Is Darrell actually DougJ?
Discuss.
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
by Tim F| 128 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Republican Stupidity
Lawyer Adam Cohen in the New York Times (formatting his):
[T]he administration has been strangely successful in pushing its message that the scandal is at worst a political misdeed, not a criminal matter.It is true, as the White House keeps saying, that United States attorneys serve “at the pleasure of the president,” which means he can dismiss them whenever he wants. But if the attorneys were fired to interfere with a valid prosecution, or to punish them for not misusing their offices, that may well have been illegal.
[…] 1. Misrepresentations to Congress. The relevant provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1505, is very broad. It is illegal to lie to Congress, and also to “impede” it in getting information. Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty indicated to Congress that the White House’s involvement in firing the United States attorneys was minimal, something that Justice Department e-mail messages suggest to be untrue.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made his own dubious assertion to Congress: “I would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney position for political reasons.”
[…] 2. Calling the Prosecutors. As part of the Sarbanes-Oxley reforms, Congress passed an extremely broad obstruction of justice provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1512 (c), which applies to anyone who corruptly “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,” including U.S. attorney investigations.
[…] 3. Witness Tampering. 18 U.S.C. § 1512 (b) makes it illegal to intimidate Congressional witnesses. Michael Elston, Mr. McNulty’s chief of staff, contacted one of the fired attorneys, H. E. Cummins, and suggested, according to Mr. Cummins, that if he kept speaking out, there would be retaliation. Mr. Cummins took the call as a threat, and sent an e-mail message to other fired prosecutors warning them of it. Several of them told Congress that if Mr. Elston had placed a similar call to one of their witnesses in a criminal case, they would have opened an investigation of it.
[…]4. Firing the Attorneys. United States attorneys can be fired whenever a president wants, but not, as § 1512 (c) puts it, to corruptly obstruct, influence, or impede an official proceeding.
That should help explain why somebody leaked to US News and World Report about panic and paralysis at the DOJ.
The fear that virtually any piece of communication will have to be turned over has paralyzed department officials’ ability to communicate effectively and respond in unison to the crisis, as has the fact that senior Justice officials themselves say they still don’t know the entire story about what happened that led to the crisis. So they are afraid that anything they put down on paper could be viewed as lies or obfuscation, when in fact, the story is changing daily as new documents are found and as the Office of Legal Counsel conducts its own internal probe into the matter.
Depending on your reading one might feel tempted to sympathize, David Broder-like, with the mess in which Gonzales and his appointees have found themselves. If that in fact was the article’s intent, it is hard to imagine a more thorough dereliction of the basic principle of causality and personal responsibility.
Revisit this sentence: senior Justice officials themselves say they still don’t know the entire story about what happened that led to the crisis. Plainly either senior officials know full well the story behind how eight of their US Attorneys got fired, or else we have one of the most dysfunctional Departments of Justice in US history. The message is either a steaming pile of damage control or yet one more indictment of our current government.
Of course the two possibilities hardly exclude each other. Senior managers routinely overrule career lawyers in politically charged cases, suggesting that the DOJ’s role as a neutral arbiter of justice subsumed to the Republican policy agenda long ago. By now we should recognize that when political considerations win out in a federal department, dysfunction follows like water flows downhill.
So of course DOJ is in disarray. The DOJ has been in disarray since the president appointed his own lawyer to the Attorney General job, and probably since Ashcroft (or not?). Like the rest of government they seem to have believed their own rhetoric and felt that Republican Congressional majorities would go on blocking oversight forever.
Again, none of this should be the least bit surprising. Removing accountability always leads to lax behavior. People cut corners, fudge reports and miss filing requirements because human nature does not include a drive to keep up with time-consuming crap unless some punishment exists for not doing it. Political hacks always do a worse job than career professionals because their career doesn’t advance on doing the job right, it moves forward if the results have the right political odor. Mix accountability-free government with political hackery of the first degree and the question of government functioning without screwing up, wrecking protocol and breaking the law becomes a mathematical impossibility.
Take this anecdote for example. In a meeting with skeptical Senators Gonzales at first dismisses them entirely, then loses his nerve and ends in a state of near panic. It might be the first time that Gonzales has experienced real accountability and he has no idea how to deal with it.
Document dumps like today’s emails will cause particular heartburn for the DOJ because the relevant actors didn’t even conspire to break a specific law. At least in that case they would know their own potential jeapordy. Instead Gonzales and his appointees merely acted as if the law (or at least the less obvious laws) didn’t exist. So in a sense it may be perfectly true that they have no real idea what kind of trouble they’re in. Try to understand if my first reaction is to point and laugh.
***
As a sidebar, don’t miss this story about the great vote fraud case on which Washington US Attorney Tom McKay supposedly lost his standing with the DOJ. It’s pretty funny.
