Philip Heymann, a Harvard law professor and former deputy attorney general under Reno, said the Justice Department has always been vulnerable to allegations of playing politics with prosecutions."But these allegations are vastly greater and more credible," Heymann said. "Really good attorney generals go out of their way to keep appearances straight as well as realities. I think something serious has been going on, and I think it's terribly important that it come out.
"If politicians were going to the White House and saying they didn't want this or that case brought, and the White House was letting the U.S. attorneys know by firing them, it would be terribly immoral and destructive."
--David Kurtz
I'll wait to see more before judging just how this fits into the larger Bush administration voter suppression agenda. But let me take note of Friday's ruling in a case that pitted the Bush Justice Department against the State of Missouri, specifically, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan. There's a jurisdictional issue in the case: balancing the state's versus localities' responsibility for administering elections. But the heart of the case is that the Bush administration sued the state for not being sufficiently aggressive in purging voter rolls. (See the original DOJ complaint.)
This is a classic battleground in the voter suppression game. Voter roll purges strikes names of people who've died or moved. But they also knock off the lists of a lot of occasional voters. This is what the Bush administration calls voting right enforcement.
In addition to finding against the Bush administration on the jurisdictional issue and a number of factual points ...
[U.S. District Judge Nanette] Laughrey said it was difficult to gauge the scope of the problem "because the United States has not presented the actual voter registration lists and shown who should have been included or excluded and why.""It is also telling that the United States has not shown that any Missouri resident was denied his or her right to vote as a result of deficiencies alleged by the United States," Laughrey wrote. "Nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred."
It's all part of the same story.
(ed.note: At TPM we're actively pursuing a Missouri angle to the US Attorney Purge story which again turns on administration 'voter fraud' claims.)
--Josh Marshall
Harper's Scott Horton is a welcome new voice in the blogosphere. You can find his wit and wisdom at his blog No Comment.
--David Kurtz
An inside look at how the Department of Justice has changed under George W. Bush, and particularly under Alberto Gonzales.
Update: Some readers have asked me to further highlight the piece I linked to above, an interview that Daniel Metcalfe, a recently retired senior career DOJ lawyer, gave to the Legal Times' Tony Mauro. Gladly.
Metcalfe had been with the Justice Department since 1971, so much of the perspective what he is able to offer on the Bush Justice Department is historical. Here is Metcalfe on how quickly things changed after Alberto Gonzales became attorney general:
Ever since the Watergate era, when Edward Levi came in as attorney general to replace former Sen. William Saxby soon after Nixon resigned, the Justice Department maintained a healthy distance between it and what could be called the raw political concerns that are properly within the White House's domain. Even Reagan's first attorney general, William French Smith, did not depart greatly from the standard that Levi set; as for Meese, I knew him to be more heavily involved in defending himself from multiple ethics investigations than in bringing the department too close to the White House, even though he came from there.More recently, of course, the DOJ-White House distance hit its all-time high-water mark under Janet Reno, especially during Clinton's second term. And even John Ashcroft made it clear to all department employees that, among other things, he held that traditional distance in proper reverence; he proved that this was no mere lip service when, from his hospital bed, he refused to overrule Deputy AG Comey on what is now called the "terrorist surveillance program." Especially in the wake of 9/11, which strongly spurred the morale and dedication of Justice Department employees, myself included, I saw only a limited morale diminution in general during the first term.
But that strong tradition of independence over the previous 30 years was shattered in 2005 with the arrival of the White House counsel as a second-term AG. All sworn assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, it was as if the White House and Justice Department now were artificially tied at the hip -- through their public affairs, legislative affairs and legal policy offices, for example, as well as where you ordinarily would expect such a connection (i.e., Justice's Office of Legal Counsel). I attended many meetings in which this total lack of distance became quite clear, as if the current crop of political appointees in those offices weren't even aware of the important administration-of-justice principles that they were trampling.
Metcalfe also makes an interesting--and on its face, plausible--claim that I don't recall hearing before: namely, that the traditional second term decline in the quality of new political appointees is worse in Republican administrations:
I'll now say something that might sound partisan, even coming from a purposely nonpartisan registered independent, but it's really not: In my experience over 11 presidential administrations, from Nixon I to what can be called Bush III, there is an unmistakable drop-off in overall appointment quality during a second presidential term -- and this definitely is more so during a Republican administration. Perhaps this is due to there being a lower quality of political appointees in Republican administrations to begin with, given that, by and large, they give up more than Democrats do to enter government service, especially with the post-Watergate ethics restrictions that all government officials face.This observation is nothing new, by the way; one need only look at the relative ages and experience levels of comparable appointees in successive administrations to see it. So when you enter the second term of a Republican administration, you get the worst of all possible worlds: You actually see some influential political appointees who are, to put it bluntly, too subject-matter ignorant to even realize how ignorant they are. (This is assuming that, if they knew, they'd actually care.)
And compounding this, as mentioned earlier, is the strong drive of political appointees at all levels (perhaps more so if they are attorneys, whose background is amenable to legal positions throughout the executive branch) to obtain that maximum capstone position before the second term ends. What happens to bureaucracy at such a time is that it becomes sluggish to the point of constipation, driven only by expediency as gauged from a political or personal agenda, and it sometimes yields some truly mind-boggling results, such as the current U.S. Attorney nightmare.
Metcalfe's perspective is worth considering. It is, in some respects, a more benign explanation for some of what we have seen than I might favor. I use "benign" guardedly because what Metcalfe witnessed in the last two years of his tenure at DOJ was clearly distressing to him and, in his view, marred the department's reputation, something he took great pride in.
What I mean is that the dysfunction he describes at the staff level can be seen as the cause of the purge scandal or it can be seen as a means to an end. If you subscribe to the former view, then Purgegate is a mess that could have been avoided if it had merely been handled better, a public relations snafu due to poor staffing. The latter view, which is perhaps more cynical but I also think more realistic, is that placing young, inexperienced, impressionable staffers in high level department positions enabled higher-ups in the Administration to exert far greater control in promulgating the Rove political agenda. (That staff level youth and inexperience could be blamed when and if the crap hit the fan was merely another advantage to the plan.)
Second term malaise may have a historical precedent, but the politicization of the Justice Department is classic Karl Rove.
--David Kurtz
I'm afraid yesterday's AP story on No Gun Ri is going to get lost in the swirl of more immediately pressing scandals, but it's such an important piece, I want to draw your attention to it:
Six years after declaring the U.S. killing of Korean War refugees at No Gun Ri was "not deliberate," the Army has acknowledged it found but did not divulge that a high-level document said the U.S. military had a policy of shooting approaching civilians in South Korea.The document, a letter from the U.S. ambassador in South Korea to the State Department in Washington, is dated the day in 1950 when U.S. troops began the No Gun Ri shootings, in which survivors say hundreds, mostly women and children, were killed.
Exclusion of the embassy letter from the Army's 2001 investigative report is the most significant among numerous omissions of documents and testimony pointing to a policy of firing on refugee groups — undisclosed evidence uncovered by Associated Press archival research and Freedom of Information Act requests. . . .
More than a dozen documents — in which high-ranking U.S. officers tell troops that refugees are "fair game," for example, and order them to "shoot all refugees coming across river" — were found by the AP in the investigators' own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None of those documents was disclosed in the Army's 300-page public report. . . .
Despite this, the Army's e-mail to the AP maintains, as did the 2001 report, "No policy purporting to authorize soldiers to shoot refugees was ever promulgated to soldiers in the field." . . .
There's a lot more detail in the AP piece about how the 2001 report which exonerated the Army left out or mischaracterized key pieces of evidence from the Army's own records.
It's never too late to get this sort of thing right, and given the looming historical accounting America will have to do on Iraq and the War on Terror, we better learn how to do it right.
--David Kurtz
Walter Pincus reports on the Administration's proposed revisions to FISA, which include immunizing telecommunications companies who cooperate in the Administration's surveillance programs from lawsuits by their customers. That provision would be retroactive to Sept 11, 2001 (via War and Piece).
--David Kurtz
White House agrees to coordinate with the Senate Judiciary Committee on choosing an independent consultant to recover all those lost emails.
Nice. The Senate gets to help pick who will find the emails but the White House still hasn't agreed to let the Senate see the emails once they are found. Ah, compromise.
Update: Speaking of compromise, Fred Fielding has his work cut out for him:
Sources tell NPR that Fielding actually wants to negotiate with Congress about how the interviews [of White House staff] will take place. But Fielding has not been able to persuade President Bush to go along.
