May all the buddhas and bodhisattvas bless Marcy Wheeler, who took on the mighty task of being Keeper of the Facts in the Valerie Plame Wilson case. Today she takes on the fact-challenged House testimony of Victoria Toensing. This is worth a bookmark.
By now you may have heard the sad news that Elizabeth Edwards’s cancer has returned. There were reports earlier today that John Edwards would suspend his campaign, but he says this is not so.
In the U.S. attorneys scandal, Gonzales was an active though second-level perpetrator. While he gave orders, he also took orders. Just as his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, has resigned as a fall guy, so Gonzales would be yet another fall guy if he were to resign. He was assigned responsibility for the purge of U.S. attorneys but did not conceive it. The plot to transform the U.S. attorneys and ipso facto the federal criminal justice system into the Republican Holy Office of the Inquisition had its origin in Karl Rove’s fertile mind.
There’s more evidence of political manipulation of justice this morning. Carol D. Leonnig writes for the Washington Post:
The leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said yesterday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government’s racketeering case.
Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s office began micromanaging the team’s strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government’s claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.
She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said.
“The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said,” Eubanks said. “And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public.”
If you don’t remember the tobacco case, here’s a June 8, 2005 article by Ms. Leonnig for background. She wrote then,
After eight months of courtroom argument, Justice Department lawyers abruptly upset a landmark civil racketeering case against the tobacco industry yesterday by asking for less than 8 percent of the expected penalty.
As he concluded closing arguments in the six-year-old lawsuit, Justice Department lawyer Stephen D. Brody shocked tobacco company representatives and anti-tobacco activists by announcing that the government will not seek the $130 billion that a government expert had testified was necessary to fund smoking-cessation programs. Instead, Brody said, the Justice Department will ask tobacco companies to pay $10 billion over five years to help millions of Americans quit smoking.
Steve Soto remarked (June 7, 2005):
Well, all those campaign contributions taken by Bush/Cheney (nearly $260,000 in 2000 and 2004) and the GOP from the tobacco industry over the years finally bought a $120 billion payday for Big Tobacco when the Alberto Gonzales Justice Department shocked the industry and anti-smoking advocates alike today by scuttling the government’s own litigation.
Remember when I said of the U.S. Attorney scandal, “this is huge“? If clear ties to President Bush are established, this issue has the potential of putting impeachment back on Nancy Pelosi’s to-do list.
Back to today’s article by Ms. Leonnig:
Yesterday was the first time that any of the government lawyers on the case spoke at length publicly about what they considered high-level interference by Justice officials.
Eubanks, who retired from Justice in December 2005, said she is coming forward now because she is concerned about what she called the “overwhelming politicization” of the department demonstrated by the controversy over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. Lawyers from Justice’s civil rights division have made similar claims about being overruled by supervisors in the past.
Pay close attention to this part:
Eubanks said Congress should not limit its investigation to the dismissal of the U.S. attorneys.
“Political interference is happening at Justice across the department,” she said. “When decisions are made now in the Bush attorney general’s office, politics is the primary consideration. . . . The rule of law goes out the window.”
In its defense, the Justice Department explains it conducted its own internal investigation and cleared itself of wrongdoing. The JD also says the decision to pull back on the case was vindicated last year when a U.S. district judge said “she could not order the monetary penalty proposed by the government.” So they have an excuse for reducing the amount of damages sought. But changing testimony? Weakening the case?
The political appointees who allegedly interfered with the prosecution were “then-Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum, then-Assistant Attorney General Peter Keisler and Keisler’s deputy at the time, Dan Meron.” McCallum is now the U.S. ambassador to Australia
The Clinton Justice Department brought the unprecedented civil suit against the country’s five largest tobacco companies in 1999. President Bush disparaged the tobacco case while campaigning in 2000. After Bush took office, some officials expressed initial doubts about the government’s ability to fund the prosecution, Justice’s largest.
Eubanks said McCallum, Keisler and Meron largely ignored the case until it became clear that the government might win. She recalled that “things began to get really tense” after McCallum read news reports in April 2005 that one government expert, professor Max H. Bazerman of Harvard Business School, would argue that tobacco officials who engaged in fraud could be removed from their corporate posts. Eubanks said she received an angry call from McCallum on the day the news broke.
