Monthly Archives: March 2007

Who’s Worse?

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[Update: Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, is on Hardball right now saying that Daniel Bogden, the former U.S. attorney for Nevada, had been doing a superb job and should not have been fired. Senator Ensign said Bogden was fired for the “wrong reasons,” but he stopped short of saying Alberto Gonzales had done anything unethical. MSNBC is also saying that Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.) is calling for Gonzales to resign.]

This Wall Street Journal editorial claims,

At the time, President Clinton presented the move as something perfectly ordinary: “All those people are routinely replaced,” he told reporters, “and I have not done anything differently.” In fact, the dismissals were unprecedented: Previous Presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, had both retained holdovers from the previous Administration and only replaced them gradually as their tenures expired. This allowed continuity of leadership within the U.S. Attorney offices during the transition.

Guess again. Six years ago today the Department of Justice issued this press release:

WHITE HOUSE AND JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
BEGIN U.S. ATTORNEY TRANSITION

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Continuing the practice of new administrations, President Bush and the Department of Justice have begun the transition process for most of the 93 United States Attorneys.

Attorney General Ashcroft said, “We are committed to making this an orderly transition to ensure effective, professional law enforcement that reflects the President ‘s priorities.”

In January of this year, nearly all presidential appointees from the previous administration offered their resignations. Two Justice Department exceptions were the United States Attorneys and United States Marshals.

Prior to the beginning of this transition process, nearly one-third of the United States Attorneys had already submitted their resignations. The White House and the Department of Justice have begun to schedule transition dates for most of the remaining United States Attorneys to occur prior to June of this year. President Bush will make announcements regarding his nominations to the Senate of new United States Attorneys as that information becomes available. Pending confirmation of the President’s nominees, the Attorney General will make appointments of Interim United States Attorneys for a period of 120 days (28USC546). Upon the expiration of that appointment, the authority rests with the United States District Court (28USC546(d)).

As for Reagan, according to the Associated Press Reagan fired all the sitting U.S. attorneys when he took office in 1981:

When the party in the White House changes hands, it is common for the new president to fire all the sitting U.S. attorneys, as Ronald Reagan did in 1981 and Bill Clinton in 1993.

I don’t have independent corroboration of what the AP says, so I am not going to assume the AP is right and the WSJ is wrong. But, surely, one of them is wrong. And if WSJ is wrong, then somebody should break the news to rightie blogger Macranger, who claims “Never in the history of US Attorney replacements has a President fired all 93 US Attorneys – never.” In the real world, “never” means pretty much every time the White House changes parties.

This afternoon President Bush made a statement about the U.S. attorney scandal —

I do have confidence in Attorney General Al Gonzales. I talked to him this morning, and we talked about his need to go up to Capitol Hill and make it very clear to members in both political parties why the Justice Department made the decisions it made, making very clear about the facts. And he’s right, mistakes were made. And I’m, frankly, not happy about it, because there is a lot of confusion over what really has been a customary practice by the Presidents. U.S. attorneys and others serve at the pleasure of the President. Past administrations have removed U.S. attorneys; they’re right to do so.

Think Progress says, um, no. It is not customary practice to fire attorneys in mid-term.

Mass firings are common when a president takes office. But as current and former administration officials have confirmed, Bush’s purge of well-qualified prosecutors is unprecedented.

See also McClatchy Newspapers.

Mass firings of U.S. attorneys are fairly common when a new president takes office, but not in a second-term administration. Prosecutors are usually appointed for four-year terms, but they are usually allowed to stay on the job if the president who appointed them is re-elected.

Even as they planned mass firings by the Bush White House, Justice Department officials acknowledged it would be unusual for the president to oust his own appointees. Although Bill Clinton ordered the wholesale removal of U.S. attorneys when he took office to remove Republican holdovers, his replacement appointees stayed for his second term.

Ronald Reagan also kept his appointees for his second term.

So, in the real world, “never” is “fairly common.” (Somebody really ought to tell Macranger.)

The WSJ editorial linked above is full of dark hints about Clinton’s interference with a pending indictment of Dan Rostenkowski (who was indicted, anyway) and slithering out of whatever the Clintons were guilty of regarding Whitewater. (How many years and how many million dollars did taxpayers spend investigating the Clintons’ involvement in Whitewater? And how many indictments were brought regarding the Clintons involvement inWhitewater? As I recall, none. Yet the righties still can’t believe the Clintons really weren’t guilty of something regarding Whitewater. Pathetic.)

But if we’re playing “my politician is less guilty than yours,” let’s pretend for a minute that tomorrow we turn up evidence that Bill Clinton really did intend to interfere with the indictment of Dan Rostenkowski. Unless appearances are extremely deceiving, the Bush White House would still be more guilty.

Appearances say Karl Rove and Co. were trying to turn the federal judicial system into a tool for getting Republicans elected and keeping Republicans in office. That’s a lot bigger deal than doing a favor for Dan Rostenkowski.

I say they’re worse.

Old Rightie Lies Never Die

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First, I want to thank everyone for the input into my hypothesis for the Stages of Rightie Reaction to a Republican Scandal. I definitely want to re-work this into something more ambitious. If anyone knows a good cartoonist/illustrator, chase ’em my way.