--David Kurtz
Milwaukee US Attorney Steven Biskupic responds to revelation that he was on and then later taken off the Bush firing list ...
Until the recent controversy surrounding the firings of eight United State Attorneys around the country, it was never communicated to me that my job could be in jeopardy or that I was considered to be disloyal to President Bush's agenda.- It is my understanding that my name appears on a list, which was a ranking of United States Attorneys. My name appeared in a category questioning my performance and loyalty to the President. That same list characterized esteemed Chicago United States Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as "mediocre." I believe the list has no credibility.
- The charging decision in the Georgia Thompson case was made in consultation with the then-Democratic State Attorney General, and the Democratic District Attorney for Dane County. The decision to charge Thompson was based solely on the facts, and was not made with consideration of my job status. To my knowledge at the time, my job status was entirely secure.
- I am a career prosecutor, selected as United States Attorney through a bipartisan commission. My numerous public corruption cases include prosecutions of Democrats and Republicans. Our records show that since 2002 when I became United States Attorney, I have brought at least 12 cases against individuals who donated money to Republican candidates or who were aligned with the Republican Party.
--Josh Marshall
So much for Fred Fielding's story (from the LAT) ...
Karl Rove and other White House employees were cautioned in employee manuals, memos and briefings to carefully save any e-mails that might discuss official matters even if those messages came from private e-mail accounts, the White House disclosed Friday.Despite these cautions, e-mails from Rove and others discussing official business may have been deleted and are now missing.
White House officials spent much of Friday reiterating that the missing e-mails were the result of an innocent mistake. About 50 aides in the executive office of the Bush administration have used e-mail accounts provided by the Republican National Committee to keep campaign-related communication separate from their official White House business.
--Josh Marshall
Condi takes another one for the team:
After intense internal debate, the Bush administration has decided to hold on to five Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence agents captured in Iraq, overruling a State Department recommendation to release them, according to U.S. officials.At a meeting of the president's foreign policy team Tuesday, the administration decided the five Iranians will remain in custody and go through a periodic six-month review used for the 250 other foreign detainees held in Iraq, U.S. officials said. The next review is not expected until July, officials say. . . .
Differences over the five Iranians reflect an emerging divide on how to deal with Iran. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went into the meeting Tuesday advising that the men be freed because they are no longer useful, but after a review of options she went along with the consensus, U.S. officials say. Vice President Cheney's office made the firmest case for keeping them.
--David Kurtz
J. Scott Jennings, Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director, Office of Political Affairs to Karl Rove, Kyle Sampson, Fred Fielding, et al., February 28th, 2007: "[Sen. Domenici's Chief of Staff Steve] Bell said Domenici's idea is not to respond [to Iglesias's accusations], and hopefully make this a one day story. They have already been contacted by McClatchy ... They have not confirmed to the reporter they were one of the Members."
AP, March 1st, 2007 ...
In a brief interview Thursday, Domenici also denied the accusation. "I don't have any comment," he told The Associated Press. "I have no idea what he's talking about."
--Josh Marshall
Big News.
In yesterday's episode of TPM TV we discussed Milwaukee US Attorney Steven Biskupic and discussed the evidence suggesting he'd been targetted by the Justice Department for firing (he didn't come through on 'voter fraud') but then apparently got a reprieve. Was it tied to his recently reversed corruption case, targetting a Democratic administration?
To remind you ...
Well, tonight we have proof. Just out from McClatchy ...
A U.S. attorney in Wisconsin who prosecuted a state Democratic official on corruption charges during last year's heated governor's race was once targeted for firing by the Department of Justice, but given a reprieve for reasons that remain unclear. A federal appeals court last week threw out the conviction of Wisconsin state worker Georgia Thompson, saying the evidence was "beyond thin."Congressional investigators looking into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys saw Wisconsin prosecutor Steven M. Biskupic's name on a list of lawyers targeted for removal when they were inspecting a Justice Department document not yet made public, according to an attorney for a lawmaker involved in the investigation. The attorney asked for anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the investigation.
This will be big.
--Josh Marshall
I told a reporter a week or so ago that the turning point in my mind in the US Attorney story came the day we saw the report in Joe Monohan's New Mexico politics blog that David Iglesias had sent an email in which he had called his firing a "political fragging." That was the first time we had a hint of the real story out of one of the fired attorneys' mouths. And it looked like there was more coming. The next day he told McClatchy how two members of Congress had called him to pressure him about that election timed indictment.
That set off the alarm bells at the White House and we have the email in which Karl Rove's deputy Scott Jennings sends out an urgent message to Rove, Fielding, Perino, Sampson, et al.
Jennings had gotten an urgent call from Steve Bell, Sen Domenici's Chief of Staff. "Bell said Domenici's idea is not to respond, and hopefully make this a one day story," Jennings tells the gang.
Good luck.
Definitely check this one out.
Also, a side note. New White House Counsel Fred Fielding has been laying a lot of the blame for the lax email policies on his predecessors. But here we have Jennings sending out a group email that includes both Fielding and Rove. And Rove's getting it at one of his RNC email addresses. I guess it was still SOP as late as February 28th, the date of the email.
--Josh Marshall
What it's looked like from the very beginning.
From NPR (courtesy of TPM Reader DE) ...
NPR now has new information about that plan. According to someone who's had conversations with White House officials, the plan to fire all 93 U.S. attorneys originated with political adviser Karl Rove. It was seen as a way to get political cover for firing the small number of U.S. attorneys the White House actually wanted to get rid of. Documents show the plan was eventually dismissed as impractical.
Why do you think they're tossing everyone under the bus but Karl?
--Josh Marshall
In episode #3 of our new TPM TV show, we discussed those DOJ emails in which Justice Department officials are caught brainstorming cover stories for why they fired San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam. And today's document dump contains even more fun.
In one memo, apparently assembled by Monica Goodling, the DOJers get so creative that they get confused about which fired US Attorney they're talking about -- Lam, Iglesias, you say Tomato, I say Tomahto. (As you know, the Iglesias was bad on illegal immigration cover story is soo down the memory hole.) And in her zeal to get on Lam's case for lax immigration enforcement in a prep memo for senate testimony, Goodling blames Lam for enforcement policies actually run by the Department of Homeland Security.
The plan to blame her for America's dependence on foreign oil doesn't seem to have made it into the emails. But we're still looking ...
--Josh Marshall
More from the Justice Department documents:
Turns out that the Justice Department under Bush does pay close attention to who's a member of the Federalist Society and who's not.
And the Justice Department has said that no replacements were ready for the fired U.S. attorneys. But today's documents show that Kyle Sampson had a list.
--Paul Kiel
Ya don't say?
From the document dump, DOJ press spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos on strategy for dealing with the Attorney Purge story: "We are trying to muddy the coverage up a bit."
--Josh Marshall
M.J. Rosenberg in top form: whether David Brooks and the neocons like it or not, most "Arab anger about (and sympathy for) Palestinians is utterly genuine."
--Andrew Golis
The latest in the White House email follies:
Karl Rove's lawyer says that he didn't mean to delete his emails. He thought the RNC was keeping a copy. Just one big misunderstanding.
The White House now says that it may have lost millions of emails due to switching from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook.
--Paul Kiel
Aahhhhh, this one's a beaut ... As we've discussed before, the folks at the DOJ really had some brainstorming to do to come up with reasons to justify the Attorney firings. Here we have what appears to be Monica Goodling's notes from one of those brainstorming sessions. On Iglesias? "Domenici says he doesn't move cases." See the whole thing here.
--Josh Marshall
Who did Kyle Sampson want to install in Carol Lam's place? A new development out of this morning's document dump.
One of Kyle's suggestions for filling Lam's position in San Diego was Jeffrey A. Taylor, already a subject of interest for us here at TPM. Instead he became US Attorney for the District of Columbia.
--Josh Marshall
A Senator in the Book Club? Ron Wyden rejects the idea that we need to wait for a Democratic president to take on health care reform.
--Andrew Golis
Did Fred Hiatt break his own stated policies on Op-eds by publishing Liz Cheney's attack on Pelosi without identifying the writer as the Veep's daughter?
Update: Don't miss what may be the crowning absurdity of this whole affair.
--Greg Sargent
More documents forthcoming from the Justice Department this morning.
Update: They've arrived. We've set a document diving comment thread at TPMmuckraker here.
--Paul Kiel
The DCCC is up on the air with a new radio ad hammering GOP Rep. Heather Wilson over her role in the Attorney Purge. Check it out here.
