I Think They Call It Plausible Deniability

(Headline fixed, thanks for correcting my spelling, y'all!)

Murray Waas somehow has dug up some damning documents from the Justice Department, you may have heard.

Let me add this. It gives Gonzales the ability to say with a straight face that he knew nothing about the firings, he just approved the decisions made without being a part of them. He didn't know anything, which is why he can't remember anything when questioned.

But ask yourself this, if you had a manager working for you who had no clue about what was happening in his office regarding personnel, would you keep him on, or fire his sorry ass and let one of the people doing the work take over. And that raises another question.

What does Gonzales do with all of that taxpayer money he gets from his salary? People issues always take up a lot of management time, that's really what managers are there for anyway, right, making sure people show up to work and work within the rules. And planning strategy and monitoring the activities of the department. So what the hell does that useless man do with his time?

Somebody needs to ask him that question.

More US Attorney purge

Yes, I can't get enough of it, and so, dear readers, neither can you!

I just wanted to bring attention to this graph from Glenn Greenwald's piece yesterday. For all the apologists and trolls who think that having a Justice Department that you can't trust to do the right thing regardless of the political party being investigated, explain to me why, if this is a whole lot of nothing, why Gonzales and company can't cooperate with the Congressional investigators? [My highlights]

Much of the evidence is, admittedly, circumstantial, but that is so precisely because we have not yet had full hearings with the key witnesses/culprits and full disclosure of key documents. And the reason the pool of information is still so incomplete is because the White House, cheered on by the national media, has steadfastly refused to reveal what it knows (and what it did), choosing instead to hide behind precarious assertions of "executive privilege."

Just like the Libby trial and conviction, there's nothing here yet because the Administration is hiding, covering-up, and probably destroying, the evidence.

And that tells us why there's no there there, because they don't want us to discover the truth. It's just like the stupid Anna Nicole paternity thing, the guy trying to block the DNA testing did so because he knew he wasn't the father. It's really as simple as that. We all can understand some reluctance to air out dirty laundry on the part of normal people, but this intransigence goes way beyond reluctance. It's part and parcel of how the Bushites operate, and they do it for a reason.

Because their actions are not in the least bit concerned with the interests of the American People, with our Nation, our Laws, our Traditions, or our Founding Principles. It's all about keeping the power they essentially stole and using it to perpetuate their corporate and neo-con and insane fundie wet dreams. Plain and simple.

Politicizing Function

That's what this USA Purge is doing in the long term, even as the White House uses the US Attorneys to push their bogus voter fraud schemes, their Democratic investigations, and stopping their Republican investigations.

Way back in 1982 or so, I saw the Reagan WH doing the same thing to the environment via James Watt and his disciple Gail Norton, and that's when I got involved in politics, in my own small way, opposing the politization of the Executive Branch, opposing their corporate giveaways, opposing their unending violations of precedent and reasonable decorum. Looking back, of course, I realize what pikers they were, or maybe since they didn't own Congress it was just a matter of limitations imposed on them by a slightly less corrupt Democratic Congress.

Regardless, what we see today is the fruits of those labors begun in earnest by the Reagan Republicans. This CBS News article makes the case for the damage being done at the Justice Department. The writer is particularly blunt in his words discussing the actions of the Bush Administration. He concludes thus:

When you populate an office with ideologues and partisans and underachieving talent, you get an ideological and partisan office with underachieving results. And if there is any department in our federal system that can least afford to be ideological and partisan and underachieving, it is the Justice Department. This sorry state is true today, regardless of how and when the scandal over the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys is resolved. Of all the dismaying legal legacies left by this administration, this one surely ranks near the top.

Read the article, because it gives a deeper layer of context to the United States Attorney Purge. It shows the shortsighted and destructive consequences of the Mayberry Machiavellis, whose determination to seize and hold political power for their corporate masters and their stupid, ignorant, and just plain stupid and deluded ideology has led us to this point in history. The Corps, they don't mind the stupidity of Bush/Cheney/Rove and their ideology since they profit so handsomely from it, but for real, caring, human, people, we pay twice for their insanity, once to the Corps, once to the consequences of their wilful destruction of our government and its many and varied agencies, like our military and our justice system.