Along these lines, I want to share with you this charming email received this morning from Greg S.:

How come, as a journalist, you failed to report that Janet Reno demanded the resignations of all federal prosecutors? The NYT ran the story on 3/23/93. I guess it’s only political when a Republican culls the herd. You should have no problem getting a job in the New York area. You bozo’s all think and act alike, I’m sure some going out of business newspaper will pick you up.

Here is my response:

Greg: How come you can’t read? I’ve brought up the Janet Reno episode several times in the past few weeks. The last time I mentioned it was yesterday, in this post . I also brought it up on March 9 in this post.

I wrote about it extensively in these posts, which I urge you to read:

January 18: ” U.S. Attorneys: It’s the Replacing, Stupid”

In the post linked I dug some stories from 1993 about Janet Reno’s firing of the attorneys out of the New York Times archives and quoted from them at length. You really should read it and educate yourself about what really happened, because you are embarrassing yourself by being ignorant of the facts.

February 16: “Drooling Idiot Alert”

The “drooling idiot” post was inspired by a comment I had received from some other pea-brain rightie who demanded to know why I didn’t report that Janet Reno had asked for the resignation of all federal prosecutors. What was hysterically funny about that was that the drooling idiot had made this comment to a post in which I had extensively discussed Janet Reno’s firing of the attorneys.

BTW, why is it you righties all have the reading comprehension level of gnats?

I also mentioned the Janet Reno episode on January 19.

You can apologize to me whenever you’re ready.

Of course, he’s not going to apologize. He’ll slink off somewhere, whining that I was mean to him. Righties are so pathetic.

But this encounter made me think about where this kind of reaction falls on the “reaction” scale. It’s so typical I definitely need to work it in somewhere.

As I have explained at great length already, it is standard procedure for a new administration to ask for the resignations of the the former president’s attorneys, particularly if the former president was from the other party. U.S. attorneys serve for four-year terms, so as a rule when a new administration begins their terms are about to expire, anyway. George W. Bush asked for the resignations of most of Clinton’s attorneys, and replaced them with his own appointees, in 2001.

[Update: I just found this paragraph in an Associated Press story —

When the party in the White House changes hands, it is common for the new president to fire all the sitting U.S. attorneys, as Ronald Reagan did in 1981 and Bill Clinton in 1993. By contrast, Bush allowed some to stay on the job for several months when he took office in 2001, although all were replaced eventually.

In 1993, the Dems should have been shrieking “Reagan did it, too!”]

As I have said before, replacing U.S. attorneys is not, in itself, scandalous. However, as explained at length in the posts linked above, the circumstances surrounding the recent replacements make these replacements grossly unethical if not illegal.

The Right Wing Noise Machine raised a huge stink when Janet Reno made the very routine and long anticipated request for the resignation of the Republican-appointed attorneys, which was all of them. (The Clinton Administration, for some reason, allowed one prosecutor to stay over — Michael Chertoff. Very weird. There’s probably a story behind that.) The Machine pretended there was something sinister about the firing of the attorneys and accused Bill Clinton of getting rid of all of them just to interfere with an investigation of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski. (The investigation was not stopped; Rostenkowski would be indicted in 1994.)

This huge stink was just part of their ongoing campaign to smear, bash, discredit, and destroy the Clinton Administration any way it could, honest or dishonest. The Right’s knuckle-dragging followers dutifully got all worked up about it, and we see now that many of them still are.

ABC News is reporting that Senator Hillary Clinton is calling for the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Righties who reacted with “nyah nyah Clinton did it to” (Stage 4) include: Macsmind (who, remarkably, somehow connects the U.S. attorneys to then-First Lady Clinton’s health care proposals), Gateway Pundit, Betsy Newmark, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Congratulations to the first three for being brainless stooges, and to WSJ for so diligently doing its job as a propaganda machine.

A clue about how these replacings are different — the Seattle Times reports today:

Former Washington state Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance acknowledged Tuesday that he contacted then-U.S. Attorney John McKay to inquire about the status of federal investigations into the 2004 governor’s race while the outcome was still in dispute.

Vance also spoke regularly with presidential adviser Karl Rove’s aides about the election, which Democrat Christine Gregoire ultimately won by 129 votes over Republican Dino Rossi. But Vance said he doesn’t recall discussing with the White House McKay’s performance or Republicans’ desires for a formal federal investigation. …

… Vance is one of at least two Republican officials who called McKay to inquire about a possible investigation by his office into the governor’s race. …

…Vance said he felt compelled to approach McKay as a fellow Republican.

“Republican activists were furious because they felt that you had a Republican secretary of state [Sam Reed], a Republican county prosecutor in Norm Maleng and a Republican U.S. attorney, but still they saw the governorship slipping away, and they were just angry,” Vance said.

Combine that story with this March 7 story from the Seattle Post-Ingelligencer, and it’s hard not to conclude that McKay’s firing was punishment for not convening a grand jury and seeking indictments against Democrats in the Gregoire election. McKay says he couldn’t find enough evidence of voter fraud to convene a grand jury; apparently, that was no excuse.