--Greg Sargent
TPM Reader RL sends us along this editorial from the Milwaukee alt weekly, the Shepherd Express, which gives us more helpful background on Milwaukee US Attorney Steven Biskupic's curious habit of prosecuting Democrats and how it ties in to the US Attorney Purge.
--Josh Marshall
Shocked and somewhat awed (CNN)...
The alleged "D.C. madam" dropped a name in court documents filed Thursday, but the man named bristled at being accused of hiring the high-end escort service run by Deborah Jean Palfrey.Government prosecutors say Pamela Martin and Associates was actually a prostitution ring that Palfrey operated in the Washington area for 13 years. Palfrey denies that her business provided sexual services to its customers.
In her motion to reconsider appointment of counsel, Palfrey named Harlan K. Ullman as "one of the regular customers" of the business.
Ullman is one of the leading theorists behind the "shock and awe" military strategy that was associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"The allegations do not dignify a response," Ullman told CNN. "I'm a private, not a public, citizen. Any further questions are referred to my attorneys."
--Josh Marshall
There are so many shoes dropping tonight that it's hard to know which one to catch or grab on to. But here's a decent place to start. Various White Houses have made more or less copious claims for executive privilege. But even Richard Nixon was not half this audacious. Remember those Republican National Committee emails that seem to have gone missing? President Bush's lawyers says that if they're ever 'found' then they're covered by executive privilege too.
From the Times ...
The clash also seemed to push the White House and Democrats closer to a serious confrontation over executive privilege, with the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, asserting that the administration has control over countless other e-mail messages that the Republican National Committee has archived. Democrats are insisting that they are entitled to get the e-mail messages directly from the national committee.
This one is worth slowing down and seeing just what the White House is saying. Executive privilege doesn't just apply to conversations the president has with his top aides. It doesn't just apply to conversations his top aides have with each other. It doesn't even just apply to any presidential aides doing anything connected to the White House. Executive privilege applies to the outside political party work the president's aides do on their own time.
Remember, members of the White House staff have outside party-funded email accounts for doing political work they are not permitted to do on taxpayers' time. They do their official work with government phones, emails, blackberries, etc. But if they break the rules and do official work using outside party-funded email addresses then executive privilege covers that too.
--Josh Marshall
A bunch of you have asked, 'Hey, as long as you're taking the time to produce these daily video segments, why aren't you making it available as a podcast?' Well, we are. It's on itunes. And you can go download it or subscribe whenever you want. Just go to the itunes store and search for 'veracifier'.
Of course, that raises the question, 'What the hell's veracifier?' A good question with a good answer, which I'll answer in an upcoming post.
--Josh Marshall
Rudy: Don't believe the hype. I can be just as friggin' crazy as the other 'wingers.
Greg Djerejian brings us the news that Rudy is being advised on Iraq by none other than John Bolton. So basically Rudy's in with the one guy who was even too whacked for the Bushies.
The guy really knows how to pick good people.
--Josh Marshall
US Attorney Purge smoke comin' out of Wisconsin ...
Late Update: After we finished today's piece, Rep. Conyers (D-MI) put out the word that he now has evidence that some of those RNC emails contain more information about Wisconsin US Attorney Steven Biskupic. All eyes on Wisconsin.
--Josh Marshall
Fred Hiatt responds to our questions, explains why it's okay to publish a Liz Cheney Op ed piece bashing Nancy Pelosi without identifying her as Veep Cheney's daughter.
--Greg Sargent
AP: CBS cans Imus.
BREAKING!: David Gregory hangs tough against the anti-Imus lynch mob. Video Soon!
Late Update: There seems to have been at least one reader who didn't realize the 'breaking' line above was a sarcastic remark at David Gregory's expense. Please tell me he's the only one? Please?
--Josh Marshall
The new details keep coming fast and furious. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) just sent a letter to Alberto Gonzales, who I guess we might call the AG pro-tem. Waxman spoke to RNC Counsel Rob Kelner. According to Kelner, even after the RNC began saving Karl Rove's emails, in response to orders from Pat Fitzgerald, Rove himself apparently continued to delete the messages himself well into 2005. This one's pretty fishy. So you'll want to read the details Paul has in this new post at TPMmuckraker.
--Josh Marshall
Exclusive: We've obtained the full memo from Rahm Emanuel to fellow House Dem leaders urging them to hang tough in the face of White House pressure to fund the war. Check it out.
--Greg Sargent
Josh Green explains for us how Karl Rove once used the 'vote fraud' issue to get one of his clients' election defeats reversed in court. This isssue's really close to Karl's heart.
--Josh Marshall
Hillary heads to Rutgers to discuss women and politics. I guess probably no stop for the Imus show.
--Josh Marshall
It just never stops. According to CREW, there are millions of missing emails from the White House -- these from the White House servers.
--Paul Kiel
I think White House pressers Scott Stanzel can do a little better on telling us why the White House changed their email retention policy for RNC emails back in 2004. Some pretty canny reporter asked this question this morning in the gaggle ...
Reporter: On the change in policy in '04, wasn't that in response to Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the White House and the need, in response to his inquiries, to preserve records?Stanzel: I don't know the reasons for that change. That's our understanding of when that change occurred. But the White House Counsel's Office is working with the RNC counsel to be sure and to gather more information about when changes were made and why they were made....
I can say that I am very confident, very confident that that reporter is correct and that orders from Pat Fitzgerald were the reason for the change in White House policy in 2004. So the change in policy was tied to yet another criminal investigation of the White House. And the White House and the key employees in question -- namely Karl Rove and people working for him at the White House political office -- were specifically on notice not to destroy the emails they sent through the RNC servers. And yet they took affirmative steps to continue destroying them, even after all of this had happened.
--Josh Marshall
If you're a Republican lawyer, you just can't beat having the muscle of the Justice Department to pursue Democrats.
--Paul Kiel
From TPM Reader DS ...
You should post a shout-out to anyone who has ever been investigated by the federal government who claimed to have deleted some relevant e-mails. What did the Justice Department, IRS, or SEC do in response? Particularly relevant would be industries that have mandatory document retention policies, such as the financial sector. The tales would be rather amusing at this point, I imagine.
--Josh Marshall
He's so good he plays both sides of the argument. Jon Cohn makes the case against single-payer.
And if you're just tuning in to this week's Book Club, a summary of what you've missed.
--Andrew Golis
Check out the Republican National Committee's entire case against Nancy Pelosi -- all in one tidy memo.
--Greg Sargent
This morning's press gaggle with White House spokesman Scott Stanzel was a fun one.
A quote:
...what you're talking about is the user's ability, if they are sitting at their laptop, and decide that, 'gosh, I've got a hundred emails here that I just -- are cluttering up my inbox, I want to put them in the deleted file, and I right-click the deleted items to empty my deleted file.' It's possible, possible, that those records could have been lost....
--Paul Kiel
Check out Dan Froomkin's new piece just up on the Post website in which he shows how clear it must have been to the White House officials in question that they were violating the White House's own stated policies in this whole RNC email situation.
--Josh Marshall
Senate Judiciary Committee authorizes subpoenas for Justice Department documents, White House emails, White House officials....
--Paul Kiel
Interesting. More details coming from this morning's gaggle on how those RNC-White House emails just happened to get deleted.
--Josh Marshall
Kyle Sampson back up to the Hill tomorrow for "voluntary follow-up interview."
--Josh Marshall
McCain camp: All the bad press we got for the Baghdad Stroll is good for us.
--Greg Sargent
Today's Must Read: parsing the White House's "mishandling" (read:deletion) of Karl Rove's and other staffers' emails.
--Paul Kiel
Remember, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales goes to Capitol Hill to testify about the US Attorney Purge next Tuesday, April 17th.
--Josh Marshall
The 'lost' RNC emails story deserves and will get a lot of attention. But tomorrow's Times has another story that will probably generate less heat but is closer to the core of what the Purge story is about. Since President Bush came into office, the Justice Department has made 'voter fraud' prosecutions a high priority. Yet, not for lack of effort, they've barely been able to find any examples of it. The grand effort has boiled down to a program to send a few handfuls of folks -- mainly black -- to jail for what are in almost every case notional or unintentional voting infractions.
As those of you who follow this issue know, the vast number of the claims about 'voter fraud' are based on poorly kept voter rolls. Joe Smith is registered to vote in New Jersey and New York! The small print is that he lived in New Jersey but then moved to New York. The election board in New Jersey just hasn't taken him off the rolls yet. It may sound like I'm joking. But most of the scare stories about 'voter fraud' are just as stupid as that example.