US Attorney Dismissals: Four Flavors Of Legal JeapordyPost + Comments (128)
by John Cole| 37 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Republican Stupidity, Outrage
The reasons for the attorney firings turns out to be more of the same, piled higher and deeper:
It’s becoming one of the central rules of the U.S. attorney purge scandal: whatever “performance related” complaint the administration claims as the justification for a U.S. attorney’s firing, it’s actually an area of performance for which that U.S. attorney was lauded.
In this instance, the White House has said that U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico was removed in part due to his handling of voter fraud complaints. That’s backed up by the numerous instances of powerful New Mexico Republicans (including Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM)) complaining to Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and President Bush about Iglesias’ decision not to prosecute certain cases of voter fraud.
What does this mean? It means that Iglesias must have been lauded by the Justice Department for his handling of voter fraud cases. And not just lauded — but cited as an example for U.S. attorneys across the country.
As I noted in an earelier thread, I have learned that with this administration, you look for the simplest and most base explanation for their behavior. In this case, the memo stating insufficient loyalty will suffice. The prime sin in this administration and with this current GOP (hell, the only real sin) is insufficient loyalty.
Every other excuse for the attorney firings is turning out to be nonsense, and insufficient loyalty seems to be the only reason I can come up with at this point. The only question that remains is how the insufficient loyalty was manifesting itself in such a way that these attornies needed to be removed. Was it the CIA bit? Voter fraud?
I am sure we will find out in a few weeks, after we have gone through several more iterations of official administration excuses.
This post is in: Politics
This will be fun to watch:
The Democratic senator leading the inquiry into the dismissal of federal prosecutors said today that he wanted Karl Rove and other top aides to President Bush to testify publicly and under oath, setting up a confrontation between Congress and the White House, which has said it is unlikely to agree to such a demand.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said his committee would vote Thursday on whether to issue subpoenas for Mr. Rove, as well as Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, and William Kelley, the deputy White House counsel, in the inquiry, which centers on whether the White House allowed politics to interfere with law enforcement.
The question of whether Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales would be forced to step down as a result of the inquiry dominated the Sunday morning talk shows here, a staple of weekend life in Washington. The White House press secretary, Tony Snow, said in a brief interview today that Mr. Bush continues to have confidence in Mr. Gonzales, despite the speculation.
Why not testify? After all, if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to hide.
Personally, I say we subject them to strict interrogation methods. After all, those methods aren’t torture.
by John Cole| 46 Comments
This post is in: Movies
I finally watched Casino Royale yesterday, and he is, hands down, the best Bond ever. Sorry, Sean.
And OMG, Caterina Murino. Move over, Sophie Marceau.
Also saw half of Borat (I will watch the rest while on the exercise bike today), which was not as funny as I thought it would be, and there were some scenes (the rodeo, for example), that were downright depressing.
This post is in: Politics, Republican Stupidity
I am not sure why the press is not talking about this more, or why no one has pointed it out:
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales apologized to the nation’s 93 U.S. attorneys in a conference call Friday as he tried to hold on to his job amid the scandal over the firings of eight federal prosecutors.
In another move to repair his credibility, Gonzales named a respected U.S. attorney from Virginia, Chuck Rosenberg, as his interim chief of staff to replace Kyle Sampson, who stepped down because of his involvement in the controversy.
But pressure for Gonzales’ resignation continued to build.
In recent days, the Justice Department and the White House have been forced to defend the firings after internal e-mails revealed a coordinated effort to root out U.S. attorneys who’d fallen out of favor with the administration.
Administration critics and allies alike were startled by the degree to which politics appeared to be driving the planned purge of the Republican appointees in the months before the 2006 congressional elections. In one e-mail, one official said the plan was to replace “underperforming” U.S. attorneys and retain the “vast majority” who were “loyal Bushies.”
It isn’t just the ones who were fired- it is the ones who are still in place who have had their integrity smeared. By politicizing this to such an extent, the administration has given the appearance that the retained attorneys are little more than lackeys who will be political hacks for the administration.
*** Update ***
Their hackery has undermined the integrity of every US Attorney and will now throw every prosecutorial decision into question. Well done, guys.
by Tim F| 6 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Our Irish friends missed Burns Day this year so tonight everybody has to attend their Paddy’s Day party in a kilt.
In honor of the wrong holiday, here is the poem that I read at the last Burns Day.
AE fond kiss, and then we sever;
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee!Who shall say that Fortune grieves him
While the star of hope she leaves him?
Me, nae cheerfu’ twinkle lights me,
Dark despair around benights me.I’ll ne’er blame my partial fancy;
Naething could resist my Nancy;
But to see her was to love her,
Love but her, and love for ever.Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met—or never parted,
We had ne’er been broken-hearted.Fare thee weel, thou first and fairest!
Fare thee weel, thou best and dearest!
Thine be ilka joy and treasure,
Peace, enjoyment, love, and pleasure!Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee!
Chat about whatever.