From an editorial in today’s New York Times:

Among the documents is e-mail sent to Ms. Miers by Kyle Sampson, Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, ranking United States attorneys on factors like “exhibited loyalty.” Small wonder, then that United States Attorney Carol Lam of San Diego was fired. She had put one Republican congressman, Duke Cunningham, in jail and had opened an inquiry that put others at risk, along with party donors.

More disturbing details have come out about Mr. Iglesias’s firing. We knew he was ousted six weeks after Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, made a wildly inappropriate phone call in which he asked if Mr. Iglesias intended to indict Democrats before last November’s election in a high-profile corruption scandal. We now know that Mr. Domenici took his complaints to Mr. Bush.

After Mr. Iglesias was fired, the deputy White House counsel, William Kelley, wrote in an e-mail note that Mr. Domenici’s chief of staff was “happy as a clam.” Another e-mail note, from Mr. Sampson, said Mr. Domenici was “not even waiting for Iglesias’s body to cool” before getting his list of preferred replacements to the White House. …

…The Justice Department has been saying that it is committed to putting Senate-confirmed United States attorneys in every jurisdiction. But the newly released documents make it clear that the department was making an end run around the Senate — for baldly political reasons. Congress should broaden the investigation to determine whether any other prosecutors were forced out for not caving in to political pressure — or kept on because they did.

There was, for example, the decision by United States Attorney Chris Christie of New Jersey to open an investigation of Senator Bob Menendez just before his hotly contested re-election last November. Republicans, who would have held the Senate if Mr. Menendez had lost, used the news for attack ads. Then there was the career United States attorney in Guam who was removed by Mr. Bush in 2002 after he started investigating the superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. The prosecutor was replaced. The investigation was dropped.

In mid-December 2006, Mr. Gonzales’s aide, Mr. Sampson, wrote to a White House counterpart that using the Patriot Act to fire the Arkansas prosecutor and replace him with Mr. Rove’s man was risky — Congress could revoke the authority. But, he wrote, “if we don’t ever exercise it, then what’s the point of having it?”

Sort of how I’m feeling about impeachment power these days.

Update: McClatchy Newspapers explains —

Mass firings of U.S. attorneys are fairly common when a new president takes office, but not in a second-term administration. Prosecutors are usually appointed for four-year terms, but they are usually allowed to stay on the job if the president who appointed them is re-elected.

Even as they planned mass firings by the Bush White House, Justice Department officials acknowledged it would be unusual for the president to oust his own appointees. Although Bill Clinton ordered the wholesale removal of U.S. attorneys when he took office to remove Republican holdovers, his replacement appointees stayed for his second term.

Ronald Reagan also kept his appointees for his second term. …

… Nonetheless, Bush aide Dan Bartlett noted Clinton’s first term firings in defending Bush’s second term dismissals.

“Those discretionary decisions made by a president, by an administration, are often done,” he told reporters Tuesday.

U.S. Attorney Updates

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Stuff’s happenin’ almost faster’n I can keep up with it. This first is from the Greg Palast for the BBC, via Dan Froomkin:

A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan – possibly in violation of US law – to disrupt voting in the state’s African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.

Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign’s national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called “caging list”.

It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: “The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day.”

They had a list. Maybe a plan. It doesn’t appear to have been carried out. But then, Dan Froomkin says,

Republican National Committee e-mails about “caging” — a tactic that targets people for voter challenges — turned up on this Web site. Several of them had been sent by Tim Griffin, then the RNC’s research director, later Karl Rove’s deputy director of political affairs at the White House — and the man Rove got appointed as the interim replacement to one of the purged U.S. Attorneys.

It’s a spoof web site, but the emails appear to be real, sent to the domain georgewbush.org by mistake. Take a look and see what you think.

This afternoon Attorney General Alberto Gonzales accepted responsibility (sort of) for “mishandling” the U.S. attorney situation, but says he will not resign. I say “sort of” accepted responsibility because Gonzales seemed to claim ignorance — he doesn’t know why Congress wasn’t told earlier the White House was involved in the purge; Sampson failed to brief other Justice Department officials about his email correspondence with Miers.

Lordy, no one in this Administration every knows anything. Between their failure to communicate and their bad memories, they are reminding me of the Know Nothing Party.

Oh, and Sampson is still on the government payroll, in spite of the fact that he resigned.

Some of the documents discussed in this morning’s “This Is Huge” post are available for viewing on the House Judiciary Committee web site.

As usual, Dan Froomkin makes an essential point:

… this White House appears to have lost sight of a distinction that is critical to the maintenance of good government: That just because someone is a political appointee doesn’t mean they’re supposed to do their jobs primarily as partisans — or that they should be fired if they fail to do so to the satisfaction of political operatives in the White House.

That is particularly the case with law enforcement. Filling non-law enforcement jobs with political appointees who are incompetent or blindly partisan may well take a toll on the government’s ability to do function properly. (See, for instance, David E. Lewis in NiemanWatchdog.org.)

But in law-enforcement jobs — such as the attorney general, the director of the FBI, and the country’s 93 U.S. attorneys — overtly partisan behavior is a more troubling problem. While the men and women in those positions serve at the pleasure of the president, it is also a critically important part of their job to remain independent.