At TPMmuckraker at the moment, we're giving a very close look to the 'voter fraud' claims in Wisconsin that Karl Rove was so interested in. GOP activists were incredibly disappointed and angry when the US Attorney in Milwaukee brought only a tiny handful of prosecutions, after the activists had charged a massive conspiracy to steal the 2004 elections from Republicans. But the government actually lost a stunningly high percentage of even those cases because they were so weak.
Cynthia C. Alicea, 25, was indicted for double-voting. The evidence was that election officials found she'd registered to vote twice. She was acquited because it turned out election officials told her to fill out another card because the first one had been filled out wrong. Pretty lurid stuff. There was no evidence she'd ever voted twice. The other three people indicted in Milwaukee for double voting were acquited too.
Out of the tiny number of bona fide voter fraud cases, the great majority fall into two categories. The first are cases where workers hired in voter registration drives appear to sign up non-existent people to get paid more money from the sponsors of the drive. The actual examples of this are exceedingly rare. But since the people don't exist, no one ever shows up to vote in their name.
The second are felons or parolees who either register to vote or actually vote, in most cases not knowing they're not eligible to vote.
One great example from the Times article is the case of 43 year old grandmother Kimberly Prude ...
Ms. Prude’s path to jail began after she attended a Democratic rally in Milwaukee featuring the Rev. Al Sharpton in late 2004. Along with hundreds of others, she marched to City Hall and registered to vote. Soon after, she sent in an absentee ballot.Four years earlier, though, Ms. Prude had been convicted of trying to cash a counterfeit county government check worth $1,254. She was placed on six years’ probation.
Ms. Prude said she believed that she was permitted to vote because she was not in jail or on parole, she testified in court. Told by her probation officer that she could not vote, she said she immediately called City Hall to rescind her vote, a step she was told was not necessary.
“I made a big mistake, like I said, and I truly apologize for it,” Ms. Prude said during her trial in 2005. That vote, though, resulted in a felony conviction and sent her to jail for violating probation.
The whole thing really does pretty much come down to a thankfully not very successful effort to send a bunch of poor blacks to prison for unintentional voting violations.
Past Justice Department policy was not to indict in cases where there was no clear intent to tamper with an election. But the Bush administration did away with that policy leading to serious time for hardened vote criminals like Ms. Prude.
Another example is that of Pakistani immigrant Usman Ali. He'd been in the US for ten years and owned a jewelry store. He was in line one day at the DMV when a clerk put a registration form in front of him along with other forms. Ali hastily filled it out. He never made any attempt to vote. But the mistake got him deported back to Pakistan where he's now trying to rebuild his life with his US citizen wife and daughter.
We're certainly lucky to be rid of Mr. Ali and his efforts to undermine our democracy.
Most of the examples, like these, are genuinely disgusting -- non-malicious errors for which people get serious punishment because federal prosecutors are under immense pressure to find someone to indict for voter fraud. But it's also easy to get lost in or distracted by the individual stories. The bigger picture is what you need to focus on. And the picture looks like this.
Republican party officials and elected officials use bogus claims of vote fraud to do three things: 1) to stymie voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts in poor and minority neighborhoods, 2) purge voter rolls of legitimate voters and 3) institute voter ID laws aimed at making it harder for low-income and minority voters to vote.
This sounds like hyperbole but it is simply the truth. (A great example of this in microcosm was the 2002 senate election in South Dakota -- Johnson v. Thune -- in which Republicans spent the entire election ranting about a massive voter fraud conspiracy on the state's Indian reservations, charges which turned out to be completely bogus but had the aim of keeping voting down on the reservations. You can find much more on this in the TPM archives. Go to the search feature and type in some combinatin of 'fraud south dakota' etc. I'll try to write more recapping the story soon.)
The tie-in with the US Attorney story is that the White House and the Republican National Committee have used the power of the Department of Justice to accomplish those three goals that I outlined above. Only most of the relatively non-partisan and professional US Attorneys simply didn't find any actual fraud. Choosing not to indict people on bogus charges got at least two of the US Attorneys (Iglesias and McKay) fired. And we are seeing evidence that others may have been nudged out less directly for the same reasons. In turn they've been replaced by a new crop of highly-political party operative prosecutors who, in the gentle wording of the Times, "may not be so reticent" about issuing indictments against people who have committed technical voting infractions with no intent to cast a fraudulent ballot. Along the way, the fever to find someone, anyone guilty of committing even a technical infraction has landed folks like Ms. Prude in the slammer. They are what you might call the prosecutorial road kill in the Rove Republican party's effort to ride roughshod over American citizens' voting rights to entrench the GOP as the country's permanent electoral majority.
Who's running all this? Who's put it all in motion? Look at the documents that have already been released. It's been run out of Karl Rove's office at the White House.
--Josh Marshall
I feel really bad about the server problems the White House/RNC seems (no, not a typo -- they appear to be a single entity) to be having on the email front. Believe me, I run a small business that is heavily dependent on cranky servers and other gizmos. So I know how hard this can be. But I think this might be a case where that NSA 'terrorist surveillance program' may really come in handy. I'm told the NSA has some very capable data recovery tools they've developed. And even if those guys are too busy hunting al Qaida, doesn't the FBI have some pretty good forensic computer geeks? What happens when, say, a company like Enron (okay, perhaps not a great example) says some emails were 'mishandled' and now are gone forever. I guess that's just the end of it, right? Normally, it's not kosher for a government agency to offer direct assitance to a private entity or political organization. But, hey, we're pretty far down that road I guess. So let's have the FBI go down and take a look at these servers and see if these emails have really disappeared forever.
--Josh Marshall
Gosh, accidents do happen, don't they?
Just off the AP wire ...
The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.Congressional investigators looking into the administration's firing of eight federal prosecutors already had the nongovernmental e-mail accounts in their sights because some White House aides used them to help plan the U.S. attorneys' ouster. Democrats were questioning whether the use of the GOP-provided e-mail accounts was proof that the firings were political.
I guess we'll just never know since the emails accidentally disappeared. Darn.
Late Update: See if you can find a major news site that has picked up this development.
--Josh Marshall
Fox News and Drudge still reporting that Pelosi's going to Iran -- hours and hours after her spokesperson unequivocally denied it.
--Greg Sargent
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What the job lacks in financial reward it more than makes up for in the spiritual reward of being a key part of a high-energy, if under-decorated, newsroom. TPM interns dig through muck, help us with our growing multimedia system, and even write stories. Past interns have gone on to such prestigious positions as ThinkProgress blogger, aspiring Argentinian novelist, and even Associate Editor of TPM Media.
If you'd like to apply, send an email to talk(at)talkingpointsmemo.com with the subject "TPM Summer Internship." Attach a cover letter outlining your interest in the position, a resume, and the contact information of two references.
We hope to hear from you!
--Andrew Golis
Here's our pick for most audacious passage in John McCain's big Iraq speech today.
--Greg Sargent
Wisconsin's U.S. attorney Steve Biskupic has been a frequent topic here at TPM.
That's mostly been because of a case Biskupic brought against a state bureaucrat named Georgia Thompson last year. The prosecution, which broadly implicated the Democratic governor Jim Doyle, was frequent grist for Republicans in political ads against Doyle. But though Biskupic somehow scored a conviction, the case was forcefully overturned on appeal last week. The evidence, one of the circuit judges said, was "beyond thin."
Because of this, we thought, here might be a prime example of a "loyal Bushie."
But take a look at this. There's strong evidence that, as a result of complaints from Karl Rove and President Bush himself, Biskupic was inches away from being purged last year.
The real question becomes -- what saved him? The Thompson prosecution?
--Paul Kiel
Behold TPM HQ and how you can help us add to the news coverage we bring you ...
(ed.note: Today's episode's soundtrack is from 'Laura Bush's Eyes', from music.podshow.com.)
--Josh Marshall
Pelosi's office shoots down the latest winger "scandal" surrounding the Speaker, confirming that she has no intention of going to Iran.
--Greg Sargent
This one's priceless. Remember Shirlington Limo, the slapdash outfit reportedly involved in ferrying Duke Cunningham, assorted bribers and sundry ladies of the night to poker parties over at the Watergate? They're suing DHS for "caving" to "political pressures" and canceling the company's contract to run its shuttle services. Stuff's tough all over.
--Josh Marshall
Check out this new poll: It finds that more Americans want Congress to withhold funding for the war if Bush vetoes the Dems' withdrawal bill.