If you want a reason to impeach these fuckers, pardon my french but there it is, look no further than the Justice Department. And when Bush nominates his replacement for the faithful cur Alberto Gonzales, press your Senators, no blank check, no free pass, no uncritical deference because that crank is the President and he deserves the cabinet he wants. Screw that, he deserves nothing but a one way plane ticket to Amersterdam, which is in the same country as The Hague, if you know what I mean.

Brent Wilkes Plays Carol Lam Card

Brent Wilkes lawyer, Mark Geragos, the same guy trying to screw the city of San Diego for Alex Spanos, has his hand in the Brent Wilkes Randy Cunningham scandal too. Now he's playing the card dealt him by A Gonzales for his client, Brent Wilkes.

A lawyer for former Poway defense contractor Brent Wilkes told a judge yesterday “there is no way” his client will plead guilty to charges stemming from the Randy “Duke” Cunningham bribery scandal.

The lawyer, Mark Geragos, also said he planned to seek dismissal of the case because he has reason to believe former U.S. Attorney Carol Lam may have leaked secret grand jury documents to the media.

Even though Ms. Lam's dismissal for cause has been well and truly repudiated, the issue opens enough of a door for a snake like Geragos to stick his foot in, with this claim that Lam leaked grand jury documents, he hopes to get Wilkes off without a trial.

So far, the judge doesn't seem to be buying it, and given what I remember from local reporting, I can't recall any reporting based on GJ leaks that amounted to anything more than the whisper that Wilkes and Foggo were going to be indicted, and given that we all were quite familiar with their involvement, that wasn't much of a leak.

But it's enough for Geragos, that suggestion of impropriety, and he's going to try to use the Democratic investigations of the USA Purges to bolster his case.

In court he referred to e-mails – unearthed as part of the congressional investigation of the controversial firings of Lam and seven other U.S. attorneys – that supposedly bolster his position. After court, he would not elaborate.

Fortunately the case seems to be proceeding, and I have to like the comments later in that article that suggest Geragos is full of it.

A scenario in which Lam was thwarted by the Justice Department, then leaked documents to the press to ultimately obtain indictments, seemed far-fetched to some lawyers familiar with the office's protocols for obtaining indictments.

“If the Justice Department balked, I would think they would not give approval and she wouldn't have returned the indictment,” said defense attorney Charles LaBella, a former San Diego U.S. attorney. “I just can't imagine a U.S. attorney would ignore the approval process. It's not consistent with how Carol operated.”

But consistent with how a Bushite would operate. So the judge will hear arguments on May 14, and he's set a trial date before September.

Just remember, Wilkes is the one with all of the dealings with the Congressmen, Hunter and Doolittle and DeLay etc. He's the one involved with the CIA, he's the one who probably is/was CIA, and with his procurement buddy Foggo, he's the one that can uncover a lot of the general corruption of the Republicans in Congress. I don't know who's a bigger fish, Wilkes or Abramoff, but it's worth a full scale investigation to find out. Here's hoping the Interim USA for San Diego is a professional and not a crony. More on that later.

Grilled Mueller with Avocado Butter

I just got home and I was watching an enjoyable performance on the teevee. No, it wasn't some symphonic masterpiece, a reunion concert of a bunch of old and withered rock stars, not even the running of a classic black and white Japanese Kurosawa film. Nope, it was simply a display of elective consequence.

Robert Mueller was squirming under the disbelieving questions of a handful of Senators, trying desperately to justify and explain the actions of the FBI, aided of course by that Senator from Alabama, Sessions, and the whiner from Utah. Last year, Mueller would have had a couple of glare downs with Sen. Feinstein, maybe some curt words with Sen. Leahy, and that would've been that. Just another drive-by bricking of America's windows, and soon done.

But not this time. And it was a pleasure to see.

It happened, Mueller said, because of "mistakes, carelessness, confusion, lack of training, lack of guidance and lack of adequate oversight."

Then came this line, which senators didn't find reassuring either:

The FBI's use of inaccurate information to obtain secret search warrants? The problem was "very lengthy documents . . . with thousands of facts."

