I Know Nothink, I See Nothink

Somebody got to Tom Ridge. Someone got to him so badly, he's claiming that he was misquoted by his autobiography.

Ridge is now trying to get back into their good graces. He has been on an apology tour this week, insisting that he never meant to insinuate any bad motives on his former colleagues. Yesterday he groveled to Sean Hannity on Fox News, and today he went on CNN and is scheduled to talk with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC tonight. He also gave an interview to ABC’s Political Punch podcast. In all the appearances he criticized people for misinterpreting what he had written:

• But there’s never been any doubt in my mind that any of these individuals, Secretary Powell, Attorney General Ashcroft, Secretary Rumsfeld, the FBI Director Mueller, they’ve always had the security of America as the number one reason they would say, let’s go up or let’s not go up. I don’t think it ever was politics.” [CNN, 9/1/09]

• “”Is there any other reason that’s out there and perhaps this — expressed it unartfully — but I’m not suggesting that anybody in that room on that occasion or any other occasion was interested in doing anything other than the right thing to protect America.” [ABC, 9/1/09]

• “I was musing in the book, as I was trying to think back on those discussions. … Is there something else that I am missing or my department’s missing? Pure and simple. It’s not an accusatory statement. Wasn’t intended to be. And if people want to talk about it in that fashion, in this world — see, security is not black and white.” [Fox News, 8/31/09]

That Maddow interview was straight crazy. He denied words on the jacket of his own book.

I wonder what the Bushies have on this guy. Ridge has talked about political pressure in the past, in fact for years and years. John Dean speculates that he talked himself into criminal actions of politicizing terror this time, so he has to backpedal.

Clearly A Political Move

I didn't bother to watch Dick Cheney's Traveling Emporium and Snake Oil Sales Extravaganza on Fox News Sunday, mainly because I knew that pro-torture Chris Wallace and the whole pro-torture team over there would treat it like a fanzine fluff piece. Wallace's hourlong fellatio session probably satisfied Cheney immensely, and predictably, the other networks saw fit to publicize Little Dick and his concubine, because what a former Vice President says is automatically news! News! News! Don't you remember all those prime-time slots for Walter Mondale, Dan Quayle and Al Gore recently?

In this case, there was some news made, although not of the variety that's being reported. First of all, Cheney, who appears to think that the Bush White House functioned under the auspices of the law, believes that the Attorney General of the United States is a political appointee. I'm sure that, in the case of Alberto Gonzales, that was true. It's not how the American system works, of course.

The president is the chief law enforcement officer in the administration. He’s now saying, well, this isn’t anything that he’s got anything to do with. He’s up on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard and his attorney general is going back and doing something that the president said some months ago he wouldn’t do [...] Well, I think if you look at the Constitution, the president of the United States is the chief law enforcement officer in the land. The attorney general’s a statutory officer. He’s a member of the cabinet.

Fourthbranch would have been the world's best Revolution-era Tory. He truly believes in the divine right of kings. Witness later in the interview, where he in his capacity as chief law enforcement officer of the United States decides to toss out the law books.

WALLACE: Do you think what they did, now that you’ve heard about it, do you think what they did was wrong?

CHENEY: Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives, in preventing further attacks against the United States, in giving us the intelligence we needed to go find al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. … It was good policy. It was properly carried out. it worked very, very well.

WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re okay with it.

CHENEY: I am.

Worked so well, in fact, that CIA and military interrogators killed dozens of detainees in their custody. But what's a little torture and murder when you're talking about saving lives? Oh, and Cheney's answer is a lie, but that's redundant.

Perhaps the most absurd thing about Fourthbranch, and also what gets him through the night, I would gather, is how he actually thinks his Administration has a good record on counter-terrorism.

I seem to recall the Bush/Cheney era a little differently. Cheney thinks it was a sterling success when it came to national security and counter-terrorism. Perhaps there's something to this. After all, except for the catastrophic events of 9/11, and the anthrax attacks against Americans, and terrorist attacks against U.S. allies, and the terrorist attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Bush's inability to capture those responsible for 9/11, and waging an unnecessary war that inspired more terrorists, and the success terrorists had in exploiting Bush's international unpopularity, the Bush/Cheney record on counter-terrorism was awesome.

After the previous administration established a record like that, President Obama didn't ask Cheney for tips? The nerve.

You see what Cheney is doing here. He wants to politicize the Bush terror policies - the investigations being sought by the Attorney General are "clearly a political move," he says - so that any attempt to question them becomes a partisan food fight instead of simply the application of law. This is his metier and he does it very well, judging from all the attention he receives every time he emerges from the bunker. Conservatives, ever on the lookout for victimization, cry that the Justice Department is being all political by investigating torture and murder, and the media cover the ping-pong match.

But they do more than that. They print fallacious articles that continue to muddy the waters, still trying to determine if torture "worked" (using anonymous sources and expertly cherry-picked information), and declare themselves unable to read the unbiased evidence that shows the opposite of Cheney's blathering.

And thus, the public is confused. About torture.

Bravo, Fourthbranch.

...Also, Cheney won't cooperate with any "improper" investigation. A Justice Department-directed investigation. You know, "fuck you" and all that.

The Meaning Of Compromise

I think everyone expected Republicans to pre-emptively accuse Democrats of politicization in the wake of Ted Kennedy's death. (By the way, please politicize my death.) But that's just the far edge of the Overton window, the bluff so Democrats won't try to take comfort and inspiration to pass the cause of Kennedy's life. The far more insidious tactic, proffered by the right in a coalition with the bipartisan fetishists in the media, is to revise Kennedy's legacy as that of the ultimate centrist, in a fashion, the bipartisan dealmaker, the Great Compromiser. They've done a full-court press on this:

Senator Judd Gregg is already hinting at the idea. In an interview with the Boston Globe, Gregg hailed the bipartisan support for legislation he and Kennedy created together, adding that Kennedy knew how to “move the ball down the road with conservatives like myself.”

Meanwhile, Karl Rove hailed Kennedy on Fox this morning for being “willing to compromise.”

Other GOPers are floating the idea in The New York Times anonymously, in a discussion of how to navigate the politics of Kennedy’s death:

Republicans also noted that Mr. Kennedy, though an ideological liberal, was a legislative pragmatist who worked with Republicans to strike compromises on difficult subjects like health care, education and immigration. They said they saw little such reaching across the aisle in his absence.

Any member of the United States Senate with a long record will have many moments of compromise, whether between the parties or intra-party. But the idea that Kennedy should be remembered for "making the right concessions," solely in the context of bipartisanship, is a media projection helped along by a right wing who wants to blame Kennedy's absence for political polarization and the eventual death of a health care bill. We see this today with Steven Pearlstein's eleventy-billionth column arguing for the wise, high Broderist, split-the-baby approach:

And while there will be plenty of liberal Democrats who will be fuming about all the compromises forced upon them, somewhere from above will come a familiar voice with that distinctly Boston accent, whispering, "The dream will never die. Take the deal."