--Greg Sargent
TPM Reader JP wrote in, so on the mark, saying this article in the Post reads like a joke piece ...
The White House wants to appoint a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, but it has had trouble finding anyone able and willing to take the job, according to people close to the situation.At least three retired four-star generals approached by the White House in recent weeks have declined to be considered for the position, the sources said, underscoring the administration's difficulty in enlisting its top recruits to join the team after five years of warfare that have taxed the United States and its military.
The article's not the problem, mind you, but the subject matter. This is truly DC-czarism, 'we can't figure out what the hell we're doing so let's appoint a new bubble on the flowchart' run amok. Instead of 'czar' maybe we can just call the person 'training wheels'? Someone to oversee wars, the Pentagon, the State Department and everything else? Don't we elect that person every four years?
JP says it reminds him of this November 2005 piece from The Onion ...
In response to increasing criticism of his handling of the war in Iraq and the disaster in the Gulf Coast, as well as other issues, such as Social Security reform, the national deficit, and rising gas prices, President Bush is expected to appoint someone to run the U.S. as soon as Friday.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a better sign -- though wrapped in a humorous package -- of why this president really can't be trusted to be in charge of anything and why the Republic is genuinely in peril as long as this pitiful goof remains in office. Bush wants to find a general to do his job for him. But he can't get anyone to agree to do it.
--Josh Marshall
Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell on one of the journalistic heroes of the US Attorney Purge story.
--Josh Marshall
AP: GOP says there's no evidence of wrongdoing in the US Attorney Purge. So that's what we're going to go with.
--Josh Marshall
Signs of intelligent life at the Post OpEd page? Glenn Greenwald plays astrobiologist.
--Josh Marshall
Today's Must Read: the Bush administration guts the FBI and creates a fraudster's paradise.
--Paul Kiel
I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't know anything about this. But April 14th, which is Saturday, is the National Day of Climate Action. And there are a whole bunch of grassroots actions and events planned on that day to raise awareness and hopefully spur real action on climate change. Stop by this site to find out more. There's probably an event somewhere in your area. Or maybe you can help plan one.
--Josh Marshall
How shocking. A federal panel's report overruled the conclusions of election experts who determined there was little evidence of significant voter fraud in US elections. Read this. This is an important part of the US Attorney puzzle.
You have to put all these pieces together to see the whole picture. The Republican party is heavily invested in hyping and inventing claims of voter fraud which they then use to stymie legitimate voter registration drives and institute 'ballot integrity' efforts which have the actual goal of limiting voting by racial minorities and under-income voters. The truth can hurt but that's the unvarnished truth. And the backdrop to the US Attorney Purge was a concerted effort to enlist US Attorneys to put the power of the state criminal prosecution apparatus behind this partisan gambit.
--Josh Marshall
If you're a longtime reader of this site you know that maybe every year or so I do a post reiterating our ad policy -- first announced more than three years ago when we first started taking ads. The key point in the policy is simple enough: while we reserve the right to reject ads on the basis of taste and appropriateness, we neither accept nor reject ads on the basis of political content. Clearly, if you wished to do so, you could find 'taste' or 'appropriateness' reasons to reject a lot of stuff you just don't agree with politically or find politically offensive. But as best as we are able we try never to do that.
Now, in the past this has always been a fairly theoretical issue. Because given the nature of the site there just weren't that many conservative causes, candidates or people who were interested in advertising with us. My annual or semi-annual posts were usually occasioned by reader complaints or queries about the occasional ad. So, for instance, back in 2005 there was an ad for an Ann Coulter book we ran. A year or so ago there was an anti-Net Neutrality ad. And recently there was an anti-union ad.
Clearly, though, that's changed. Recently there've been a lot of John McCain ads and another ad for some daily email from Ann Coulter. Now, as it happens, these two ads are, I think, coming through the Google ad network. So we don't have any contact with the advertiser. We sign on to the Google Adsense service and the ads just appear. We see them the first time when you do. But that doesn't change the real issue. We could stop them from running if we wanted to. But we don't.
These ads have prompted a lot of emails, ranging from bemusement to curiosity to outrage (with a decided lean toward the end of the list.)
So let me explain again why this is our policy.
The reason is essentially twofold. The first and most important reason is that the policy is critical to preserving the editorial integrity of our product, which is news and information. Precisely because we are in the news and opinion business, advertising tied to ideas, issues or advocacy presents us with a particular challenge. If we reject ads that we disagree with, every ad we accept becomes, to one degree or another, a de facto endorsement. And that's a de facto endorsement that is tied to money we're paid to run the advertising. In other words, if we run ads only from candidates or causes we support, then the ad relationship also becomes an endorsement relationship. Even worse a paid endorsement. And that threatens the integrity of what we do -- which is to report the facts we find and explain the opinions we have.
Many 'slippery slope' arguments don't hold up. But this is one that there is no way around. And that is why while we very much appreciate the support of our advertisers our attitude toward who is advertising and what they are advocating is one of intentional indifference.
So when you see an ad on our site you shouldn't draw any conclusion from its presence that TPM endorses it, agrees with it, disagrees with it, etc. It only means that the advertiser has purchased a product we sell, which is commercial space on our sites. That's all. Nothing more. And, again, certainly not because we don't appreciate the funds that allow us to do our work but because that attitude and policy of indifference is essential to our work.
Now, a digression. Do we ever reject ads? Yes, we do. In most cases they're ads for 'dating services' that look like they might run afoul of anti-solicitation laws or sites that promise to show you this or that starlet with her boobs exposed. Not that we're against boobs, but ... a time and a place. Going back a few years there were also some ads for anti-Bush goods that I rejected because I found them tasteless. We of course frequently reject ads that are too visually jarring and we're pretty strict on not having ads that have little creatures running across the site or stuff like that. I would reject an ad that contained what I considered hate speech or an ad which itself seemed intentionally demeaning to our audience. But again, I would always try to err on the side of inclusion.
In any case, what I've set forth above is both a necessary and a sufficient reason for the policy we follow. But there's another additional reason that it makes sense to me. We fund TPM by selling space where people can communicate with our readers. That's our business model. Clearly, there are no constitutional free speech issues at stake in who we allow or don't allow to run ads on our site. We're a private business, etc. But there is a free speech ethic that is at least implicated in all this.
If you read my site you know a good bit about me, at least a part of me. You know that I have strong opinions and voice them, often aggressively. But the business part of TPM isn't part of that. There are ideas or people that I'd like to tear apart in argument. But it would just be distasteful to me personally at some level to use the power I have as the owner of this business to prevent them from communicating their message to the TPM audience. There are a lot of readers who say that seeing certain ideas or images or people presented in advertising simply offends them. They don't want to see it. But that's just not a sensibility I share in most cases.
That's not to say that there haven't been ads that have annoyed me every time I opened my site and saw them there. I can think of one or two in particular. But this policy -- one of intentional indifference to the political content of the advertising that appears on our sites -- is one I'm confident is the right one for us because it protects what is most important to us which is the integrity and credibility of the news and opinion we publish.
--Josh Marshall
Rep. Gilchrest (R-MD) and four other Republican reps want to try to get President Bush to compromise on the Iraq funding bill. Presumeably they're getting ready to hop into the wood chipper.
--Josh Marshall
Paul Kiel digs up more on Karl Rove's obsession with rooting out 'vote fraud' in heavily Democratic precincts. Says Rove: "We are, in some parts of the country, I'm afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where they guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses."
--Josh Marshall
A few of the reasons why we don't believe Carol Lam was fired because of lax immigration enforcement on the California-Mexico border ...
--Josh Marshall
Health care expert Jacob Hacker on Jon Cohn's call for "thinking big": reality matters.
--Andrew Golis
One year ago, before any of the insufficiently loyal U.S. attorneys got the ax, Karl Rove gave a long speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association. Voter fraud was one of the prime topics.
It's a window into his mind. Take a look.
--Paul Kiel
TPM Reader TA on Al Gonzales' stonewall games ...
It simply doesn't matter what the real substantive basis for any objection is, this is an old, old litigation tactic that is helpful in any number of broader strategies. And the strategy that the Administration is playing is Delay and Stonewall Until the Clock Runs Out. Dan Bartlett has a clock on his desk that counts down the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds (or so I read in the Washington Post). I suggest that many other officials keep a similar clock, at least in the back of their mind. If this goes to court, Gonzalez stays in the position until it is resolved.But wait: each litigation shield has an opposing sword. The Senate will and should swear him in next week, take his testimony, and note that they are reserving the right to call him back on these issues if and when they get those documents. An old litigator's play. Keeps the pressure on.
