Democratic senators want to know more about why the President shut down the internal Justice Department investigation into warrantless wiretapping.
--David Kurtz
The conviction of Stephen Griles, the Interior Department's former No. 2 official, shows why Congress just might want transcripts of any interviews with White House officials about the U.S. attorney purge.
--David Kurtz
Many of you have probably already seen this, but I just want to flag it for future reference:
The Justice Department also said yesterday that Monica Goodling, a senior counselor to Gonzales who worked closely with Sampson on the firings, took an indefinite personal leave from her job on Monday. A Justice official said that she is still employed there but that it is not clear when she will return.
Goodling was the DOJ liaison to the White House.
--David Kurtz
KSTP-TV in St. Paul broadcast a nice investigative piece last night on what is being called the "coronation" of the new U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, Rachel Paulose.
Since the purge scandal broke, Minnesota readers of TPM have been insisting that we look more closely at the interim appointment of Paulose and her eventual confirmation by the Senate. Paulose was just 33 years old at the time of her appointment. Her previous experience has included time in DOJ's Civil Rights Division and a stint as senior counsel to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, for two months before her interim appointment, according to the Star-Tribune.
Aside from being one of the legal neophytes with strong connections to Bush political appointees at Main Justice who, as McClatchy reported, has landed U.S. attorney positions in the past year, I haven't seen anything yet connecting Paulose directly to the purge, although the circumstances of her predecessor's resignation remain murky.
Still, there's plenty of smoke there. For instance, the Star-Tribune noted that her Senate confirmation was almost derailed because, though Paulose had Administration backing, "she and her supporters had neglected to seek the support of both home-state senators," an oversight so unbelievable as to suggest that perhaps the Administration did not originally intend to submit her nomination for Senate approval but rather planned to rely on the attorney general's appointment authority under the Patriot Act. You can find more on Paulose here.
Regardless, the KSTP report shows that her lack of experience didn't keep Paulose from putting on the dog at her swearing-in, complete with honor guard and choir. There was also reportedly a list compiled of "potential problem reporters" who might attend the event. In an interview with the station, Paulose bobbed and weaved when questioned about the existence of such a list.
It's quite a good report, so go take a look.
--David Kurtz
Wingnut campaign against antiwar majority of Americans plummets to new depths of desperation.
--Greg Sargent
A key aspect of the U.S. attorney purge that often seems to get overlooked--by those who argue that the firings were business as usual and no different from the removal of USAs at the beginning of a president's term--is the change to the Patriot Act that was quietly inserted by Sen. Arlen Specter at the behest of the Justice Department.
As close followers of the scandal know, the Patriot Act provision, in essence, transferred the power to appoint interim USAs from the federal district courts to the attorney general and allowed the attorney general to install interim USAs indefinitely, thereby bypassing the Senate confirmation process.
Only the naive or willfully blind would see the Patriot Act amendment as a distinct and separate action from the purge itself. Indeed, vesting such powers in the attorney general was a predicate to the purge, and was one of the very first indications, at least to everyone here at TPM, that the removal of the eight U.S. attorneys was not some random act or unrelated series of acts but a deliberately conceived and executed plan that required time to develop and numerous participants to implement. Otherwise, the Senate confirmation process would have made installing political hacks as USAs difficult and would have provided supporters of the ousted prosecutors with a ready-made platform to challenge the removals publicly.
So when William Moschella, who is now the principal deputy attorney general, recently told McClatchy "that he pursued the changes on his own, without the knowledge or coordination of his superiors at the Justice Department or anyone at the White House," the purpose of his comments was to decouple the Patriot Act provision from the purge itself. Since Moschella was, at the time he pursued the Patriot Act changes, just a mid-level assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, we were supposed to believe that simply because B (the purge) followed A (the Patriot Act change), doesn't mean A caused B or was in any way related to B.
But wait.
From the document dump last night, we learn, again from McClatchy, that Moschella sent an email to other Justice Department officials way back in November 2005 announcing support for the change to the law. Paul has more.