Notwithstanding the fact that Kennedy's staff wrote the HELP Committee version of the bill, and Kennedy himself labored over it, and that includes a public option, misses the point of Kennedy's legislative style, which continued to focus on broadening his goals and moving ever forward even when the odds weren't on his side. As Jonathan Cohn writes:

But this notion that Kennedy's liberal reputation somehow belied his pragmatism--a notion already gaining traction in the media, which has turned non-partisan accommodation into a fetish-- misses the point. Kennedy compromised on means, not ends. He would negotiate because it helped achieve his broader goals--signing on to NCLB, whatever its cookie-cutter standards, because it would send money to schools in poor, underfunded districts; embracing the Medicare drug benefit because, however poorly designed, it'd save senior citizens from having to choose between medicine and food.

It was precisely because Kennedy's devotion to his notion of social justice was so clear and dependable that he could make such deals stick. Liberals trusted him because we knew he wouldn't sell out the broader cause. If it was good enough for Kennedy, we figured, it was good enough for us. We knew he didn't see pragmatism as an alternative to ideology. It was just a necessary method of fulfilling it [...]

In the hours since Kennedy's passing, his speech to the 1980 Democratic convention--his most memorable oration, along with the RFK eulogy--has gotten a lot of play. Typically the networks show the final quote, in which he promises to continue his crusade even as he gives up his quest for the presidency. But the more important passage is where he invokes Franklin Roosevelt as an unabashed defender of the common man against the forces--and, yes, the people--who would disregard his well-being. Like FDR, Kennedy was not afraid to talk about values, to talk about right and wrong. Now that Kennedy is gone, who will pick up that torch?

Blue Dogs and ConservaDems have high praise for compromise these days, but their version of it basically preserves corporate goals and sells out their constituents in the exchange. Kennedy's version was precisely the opposite. His concern was "the least among us," the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the sick, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the less fortunate. He tried to get something for them, whenever possible. Pundits can call that "bipartisanship" but they ought to understand what that means.

The deviousness of the conservative project, to lament Kennedy's passing because now wild-eyed ideologues (like Max Baucus?) will go crazy, is clear. The true scoundrels, however, are those in the press trying to position the life of the man who did as much to advance the causes of the voiceless as anyone in the history of the Senate as someone who preferred half a loaf. Democrats should take a better lesson.

No, mere words cannot honor Ted Kennedy's memory. To pretend otherwise would be to cheapen his legacy, to lie about who Ted Kennedy really was. He was, for the vast majority of his life, a fiercely ideological public servant. It was his commitment to that New Deal social compact which defined him, which made him relevant to you and me. And his actions, not his words, were what marked him as the greatest Senator of his era. To attempt to honor Ted Kennedy without striving to further his life's work is simply impossible.

When Paul Wellstone died they told us that we couldn't celebrate him him as a political actor, that to do so would be crass and opportunistic. But the entire reason we knew Paul Wellstone, the reason we were crushed by his passing, was his political activism. It would have been a lie not to celebrate that legacy. It would have been crass to act as if Paul Wellstone hadn't been first and foremost a progressive hero, to feign nonchalance over political concerns as we eulogized the man, and in so doing stripping him of his essence. Likewise, it would be a lie today to pretend that the reason we loved Ted Kennedy had nothing to do with his leadership for working people. And it would be crass to attempt to celebrate him with mere words, rather than the action he demanded from us in life. How can we not "politicize" his legacy? The man was who he was because of his wholehearted commitment to his politics. The real obscenity -- the real opportunism -- would be for his political opponents to now try and depoliticize a quintessentially political life.

...George Steph agrees: Kennedy would have ditched the public option. Amazing how Kennedy's beliefs, after his death, line up perfectly with the beliefs of the blow-dried commentariat, n'est-ce pas? Lawrence O'Donnell, by the way, has a different perspective:

"Senator Kennedy...is not an easy compromiser on health care reform. In 1994, I was in the room when he told the president that he believed the strategy should be a Democrats-only strategy and that we should not be trying to reach out and get Republican votes."

Yes, We're Going To Politicize Ted Kennedy's Death.

I'm hearing a lot of whining on the right about the wall-to-wall coverage of Ted Kennedy's death and his politics, and how it's being "politicized". They're particularly concerned that Democrats might use Kennedy's death to push their health care reform package forward.

On the first point, those of us who sat through weeklong tributes to Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford - heck, even Jerry Falwell! - are pretty amused at this complaint. If nothing else, Ted Kennedy spent 46 years in the world's most deliberative body and has his name on over 300 pieces of major legislation. Celebrity politician deaths are practically the only time we hear anything substantive about political ideology and political positions, and there are plenty of living Republicans who will go gently into that good night someday, so it seems to me this will even out at some point. A fairly important American died. We'll get back to some guy with a sign at a town hall meeting tomorrow.

On the second point, it's similarly amusing that anyone in either party would whine and complain about events becoming "politicized." Another word for it is "the normal rhetorical connections human beings make to advance their policies." It's been done by approximately every human being in all of history. And it actually should be that way. Aimai puts this about as well as it can be put:

It's our own little dance of death. Anyone remember the fake outcry at the Wellstone Memorial's political tone? If you missed it, or can't remember, you can read all about it here. Its one of the things that really politicized Franken, and in the linked essay he draws the connection between the way the right wing treated the outpouring of grief and political activism around Wellstone's death to the way they treated Coretta Scott King's funeral. In both cases the left was lectured in how we are to understand the lives of our own members and we were ordered not to celebrate those lives, not to take up the banner of their causes, but to mourn quietly, secretly, almost shamefacedly. But funerals and memorials aren't about something quiet, private, shameful. Death and Politics are both important parts of life. Funerals and memorials are places where we gather to be together and to pursue communal goals. We mourn, but we celebrate. We gather together to remember, and to plan to leap forward.

In America, as around the world there is a natural logic to the political and social use of the funeral. The end of one life is not the end of that person's struggle. Sometimes its the key inflection point, the moment that the solitary struggle becomes public, or the moment that the lone voice, though stilled, is taken up. This is as true for the famous (see e.g. MLK, Malcolm X, JFK, BK, Ninoy Aquino, etc..etc...etc...) as it can be for the lowly member of the crowd--(Neda Soltan).

As inevitable as the use of the funeral, or the memorial, by partisans is the attempt to repress the funeral or the memorial by the forces of reaction. Wherever funerals are an important social setting--a safe place for people to turn out, grieve, communicate, and organize there will be attempts from above or below to prevent any mobilization around the body, or the cause. In Iran, to give just one example, the state decides who is a "martyr" and whose death will be publicly solemnized, and it has for years interfered with families trying to publicize or socialize the deaths of their loved ones if those deaths looked like they would cause trouble for the government. The recent death of Neda was one such occasion. In the US, of course, we have struggled for years over who owns or appropriates public deaths like those of the 9/11 victims, the Katrina dead, and our soldiers.

Funny, I seem to remember plenty of Republicans waving the bloody shirt and using the death of Neda to serve their political ends. And I remember walking back from a night of the DNC in Denver - site of Ted Kennedy's last major speech - to anti-abortion conservatives holding up pictures of dead fetuses trying to compel me to change my mind on a women's right to choose. Death has been used as a weapon by conservatives for many, many years. "Death panels," anyone?

