 against a plan to destroy hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda, government officials said Friday.

The chief of the agency’s clandestine service nevertheless ordered their destruction in November 2005, taking the step without notifying even the C.I.A.’s own top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, who was angry at the decision, the officials said [...]

Top C.I.A. officials had decided in 2003 to preserve the tapes in response to warnings from White House lawyers and lawmakers that destroying the tapes would be unwise, in part because it could carry legal risks, the government officials said.

But the government officials said that Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the agency’s clandestine service, the Directorate of Operations, had reversed that decision in November 2005, at a time when Congress and the courts were inquiring deeply into the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program. Mr. Rodriguez could not be reached Friday for comment.

As the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee in 2003, Porter J. Goss, then a Republican congressman from Florida, was among Congressional leaders who warned the C.I.A. against destroying the tapes, the former intelligence officials said. Mr. Goss became C.I.A. director in 2004 and was serving in the post when the tapes were destroyed, but was not informed in advance about Mr. Rodriguez’s decision, the former officials said.

Who the hell is running the CIA when physical evidence can be destroyed without the Director's knowledge?

But this not only is a dark stain on the CIA, and the Administration for authorizing the techniques that are now being covered up. It is a stain on those Democrats who were informed about the existence of these tapes and said nothing in public, meekly sending letters asking for their preservation. This is a persistent pattern among squishes like Jay Rockefeller and Jane Harman.

Jay Rockefeller is constantly learning of legally dubious (at best) CIA intelligence activities, and then saying nothing about them publicly until they are leaked to the press, at which point he expresses outrage and incredulity -- but reveals nothing. Really, isn't it about time the Democrats select an effective Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, one who will treat this scandal with the seriousness it deserves, and who will shed much-needed light on the CIA program of torture, cruel treatment and obstruction of evidence? ...

Jane Harman also knew of the intention to destroy the tapes, and she at least "urged" the CIA in writing not to do it. (Where were her colleagues?) But when she found out the CIA had destroyed the tapes, where was Harman's press conference? Where were the congressional hearings?

Rockefeller, indeed, is trying to change his story and claim that he didn't know about the tapes until a couple days ago. Of course, Intelligence Committee members are in a tough spot, forbidden from revealing state secrets while charged with official oversight. However, they are not powerless:

There are countless mechanisms available to a U.S. Senator or Representative to do something about illegal behavior they discover. Anyone -- not just someone in such a position -- has mechanisms available to them under whistleblower laws to intiate proceedings to investigate illegal government conduct. Why couldn't they have done that?

They could have also communicated much more aggressively within the government that unless the illegal behavior stopped, they would invoke those mechanisms. Why couldn't they have done that?

They could also commence closed door investigations to exert oversight over these illegal intelligence activities. The whole point of the SECRET SELECT INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEES is to enable Congress to exercise oversight even over the most secretive governmental conduct, precisely in order to prevent illegal behavior of this sort.

After the fact, Democrats are calling for an inquiry into the tapes' destruction. But they should have been adjudicating this all year long, on a bipartisan basis, inside the government, to provide a check on this potential obstruction of justice. That they didn't reflects the fact that they are disinterested in rocking the boat and doing their jobs.