That’s because it’s flatly un-American for the law to be used as a political weapon. It erodes public confidence in the justice system, and offends the American commitment to fairness. It’s the sort of thing that, quite properly, can lead to impeachment.

Be sure to read all of Dan’s post today.

Finally for a Hell Just Froze Over alert — someone in the MSM complimented bloggers. No, really. Jay Carney posted at Time magazine’s Swampland:

Twelve days ago, after David Iglesias went public, I said that if there turned out to be a broad conspiracy behind the firing of the U.S. Attorneys, “I will take my hat off to Marshall and others in the blogosphere and congratulate them for having been right in their suspicions about this story from the beginning.”

My hat is off. Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo and everyone else out there whose instincts told them there was something deeply wrong and even sinister about the firings, and who dug around and kept writing about them while Iglesias decided whether to talk to the press or go quietly on to his next job, deserve tremendous credit.

When this story first surfaced, I thought the Bush White House and Justice Department were guilty of poorly executed acts of crass political patronage. I called some Democrats on the Hill; they were “concerned”, but this was not a priority. The blogosphere was the engine on this story, pulling the Hill and the MSM along. As the document dump proves, what happened was much worse than I’d first thought. I was wrong. Very nice work, and thanks for holding my feet to the fire.

‘Course, I’m not holding my breath for this admission to make it into the print edition …

Five Stages

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You’ve no doubt heard of the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). I’ve come to realize something like that goes on among righties whenever a new Republican scandal washes ashore. I propose that the five stages of reaction to a scandal are:

1. Ignoring
2. Belittling
3. Blaming the Media
4. Evoking Bill Clinton.
5. Boredom

That last stage allows the sufferer to return to stage 1 and ignore the issue. Also note that righties don’t necessarily go through these stages in order or even one stage at a time.

This is a working hypothesis; I might choose to revise the list in the future. Let me know what you think.

Anyway, I’ve been surfing about looking at reaction to the U.S. attorney scandal to find examples. Here we are:

Macsmind is at Stage 2, Belittling:

Business as usual folks, nothing to see here. Fact is that they weren’t doing their job (note this was suspected democrat voter fraud – like that never happens) – so (for those slow of mind) that means bye, bye.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News is even deeper into Stage 2, if that’s possible:

So basically, this whole non-scandal scandal is over one guy who was dragging in feet in investigating voter fraud. Yet, the White House is taking it on the chin.

In our current model, “belittling” is just a nudge away from “ignoring.” The bloggers are noting that something happened, but they mentally edit out parts of the story; such as, the lack of evidence of Republican allegations of voter fraud and the fact that some of the purged attorneys were pressured to bring indictments against Democrats before the midterm elections.

For example, see this March 7 story about former U.S. attorney John McKay of Washington State, who was pressured by a congressman about voter fraud allegations in the election of Governor Chris Gregoire, and also accused by the White House of “mishandling” an investigation into the alleged fraud.

Asked if his failure to convene a grand jury in the election probe was the reason he was denied a judgeship, McKay said he did not know.

But he said he was confident he and his staff had handled the case properly, adding that there was no evidence of voter fraud despite widespread complaints by Republicans in Washington state and the nation’s capital.

“Frankly, it didn’t matter to me what people thought,” McKay told a House Judiciary subcommittee. “There was no evidence of voter fraud.”

No evidence? A mere technicality. The Dems must be guilty because, well, they’re Dems.

Sister Toljah and the Flopping Ace seem to be at Stages 2 and 3 at the same time. This is the Ace:

They were not doing their job. Their appointments were stripped.

But the left and our MSM want to bombard us with the appearance of evil.

Now, one could argue that “blaming the media” and “belittling” are pretty close to the same thing, and maybe I should roll them into one stage. But sometimes “blaming the media” can be so much more. Remember Jamil Hussein?

Mascmind and Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom are at Stage 4, Evoking Bill Clinton, recalling the Great Purge of U.S. Attorneys by Janet Reno in 1993. I explained here why that isn’t relevant.

Mr. Hawkins also provides a fascinating twist on Stage 4:

What they should be doing is exactly what the Clinton Administration would be doing in a situation like this, relentlessly and savagely attacking the other side, calling it a political witch hunt, and telling the public that this is exactly why we can’t have bipartisanship in Washington, because these jerks keep pulling stunts like this.

This whole thing is a big joke, but because the Bush Administration is still, STILL, for the most sticking with this “new tone,” mush and letting the Democrats use them as punching bags, the joke is on the Bushies.

In some cases “evoking Bill Clinton” means just the basic “Clinton did it, too” excuse, which is the foundation of all conservative ethics. Righties seem to think that Bill Clinton is the measure of all morals, and that they can’t be accused of doing anything wrong if Clinton did the same thing. But Mr. Hawkins’s post is a lovely example of psychological projection, either conscious or unconscious. David Neiwert at Orcinus has written some great posts on this, such as here and here. So “evoking Bill Clinton” describes a wide and complex range of behaviors.

James Joyner skipped to Stage 5:

For whatever reason, I’ve had trouble mustering an interest in the brouhaha over Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez’ firing of some U.S. attorneys for “political reasons.” It’s been the topic of much discussion in the blogosphere and the halls of Congress but just hasn’t inspired me to write anything.