So contrary to earlier assertions, the attorney general was involved in the firings, and higher-ups in the Justice Department knew about the Patriot Act provision.
No surprise there, really. But keep this in mind. Everything the Justice Department has said that later turned out to be false was almost certainly known by the White House to be false, at the time the false statements were made, to the media, and most importantly, to Congress.
Let that sink in.
--David Kurtz
So many Justice Department scandals, so little time. But in case you missed this yesterday, an account in the Washington Post from an anonymous recipient of a national security letter.
--David Kurtz
Paul Kiel begins the TPMmuckraker rundown on the latest DOJ document release, starting with what AG AG knew and when he knew it.
--David Kurtz
Thou dost protest too loudly.
In McClatchy's piece late yesterday on the whole "voter fraud" mumbo-jumbo that has been animating the Bush Justice Department, this section caught my eye:
Bradley Schlozman, who became the civil rights division’s deputy chief in 2003, agreed in 2005 to reverse the career staff’s recommendations to challenge a Georgia law that would have required voters to pay $20 for photo IDs and in some cases travel as far as 30 miles to obtain the ID card.A federal judge threw out the Georgia law, calling it an unconstitutional, Jim Crow-era poll tax.
In an interview, Schlozman, who was named interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City in November 2005, said he merely affirmed a subordinate’s decision to overturn the career staff’s recommendations.
He called it "absolutely not true" that he drove out career lawyers. "What I tried to do was to depoliticize the hiring process," Schlozman said. "We hired people across the political spectrum."
I'm no expert on DOJ hiring policies, but how exactly did Schlozman know he was hiring people from across the political spectrum?
If he had said, "We hired people without regard to political affiliation," that would have been close to an airtight denial of political interference in the hiring process. It might not have been true (and the evidence suggests it would not have been true), but it would have been a specific denial of the conduct alleged.
Instead, Schlozman says he made a concerted effort to "depoliticize the hiring process" by hiring "people from across the political spectrum." That certainly seems to suggest that political affiliation was indeed taken into account.
Keep in mind here that we're talking about the hiring of career prosecutors, not political appointees. We're also talking about the Civil Rights Division, which conservatives have long viewed as a hotbed of liberal activism. So any alleged politicization that existed in the division before Bush arrived on the scene is code for too many perceived Democrats (again, DOJ would have no way of directly knowing the political affiliations of its career prosecutors) enforcing the nation's civil rights laws too vigorously.
When a Bush political appointee says he's trying to "depoliticize" something, it's like Fox News claiming to be "fair and balanced."
--David Kurtz
Ready for more sleuthing? We've just opened up a new post and discussion thread at TPMmuckraker for analyzing and reporting on tonight's DOJ document dump.
One fun nugget that might be amusing to those who got snookered by the 'immigration enforcement' bamboozlement ...
The e-mails also show that administration officials struggled to find a way to justify the firings and considered citing immigration enforcement simply because three of the fired prosecutors were stationed near the border with Mexico. While the e-mails don't provide evidence of partisan motives for the firings, they seem to undercut the administration's explanation that the prosecutors were dismissed for poor performance."The one common link here is that three of them are along the southern border so you could make the connection that DOJ is unhappy with the immigration prosecution numbers in those districts," Tasia Scolinos, a senior public affairs specialist at the Justice Department, told Catherine Martin, a White House communications adviser, in an e-mail.
--Josh Marshall
A prescient email from the dump, flagged by the Times ...
“I think most of them will resign quietly,” said Ms. Scolinos, the department’s chief spokeswoman, in a Nov. 17 e-mail message, a few weeks before the dismissals. “It’s only six U.S. attorneys (there are 94) and they don’t get anything out of making it public they were asked to leave in terms of future job prospects. I don’t see it as being a national story — especially if it phases in over a few months.”
What's worth noting is that most of them did keep quiet. At first. Then questions started being asked. And that led the Justice Department to publicly justify the firings by putting out word that the USAs had been canned for poor performance. But that proved to be a pregnant error. Because while the fired US Attorneys were willing to go quietly they weren't willing to stay quiet while their reputations were sullied.