“How could you put that in there?” she recalled him saying. “We’re not going to be pursuing that.”
Afterward, McCallum, Keisler and Meron told Eubanks to approach other witnesses about softening their testimony, Eubanks said.
Yesterday Bob Barr, of all people, appeared on CNN blasting the Bush Administration’s apparent interference with the justice system. From Think Progress, which has the video:
Barr blasted the White House, saying “the integrity of the Department of Justice is being used as a political football by the administration to prove who’s the toughest hombre in all this.†Rather than fighting accountability, Barr said, “the administration really ought to be going out of its way to do what prior administrations have done, such as the Bush 1 administration and Reagan administrations, and that is take whatever steps are necessary to assure the American people that the integrity of our justice system has not been compromised.â€
Last year Barr left the GOP to join the Libertarian Party. One wonders what the Bushies/GOP did to him to piss him off.
Make a Phone Call for the Constitution
Emails and faxes are good, too.
Update: ABC News —
A Democratic-led congressional panel defied President George W. Bush on Wednesday and authorized legal orders to force several White House aides to testify under oath about the firing of eight U.S. prosecutors.
Subpoenas! Here’s the news release from the House Judiciary Committee.
Judiciary Subcommittee Authorizes Chairman Conyers to Issue Subpoenas in US Attorney Investigation (Washington, DC)- Today, the House Judiciary Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee (CAL) voted to authorize the full committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) to issue subpoenas for current and former White House and Justice Department officials Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, William Kelley, Scott Jennings and Kyle Sampson, as well as documents that the Committee has not yet received.
“The White House’s offer provides nothing more than conversations. It does not allow this Committee to get the information we need without transcripts or oaths,†Conyers said. “This motion allows the Committee to pursue good faith negotiations. We are continuing our talks with the White House, along with the Senate, but we must protect the interest of the Congress and the American people by maintaining the option to move forward with our investigation with or without continued cooperation from the Administration.â€
“We have worked toward voluntary cooperation, but we have to prepare for the possibilty that the White House will continue to hide the truth,†said CAL Subcommittee Chairwoman Linda Sánchez. “This Congress respects White House prerogatives as a safeguard for the internal deliberations on the legitimate creation of policy, but they are not a ‘get out of jail free’ card. There must be accountability.â€
The motion authorizes the Chairman to issue subpoenas at his discretion for the officials to appear before the Committee relating to the ongoing investigation. It also authorizes Conyers to subpoena additional documents relating to the issue – specifically, unredacted documents that have not previously been provided.
My understanding is that, if people receiving subpoenas refuse to comply, Congress could bring contempt of Congress charges. However, to do that Congress has to go through a (Bush appointed) U.S. attorney. Hmm.
In today’s New York Times, David Iglesias writes that he was purged because he didn’t file charges against Democrats that were unsupported by evidence.
Ms. [Rep. Heather] Wilson asked me about sealed indictments pertaining to a politically charged corruption case widely reported in the news media involving local Democrats. Her question instantly put me on guard. Prosecutors may not legally talk about indictments, so I was evasive. Shortly after speaking to Ms. Wilson, I received a call from Senator Domenici at my home. The senator wanted to know whether I was going to file corruption charges — the cases Ms. Wilson had been asking about — before November. When I told him that I didn’t think so, he said, “I am very sorry to hear that,†and the line went dead.
A few weeks after those phone calls, my name was added to a list of United States attorneys who would be asked to resign — even though I had excellent office evaluations, the biggest political corruption prosecutions in New Mexico history, a record number of overall prosecutions and a 95 percent conviction rate. (In one of the documents released this week, I was deemed a “diverse up and comer†in 2004. Two years later I was asked to resign with no reasons given.)
To those who say he was not doing his job:
As this story has unfolded these last few weeks, much has been made of my decision to not prosecute alleged voter fraud in New Mexico. Without the benefit of reviewing evidence gleaned from F.B.I. investigative reports, party officials in my state have said that I should have begun a prosecution. What the critics, who don’t have any experience as prosecutors, have asserted is reprehensible — namely that I should have proceeded without having proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The public has a right to believe that prosecution decisions are made on legal, not political, grounds.