Front page stories in today’s NYT and WaPo, which have inspired another mini-surge in blog outrage, continue to leave me yawning.

I wrote in January 2006 that “When cornered, righties will either fall back on “Dems” (or “Clinton”) “did it too,” or else feign boredom. (Yawn. So Washington is corrupt. Who cares?).” It’s where they go when their only other option is admitting the truth.

It is worthy of note that the bulk of the Right Blogosphere only recently moved out of Stage 1. You know a Republican scandal is getting long legs when that happens.

This Is Huge

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A White House document dump has provided new revelations about the U.S. Attorney purge. And the biggest revelation — although not a surprising one — is that the idea to fire U.S. Attorneys and replace them with politically compliant toadies originated in the White House.

I’m piecing together two news stories, one by David Johnston and Eric Lipton in today’s New York Times, and the other by Dan Eggen and John Solomon in today’s Washington Post. The story thus far:

In early 2005, White House legal counsel Harriet Miers asked D. Kyle Sampson, a justice department official, if it would be feasible to fire and replace all 93 U.S. attorneys. It appears the White House was unhappy with the attorneys because Republicans were alleging widespread voter fraud on the part of Democrats, and the attorneys were unwilling to bring indictments against the Democrats, most probably because the allegations were a fantasy. (Josh Marshall provides an archive of his posts on the voter fraud allegations going back to 2001.)

However, as Johnston and Lipton note, the documentation isn’t clear if the voter fraud issue was the real or only reason.

The documents did not provide a clear motive for the firings. Some suggested that department officials were dissatisfied with specific prosecutors, but none cited aggressive public corruption inquiries or failure to pursue voter fraud cases as an explicit reason to remove them.

As has been widely noted in the recent past, the pattern suggests that the White House and the Republican Party generally have been using the Justice Department as part of their election campaign process. In other words, Karl and Co. have been turning our criminal justice system into a Republican Party machine.

Sampson — who resigned yesterday, btw — replied to Miers that filling that many jobs at once would be too big a job. (The Washington Post reports that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the same thing at the time.) Instead, Miers and Sampson began working together on a select list of attorneys to replace. As they did this, Karl Rove and other White House officials helpfully relayed the complaints they were getting from Republican officials about the attorneys’ failure to indict Democrats on voter fraud.

Eggen and Solomon, WaPo (emphasis added):

The e-mails [between Miers and Sampson] show that Rove was interested in the appointment of a former aide, Tim Griffin, as an Arkansas prosecutor. Sampson wrote in one that “getting him appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, etc.”

Sampson sent an e-mail to Miers in March 2005 that ranked all 93 U.S. attorneys. Strong performers “exhibited loyalty” to the administration; low performers were “weak U.S. attorneys who have been ineffectual managers and prosecutors, chafed against Administration initiatives, etc.” A third group merited no opinion.

In January 2006, Sampson sent a first list of attorneys to be fired to the White House. Four of the attorneys who would be fired were on this list: Chiara, Cummins, Lam and Ryan (the final list is here). This list also suggested Tim Griffin be one of the replacements.

Eggen and Solomon, WaPo:

In September, Sampson produced another list of firing candidates, telling the White House that Cummins was “in the process of being pushed out” and providing the names of eight others whom “we should consider pushing out.” Five on that list were fired in December; the others were spared. …

… Sampson also strongly urged bypassing Congress in naming replacements, using a little-known power slipped into the renewal of the USA Patriot Act in March 2006 that allows the attorney general to name interim replacements without Senate confirmation.

“I am only in favor of executing on a plan to push some USAs out if we really are ready and willing to put in the time necessary to select candidates and get them appointed,” Sampson wrote in a Sept. 17 memo to Miers. “It will be counterproductive to DOJ operations if we push USAs out and then don’t have replacements ready to roll immediately.

“I strongly recommend that as a matter of administration, we utilize the new statutory provisions that authorize the AG to make USA appointments,” he wrote.

By avoiding Senate confirmation, Sampson added, “we can give far less deference to home state senators and thereby get 1.) our preferred person appointed and 2.) do it far faster and more efficiently at less political costs to the White House.”

[Update: See also Think Progress.]

Note that the Patriot Act provision came into being in March 2006, about a year after Miers and Sampson began work on their list. Coincidence? Not a chance.

Notice this little detail, from Eggen and Solomon:

Iglesias, the New Mexico prosecutor, was not on that list. Justice officials said Sampson added him in October, based in part on complaints from Sen. Pete V. Domenici and other New Mexico Republicans that he was not prosecuting enough voter-fraud cases.

You may remember that in October 2006 — shortly before the elections — Domenici had called U.S. attorney David Iglesias and asked him about the status of an investigation into a Democratic state senator. Domenici also spoke to President Bush. Then Bush spoke to Gonzales “to pass along concerns by Republicans that some prosecutors were not aggressively addressing voter fraud,” Johnston and Lipton write. Thus Iglesias was added to the purge list, even though he had received a “strong performer” rating from Miers and Sampson in the earlier stages of their list-making.

A White House spokeswoman insisted that the President did not call for the removal of any specific attorney. Nor did he know that Miers, Sampson, and Rove had been drawing up a list already. (Bush never seems to know anything that’s going on under his nose, does he? I find it hard to believe that Bush didn’t at least mention Iglesias to Sampson.)