The turning point came when New Mexico US Attorney David Iglesias sent an email to a friend in which he labelled his dismissal a "political fragging". To this point there was plenty of reason for suspicion and an increasing body of circumstantial evidence. But as yet there was no hard evidence of a the kind of wrongdoing some of us suspected, no party to the incidents in question willing to come forward and put facts on the table. Iglesias' phrase was cryptic or perhaps ambiguous. But it strongly suggested the story he told the next day -- that two members of Congress had pressured him to pursue an election-turning indictment and that he believed his refusal to do so had led to his ouster.
Of course, from that point, everything began to unravel.
--Josh Marshall
Now we know with crystal clear proof what we really already knew a week ago: that Alberto Gonzales was lying about his role in the US Attorney Purge. So add that to the list of all the other things he's lied about.
But don't get distracted by the lying or even the cover-up.
Right-wing shills want to chalk the blundering administration response to US Attorney Purge scandal to incompetence. But just as we can infer the force of gravity from the descent of the falling apple, the panicked succession of lies and dodges out of the administration implies not incompetence but guilty knowledge of underlying bad acts.
This isn't about the AG's lies. It's not about the attempted cover-up. It's not about executive privilege and investigative process mumbojumbo.
This is about using US Attorneys to damage Democrats and protect Republicans, using the Department of Justice as a partisan cudgel in the war for national political dominance. All the secrecy and lies, the blundering and covering-up stems from this one central fact.
--Josh Marshall
As Atrios might say, I think this might be that 'Bye Alberto' moment. From the AP ...
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales approved plans to fire several U.S. attorneys in a November meeting, according to documents released Friday that contradict earlier claims that he was not closely involved in the dismissals.
Also worth noting, these new and very daming emails are from the 'gap'.
Late Update: And of course, just an oversight. From the NYT ...
Department officials said there had not been an intentional effort to delay the release of the new material. Instead, they said, the e-mail messages were overlooked in past searches of office files and computers. Many, they said, were copies of e-mail that had already been disclosed. The latest batch of documents shows just how completely the department misjudged what the reaction would be to the dismissals.
--Josh Marshall
Liberal House Dems get a standing ovation from members for helping swing passage of the Iraq withdrawal bill today.
--Greg Sargent
The US Attorney Purge is part of a bigger Rove-backed program of pushing bogus 'voter fraud' claims to keep Democrats away from the polls. McClatchy's got a good overview.
--Josh Marshall
Once again, many thanks to everyone who's joined us in our DC Muckraking Fundraising Drive. We appreciate not just your generosity but the confidence you're putting in us and what we're doing. Once again, lots of muck and we want more rakes to rake it with. Specifically, we're raising funds to expand our muckraking operations by hiring more reporter-bloggers, at least one of them to report directly from Capitol Hill to you every day. We're off to a great start after just three and a half days. So we want to make one more push before the weekend. If you'd like join us, click on the button below to contribute. And thank you.
--Josh Marshall
Like Atrios, I'm a bit mystified by Michael Kinsley's apparently determined obtuseness about the US Attorney Purge. All the more so since of all people Kinsley was probably the guy who inspired me to get into the opinion journalism business in the first place.
It's all worth a run-down, a refresher on where we are in this whole sordid mess.
First, is this about firings? Kinsley is still mulling over whether this is comparable to Bill Clinton's entirely normal dismissal of US Attorneys when he came into office. Would it be as big a deal if the Bush White House had fired all the US Attorneys at the start of the second term, as folks at the White House first seemed to have considered?
The firings were not the offense. They were the clue that suggested the offense. As the Congressional Research Service has shown, over the last twenty-five years only ten US Attorneys have been dismissed other than at the beginning of a new president's term of office. And of those eight were for clear cause. For instance, one of them bit a stripper on the arm in a night club. And that, not surprisingly, led to his ouster.
To quote the CRS report ...