What’s more, their narrative has largely ignored that I was one of just two United States attorneys in the country to create a voter-fraud task force in 2004. Mine was bipartisan, and it included state and local law enforcement and election officials.
After reviewing more than 100 complaints of voter fraud, I felt there was one possible case that should be prosecuted federally. I worked with the F.B.I. and the Justice Department’s public integrity section. As much as I wanted to prosecute the case, I could not overcome evidentiary problems. The Justice Department and the F.B.I. did not disagree with my decision in the end not to prosecute.
(Unfortunately, this New York Times article on purged prosecutor Carol Lam uncritically repeats the Bush Administration’s claims that she was dumped for failing to pursue immigration cases and not because she was prosecuting Duke Cunningham et al. There’s still no indication that anyone in the Justice Department ever actually discussed their concerns about immigration with her, which makes the immigration argument look more like the excuse than the reason.)
Also in this morning’s NY Times is this outstanding editorial —
In nasty and bumbling comments made at the White House yesterday, President Bush declared that “people just need to hear the truth†about the firing of eight United States attorneys. That’s right. Unfortunately, the deal Mr. Bush offered Congress to make White House officials available for “interviews†did not come close to meeting that standard.
Mr. Bush’s proposal was a formula for hiding the truth, and for protecting the president and his staff from a legitimate inquiry by Congress. Mr. Bush’s idea of openness involved sending White House officials to Congress to answer questions in private, without taking any oath, making a transcript or allowing any follow-up appearances. The people, in other words, would be kept in the dark.
The Democratic leaders were right to reject the offer, despite Mr. Bush’s threat to turn this dispute into a full-blown constitutional confrontation.
Alas, if only the Times’s reporting were as good as its editorial writing. Weirdly, the Washington Post doesn’t offer an editorial today on the looming Constitutional crisis in Washington. But the reporting is a little better; Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein write,
The documents [the 3,000 pages released Monday] also show that the White House was more closely involved than had been known in attempting to contain the controversy as it began to spin out of control in recent weeks. Just two weeks ago, on March 5, White House lawyer William Kelley personally oversaw a meeting called to prepare and edit testimony by William Moschella, the principal associate deputy attorney general. Moschella told the House Judiciary Committee the next day that the White House was only tangentially involved in the dismissals.
With an attorney general seemingly focused on other matters, McNulty and other senior Justice officials struggled to cope with pressure from increasingly agitated lawmakers. A Justice spokesman sought to mislead a reporter by questioning the accuracy of his sources, as other officials revised the administration’s story and deflected queries from Congress about the firings. The dismissals would eventually be revealed as the result of a two-year-old plan, hatched in the White House, to sack U.S. attorneys seen as disloyal to the administration.
The dismissal process itself, the documents show, was chaotic and spiked with petty cruelties. Two senior officials joked caustically about U.S. Attorney Carol Lam in San Diego — who prosecuted the corruption case of former congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.) — calling her “sad” and saying her record was “hideous.”
It’s not beyond belief that the Washington crew wanted Lam to take on more high-profile immigration cases. It’s also not beyond belief that, Bushies being Bushies, no one at the Justice Department shared their concerns about immigration with Lam before they purged her. If there’s one thing Bushies are famous for, it’s their inability to manage their way out of a wet paper bag. But as I said above, it looks as if the immigration charge is more of an excuse than the real reason.
For all their vivid detail, the e-mails and other records shed little light on the Bush administration’s motives for carrying out the firings in the way it did. The new documents also provide little evidence that Justice officials sought to interfere with public corruption probes, as many Democrats and some of the prosecutors have alleged.
In Lam’s case, was not the purge itself the interference?
Along with documents released last week, the new records show that the firing lists drawn up by D. Kyle Sampson, a former Gonzales aide who resigned last week, frequently changed, rarely including the same group of allegedly inferior U.S. attorneys. Only four of those fired were included on an initial March 2005 ranking chart.