A few weeks after the conversation between Bush and Gonzales, the Justice Department forced out seven prosecutors.

Johnston and Lipton, NY Times:

On Dec. 4, 2006, three days before the dismissals, Mr. Sampson sent an e-mail message to the White House with a copy to Ms. Miers outlining plans to carry out the firings

“We would like to execute this on Thursday, Dec. 7,” Mr. Sampson wrote. Because some United States attorneys were still in Washington attending a conference, he planned to postpone telling them they were being fired. He wrote, “We want to wait until they are back home and dispersed to reduce chatter.”

Eggen and Solomon, WaPo:

On the day of the Dec. 7 firings, Miers’s deputy, William Kelley, wrote that Domenici’s chief of staff “is happy as a clam” about Iglesias.

A week later, Sampson wrote: “Domenici is going to send over names tomorrow (not even waiting for Iglesias’s body to cool).”

Domenici is so busted.

E-mails show that Justice officials discussed bypassing the two Democratic senators in Arkansas, who normally would have had input into the appointment, as early as last August. By mid-December, Sampson was suggesting that Gonzales exercise his newfound appointment authority to put Griffin in place until the end of Bush’s term.

Griffin’s appointment and his connection to Karl Rove was reported in Arkansas newspapers in mid-December. This was one of our first clues that something screwy was going on regarding the U.S. attorneys.

Miers resigned as White House counsel less than three weeks later, in early January.

As for D. Kyle Sampson, in a sidebar story the New York Times reports that he had been using his post as chief of staff to the attorney general to get named U.S. attorney in Utah, his home state, even though he had never worked as a full-time prosecutor. The White House and Justice Department backed Sampson, but Senator Orrin Hatch wanted Brett Tolman, “a one-time Utah federal prosecutor who had spent the previous three years working on antiterrorism issues for the Judiciary Committee staff.”

This suggests to me that Orrin Hatch has known about some of these shenanigans for some time. But let’s go on …

This put Mr. Sampson in an unusual position. As Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, he was fielding calls and letters from Mr. Hatch’s office, even though he was vying for the job that Mr. Hatch was writing about, two former officials from Mr. Hatch’s office said. That made at least some Senate officials uncomfortable.

“It was a little like the fox watching the hen house,” said one former Senate staff member, who asked not to be named because he now works in a different job.

Mr. Sampson did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.

Mr. Hatch finally made a personal appeal to Mr. Gonzales to drop his bid to nominate Mr. Sampson. After a four-month delay, President Bush nominated Mr. Sampson’s rival for the job last June.

Sampson — did I mention he resigned yesterday? — is a religious conservative (a Mormon) who “told the Brigham Young University news service that he admired Mr. Bush because the president recognized that politics and religious beliefs could not be separated.” Apparently Mr. Sampson’s religious beliefs didn’t teach him anything about ethics.

This really is huge. The “underlying crime” in the Watergate scandal was the White House’s illegal activities — such as money laundering and breaking into Dem Party offices to look for something incriminating — to ensure Nixon’s re-election in 1972. Now there is mounting evidence that the Bush White House and other Republican officials have been trying to use the entire federal criminal justice system to win elections for Republicans. I say this has Watergate beat all to hell. So far we know thatGonzales has lied to Congress about the reasons for purging the attorneys, and certainly more juicy bits will be revealed as time goes on.

Yesterday Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said he intends to subpoena Karl Rove if he doesn’t testify to Congress voluntarily. Stay tuned.

Last Refuge of a Soundrel

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“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Samuel Johnson said. Maybe ’twas true then, but we’ve stooped a bit lower since. When all else fails, blame incompetence.

At least, that’s what the Wall Street Journal is doing. Check out this editorial about the FBI’s improper use of national security letters:

Just when President Bush seemed to have beaten back the Congressional defeatists on Iraq, along comes his own Justice Department to undermine some hard-won antiterror policy gains. The incompetence at Justice is getting to be expensive for Presidential power.

Remember, WSJ still believes President Bush has a glorious strategy for victory in Iraq. So for them to have gone from denial to excuses in such a short time is something of a miracle.

It’s true that the Justice Department’s internal investigation on the national security letter issue blamed human error and shoddy record keeping for most of the unauthorized wiretapping. But this tells me that the people at the top — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller — have been winking at nodding at gross violations of citizens’ 4th Amendment rights. If these two had made it clear that all surveillance would be conducted lawfully, you can bet there’d have been a whole lot less human error and shoddy record keeping.

Dem Senator Chuck Schumer has called on Alberto Gonzales to resign. Republican Senator Lindsay Graham accused Schumer of interjecting “a little politics here.” I guess some righties are still in denial. I also infer that it’s unseemly for a Senator to speak up on a serious lapse if the lapser is a member of the other party. But if Republicans would take responsibility for their problem children, the Dems wouldn’t have to speak up. But Republicans, in effect, let the kids run all over the restaurant screaming and tripping the waiters and stealing food off plates, and when, finally, some adult says stop that, you little brat, the GOP gets all indignant about it.