In virtually all of those 10 previous cases, serious issues of personal or professional conduct appeared to be the driving issue. Prior to December, for example, only two U.S. Attorneys were outright fired for improper, and in one case criminal, behavior. The CRS report identifies six other U.S. Attorneys who resigned during the 25-year period who were implicated in news reports of “questionable conduct.” For two others, the CRS was unable to determine the cause.
(For more details on this key element of the firings story, see this discussion by Scott Lilly.)
In any case, ten times over twenty five years and in eight of those cases for clear and publicly aired reasons.
And then on one day, secretly and with no explanation, seven get canned. And several are involved in corruption investigations targetting Republicans. The first public explanation is that they were fired for poor performance. But then it turns most were among the highest performing US Attorneys in the country. Add in the fact that one of the eight was overseeing one of the broadest ranging and historic public corruption cases in US history and ... well, it all got our attention.
Then, only a little digging revealed clear evidence that two of the US Attorneys were dismissed for not pursuing bogus claims of Democratic 'voter fraud'.
Now, Kinsley seems to have bought in to David Brooks artfully laddled line that some of the firings seem to have been for partisan political reasons (bad) while others were for policy political reasons (not necessarily bad). But with all due respect, like history repeating itself, it only looks that way to those who don't know the details.
One point not many have yet noticed is that the Justice Department actually singled-out David Iglesias for his expertise on voter fraud issues and selected him to train other US Attorneys on voter fraud issues -- so great was their confidence in his grasp of the issue and his approach to it on the policy level. The only reason he got canned was because he didn't indict specific Democrats who Republican operatives and officeholders wanted indicted.
With Carol Lam, looking closely even at the emails the White House has allowed the Justice Department to release and it's clear that most of the Justice Department's dealings with Lam were coordinating with her on defending the policies she was pursuing against outside criticism. Given that this is being proferred as the after-the-fact excuse for her firing it is surpassingly curious that there appears not to be a single email showing anybody at the Justice Department or the White House asking her to change anything she was doing. The emails that show DOJ and White House officials brainstorming after the fact to come up with reasons for why they fired different prosecutors.
It's not that Lam was fired for not following administration policies on immigration. It's simply the one instance where the Attorney General and the White House are trying hardest to make that case. And it's just not convincing.
There are many people in this conversation trying to avoid the issues, confuse the issues or just ignore them. And more than a few people are just plain confused. But it's not that complicated. Administration officials have repeatedly and demonstrably lied about the firings. And there is now abundant evidence of a pattern of using the president's power to hire and fire US Attorneys to stymie public corruption investigations of Republicans and use the Justice Department to harass Democrats by mounting investigations of demonstrably bogus 'voter fraud' claims. It's really that simple.
--Josh Marshall
Following the US Attorney Purge story. Here's more clear evidence that Kyle Sampson, former Chief of Staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, knowingly lied to congressional staff and that the DOJ document dump did not include key emails directly relevant to the investigation.
--Josh Marshall
House Dems passed the Iraq withdrawal bill today by a hair, 218-212. A list of Dems who voted against it and Republicans who backed it is here.
--Greg Sargent
Don't miss this one.
A Dem Congressman tore into The Washington Post editorial page on the House floor today, placing the blame squarely on the paper for helping land America in the Iraq mess.
--Greg Sargent
Mark Schmitt has a very good question: what was the US Attorney Purge meant to accomplish?
--Josh Marshall
Arlen ...
Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), Judiciary’s senior Republican, at first declined to reveal his vote, later adding that he abstained by remaining silent.
--Josh Marshall
Another guilty plea in the Abramoff investigation: this one from Steven Griles, formerly the #2 at the Interior Department.
Update: Here are the mucky details.
--Paul Kiel
Today's Must Read: Secretary of Defense Bob Gates argues that Guantanamo Bay should be shut down.
--Paul Kiel
At last minute, liberal House Dems throw their weight behind the leadership's Iraq bill, making passage all but certain.
--Greg Sargent
Dems to White House: let's talk, but hey, don't dump any relevant documents while we're talking.
--Paul Kiel
Take what we can get, says Arlen. Check out this exchange this morning between Sens. Specter (R-PA) and Leahy (D-VT) on whether the senate Judiciary Committee should issue subpoenas.