The document delay may limit the damage Gonzalez faces next week, but it is probably not enough. They pulled their shield out too late. I am sure they've served only to irritate the Senate with this latest stunt.
Months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds. Tick tock, tick tock.
I think time is about up for the Attorney General.
--Josh Marshall
The Dems on the Hill are also getting curious about what's been happening in the Milwaukee (Eastern District of Wisconsin) US Attorney's office. Here's the letter they sent today.
--Josh Marshall
Is this the ultimate irony? Is the Gonzales Justice Department going to fight congressional subpoenas on the basis of a right to privacy?
--Josh Marshall
White House reiterates: Congress will do our bidding on Iraq. Now. End of story.
Update: Now that Bush has invited Dems to meet about Iraq, let's not forget that Congressional Dem leaders repeatedly invited Bush to sit down and compromise with them on Iraq -- without getting any responses from the White House.
--Greg Sargent
Greg Anrig, Jr. warns: beware of conservatives saying nice things about universal health coverage.
--Andrew Golis
I mentioned earlier that in addition to the no-senate-confirmation provision in the revised USA Patriot Act, there's also a new provision allowing the Attorney General to waive the residency requirements for US Attorneys. So the US Attorney for, say, Omaha can do his job from Washington, DC. This prompts me to ask, let alone what they did before they passed the bill, since the Purge story broke, has anyone actually gone through the Patriot Act to put together a list of all the last-minute provisions that were dropped in to change the way that Main Justice interacts with US Attorneys across the country?
--Josh Marshall
It's a busy day.
House Democrats issued a subpoena today for Justice Department documents.
--Paul Kiel
Senate Democrats ask Alberto Gonzales for documents related to the U.S. attorney in Wisconsin.
--Paul Kiel
Bush and White House confirm it: There will be no compromises whatsoever with Congress over Iraq War.
--Greg Sargent
This is interesting. Dan Eggen's article in this morning's Post discusses the growing trend in the Gonzales Justice Department to have sitting US Attorneys have second postings at Main Justice in Washington DC. As Eggen explains, six US Attorneys currently have second postings in DC. So they're basically absentee US Attorneys.
This isn't against the law and it's not unprecedented. But as Eggen explains, "the number of U.S. attorneys pulling double duty in Washington is the focus of growing concern from other prosecutors and from members of the federal bench, according to legal experts and government officials."
Now, here's what Eggen doesn't mention. We know about the provision of the revised USA Patriot that allows for non-senate-confirmed US Attorneys. But TPM's David Kurtz has just been digging back in to the Patriot Act revision and he's found that they also got something in about this. The revised Patriot Act gives the Attorney General the power to set aside the US Attorney residency requirements. Here's the text ...
SEC. 501. RESIDENCE OF UNITED STATES ATTORNEYS AND ASSISTANT UNITED STATES ATTORNEYS.(a) In General- Subsection (a) of section 545 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following new sentence: `Pursuant to an order from the Attorney General or his designee, a United States attorney or an assistant United States attorney may be assigned dual or additional responsibilities that exempt such officer from the residency requirement in this subsection for a specific period as established by the order and subject to renewal.'.
(b) Effective Date- The amendment made by subsection (a) shall take effect as of February 1, 2005.
Now, this isn't as egregious or as clear-cut as the no-confirmation provision. But having US Attorneys actually operating out of Main Justice does fit with the broader Gonzales program of centralization and politicization of the Justice Department. So maybe there's still more to this story hidden in the Patriot Act renewal from 2005. Maybe someone should actually give it a look?
--Josh Marshall
Hillary weighs in for the first time on the Pelosi-to-Syria flap, defends Speaker from White House attacks.
--Greg Sargent
The Senate Judiciary Committee gives Gonzales one last chance to turn over all the documents voluntarily.
--Paul Kiel
Just your daily reminder that Gonzales' Justice Department doesn't really care about the performance of U.S. attorneys.
--Paul Kiel
Jonathan Cohn kicks off this week's book club making the case for thinking big on health care:
I realize that much of the media elite - and, more broadly, the entire political class - already thinks single-payer is not feasible. But we're not yet at the point of the debate where those boundaries are fixed. This is the time when educating and organizing - both the public and the political class - can actually broaden the political playing field. By preemptively rejecting single-payer, we narrow that field.
Update: You can follow the book club discussion here.
--Andrew Golis
Today's Must Read: Democrats conspire to have The Wall Street Journal publish stories on Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons (R). Yeah, you read that right.
--Paul Kiel
Tim Noah on Phil Spector and the woman he (okay, okay, allegedly) whacked.
--Josh Marshall
I'm more than a little surprised that no one had sent me this link before. But TPM Reader JL just sent me a link to what certainly appears to be the archived (www.archive.org) personal website of Monica Goodling from her days at Regent University.
Alas, most of it is pretty mundane -- a page with links to her favorite political sites ( complete with a quote from John Ashcroft), her resume, some stuff about her friends and family. But you may want to glance at her essay "The Devaluation of Human Life: Neglecting America's Kids" which examines how America's children are being destroyed by America's culture of social permissiveness and individualism run amok. It starts ...
America in the nineties is the largest and most dedicated throw-away society in the world. We toss as fast as we can use, fast food wrappers, diapers, plastic plates, napkins, even Yugos. But children? One grimaces at the thought of society discarding children like a Big Mac wrapper, but a look into the reality of America's children portrays a grisly picture indeed. While rapidly escalating abuse makes the eleven o'clock news regularly, even more insidious is the lack of care, love, and attention that threaten the lives of many more of our youth. For millions of children, neglect is the one constant element in their sad lives. It seems children just are not worth very much anymore.All across America millions of parents seem to feel that their children are not worth the time it takes to raise them--the time it takes to shower them with love, listen with interest to their thoughts, nurture values of trust, honesty, fairness, joy, and justice. Regretfully, the children do not even know that their experience is abnormal, and that if they had just been born in the beginning of the century instead of at the end, chances are that their lives would have been much different. This paper will examine the devaluation of America's children and propose solutions to the various components of the problem.
You can read the rest here.
--Josh Marshall
The US Attorney Purge story has gone into a semi-eclipse in the mainstream media. And it will probably stay there until the 17th when Alberto Gonzales goes up to the senate to beg, probably in vain, for his job. Indeed, on this weekend's Sunday shows, 
a number of guests blithely reassured viewers that there was no evidence of wrongdoing in the whole scandal -- see Woodruff and O'Beirne on Meet the Press.
But outside of the media's view another chapter of the story is unfolding.
We know about the US Attorneys who were purged, i.e., the ones who didn't get the message and resign and got the call on December 7th telling them to pack their bags.
But there were others.
These are cases in which sitting US Attorneys resigned under quetionable circumstances in late 2005 or early 2006 and then were replaced by young DOJ staffers who Attorney General Gonzales appointed using the Patriot Act provision. The names of at least some of these resigned USA were showing up on a list of potential firees at Main Justice. And there's also at least some overlap with the states from which GOP officials were sending complaints about 'voter fraud' to Karl Rove.
Rove, of course, wanted results. And it's no accident that almost all of the states in question were key swing states.
The details are murky. And we're still looking in to several of these cases. But it looks more and more like the 8 Attorney Purge was just a new chapter in a longer running story -- and the hold the White House political office had over the Justice Department through President Bush's footman Alberto Gonzales is and was at the center of every part of the story.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, I write a lot of media criticism about very important topics, botched stories which could change the fate of nations and all that. Now, admittedly this is a silly story, about which nothing really matters at all. But it's such a monumentally botched headline I just couldn't help writing a post about it.
Here I am with my wife trying to enjoy some rare hours in the evening when our four month old Sam is actually asleep. And I go to the CNN page to catch the latest news. And what do I see but this shocking headline: "Howard K. Stern hires lawyer in JonBenet case."
So I'm thinking, holy crap, first he's accused of killing Anna-Nicole's son, then Anna-Nicole, now it turns out he killed JonBenet too? I mean, it's like he's a one-man serial killer on the payroll of Star magazine. So I click through the link not quite sure what I'm going to find.
But alas it's rather more prosaic. Stern is hiring Lin Wood, who represented the Ramsey family in the JonBenet case to sue media companies he says are "falsely implicating him in the death of the former Playboy Playmate and her son, Daniel."
So I guess that would be more like lawyer from the JonBenet case rather than in the JonBenet case. Ahhh, my kingdom for a preposition, or a brain.