It is perfectly normal in any society for heroes to be lauded in death and for people who admired them to honor their memory by endeavoring to secure their goals. If I die, I'd want others to politicize it by taking up the causes I favor and working to pass them. Most people would call that tribute and not an insult.

So, in the event of my passing, I want it to be clear these are my wishes:

1) Please honor me by continuing to fight for the liberal causes I held dear.
2) Explicitly state in any obituaries, memorial services, etc. that what I would have wanted was to keep the fight going
3) Impassioned speeches about the fight ahead for progressivism are especially welcome
4) Indeed, the only way to honor my memory is to double down and fight for a better world
5) Conservatives who don’t like this should shut the fuck up.

Similarly, I don't think conservatives have to necessarily stop their advocacy just because of the death of a popular opponent. It's a nice sentiment of respect, but I don't think anyone really considers it sincere. Liberals should draw inspiration from their heroes just as conservatives draw inspiration from theirs. And if each side is comfortable in their ideas, there should be no reason to censor them in the face of an untimely loss from their adversaries. We don't need loss to remind us of our goals, but it tends to put things in perspective and serve as a focal point for them. I'm assuming that leaders would want it that way.

What set Ted Kennedy apart was not his liberal scorecard or how he lined up on this issue or that issue - there are plenty of liberals who have come and gone through the Senate - but how he set his ideology in specific moral terms. Few others were willing to advocate on moral grounds for, say, the right to a living wage, or quality health care for all, or civil rights regardless of race or creed, color or class, or physical disability. He spoke not to the head but to the heart. And when someone with that worldview dies, it's perfectly natural to react in the same moral terms - to honor the legacy through carrying out his many causes, by living up to his ideal. It's how we repay the debt of a man who put himself on the line for the less fortunate.

And we shouldn't apologize for it.

My Gut Hatred Of People Who Use The Term "Gut Hatred" To Marginalize People

I'm glad that the Tom Ridge revelation about FEAR Unit is getting the pickup it deserves - we shouldn't forget the kind of place this country was after 9/11 and during the bulk of the Bush regime (By the way, Ridge has been hinting at this for years). Maybe if Democratic leaders understood that more they wouldn't be stubbing their toes right now. The facts are that the Republicans at that time were willing to politicize national security, and lie to terrorize the public, all to win elections. The fact that Ridge refused to raise the terror alert level one time (in response to the bin Laden message right before the 2004 vote) doesn't excuse him for doing Bush's bidding numerous times beforehand, like holding press conferences right after the Democratic National Convention raising fears of terrorism. And the spin from Frances Townsend, that they only discussed if raising threat levels would HURT Bush, makes no sense at all.

It was clear just by recognizing the pattern - that even election year came with a whole slew of terror alerts - that this was a coordinated effort to scare people into trusting Daddy Bush and the GOP with their lives. When Marc Ambinder tried to call those who recognize this pattern motivated by "gut hatred" of Bush and admitted that "journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt," he really summed up the state of the modern media. Ambinder's apologized for the term "gut hatred," but not the underlying fallacy supporting his beliefs. Glennzilla:

Just as is still commonly said about opponents of the Iraq War (even though they were right, they were still wrong and unSerious because their motives were bad), Ambinder acknowledges that Bush critics were right that the terror alerts were being manipulated for political ends (he has no choice but to acknowledge that now that Ridge admits it), but still says journalists like himself were right to scorn such critics "because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." As always: even when the dirty leftist hippies are proven right, they're still Shrill, unSerious Losers who every decent person and "journalist" scorns [...]

The reason journalists such as Ambinder saw no such evidence wasn't because it didn't exist. It existed in abundance; you had to suffer from some form of moral, intellectual or emotional blindness not to see it. It's because they didn't want to see it, because -- as Ambinder said -- they trusted the Bush administration as good and decent people who might err but would never do anything truly dishonest. It's because only loser Leftist ideologues distrusted Bush officials and the overriding goal of establishment journalists is to prove that they are not like them, that they're much more Serious and responsible and thus would never attribute bad motives to government leaders such as those who ran the Bush administration.

As Krugman says, "it’s really sad that those who missed the obvious, who failed to see what was right in front of their noses, still consider themselves superior to those who got it right." But then, they wouldn't be modern journalists if they didn't act that way.

Holder Pattern

I caught a little of the Eric Holder testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the way in. I guess the page one headline is that he called waterboarding torture. If that's so, then he is obligated by law to prosecute those who authorized and directed it. Just sayin'.

The cable gabfests are probably talking about him taking responsibility for mistakes made in the Marc Rich pardon. I want to focus on a couple other things. First, the issue of Guantanamo:

Holder echoed that stance Thursday but said shuttering the prison would be difficult and would take time. Many detainees could be transferred to other countries, he said, and some could be charged in U.S. courts. That is a contentious proposal because many oppose the idea of bringing terrorism suspects onto U.S. soil.

"There are possibly many other people who are not going to be able to be tried but who nevertheless are dangerous to this country," Holder said. "We're going to have to try to figure out what we do with them."

What we do is old-fashioned detective work, figure out if we can charge these people, and if we can't, release them. It's as simple as that. That's going to take a little time, since the evidence is currently in complete disarray, as a former prosecutor at Gitmo acknowledges. But it can and should be done as quickly as possible. Furthermore, there is an error in assuming this applies to every detainee still at the facility. It does not. There are hundreds that present no threat to the United States and should be released.

A federal judge ordered the release yesterday of a detainee at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ruling that the government's evidence is too weak to justify the man's continued confinement.

It is the second time that U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon has ordered the release of a detainee after examining government evidence, most of it classified. Leon said that the Justice Department failed to prove that Mohammed El Gharani, 21, is an enemy combatant because it relied heavily on statements made by two other detainees whose credibility is questionable.

In fact, the least we can do is allow some of the detainees whose lives we destroyed to remain free in the United States, even as a symbolic act of contrition and tolerance. This will make it easier to export other detainees to Western nations. If the Obama-Holder plan is just a kinder and gentler indefinite detention and more friendly military commissions, then they own a process which, among other things, is trying children in sham courts, against international law.

A couple other things - Jeff Sessions' questioning of Holder was hilarious. Sessions admitted being "concerned" that Holder wants to operate within the "spirit of the Constitution," because that could mean different things to different people. Yes, see, if your version of the Constitution means that we're not allowed to crush the testicles of children, Mr. Holder, we've got a problem!

In Chuck Schumer's testimony, Holder was asked if he would review the case of Bradley Schlozman and the politicization of the civil rights division, to determine why the US Attorneys declined to prosecute, and Holder said he would. So the Schloz is not out of the woods yet. And he was strong on the overall issue of politicization.

Holder promised to be an independent attorney general, telling lawmakers that he did not believe the attorney general's job was to serve as the president's lawyer — a frequent criticism of Gonzales' tenure under President George W. Bush. He also pledged to restore the independence of a Justice Department where Bush administration appointees used political benchmarks when making hiring decisions.