(On a related note, see the Carpetbagger — “It’s become a fairly common refrain, hasn’t it? The right does something offensive, the left gets mad when there are no consequences, time elapses, and the right, annoyed by lingering resentment, tells the left to ‘get over it.’”)

Meanwhile, the U.S. attorney purge continues to get attention. What we know so far is that some of the U.S. attorneys were fired after Republican officials in their districts complained to Karl Rove— the bleeping White House political director — about the attorneys’ performance.


Paul Krugman wrote today,

Sources told Newsweek that the list of prosecutors to be fired was drawn up by Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, “with input from the White House.” And Allen Weh, the chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party, told McClatchy News that he twice sought Karl Rove’s help — the first time via a liaison, the second time in person — in getting David Iglesias, the state’s U.S. attorney, fired for failing to indict Democrats. “He’s gone,” he claims Mr. Rove said.

After that story hit the wires, Mr. Weh claimed that his conversation with Mr. Rove took place after the decision to fire Mr. Iglesias had already been taken. Even if that’s true, Mr. Rove should have told Mr. Weh that political interference in matters of justice is out of bounds; Mr. Weh’s account of what he said sounds instead like the swaggering of a two-bit thug.

As Digby writes,

The minute I read that the Arkansas replacement was one of Rove’s little minions and that Iglesias had been pressured before the election to indict a Democrat, it was clear that this was Rove deal all around.

The Dems want to question Rove ao I suspect we are going to see some executive privilege claims start flying. Rove seems to have developed a bad case of SMS (Scooter Memory Syndrome) in which he can’t remember a damned thing whenever it becomes clear that he was playing politics in the lowest most obvious way possible. In his case, once the investigations start, the disease will render him braindead so he probably won’t be much use to anyone from this point forward.

And have I mentioned in the last few hours that we are paying this asshat’s salary?

See also Ron at Middle Earth Journal.

Update: Jack Cafferty calls Alberto Gonzales a “weasel.”

Supporting the Troops!

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The Talking Dog interviews James Yee! You might remember that Yee was the Muslim Chaplain at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. While on leave Captain Yee was arrested and accused of espionage and spying, charges which carried the death penalty. He was then placed in solitary confinement in the Naval Brig in Charleston, South Carolina, under conditions resembling those in which Guantanamo detainees were kept, for 76 days. As the case against Yee fell apart, the military instead added criminal charges of adultery and having pornography on his computer, charges that were also eventually dropped. Captain Yee left the Army with an honorable discharge and service commendations.

Lindsay Beyerstein interviews Nina Berman, who took this iconic photograph of an Iraq vet and his bride.

Mark Benjamin reports that injured soldiers are being sent back to Iraq.

As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Ga., is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor, according to medical records.

Feel free to snark about how Bush supports the troops in the comments.

Pure Faith

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Following up the last post — Robert Kagan has a column in today’s Washington Post claiming that “the surge” is succeeding. Glenn Greenwald asks the sensible question, “Why would any rational person listen to Robert Kagan?” Glenn reminds of of several things Kagan has declared to be true in the past that, um, weren’t. See also No More Mr. Nice Blog.

Naturally, the usual Kool–Aiders uncritically embrace everything Kagan wrote.

In the last post I talked about “idealists” in Washington cooking up impractical policies for Iraq. Here we see a variation on the same phenomenon — Kagan’s writing from his home — I believe he lives in Brussels — and he knows the surge is working. How? He reads the blog Iraq the Model. He also mentions a report by NBC’s Brian Williams.

At least 42 people were killed by suicide bombers in Iraq today, but who’s counting? Kagan doesn’t mention bombs in his op ed. The new counterinsurgency strategy is having a significant effect, Kagan says. Of course, if 42 Americans were killed by suicide bombers in U.S. cities, Kagan would think it among the greatest atrocities ever to befall mankind. Not to mention reason to start two or three more wars.

The New Aristocrats

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Rajiv Chandrasekaran in today’s Washington Post writes that agencies in the Bush Administration and the U.S. embassy in Baghdad are not playing well with each other.

Instead of collaborating, agencies have often found themselves split by the gulf between idealistic officials in Washington, some of whom have never been to Iraq, and embassy staffers whose ambition to promote change has been attenuated by the violence and dysfunction they witness every day.

The disagreements often center on arcane subjects — such as tariff policy or the rehabilitation of state-owned enterprises — but the impact can be profound, according to people on both sides of the fights. Embassy staffers said they have wasted countless hours squabbling with Washington instead of focusing on more urgent initiatives to stabilize Iraq. In one incident, as the bickering between Commerce and State intensified, the embassy blocked a team of Commerce officials from entering the country.

Most of the article discusses an Iraqi food distribution program that the idealists in Washington want eliminated.

Some background: Last year at a Camp David meeting, President Bush requested that the departments of agriculture, commerce and energy get more involved in Iraq. Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez then asked his staff to draw up a list of Iraq-related projects. Two months later, Commerce sent its list to Baghdad and waited for the embassy to shower them with gratitude.

Instead, the document, “Secretary Gutierrez’s Five Priority Areas for Economic Reform in Iraq,” set off a bureaucratic grenade in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The second item on the list called for the United States to pressure Iraq’s government to cease providing people with monthly food rations, which more than half of Iraq’s population relies on for sustenance.