See, this is what we voted for, an end to this nonsense. Feinstein and company aren't buying the incompetence canard so much, because they don't have to. And when you look at the forces peeling back the layers of corruption being revealed by the purging of those US Attorney's, you see substantive, concrete, changes thanks to 11/7/06.

Just listen to the bleating from the Bobo's and Broder's out there, trying in their own timorous ways to head off the Democratic investigations threaten their grip on power. They know that once this train gets a rollin there will be no stopping it. And know this, my friends, for all of its horrors and heartbreak, for all of the destruction being wrought to both Iraq and the United States, the Iraq Invasion and Occupation is not the heart of the matter, is not the purpose and mission of this Administration.

Iraq, al Qaeda, Incompetence, US Attorney's, NSA spying, Evolution in Kansas, Mexicans at the Border, all these things are symptoms or distractions or both for what they really want, a Corporate Government. They don't want to do the actual governing work, that's too tedious and quaint. They just want to be the puppet master greasing the skids for their access to all of that USA cash.

That's what is a the center of the US Attorney purge, Carol Lam's investigation. Josh Marshall has been all over this from the get go, and every day it gets darker and higher up the food chain. Don't think this is about Alberto, no this is all about stopping Lam's investigation, and if we have to fire some decent people and gut 6 or 8 other investigations in the process, so be it.

Consider this piece from Copley News Service

First came the May 11, 2006, exchange between Justice Department officials suggesting Lam's removal, the day after she notified them she would serve search warrants on former CIA Executive Director Kyle “Dusty” Foggo.

It was a week later that Mercer revealed in an e-mail that Lam's situation “now has Frist's attention” – referring to then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Republican struggling to ensure his party retained control of the Senate in the upcoming November elections.

Two weeks after that, Mercer questioned the wisdom of giving Lam more resources.

The day after this Mercer missive, Sampson directed Mercer in an e-mail to have a “heart-to-heart” with Lam about “the urgent need to improve immigration enforcement in San Diego.”

“Put her on a very short leash,” Sampson wrote. “If she balks – or otherwise does not perform in a measurable way by July 15, remove her.”

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out what's happening here, it's all about the contracts and the access and the jobs for spouses and the burnishing of the image with those lavish charity dinners that cretins like Randy Cunningham wallowed in, the dismantling of the structures and reputations of our government so they can replace it with something more lucrative. That's the Heart of the Matter. And that's what these investigations are going to reveal. Because they've stepped on too many people to get to this place, people once on their side but now tossed aside or under the bus, and much like an Iraqi whose home has been invaded by American GI's, revenge is their coin.

Nixon and Bush

[cross posted at DKos]
As I was reading this AP piece, I couldn't help but visualize Richard Nixon solemnly swearing that these stacks of transcripts

In these folders that you see over here on my left are more than 1,200 pages of transcripts of private conversations I participated in between Sept 15, 1972, and Apr 27 of 1973 with my principal aides and associates with regard to Watergate. They include all the relevant portions of all of the subpoenaed conversations that were recorded, that is, all portions that relate to the question of what I knew about Watergate or the coverup and what I did about it.

[...]

As far as what the President personally knew and did with regard to Watergate and the coverup is concerned, these materials—together with those already made available—will tell it all.

Bush says this:

The president cast the offer as virtually unprecedented and a reasonable way for Congress to get all the information it needs about the matter.

"If the Democrats truly do want to move forward and find the right information, they ought to accept what I proposed," Bush said. "If scoring political points is the desire, then the rejection of this reasonable proposal will really be evident for the American people to see."

You want it made more clear? Try this, first Bush, then Tricky Dick.

Bush said he worried that allowing testimony under oath would set a precedent on the separation of powers that would harm the presidency as an institution.

"My choice is to make sure that I safeguard the ability for presidents to get good decisions," he said. "If the staff of a president operated in constant fear of being hauled before various committees to discuss internal deliberations, the president would not receive candid advice and the American people would be ill-served."