"One of the things I'm going to have to do as attorney general in short order is basically do a damage assessment," Holder said.

Several Republicans have already agreed to back Holder, so the effort to oppose him is pretty much a sideshow. Inside the false media narrative, however, there is some important information coming out.

No Day In Court For The Schloz

The Justice Department's Inspector General report on politicization under the Bush regime was so overwhelming that they had to cut it into sections. Yesterday's release of the section concerning the Civil Rights Division once again invites us to witness the glory that is Bradley Schlozman:

In sum, we concluded, based on the results of our investigation, that Schlozman improperly considered political and ideological affiliations in the recruitment and hiring of career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division, and in doing so, he violated Department policy and federal civil service laws, and committed misconduct.

We found evidence that Schlozman told others in the Department about his success in hiring conservatives. In addition, in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Schlozman admitted making such boasts. Numerous e-mails from Schlozman described above also demonstrate that he sought conservative candidates and rejected liberal ones. Further, Schlozman admitted to Special Litigation Section Chief Cutlar in March 2007, after allegations of partisan hiring surfaced in the media: “I probably made some mistakes. . . . I probably considered politics when I shouldn’t have.” Moreover, a statistical overview of the political and ideological affiliations of attorneys hired in the Division during his tenure showed that Schlozman hired far more Republican or conservative attorneys than Democrats or liberals. At the same time, political and ideological affiliations did not appear to have been a factor when attorneys were hired without Schlozman’s involvement [...]

We concluded that Schlozman inappropriately considered political and ideological affiliations when he forced three career attorneys to transfer from the Appellate Section.

As noted above, Schlozman frequently criticized the attorney staff in the Appellate ection and talked of his plan, when he “came into power,” to move certain attorneys from the section to make room for “real Americans.” Based on our interviews and our review of numerous e-mails, we found that Schlozman used the term “real Americans” to
refer to individuals with conservative political views. Appellate Section Chief Flynn also told us that Schlozman named Appellate Section Attorneys A, B, and C as among several in the section whom he considered to be “disloyal,” “not one of us,” “against us,” “not on the team,” or “treacherous” and whom he wanted to move out of the section [...]

We concluded that Schlozman inappropriately used political and ideological affiliations in managing the assignment of cases to attorneys in the sections of the Division he oversaw. According to Section Chiefs Flynn, Cutlar, and Palmer, Schlozman placed limitations on the assignment of cases to attorneys whom Schlozman described as “libs” or “pinkos,” and he requested that “important” cases be handled by conservative attorneys he had hired. In addition, Schlozman expressly inquired about the politics of Cutlar’s nominees for performance awards.

On June 5, 2007, Schlozman testified under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee in connection with its investigation into the use of political considerations in the hiring and firing of career attorneys at the Department of Justice. At the time of his testimony, Schlozman was Associate Counsel to the Director of EOUSA.

On September 6, 2007, after resigning from the Department, Schlozman responded by letter to supplemental questions for the record posed to him in writing by several Senators as a follow-up to his Senate Judiciary testimony.

We believe that Schlozman made false statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee, both in his sworn testimony and in his written responses to the supplemental questions for the record. In this section, we describe Schlozman’s statements and the evidence that we believe demonstrates their falsity.

That's the bill of particulars, and I believe the words "preponderance of evidence" apply.

And yet, Schlozman will only see the inside of a courtroom in his continued capacity as a lawyer, despite an investigation clearly detailing numerous crimes.

Because the US Attorney in DC, after reviewing this report (which is dated July 2, 2008, and obviously held back until right before Bush leaves town), declined to prosecute.

We referred the findings from our investigation to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia in March 2008. We completed this written report of investigation in July 2008.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office informed us on January 9, 2009, of its decision to decline prosecution of Schlozman. The Interim U.S. Attorney, Jeffrey Taylor, was recused from the matter and the decision.

So, after taking ten months to decide whether or not to prosecute (ten months which happened to include an election in which one of those named in the report--Hans Von Spakovsky--served on FEC), they now release the report. Nice.

There you have the latest from the culture of accountability.

If I follow this, a Bush appointee committed crimes by hiring ideological soulmates. The Inspector General reported the crimes to Bush's Justice Department, and they held the report. The Bush appointee at the US Attorneys office in DC recused himself, and let his staffers reject the findings. And those ideologues hired through criminal practices will REMAIN in the Justice Department, protected by civil service laws, well into the future.

There's more here, including a peek into the classiness of these folks.

Slapping down "a bunch of . . . attorneys really did get the blood pumping and was even enjoyable once in a while," Schlozman wrote three years later when he left to become the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo.

Schlozman surrounded himself with like-minded officials at the Department of Justice. When he was due to meet in 2004 with John Tanner, then chief of the voting section, he asked how Tanner liked his coffee.

"Mary Frances Berry style -- black and bitter," Tanner replied by e-mail, referring to the African American woman who chaired the U.S. Civil Rights Commission from 1993 to 2004. Schlozman circulated the e-mail. "Y'all will appreciate Tanner's response," he wrote.

Did the fun ever stop?

So this is the inevitable result of an attitude of "looking forward" and making sure abuses "never happen again" instead of prosecuting clear crimes. There were civil service laws violated as well as, you know, lying to Congress. Republicans love to talk about deterrence in the criminal justice system unless they're the defendant. Likewise, the establishment Villagers love to punish the wicked with their knowing glances and poison pens and scorn, unless, you know, one of their own is in trouble.

Here's Pat Leahy.

I really wish that the current U.S. attorney's office appointed by this administration had prosecuted. I think that the only way you stop such blatant criminal violations by people who know better, people who are sworn to uphold the law, (unint.) that they know they'll go to jail for breaking the law. That's what should have been done. And just because they broke the law in the Bush administration and the Bush administration did not, or deemed not to prosecute, I think that raises real questions. Prosecution should be done no matter who breaks the law. I think about one of the people who testified that same investigation and said that, uh, "we swear an oath to President George Bush." I said, "no, you swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. That constitution is the constitution you're sworn to uphold and I'm sworn to uphold and it's the constitution that reflects all Americans." [...]

And when somebody deliberately, purposely sets out to subvert the constitution of the United States, and then lies about it, lies about it, Mr. President, I find that a heinous crime. We will see some kid who steals a car, they'll be prosecuted as they probably should. But when you have a key member of the DoJ lie about it under oath, who subverts the consitution of the United States, all the more reason to prosecute that person.

Silly Leahy. Justice is for those other people.

Political Appointee Whines About Politicization

I was happy enough to discover that the Obama transitionwill dismiss 90 political appointees at the Pentagon after Inauguration Day. But as Billmon notes (ahh, it's so could to write that), the icing on this cake is that it brings back to the spotlight the pathetic Pentagon career of Jim O'Beirne.

Those calls and emails were followed up by an email from Jim O'Beirne, the special assistant to the secretary of defense for White House liaisons, who expressed exasperation that Gration informed the employees directly instead of letting O'Beirne's office know first.