--Josh Marshall
More like this: Richard Holbrooke tears the media a new one for its dismal coverage of fraudulent Pelosi Syria trip story.
--Greg Sargent
State Department refusing to say whether Nancy Pelosi's Syria trip constituted a violation of the Logan Act.
--Greg Sargent
Since the U.S. attorney scandal implicates practically the whole of the Justice Department's leadership, the reins have been passed to Paul Clement, the Solicitor General, who's now in charge of how the department handles things.
So it was apparently his call to keep Monica Goodling on the payroll even after she'd pleaded the Fifth. That's a good start.
--Paul Kiel
At TPMCafe, Ken Baer says that whatever the ins and outs of Syria policy, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was wrong to travel to Damascus because it threatens to erode the president's ability to conduct foreign policy. But I don't think this is a rational concern. Ken draws the analogy to Jimmy Carter's semi-freelance diplomacy during the 1994 North Korea crisis. But these two cases are not remotely comparable -- Carter went to try to negotiate a deal in the midst of a tense diplomatic stand-off that risked slipping into war. To discuss these cases in the same breath makes no sense.
The simple fact is that senior members of Congress routinely go on trips abroad to meet heads of state and government. When they are sufficiently senior, their trips inevitably have diplomatic dimensions in addition to fact-finding ones. To make a distinction between fact-finding and diplomacy in a case like this is to misunderstand not only how congressional delegations do operate but how they should operate.
More generally, this sort of event itself is actually quite common in US history -- trips by members of Congress take on more visibility when the president is extremely weak or discredited at home, both of which are the case today. President Bush's self-immolation (and not just self-) on the domestic and international stages is his doing, not Pelosi's. And there is no need for the Speaker to modulate her activity to take his invalid status into account.
There seems to be a real effort to salvage the Pelosi 'story' from its maculate conception as a Republican talking point. But I'm afraid it cannot be done. At the core it's pure bamboozlement.
--Josh Marshall
We're going to try to get more deeply into this. But I at least wanted to touch on the story so word of this shocking incident gets wider attention. Walter F. Murphy is a legendary expert on constitutional theory and the Court. I actually took his class in college almost twenty years ago. Yesterday at the Balkanization blog, Mark Graber published a letter from Murphy in which he explains his experience finding himself on the Terrorist Watch List.
Now, we've all heard stories at this point about all sorts of different people ending up on this list who obviously have no credible connection to any terrorist organization. Often it's a matter of a mispelled name or someone having the same name as someone else. And often the stories are treated as oddities or examples of how randomly names get added, as though the issue is the poor management of the list and disorganization of the process of compiling it. But that doesn't appear to have been the case here.
Let's pick up Murphy's description of what happened ...
"When I tried to use the curb-side check in at the Sunport, I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list. I was instructed to go inside and talk to a clerk. At this point, I should note that I am not only the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (emeritus) but also a retired Marine colonel. I fought in the Korean War as a young lieutenant, was wounded, and decorated for heroism. I remained a professional soldier for more than five years and then accepted a commission as a reserve office, serving for an additional 19 years.""I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That'll do it," the man said. "
"After carefully examining my credentials, the clerk asked if he could take them to TSA officials. I agreed. He returned about ten minutes later and said I could have a boarding pass, but added: "I must warn you, they're going to ransack your luggage." On my return flight, I had no problem with obtaining a boarding pass, but my luggage was "lost." Airlines do lose a lot of luggage and this "loss" could have been a mere coincidence. In light of previous events, however, I'm a tad skeptical."
Given who Professor Murphy is, I have no doubt this is an accurate account of his particular experience. And it would seem that the people who actually work with the list on a daily basis treat it as a given that the most innocuous and obviously protected forms of criticism of the Bush administration routinely get you on the watch list. That pretty much confirms the truth of what most of us would probably have thought was a harebrained conspiracy theory. Doesn't this deserve more scrutiny?
Late Update: This is apparently the lecture that may have landed Murphy on the list.
Even Later Update: At Wired's Threat Level blog, Ryan Singel says he's sure Murphy didn't get put on any list because of any 1st Amendment protected speech.
--Josh Marshall
Finally! A big news org aggressively goes after the GOP's bogus attack on Pelosi's trip to Syria.
--Greg Sargent
The Los Angeles Times delves into the White House's parallel email system -- and once again the White House's inability to draw a distinction between politics and policy is laid bare.
--Paul Kiel
Today's Must Read: two months into the surge, it's time to measure its progress.
--Paul Kiel
Drawing on law enforcement records of phone calls, Newsweek has interesting new details on the circumstances of Bernie Kerik's nomination as secretary of homeland security.
[A]round the time of his nomination, Kerik spoke by phone with two people with whom he had a potentially embarrassing history. According to the records, on Dec. 2, 2004, one day before President George W. Bush announced Kerik's nomination, three phone calls were logged between Kerik and New Jersey businessman Frank DiTommaso. A few weeks earlier, DiTommaso's construction firms had been described in court testimony as mob connected. (DiTommaso and his company have denied wrongdoing.)Shortly after the nomination, Kerik exchanged several phone calls with Jeannette Pinero, a New York prison guard with whom he had an affair. . . . Similar calls were made before the Dec. 10 announcement that Kerik's nomination would be canceled. Two days before the withdrawal, Kerik and DiTommaso exchanged three calls. On the day the nomination crashed, Kerik and Pinero exchanged three calls; the last one was about an hour before the White House pulled Kerik's nomination. The records also show more than a dozen calls between DiTommaso and Kerik after the withdrawn nomination.
Couple the Newsweek revelations with the Post story today on how the White House fast-tracked the Kerik nomination despite internal concerns about Kerik's background and you start to wonder who is leaking all this stuff. Is it Guiliani opponents trying to dent his presidential campaign, or Guiliani supporters trying to air his abundant dirty laundry sooner rather than later?
--David Kurtz
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, hard at work:
At a recent "prep" for a prospective Sunday talk-show interview, Gonzales's performance was so poor that top aides scrapped any live appearances. During the March 23 session in the A.G.'s conference room, Gonzales was grilled by a team of top aides and advisers—including former Republican National Committee chair Ed Gillespie and former White House lawyer Tim Flanigan—about what he knew about the plan to fire seven U.S. attorneys last fall. But Gonzales kept contradicting himself and "getting his timeline confused," said one participant who asked not to be identified talking about a private meeting. His advisers finally got "exasperated" with him, the source added.
--David Kurtz
More dirty tricks from the crooked crowd in the White House?
From the start of this sub-controversy over Speaker Pelosi's comments in Damascus I've suspected a tampering hand from the White House.
You know the details. Pelosi said she had conveyed a message of peace from the Israelis to the Syrians. And then Prime Minister Olmert's office issued a statement appearing to contradict what Pelosi said. The Post OpEd page, the organ of jejune establishmentarianism and neo-Blimpism, called Pelosi's claim a 'pratfall'. With admirable diligence, the Post OpEd writers took Olmert's Office's statement at face value and then embellished it ...
The Israeli prime minister entrusted Ms. Pelosi with no such message ... Ms. Pelosi not only misrepresented Israel's position but was virtually alone in failing to discern that Mr. Assad's words were mere propaganda.
But I've never thought it was that simple since before Pelosi ever made her statement, the Israeli press was reporting that Olmert had entrusted Pelosi with such a message. As Ha'aretz highly respected diplomatic correspondent Aluf Benn wrote the day before Pelosi's arrival in Damascus ...
The speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is scheduled to meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus today, and will deliver a message of calm from Israel."We hope the message will be understood," political sources in Israel said yesterday. "The question is whether Assad is looking for an excuse ... so that he can carry out an attack against Israel in the summer, or whether this is a mistaken assessment."
Pelosi visited Israel yesterday and told her Israeli interlocutors that the country must speak with Assad and that the door should not be closed to Syria, even though she is aware that Syria supports terrorism and continued cooperation with Iran.
If you read Benn's article you'll see that Olmert's message was part of an effort to head off a possible confrontation this summer tied to Arab fears of an American strike against Iran. (It's a complicated issue, which can find out more about by reading Benn's article.)
Now, who else says this? Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) is the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a Holocaust survivor and very close to AIPAC. He was with Pelosi in the key meetings in Jerusalem and Damascus and he says "The speaker conveyed precisely what the prime minister and the acting president asked."