Tricky

Ever since the existence of the White House taping system was first made known last summer, I have tried vigorously to guard the privacy of the tapes. I have been well aware that my effort to protect the confidentiality of Presidential conversations has heightened the sense of mystery about Watergate and, in fact, has caused increased suspicions of the President. Many people assume that the tapes must incriminate the President, or that otherwise, he would not insist on their privacy.

But the problem I confronted was this: Unless a President can protect the privacy of the advice he gets, he cannot get the advice he needs.

This principle is recognized in the constitutional doctrine of executive privilege, which has been defended and maintained by every President since Washington and which has been recognized by the courts, whenever tested, as inherent in the Presidency. I consider it to be my constitutional responsibility to defend this principle.

Other than the fact that Nixon could speak without sounding like an idiot, is there really any difference between these two Presidents, the heretofore reigning Worst President Ever and the Hands Down New Champ?

The discussion and overanalysis of the "Constitutional Crisis Question" will continue regardless of what I say, but NOW is the time to back up the Democrats on this. Bush's "offer" is an insult, a joke, a charade, to not just Congress, but to every American living or dead, an insult to the troops dying for greed and hubris, an insult to the taxpayers who fund this government (He [Bush] added that federal prosecutors work for him and it is natural to consider replacing them. [Actually they work for the American People you feckless git]), an insult to my Dad who taught 6th grade for 30 years, my Mother who taught me decency and compassion before she passed, to my sweet little Gramma who taught me about family and homemade desserts and scratching each others back while watching Hawaii 5-0, yeah, that was some offer he made. No oath, no press, no transcript, pretty much never happened.

Here's the link to the House Judiciary Committee, here's the link for the Senate Judiciary Committee, and here's its contact page. Use it.

Attorney's and Corruption

Paul Krugman raises a good question, and i was very happy to hear Chuck Schumer make the same point today during the Judiciary Committee hearing. What about the ones not fired? For instance,

[T]he subpoenas that Chris Christie, the former Bush “Pioneer” who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, issued two months before the 2006 election — and the way news of the subpoenas was quickly leaked to local news media.

The subpoenas were issued in connection with allegations of corruption on the part of Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who seemed to be facing a close race at the time. Those allegations appeared, on their face, to be convoluted and unconvincing, and Mr. Menendez claimed that both the investigation and the leaks were politically motivated.

Then there's this piece from New Mexico regarding a local Democratic scandal involving courthouse construction. Here's the key line in the article, after all the Rove involvement is discussed: The courthouse controversy has yet to yield indictments.

We've all heard about this study that out of 375 investigations, 298 involved Democrats. Seeing as how there's some rough parity of elected officials party affiliation across the country, you would figure the numbers would be more like 200 GOP and 150 Dem and the rest others, but then you wouldn't be thinking about who's involved here. Karl Rove, Mr politics is policy.

I have to hand it to the committee today, Schumer made that point, Feinstein made some good points about the obvious politization involved here, and she countered when that jackass Kyl threw in the Clinton fired all 93 US Attorney's canard. And I have to question that based on this article from Minnesota Public Radio, (my bolds) to wit:

Tom Heffelfinger resigned his post as U.S. attorney in Minneapolis last February. He had served two stints -- the first from September 1991 to April 1993, and then again from September 2001 to February 2006. President Clinton took office in January of 1993, so there's one USA he didn't fire, it would appear. I'll bet there's others who they asked for and received resignations from, but who then stayed for a while until replacements were found. After 12 years of Reagan and Bush you know damn well they needed replacing by Democrats, that's just too long for one party to control their positions, especially given the corruption and cronyism, a pale spectre of Bush/Cheney's but present nonetheless, of Reagan and his Spymaster Bush.

Somebody at TPM Muckraker said that Abu would resign and that would be the end of it. But I say no. Perjury is a felony regardless of your employment status, and there are too many threads of corruption running around this issue to be satisfied by the scalp of that wretched little man Gonzales. Not that he's ever going to talk, he knows what would happen to him if he did, there'd be no spider hole deep enough for him to hide in, but putting the squeeze on him and his wretched flunkies is bound to achieve results. Hey, it worked for Khalid Sheik Mohammed, right, it oughta work for Abu G.