Embassy officials were incensed. Although the embassy’s economists favored changes to the ration system, they believed that dismantling it as Commerce was proposing could spark riots that might topple the Iraqi government.

“Commerce was stunningly naive,” said a senior State Department official involved in Iraq policy. “They were way out of their lane.”

Part of the problem seems to come from what one means by “help.” When the State Department and the Baghdad embassy say they want help, they seem to mean they want more people and resources. But the Washington idealists think that “helping” in Iraq means thinking up better policies and telling the Baghdad crew what to do.

Some at Commerce regard embassy staffers and their bosses at the State Department as ungrateful and unwilling to embrace others’ ideas — even as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pleads with other federal agencies to send more people to Iraq. “We were willing to help, as the president asked us to do, but the State Department feels that it has control of the situation,” said a senior Commerce official involved in the food-ration policy.

Officials at State contend that they do want other federal departments to assist in Iraq, but they said they are less interested in policies that are developed by those agencies in Washington and imposed on Baghdad.

“The problem stems from this view at the White House that the whole Cabinet has to be involved,” the senior State Department official said.

The result, an embassy official with direct knowledge of the food-ration debate said, is that “there are too many cooks in the kitchen.”

The ration program has been going on since sanctions were imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War. In 2003, when L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority was running Iraq, Bremer wanted to dismantle the program because it interfered with the CPA’s plans to promote capitalism. (Bremer, you might recall, is the same genius who dismantled the Iraqi Army.) The U.S. military objected, saying that there was enough social unrest going on as it was.

Then last year the Commerce Department delivered its list of nifty policy ideas to the Baghdad embassy, touching off months of squabbling. Then Susan Hamrock, the director of Commerce’s Iraq task force, and one of her subordinates, Stephen L. Green, asked the embassy for permission to visit Baghdad. Hamrock wanted to bypass the Embassy and talk directly to the Iraqi minister responsible for the food distribution system. The Embassy refused to give Hamrock and Green clearance to visit the Green Zone. Then Hamrock found out the minister would be attending a conference in Brussels.

Hamrock and Green flew to Brussels to see the Iraqis. According to Hamrock’s written summary of the meeting, they discussed changes in the ration system.

Since then, the Commerce official said, Hamrock and other Commerce officials have continued to discuss the ration system with Iraqi officials over the phone and by e-mail.

The minister and other Iraqi officials “fully support our efforts,” the Commerce official said.

The trade minister, Abdul Falah al-Sudani, could not be reached for a comment.

However, it seems that in Iraq, “full support” may not mean full support, exactly. So far, the only reform the Iraqis have been willing to make is to exclude senior government officials from receiving rations.

Commerce isn’t giving up. Hamrock’s boss, Franklin L. Lavin, the undersecretary for international trade, wants “free-market solutions” for the food problem.

Last month, Lavin traveled to Iraq to meet with trade ministry officials. His PowerPoint presentation included an exhortation to revise the ration system by providing handouts only to the needy.

The Iraqi officials present nodded in agreement. But that is about all they have done, embassy officials said.

“No Iraqi politician wants to get rid of free food. It’s political suicide. They’re not going to do it,” said a former embassy official who worked on ration-related issues. “These grand schemes are irrelevant. I can’t tell you how many hundreds of hours everyone has wasted on this issue, when there were all sorts of more productive things they could have been doing with their time.”

What is it with Bushies and Powerpoint presentations? Anyway, I thought this bit was illuminating [emphasis added] —

Commerce was not the embassy economic section’s only concern when it came to rations. Last fall, the embassy’s Joint Strategic Planning and Assessment Office, headed by a Rand Corp. analyst on contract with the embassy, created its own plan to restructure the ration system. It was even more aggressive than Commerce’s. It called for eliminating the rations in 38 weeks …

… The officers convened a working group composed of representatives from the economic section, the planning office, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. military command and the State Department’s Iraq Reconstruction and Management Office. No Iraqis were invited, according to the two embassy officials.

We keep saying we want Iraqis to take charge of their own country, and then we go right ahead and impose our solutions to their problems.

Over the course of several meetings last fall, the participants who were not from the strategic planning office chipped away at the 38-week proposal. They eventually reached a compromise: The ration system would cease by the end of 2008 — in more than 100 weeks.

To the embassy’s economists, saying they wanted to kill the program in two years was an elaborate ploy, the embassy officials said. It would get them on the record as favoring major changes, but the timeframe almost certainly meant it would not happen. “Things in Iraq change every six months,” the first embassy official said. “If you say you plan to do something in two years, it means you’ll never do it.”

There are other programs that the embassy and the agencies are fighting over, and I’m not certain the agencies don’t have a point about some of these programs. But after all that’s happened (and gone wrong), the unflappable hubris of the Bush Administration continues to amaze me. They remind me of Old World aristocrats — the ones in movies, anyway — inbred, vain, spoiled, and privileged. Movie aristocrats are arrogant fops who get shown up by the plain spoken American hero, who (unlike the fops) is skilled and experienced and smart. Now I wonder how many Bush Administration officials it takes to screw in a light bulb. Oh, wait, they have maids for that. Never mind.