"With regard to the process, I am unable to provide an explanation," O'Beirne wrote on Tuesday in the email, which was obtained by The Hill. "I played no part in it, and I will not speculate why matters were handled as they were."
A spokesman for the Pentagon said Gates was "absolutely satisfied" with the way the transition was handled.

O'Beirne is uniquely responsible for one of the biggest clusterfucks of the entire Bush era - the irresponsible and nakedly ideological hirings at the Coalition Provisional Authority shortly after the invasion. He was the guy that asked applicants their views on Roe v. Wade to make sure they were able to build the traffic system in Baghdad. As Billmon says,

In other words, Jim O’Beirne did as much as anyone in the US government -- and more than most -- to turn the first few years of the Iraq occupation into a complete clusterfuck, thereby contributing to the deaths of thousands of US troops and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Iraqi civilians. All for the greater political glory of George W. Bush and the Republican Party. And now he’s throwing a hissy fit because "the opposition" is getting an early start on shoveling the cow crap out of the stable?

"O'Beirne made it clear in the email that in some cases of dismissal, he thinks the employee's politics played a role in their being let go."

What can you say? Your modern conservative movement: Clueless, humorless, self-absorbed assholes, right to the bitter end.

The only regret here is that all 250 political appointees aren't being led to the door right away, though obviously with two wars we can't leave the entire cupboard bare immediately. Hopefully there will be an expedited hiring process, with the first casualty, one would hope, to be Jim O'Beirne.

They Don't Know Halfway

After shrugging off Republican caterwauling about the Holder nomination, the only one the right seems to have any interest in making a stink over, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy is pushing back the hearing date a week, a kind of compromise.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will delay confirmation hearings for Attorney General nominee Eric Holder after all -- accommodating Republican concerns that the appointment was being rushed and more vetting of Holder's resume was needed.

In an announcement from his Senate office on Monday afternoon, committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said the hearings would be moved back from January 9 to January 15, giving Republicans more than "30 days from today" to consider Holder's qualifications.

I sincerely hope that Leahy doesn't think this will calm anybody on the other side of the aisle. In fact, there will be some talk that this "proves" the "bipartisan concern" with the nomination, and the perception that it's in trouble, and that Holder will have to endure even more scrutiny, perhaps a request for multiple confirmation hearings, etc. This is not necessarily about blocking Holder from becoming the Attorney General but elongating the process and throwing up doubt. They've de-mothballed Karl Rove to lead the effort:

On Dec. 1, just one day after Holder’s nomination, Karl Rove told the Today Show that Holder’s record “will be examined” because he was the “one controversial nominee“:

ROVE: He was deeply involved as the Deputy Attorney General in the controversial pardon of Marc Rich. … I think it’s going to be clearly examined, if for no other reason that people want to lay down markers that that kind of behavior is inappropriate. … But again, there will be some attention paid to this [...]

Today on MSNBC’s Chris Matthews Show, Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly revealed that Rove is indeed “helping lead” the effort against Holder:

CONNOLLY: Word on the street is that Karl Rove is going to be helping lead the fight against Eric Holder when his nomination for Attorney General heads up to the Senate.

This is a textbook partisan ploy, designed to engender anger throughout the base and a whiff of illegitimacy to the Justice Department. Of course, that agency is already hopelessly compromised, so any effort to improve it or, ye gods, fire those burrowed deep inside the Department who are responsible for the politicization of the past few years, will then have a counterpoint in the figure of Holder, no matter how ridiculous it may appear.

It shouldn't be any surprise that the one cabinet post Rove is being tapped to sully and turn into a partisan brawl is the one that happens to be investigating him. There may or may not be merit to the idea that Rove wants to provide cover for Bush's pardons, but the Siegelman case threatens Rove where he lives, and he desperately needs to paint it as the rantings of a partisan liberal Justice Department. In fact, painting justice itself as partisan, putting it into the political arena, serves Republican needs in a variety of ways, devaluing the rule of law as just another he-said/she-said situation.

I think Leahy did the wrong thing by listening to these jackals. They have no interest in being mollified.

Guinea Pig

So Mary Beth Buchanan has been drafted to manufacture the first bogus scandal of the Obama Administration.

Mary Beth Buchanan was appointed by President Bush to serve as U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh in Sept. 2001. Buchanan has held several significant posts within the Bush/Ashcroft/Gonzales Justice Department, most notably serving as director the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys.

Just last month, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Buchanan’s reign was expected to end. Indeed, when a new president is elected, U.S. attorneys of both parties generally submit their resignations to make way for the new appointees. But Buchanan has other plans:

Despite a new administration coming into power, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan said she plans to stick around.

“It doesn’t serve justice for all the U.S. attorneys to submit their resignations all at one time,” she said yesterday. […]

More than that, she said she would consider working in the Obama administration. She would not discuss what her future might hold beyond the U.S. attorney’s office.

“I am open to considering further service to the United States,” Ms. Buchanan said.

Well, isn't that nice, she's open to it!

Buchanan, by the way, is one of the US Attorneys Bush kept in power because she was doing the bidding that those federal prosecutors who were fired wouldn't do. She has been implicated in politically motivated prosecutions of Pennsylvania Democrats, in particular Cyril Wecht:

...in 2006, Buchanan raised more than a few eyebrows when she went after former Allegheny County Coroner Dr. Cyril Wecht, indicting him on multiple counts of various federal crimes, including theft from an organization that receives federal funds.

What, exactly, did Wecht do? Apparently, his transgressions included the improper use of the coroner's fax machine for private work. There was no evidence "of a bribe or kickback" and no evidence that Wecht traded on a conflict of interest.

But Wecht's a Democrat, and for a U.S. Attorney anxious to impress her superiors in the Bush administration, apparently that was enough.

This week, a jury mulled over Buchanan's case against Wecht. The case ended, at least in the short term, with a hung jury.

Actually, a judge eliminated more than half of the charges and the trial was stayed indefinitely. The case was criticized by Republican attorney general Dick Thornburgh.

Buchanan has very close ties to the Bush Justice Department - she HIRED Monica Goodling. And so she's going to try and hang on as US Attorney. And Obama will likely fire her in favor of his own selection, and then the right will scream bloody murder. The concept that US Attorneys generally resign at the beginning of a new President's term will be completely forgotten, and instead there will be a false equivalence made between this and the US Attorney purge. It's so patently obvious.

Digby writes:

This is a Republican soldier and if Obama attempts to fire her, she will become a martyr to the cause. And she's not alone. They are all over the Justice Department.

When the US Attorney scandal broke, you'll recall that there was a lot of wingnut chatter saying that because Bill Clinton had asked for the resignations of all US Attorney's at the beginning of his term, Bush had a perfect right to fire US Attorneys who refused to do political dirty work. They set the stage for this at the time. It was entirely predictable that the new administration would be held to a completely new standard --- he would not be allowed to fire any US Attorney who had been appointed by Bush for any reason at all or risk being accused of using the Justice department for partisan gain. It's how they roll.