It was as if they took it into their heads to fire (make examples of?) some people, and it was just a matter of deciding which ones.
Repeatedly in the months leading up to the firings, Justice officials derided the U.S. attorneys who would lose their jobs in often sharp terms, the internal e-mails show.
Brent Ward, director of a Justice Department obscenity task force, opposed sending FBI and Justice officials to Las Vegas last August to persuade then-U.S. attorney Daniel G. Bogden to pursue more cases: “[T]o go out to LV and sit and listen to the lame excuses of a defiant U.S. attorney is only going to move this whole enterprise closer to catastrophe.”
There’s an unmistakable meanness and pettiness and arrogance behind these communications. The Bushies are like children, judging who’s cool and who’s not and who can sit at the same lunch table as the cool kids.
Today we might hear more about subpoenas. President Bush is already making noises about “executive privilege,” a claim that Glenn Greenwald takes apart here. Also, note that there is no precedent barring White House aides from testifying to Congress. The Talking Dog predicts an unsatisfactory deal will be struck. To this I say to Washington Dems — don’t you dare let us down on this one. I sorta kinda understand why it might be hard to pull together 218 votes on an Iraq resolution. But if Bush and Co. get off the U.S. attorney hook — that I do not forgive.
This afternoon some Democrats are meeting with White House counsel Fred Fielding to work out details for the testimony of Karl Rove et al. regarding the U.S. Attorney situation. Paul Kiel writes at TPM —
According to MSNBC just now, White House counsel Fred Fielding offered Democrats interviews with Karl Rove and other White House officials, but the testimony would be unsworn, behind closed doors, and no transcript would be permitted.
The headline is “White House Makes An Offer Dems Can Refuse.”
Chuck Schumer is sayin’ no deal.
We could have a real fight on our hands, folks. Let’s hope.
Update: I understand House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers held a press conference and expressed his disappointment that the White House wasn’t more cooperative. The Judiciary Committee will begin the task of issuing subpoenas tomorrow morning.
Here’s a pleasant surprise — today the Senate voted 94-2 to repeal that part of the Patriot Act that allows the Attorney General to appoint “interim” U.S. attorneys who can serve without confirmation.
My next question is, who were the two? I’m guessing one was Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) who had tried to attach an amendment that would have required the Senate to vote on a U.S. attorney nominee within 120 days. That amendment was voted down.
The measure passed today would reinstate the previous law, which allows interim appointees to serve no longer than 120 days without confirmation. If the Senate fails to confirm a nominee within the time period, a court appointed another interim attorney. The White House then has the option of appointing someone else or continuing to haggle with Congress.
The measure now goes to the House of Representatives, where I suspect it will pass easily by a veto-proof majority.
Last night the Justice Department released 3,000 pages of documents. House staffers have been scanning the documents and posting them on the House Judiciary Committee web site; look under the heading “What’s New.” Today TPM is looking for volunteers to search the 3,000 pages for juicy bits. If you’re into Wiki-ing, check this out.
It appears the White House is preparing to toss Alberto Gonzales overboard. I expected this, but I thought it would take longer. The White House must be anxious. Ron Hutcheson and Greg Gordon write for McClatchy Newspapers:
One prominent Republican, who earlier had predicted that Gonzales would survive the controversy, said he expected both Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty to resign soon. Another well-connected Republican said that White House officials have launched an aggressive search for Gonzales’ replacement, though Bush hadn’t decided whether to ask for his resignation.
Support for Gonzales appeared to be collapsing under the weight of questions about his truthfulness and his management ability. White House spokesman Tony Snow offered a tepid defense when asked if Gonzales would stay on the job until the end of President Bush’s term.
“We hope so,” Snow said. “None of us knows what’s going to happen to us over the next 21 months.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if Alberto is tossed this week. The White House will want to make a sacrifice to appease the investigation god before more connections are made to Karl Rove and George Bush.
Dan Eggen and John Solomon report in today’s Washington Post that
U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald was ranked among prosecutors who had “not distinguished themselves” on a Justice Department chart sent to the White House in March 2005, when he was in the midst of leading the CIA leak investigation that resulted in the perjury conviction of a vice presidential aide, administration officials said yesterday.