So what happened? Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency is another person who follows these issues closely and knows a lot about them -- that is to say, he doesn't approach these issues through the prism of reading Drudge or what the Vice President said on the Rush Limbaugh show. In any case, Kampeas takes a look at the story. It's a lengthy piece with a lot of important detail. But let me excerpt this section which touches on the issue of, again, what happened?
If that was the case, why did Olmert need to make a clarification, as Israelis were not speaking on the record. Lantos suggested there was pressure from the White House."It's obvious the White House is desperate to find some phony criticism of the speaker's trip, even though it was a bipartisan trip," said Lantos, a Holocaust survivor who is considered the Democrat closest to the pro-Israel lobby. "I have nothing but contempt and disdain for the attempt to undermine this trip."
The White House had no comment on the allegations by Lantos that it pressured Olmert to offer a clarification.
Such backdoor statecraft between the White House and Olmert would not be unprecedented.
Last year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked Olmert into a 48-hour cease-fire during the war with Hezbollah to allow humanitarian relief, but within hours Israeli planes were bombing again, to Rice's surprise and anger. Olmert had received a call, apparently from Cheney's office, telling him to ignore Rice.
So we've had a lot of fun over the last few days with the RNC political shop and Drudge leading a lot of dopes around by the nose. But let's hear a bit more about this. The message the Israelis sent to Damascus was intended to convince the Syrians that the Israelis were not planning to attack the Syrians in concert with an American attack on Iran. There was concern in Israel that this might lead to a preemptive Syrian attack. A message like that from Israel to Syria might be very unwelcome to some people in the White House. Did the White House pressure Olmert? If there was no message, why was the existence of the message being discussed by Israeli officials before Pelosi went to Damascus? Will the White House deny pressuring Olmert? And did any of this occur to the folks who write the Post's editorials?
So what's the story? Maybe this whole episode deserves some real reporting.
--Josh Marshall
Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) have introduced a bill that would require the intelligence community to produce a NIE on the national security implications of climate change.
--David Kurtz
We've long been curious about the fate of Thomas Kontogiannis, an alleged co-conspirator in the Duke Cunningham case who has thus far avoided indictment. The North County Times (via War and Piece) delves further into Kontogiannis' background and his long-rumored intelligence connections:
One source with knowledge of the case said long ago that Kontogiannis may never face prosecution. That source, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Kontogiannis would get a "pass" because of what he said were the man's relationships with key officials in the upper echelons of the Greek and U.S. governments.
I'm not sure I buy that. What kind of spook connections does it take to earn a get-out-of-jail-free card for bribing a sitting congressman?
Update: My skepticism is with the source's assessment, not with the North County Times piece, which carefully reports that the most likely reason for Kontogiannis' not being indicted yet is that he is cooperating with the government in the investigation spun out from the Duke Cunningham case.
--David Kurtz
Stepping away from politics for a moment, you might be interested in "Pearls Before Breakfast," the cover story in Washington Post Magazine, which a friend pointed me to this evening. I've been offline for much of the day, so this may already be well-covered ground, but if you missed it, the Post arranged for the violin virtuoso Joshua Bell to play in a DC subway station during the morning rush hour, like any other street musician, and filmed the reaction--or the lack thereof. The only demographic group to redeem itself: the children.
--David Kurtz
Your Senate majority leader at work, trying to weaken the Highway Beautification Act's billboard regulations--and thwarted by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN). (This requires me to invoke the weekend privilege of linking to days-old stories under the guise of reviewing the past week.)
--David Kurtz
Daniel Bice, of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is putting together the evidence on the Wisconsin connection to the US Attorney Purge.
--Josh Marshall
Sadly, I think the politicization of the Department of Justice is going to turn out to be even worse than we may have thought initially. The Boston Globe has a long piece today on Regent University, alma mater of Monica Goodling and scores of other Bush Administration appointees. Here's the part that indicates how long the politicization has been going on and how deeply ingrained it may now be in the department:
Their path to employment was further eased in late 2002, when John Ashcroft, then attorney general, changed longstanding rules for hiring lawyers to fill vacancies in the career ranks.Previously, veteran civil servants screened applicants and recommended whom to hire, usually picking top students from elite schools.
The change in hiring policies has been particularly devastating to the Civil Rights Division, as the Globe reported last year:
The Bush administration is quietly remaking the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, filling the permanent ranks with lawyers who have strong conservative credentials but little experience in civil rights, according to job application materials obtained by the Globe.The documents show that only 42 percent of the lawyers hired since 2003, after the administration changed the rules to give political appointees more influence in the hiring process, have civil rights experience. In the two years before the change, 77 percent of those who were hired had civil rights backgrounds. . . .
For decades, such committees had screened thousands of resumes, interviewed candidates, and made recommendations that were only rarely rejected.
Now, hiring is closely overseen by Bush administration political appointees to Justice, effectively turning hundreds of career jobs into politically appointed positions.
And so it goes. [Thanks to TPM Reader MO for the links.]
--David Kurtz
Apparently Gingrich says on Fox News Sunday today that Gonzales should go.
--Josh Marshall
WaPo:
When former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani urged President Bush to make Bernard B. Kerik the next secretary of homeland security, White House aides knew Kerik as the take-charge top cop from Sept. 11, 2001. But it did not take them long to compile an extensive dossier of damaging information about the would-be Cabinet officer.They learned about questionable financial deals, an ethics violation, allegations of mismanagement and a top deputy prosecuted for corruption. Most disturbing, according to people close to the process, was Kerik's friendship with a businessman who was linked to organized crime. The businessman had told federal authorities that Kerik received gifts, including $165,000 in apartment renovations, from a New Jersey family with alleged Mafia ties.
Alarmed about the raft of allegations, several White House aides tried to raise red flags. But the normal investigation process was short-circuited, the sources said. Bush's top lawyer, Alberto R. Gonzales, took charge of the vetting, repeatedly grilling Kerik about the issues that had been raised. In the end, despite the concerns, the White House moved forward with his nomination -- only to have it collapse a week later.
--David Kurtz
A former aide, on Sen. Pete Domenici's fateful call to then-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias about indicting New Mexico Democrats in time for the mid-term elections: "Pete Domenici has always been concerned about the responsiveness of government both at the federal and state level.”
--David Kurtz
It's still not clear what specifically prompted the resignations of four of the top administrators in the office of U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose in the Twin Cities, but this incident, reported in the Star Tribune, gives a sense of Paulose's management priorities:
Paulose ordered that an internal memo be prepared for high-ranking Justice Department officials who would be coming to Minneapolis from Washington to highlight the office's high-profile cases, the attorneys said.Paulose instructed the head of the narcotics section, Andy Dunne, to state in the memo that prosecutors had won convictions that ended drug dealing by St. Paul's Latin Kings gang, they said.
Dunne was told by Paulose to say that the Latin Kings were the biggest gang in St. Paul and that the office's recent convictions would stop the so-called Latin King Nation, the attorneys said.
But Dunne told Paulose he couldn't abide by the request, one of the attorneys said, and when he refused, Dunne was forced to give up his position as chief of the narcotics section. Dunne would not comment Friday.
But let's not get lost in the vagaries of Paulose's management style. The significance of the Paulose case is two-fold. First, her appointment is symptomatic of the Bush Justice Department's preference for "loyal Bushies" over strong, independent, well-qualified prosecutors. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the circumstances of Paulose's appointment may shed new light on the U.S. Attorney purge--namely, was her predecessor on the original list of USAs to be forced out (and what does that say about who was targeted for removal) and was the plan initially to appoint Paulose via the Patriot Act provision that allowed the attorney general to circumvent the Senate confirmation process (despite the Administration's denials that it had any plans to bypass the Senate).
Or as the Star Tribune's Nick Coleman puts it:
Paulose was picked by Gonzales to replace former U.S. Attorney Thomas Heffelfinger, a mainstream Republican who resigned unexpectedly, possibly just evading the ax (circumstances suggest that his name was on the original "hit list" of attorneys targeted for replacement, as I explained last week). At the time she was picked, Paulose was an aide to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, who has admitted giving false testimony to Congress about "Purge-gate," the scandal over the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.Paulose worked with those involved in "Purge-gate" at the time the plans were hatched. KSTP reported that Monica Goodling, who resigned Friday as the White House liaison for the Department of Justice, was supposed to have been a part of Paulose's semi-regal investiture ceremony at the University of St. Thomas law school. But Goodling stayed away. Later, she invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to appear before a Senate committee.
Even if Paulose is just a bit player in the purge drama, she knows all the main characters and keeps popping up in pivotal scenes.
--David Kurtz