Digby says that Democrats made this tougher by not pursuing the scandal enough, which I don't agree with up to the point of them not filing inherent contempt and jailing Harriet Miers, Josh Bolten and Karl Rove in the Capitol basement. And not only are they are still seeking investigations inside Congress, but the independent prosecutor probe ordered up by Mukasey looks to actually have some teeth, and just yesterday Main Justice reopened the Don Siegelman trial, responding to a dogged effort by John Conyers.

Siegelman, the Democratic former governor of Alabama, was convicted in 2006 on corruption charges. (He is appealing the conviction). The whistleblower, who works in the US Attorney's office in Alabama, has claimed that, during his trial, there were inappropriate contacts between members of the jury and the prosecution, including messages passed by jurors revealing that some jury members had developed a romantic interest in an FBI agent attached to the prosecution team.

A DOJ investigation of the claims, launched after the whistleblower came forward and carried out by two US Attorneys, concluded that no such contacts had occurred. But in a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey last month, Rep. John Conyers, whose judiciary committee has been looking into the issue, questioned the thoroughness of that probe, noting that investigators had not contacted the jurors themselves, or the federal marshals who allegedly passed notes between the jurors and the prosecution team.

In the recent court filing -- which responds to a filing made previously by Siegelman's defense lawyers in connection with his appeal -- prosecutors referred to that DOJ investigation, then added in a footnote:

"Out of an abundance of caution, the Department of Justice recently reopened the investigation into this matter in response to concerns raised about the completeness of the investigation ... It remains the case that we are not aware of any improper contacts."

In other words, DOJ appears to agree that Conyers' concerns have merit, and has reopened the investigation into whether inappropriate contacts between jurors and the prosecution team did indeed occur. That could be good news for Siegelman as his lawyers seek to have his conviction thrown out on appeal.

So there may be potential consequences at the margins. But what's important right now is that Buchanan will be made a martyr if she's fired. The right wing and talk radio will make her famous. She'll have her own talk show on Fox within a few months. And it will all be based on a lie - a deliberate lie at that.

This is just the beginning of how the right will try to distract and distort right from the beginning of the Obama Administration, at a time of absolute financial crisis. They are still playing a very partisan game - in fact, there's a credible case to be made that they'd favor a deep recession for a variety of reasons. "The good of the country" isn't going to matter to these people. They are in this for the long haul.

Tying Up Loose Ends

This is interesting. In the waning days of the Bush Administration, outside actors - not connected to Obama or his transition team - are threatening accountability and rollback on two key subversions of the rule of law: the US Attorney purges and the retroactive immunity for telecoms involved in the warrantless surveillance program.

First, on the US Attorney probe. Nora Dannehy has been charged with investigating the matter, and she's getting to work.

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey appointed prosecutor Nora R. Dannehy two months ago, after the department's Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility reported that they had hit a roadblock in their lengthy probe into whether political interference prompted the dismissals. Internal investigators said they had been stymied by the refusal of key witnesses, including former presidential adviser Karl Rove and former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers, to cooperate.

By naming a federal prosecutor to determine whether crimes have been committed, the attorney general ensured that authorities would have the power to compel testimony and documents. Dannehy, a longtime assistant U.S. attorney in Connecticut, in recent weeks has met with lawyers and government officials involved in the case. A grand jury in the District has issued subpoenas, the sources said [...]

D. Kyle Sampson, who served as the chief of staff to Gonzales until his March 2007 resignation, recently took a leave from his job as a partner at the law firm Hunton & Williams while the investigation proceeds. A spokeswoman for the law firm said he is on leave "pending admission to the D.C. bar."

The report by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine singled out Sampson for offering testimony that was "not credible" and "unpersuasive." The authorities also concluded that Sampson had committed "misconduct."

Well that's... interesting. Dannehy appears to be making real progress, not just with Sampson, but according to Zachary Roth, with Fredo Gonzales.

In an interview with TPMmuckraker, Bob Bork Jr., who serves as a spokesman for the ex-AG, initially said that although Gonzales' lawyer, George Terwilliger III, had reached out to Dannehy at the start of her investigation, he didn't believe that Dannehy had formally contacted Gonzales or Terwilliger in connection with the probe.

But Bork Jr. called back an hour later to say that he had been mistaken about that. "We won't be able to talk about any interactions with DOJ," he now said.

In other words, it would appear, Dannehy has contacted Gonzo and/or his lawyer.

In the WaPo article Terwilliger is whining that the whole matter should be closed, probably because he wants it shut down before an Obama Administration less sympathetic to his wishes comes into power. I believe the Dannehy investigation has a short shelf life, but if she were to hand out a few indictments there would at least be some measure of accountability.

Speaking of which, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was in court yesterday, seeking to invalidate the Congressional action that immunized the phone companies from prosecution for their role in illegal wiretapping. Marcy Wheeler notes that the judges questions are far more probing than expected, and certainly not befitting someone inclined to rubber stamp the President and the Congress.

But given the questions Judge Walker has posed to the Administration, it looks like it won't be that easy. For example, there's this question, which highlights just how nutty this retroactive immunity is:

"What exactly has Congress created with § 802 (in Pub L No 110-261, 122 Stat 2467, tit II, § 201 (2008))? It does not appear to be an affirmative defense but rather appears to be a retroactive immunity for completed acts that allegedly violated constitutional rights, but one that can only be activated by the executive branch. Is there any precedent for this type of enactment that is analogous in all of these respects: retroactivity; immunity for constitutional violations; and delegation of broad discretion to the executive branch to determine whether to invoke the provision? "

He goes from there to ask several more questions getting at that pesky separation of powers thing. You know--separation of powers, which says that the courts have the ajudicatory function?

"In making the certification called for by section 802(a)(5), is the Attorney General performing an adjudicatory function? That is, is he not making a determination that only a court can make?"

They are all good questions. And they suggest that Walker is not going to simply roll over and abdicate his Article III function. Which probably means this will be appealed beyond the time when the Bush Administration leaves office.

Judges aren't inclined to having their power usurped.

There are still vestiges of the American system left that allow for a modicum of accountability. If it were up to the aristocrats running things, all of this would be shut down. They haven't obliterated the rule of law... yet.

More Misconduct In The Siegelman Case

I didn't get to this on Friday, but there was a major revelation in the Don Siegelman investigation, involving interventions with the US Attorney who had recused herself and contacts between state prosecutors and jurors:

The USAtty, Leura Canary, supposedly recused herself from the case due to substantial conflicts of interest involving her husband, a GOP political strategist running the political campaign for Siegelman's gubernatorial rival. In subsequent emails (PDF), Canary specifically gives directives and strategy to the AUSAs in her office handling -- on multiple occasions [...]

AUSAs in the case had multiple ex parte communications with jurors, while the jury was deliberating on its verdict -- passed through US Marshalls at the courthouse -- which were never disclosed to either the judge or opposing counsel. Via Time:

Grimes last year also gave DoJ additional e-mails detailing previously undisclosed contacts between prosecutors and members of the Siegelman jury....

The DoJ conducted its own inquiry into some of Grimes' claims, and wrote a report dismissing them as inconsequential. But the report shows that investigators did not question U.S. marshals or jurors who had allegedly been in touch with the prosecution.