The ranking placed Fitzgerald below “strong U.S. Attorneys . . . who exhibited loyalty” to the administration but above “weak U.S. Attorneys who . . . chafed against Administration initiatives, etc.,” according to Justice documents.
The chart was drawn by Gonzales aide D. Kyle Sampson and sent to Harriet Miers in the White House.
Update: See also Max Blumenthal, “The Porn Plot Against Prosecutors.”
Siun at firedoglake writes about the way President’s Bush speeches and President Bush’s policies exist in different realities. He loves to talk about “freedom,” for example, but his own policies both foreign and domestic are hardly supportive of freedom. One wonders what he thinks the word means.
This pro-war op ed in the New York Post makes me wonder what time-space continuum the writer is occupying. Saddam’s regime was toppled! Its machinery of war and internal repression was dismantled! Decades of one-party rule – the “Republic of Fear” – came to an end! Political power was taken from the brutal and corrupt ruling elite and transferred to the Iraqi people as a whole!
Bombs at a Shiite mosque in Kirkuk killed at least 20 people today. Is this what newly empowered Iraqis chose for their own country? Somehow, I don’t think so.
You see that a lot with righties; they use words — freedom, victory, democracy — without seeming to have thought real hard about what they mean. It’s as if the word imposes the reality instead of describing the reality; if we claim Iraqis have “freedom,” then it must be so. If you try to impress upon righties that Iraqis are not free and that “victory” in the context of Iraq is meaningless, they accuse you of hating America.
There’s not much I can say about Iraq that I haven’t already said. So I’m going to quote Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951) instead.
It is the true believer’s ability to “shut his eyes and stop his ears†to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. … And it is the certitude of his infallible doctrine that renders the true believer impervious to the uncertainties, surprises and the unpleasant realities of the world around him.
Thus the effectiveness of a doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity or the validity of the truths it embodies, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from the self and the world as it is ….
The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound or sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the one and only truth. …
It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. …
If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine. When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning. Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hair-splitting, and scholastic tortuousness.
Bush’s Iraq War policy is not policy; nor is it a plan or a strategy. It is a doctrine, as Hoffer just defined doctrine. It is something to be believed in, not understood, and if you don’t share the faith you hate America.
Adam Cohen writes in the New York Times about possible criminal prosecutions stemming from the U.S. attorney purge. These are:
1. Misrepresentations to Congress. The relevant provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1505, is very broad. It is illegal to lie to Congress, and also to “impede†it in getting information. Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty indicated to Congress that the White House’s involvement in firing the United States attorneys was minimal, something that Justice Department e-mail messages suggest to be untrue….
… 2. Calling the Prosecutors. As part of the Sarbanes-Oxley reforms, Congress passed an extremely broad obstruction of justice provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1512 (c), which applies to anyone who corruptly “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,†including U.S. attorney investigations.
David Iglesias, the New Mexico United States attorney, says Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, called him and asked whether he intended to bring indictments in a corruption case against Democrats before last November’s election. Mr. Iglesias said he “felt pressured†by the call. If members of Congress try to get a United States attorney to indict people he wasn’t certain he wanted to indict, or try to affect the timing of an indictment, they may be violating the law.
3. Witness Tampering. 18 U.S.C. § 1512 (b) makes it illegal to intimidate Congressional witnesses. Michael Elston, Mr. McNulty’s chief of staff, contacted one of the fired attorneys, H. E. Cummins, and suggested, according to Mr. Cummins, that if he kept speaking out, there would be retaliation. Mr. Cummins took the call as a threat, and sent an e-mail message to other fired prosecutors warning them of it. Several of them told Congress that if Mr. Elston had placed a similar call to one of their witnesses in a criminal case, they would have opened an investigation of it.
4. Firing the Attorneys. United States attorneys can be fired whenever a president wants, but not, as § 1512 (c) puts it, to corruptly obstruct, influence, or impede an official proceeding.
I say this could put the peach back into impeachment, so to speak.