A key prosecution e-mail describes how jurors repeatedly contacted the government's legal team during the trial to express, among other things, one juror's romantic interest in a member of the prosecution team. "The jurors kept sending out messages" via U.S. marshals, the e-mail says, identifying a particular juror as "very interested" in a person who had sat at the prosecution table in court. The same juror was later described reaching out to members of the prosecution team for personal advice about her career and educational plans. Conyers commented that the "risk of [jury] bias ... is obvious".

This is really incredible, and grounds for disbarment if not indictment. Siegelman called these revelations "more frightening than anything that has come before." The fingerprints of GOP operatives are all over this case, and the fact that these revelations came out of John Conyers' office makes me think that he knows it as well. Karl Rove still needs to be compelled to testify in this case.

And Siegelman, a Democrat, left no doubt that he believes that the apparent politicization of his prosecution was just one example of many such cases. "If this were isolated to just the middle district of Alabama, it would be shocking enough. But I guarantee this kind of misbehavior has been going on all over the country."

He added: "Whoever is the new Attorney General has to be strong enough to weed out the Karl Rove clones who have been embedded in US Attorneys' offices throughout the United States. If not, it is going to eat at our system for years to come."

At one point, Siegelman turned philosophical: "If I've been put through this for a reason, it's to expose the fact that this is not an isolated incident. I am prayerful that Congress will dig in and demand the truth. These folks have got to be weeded out."

Emptywheel has a lot more.

No Complacency on Voter Suppression and Politicization

I'm still a little stunned that it isn't a bigger story that a sitting US President is ordering his Attorney General to intervene in a voting-rights case in Ohio - a case already decided by the US Supreme Court - just a week away from the election to pick his successor. This is attempted voter suppression at the highest levels, with the President essentially aiding an abetting the nominee from his own party. And if it's so much as hit page D-38, I'd be surprised. Only the ACLU appears the least bit worked up about this:

With the election one week away, this kind of intrusion represents partisan politics at its worst. In addition, challenging -- or purging -- lawfully registered voters in the days before the election invites chaos and undermines the integrity of the democratic process.

The whole letter is here.

Why is this not the talk of Democratic circles? Ohio may not hold the key to the election the way it has in years past, but injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, as the saying goes. My biggest fear is that after the election, if Democrats win there will be a strong pull to say "Oh well, the system worked" and not to enact the structural reforms that are needed at so many levels, whether that means instituting the National Popular Vote or same-day registration or automatic registration through Social Security numbers or a ban on e-voting machines and a paper ballot requirement or instant runoff voting or a federal voting standard or making Election Day a holiday. The catch-22 is that a win breeds inertia and a loss means the loser has no access to the levers of power.

But when people like this have a large bearing on how elections are run, there is a serious problem afoot and it doesn't matter if the eventual conclusion seems correct.

Yesterday we told you about an effort by Indiana's Republican secretary of state, Todd Rokita, to press federal and state authorities to prosecute ACORN for voter fraud. Rokita had said a review by his office of forms submitted by ACORN found "multiple criminal violations."

But it turns out that Rokita hardly has a reputation as a non-partisan public official. In October 2002, the South Bend Tribune reported (via nexis):

Working on his own time, [Rokita] also assisted George W. Bush's campaign during the infamous Florida election recount in 2000. Rokita is proud of that, especially because the U.S. Supreme Court cited Indiana election law when it decided the election in Bush's favor.

In other words, Rokita was part of the team of ambitious young Republican operatives who flew down to Florida to help out on a bid to stymie the recount effort -- remember the "Brooks Brothers riot"? -- and ultimately put George Bush in the White House.

This is a partisan operative and a McCain campaign co-chair using his office to attempt to pervert the election process. At some point, this must be fought.

NE-Sen: Johanns Making With The Hatch Act Violations

Earlier this week, Henry Waxman's team at the House Oversight Committee detailed, in a scathing report, multiple instances of the Bush White House organizing taxpayer-funded trips for government officials into swing districts to seemingly help threatened Republican incumbents. In 2006, Department Secretaries and agency heads were all of a sudden jetsetting all over the country, giving grants or talking up the positive effects of policies in regions that just happened to coincide with the swing district lists.

One of those department heads was Mike Johanns, who in 2006 was the Secretary of Agriculture. He jaunted along to appear at 38 separate stops that year, with such upstanding public servants as:

4/21/06 Marilyn Musgrave, Colorado, Taxpayer Expense for Official Event
7/7/06 John Doolittle, Auburn CA, Taxpayer Expense for Official Event
7/7/06 Richard Pombo, Elk Grove CA, Political Event
11/1/06 Heather Wilson, Albuquerque, NM, Taxpayer Expense for Official Event
11/2/06 Rick Renzi, Casa Grande, AZ, Taxpayer Expense for Official Event

Doolittle and Renzi have been indicted, Wilson is under questioning in the US Attorneys scandal, and Pombo was as corrupt as they come. In short, a pretty ignominious list.

Now, this would mean little, considering that the penalty for violating the Hatch Act (engaging in political activity as part of official government business) is removal from office, and Johanns is no longer the AgSecretary. However, he is running for the US Senate in Nebraska this year, against Democrat and netroots favorite Scott Kleeb.

Last night, Johanns was confronted with these charges at a debate, and he admitted to the wrongdoing.

Last night's Senate debate in Grand Island gave Mike Johanns his first opportunity to defend himself from devastating new allegations that he used taxpayer funds in 2006 to travel across the country campaigning for Republican candidates.

The Lincoln Journal-Star reports on Johanns' response:

As U.S. secretary of agriculture, Johanns attended 38 events recommended by the White House Office of Political Affairs headed by Karl Rove, according to the committee report.

Most of the travel costs for Rove-generated events were paid with federal funds, the report stated.

Answering a question posed by a panelist.., Johanns said he believes it would be "a great idea" to ban the use of taxpayer funds by the White House for such activities.

In case it isn't clear, this still-erupting scandal has the potential to remake Nebraska's 2008 Senate race.

Yes, it's quite clear. Johanns is basically calling himself guilty of participating in an illegal Rovian scheme. If there's one person you don't want to be tied to in this election, it's George Bush. And if there's another, it's Karl Rove. Scott Kleeb has a real opening.

I like Scott a lot. I've had the opportunity to meet him at a couple events, and he has some of the best Internet people around working for him. I really hope he can pull this off, especially because his race could mean a filibuster-proof majority for the Democrats in the United States Senate.

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.

Still At It

I often chronicle the voter suppression and intimidation machinations from the right. There's also the use of US Attorneys to investigate Democrats at fortunate times for their Republican opponents. Despite the high-profile nature of the Don Siegelman case and others, this element of the Republican machine hasn't been shut down. In fact, it's in full force in a Senate race in Mississippi.

As federal courtwatchers wonder if the Mississippi Beef Plant investigation will entangle Senate candidate Ronnie Musgrove, a Federal Election Commission check shows U.S. Attorney Jim Greenlee contributed to his opponent.

Greenlee was nominated for the U.S. attorney post in 2001 by President George W. Bush, supported by Mississippi Sens. Thad Cochran and Trent Lott.

On Oct. 11, 2002 - just weeks before then-U.S. Rep. Roger Wicker won another term in Congress - Greenlee made a donation of $200 to Friends of Roger Wicker [...]

In U.S. District Court, where Greenlee is the chief prosecutor, two Georgia company executives recently pleaded guilty to making an illegal campaign contribution to then-Gov. Musgrove’s 2003 re-election campaign. They admitted they hoped to ask Musgrove for help as they realized the Mississippi Beef Plant construction project was in trouble.

The project ultimately failed, leaving hundreds of people out of work and the state of Mississippi holding the bag on millions of loan guarantees. Two men have gone to prison on related fraud charges.

However, Musgrove has not been indicted and repeatedly insists he did nothing wrong.

Scott Horton has taken notice of this one, as it shares similarities with the Siegelman case that he's been following closely - a former Democratic governor in the Deep South, a Republican operative masquerading as a US Attorney, and trumped-up charges designed to take down Musgrove. These executives plead guilty to the illegal contributions in a plea deal:

The three, all executives with The Facility Group of Smyrna, Ga., were largely left off the hook on the more serious charges that they had swindled the state out of at least $2 million and had left the plant’s vendors and contractors holding the bag. Instead, they were allowed in a plea bargain to confess to trying to buy influence with Musgrove by steering $25,000 to the then-governor’s unsuccessful re-election campaign in 2003.

The orchestrated guilty pleas — and the prosecutors’ suggestion that more indictments could be forthcoming — are a boon to the campaign of Republican Roger Wicker, who was appointed to the vacant Senate seat in December but is considered vulnerable. They leave a cloud over Musgrove in voters’ minds and provide more fodder for negative campaign ads from the G.O.P. camp, even though Musgrove has not been charged with any wrongdoing and there’s nothing in the court records to document he did anything illegal.

Well, maybe we can get somebody over at the Justice Department to investigate. Or I know, an independent body like the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights! Anyone know any of their new hires?

It looks like Hans von Spakovsky, an old TPM favorite, is back in business. The former Justice Department official, whose nomination to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) was thwarted when Democrats objected to his long record of support for restrictions on voting rights, has been hired as a "consultant and temporary full-time employee" at the ostensibly bi-partisan U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) the agency confirmed to TPMmuckraker [...]

Among Spakovsky's duties will be overseeing the USCCR's report on the Justice Department's monitoring of the 2008 presidential elections, a source inside the USCCR told TPMmuckraker.

Spakovsky's hiring is at the request of Commissioner Todd Gaziano, who works for the conservative Heritage Foundation on FEC issues and has defended Spakovsky in the press before. According to a federal government source, Gaziano has recommended Spakovsky at the government's highest payscale -- which would work out to about $124,010 annually if Spakovsky was to stay for an entire year.

Looks like we're in good hands.

House And Senate Report

Just a few things I've seen around.

• NC-Sen: Elizabeth Dole is the subject of the worst profile I've seen of a candidate in a while. It starts with her saying that she's been in her home state a lot lately. Um, it's kind of your job to be connected with your constituents all the time. Then there's this amazing statement:

Dole said she also supports drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve, where drilling would have a small footprint that wouldn’t harm much wildlife.

“Even the caribou like to snuggle up to the pipeline,” she said.

This flavor of crazy leaped from right-wing Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota over to Dole. The idea that Liddy Dole can read the minds of caribou - and that PLAYS INTO HER POLICY THINKING - is just incredible. If I'm Kay Hagan I play that for the next 11 weeks.

• AK-Sen: Ted Stevens is going to be standing trial in Washington, losing his battle for a change of venue in his corruption case to Alaska, where he has been providing everyone with their own personal bridge for 40 years. Sound judicial decision. So he'll be spending September and October in DC while fighting for his political life back at home, returning on weekends to campaign after a 8-hour flight. And he's in his 80s. Those will be some energetic rallies.

• CO-Sen: VoteVets has gone up with a very good ad basically calling Bob Schaffer a war profiteer for negotiating oil contracts in Kurdistan in the middle of the Iraq war. It's gotten some local coverage, where you can see Schaffer's campaign manager blowing a gasket.

Schaffer's campaign manager, Dick Wadhams, demanded the group apologize to the candidate.

"That is the most reprehensible and disgusting attack that could be leveled," Wadhams said, adding that three of Schaffer's five children are officers in training in college and will be deployed within a few years [...]

Wadhams challenged VoteVets.org to release its list of donors to prove it is not funded by "labor unions and leftist organizations."

Touchy, touchy!

• MS-Sen: This race between Roger Wicker and Ronnie Musgrove is far closer than you would expect for a race in Mississippi. So it's time for the Bush Administration to step in and sabotage the election.

When the Democrats and their attorneys began claiming last year that the Bush administration was using its prosecutorial might to target opposition candidates and their major financial supporters, I greeted the allegation with a skeptical eye.

I’m not so sure anymore.

This past week’s developments in the four-year-old investigation into the failed Mississippi Beef Processors plant seem timed to help derail Democrat Ronnie Musgrove’s bid to snatch one of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats from Republican hands.

Read the whole thing.

• FL-13: CREW has filed an FEC complaint against Republican Rep. Vern Buchanan, and there are a couple interesting signatories to the complaint - Buchanan's own employees.

Today, CREW and Florida citizens Carlo Bell and D.J. Padilla (both of whom worked for Buchanan's car dealerships) filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (“FEC”) against Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) alleging serious violations of campaign finance law. The complaint and affidavits of Bell and Padilla can be found here.

Rep. Buchanan owns several car dealerships in Florida. In September 2005, dealership employees were pressured into contributing to Rep. Buchanan’s congressional campaign and some were reimbursed for making contributions. Former employee Carlo Bell was called into a manager’s office and told that if he was part of the “team” he would make a contribution. Fearing for his job, Bell agreed to make the donation and was handed $1,000 in cash. Bell also saw two other employees, Jack Prater and Jason Martin take cash in return for promising to write checks and FEC reports confirm that both men made $1,000 contributions to the Buchanan campaign.

• MN-03: It's Blog Day for Ashwin Madia, a former Marine corpsman and solid progressive. He also ended up writing a great piece about Sen. Lieberman and Iraq today.

Today, the Republican Party announced that the loudest defender of status quo policies on Iraq, Senator Joe Lieberman, will be a prominent speaker at the Republican National Convention in my home state of Minnesota. Senator Lieberman and I do have one thing in common. We’ve both changed political parties. I left the Republican Party in 2002 after it replaced “balance our budget” with “borrow and spend” and after we started a war without a plan for success; a war we did not need.

With all respect to Senator Lieberman, talking tough about Iraq is not brave. Bravery is not demonstrated through words but instead through action.

Rule Of Law Making A Comeback?

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

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

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

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

...followed by this:

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

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

...and then topped off with this:

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

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

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

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

That'd be nice...

Enforce The Laws? Sorry, Not My Job

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"...as many loyalists as possible."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loyalists have a different opinion.