--Josh Marshall
"The Attorney General's an honorable man. He's a decent man."
Rudy Giuliani, a former U.S. Attorney himself, finally shares his thoughts on the Attorney Purge.
--Greg Sargent
Quite a few people have speculated over whether Tony Snow really meant to say that Congress had no right or ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch. The claim is belied by the US constitution and all US history down to the present day. But I strongly suspect that it was no accident, slip of the tongue or loosely general statement the White House won't stand behind.
The simple truth, I think, is that there's too much criminality waiting to be uncovered.
In the US Attorney purge, yes. But that's only the start of it.
The only and perhaps the best approach for the White House is to fight what in military terms you might call a forward engagement, gumming up the very concept and premise of oversight itself in the courts for long enough to wait out the clock. That's what this is about.
Late Update: In this morning's gaggle Snow said that Congress can oversee the executive departments, just not the White House. That's a slightly more defensible position constitutionally speaking, but only slightly. It's still basically bogus. What Snow and thus the president is saying is that 'executive privilege' is the rule rather than a seldom invoked veil that the president invokes to guard his own communications and deliberation and thus prevent the balance of power between the branches of government from becoming too tilted toward the legislative branch.
--Josh Marshall
I've said quite a few times now that this administration has a deep anti-constitutionalist bent. And now Tony Snow has come out and said it flat out.
This morning Snow told ABC News: "The executive branch is under no compulsion to testify to Congress, because Congress in fact doesn't have oversight ability."
--Josh Marshall
"The campaign goes on."
John Edwards flatly denies reports that he's suspending his campaign due to his wife's illness.
--Greg Sargent
James Tobin, the RNC official convicted for his role in the New Hampshire phone jamming, may get off on a technicality.
--Paul Kiel
Senate committee votes to authorize subpoenas for Karl Rove and other White House officials.
--Paul Kiel
Thank you so much. We're now over 2000 TPM Readers who've contributed to our DC Muckraking Fundraiser. That's almost half way to our goal of 5000 contributors, which is a very tall order. But we're going to do our best to get there. Along with a lot of other websites and bloggers out there we're trying to build a new model of online, collaborative journalism that builds on the highest standards of journalism while making full use of the potential of the internet. If you want to help us get more rakes for all the muck that's out there you can click here to find out how to send a check in the mail or click the button below to make a contribution online.
--Josh Marshall
Today's Must Read: the case of U.S. Attorney for San Francisco Kevin Ryan, a "loyal Bushie" who would have escaped the purge if his incompetence hadn't threatened to become a PR liability for the Justice Department.
--Paul Kiel
It's not a gap in the emails, says DOJ spokesman Brian Roehrkasse. It's a "lull."
--Josh Marshall
AP ...
Six of the eight U.S. attorneys fired by the Justice Department ranked in the top third among their peers for the number of prosecutions filed last year, according to an analysis of federal records.In addition, five of the eight were among the government's top performers in winning convictions.
--Josh Marshall
WaPo ...
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.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, enough. The president fired US Attorneys to stymie investigations of Republicans and punish US Attorneys who didn't harass Democrats with bogus voter fraud prosecutions. In the former instance, the evidence remains circumstantial. But in the latter the evidence is clear, overwhelming and undeniable.
Indeed, it is so undeniable the president hismelf does not deny it.
The president himself says that in some cases US Attorneys were dismissed because they were too lax in prosecuting election fraud. What he does not say -- but what we know directly from the accounts of the players involved -- is that these were cases in which Republican operatives and activists complained to the White House and Republican members of Congress that certain US Attorneys weren't convening grand juries or issuing indictments against Democrats, even though these were cases where all the available evidence suggests there was no wrongdoing prosecuted. (It's all reminiscent of the bogus voter fraud allegations Republicans got caught peddling in the South Dakota senate race in 2002. Only in this case getting these charges into the press wasn't enough; they wanted to use US Attorneys to actual harrass people or put them in jail.)
We know that Republican members of Congress sought to pressure the prosecutors in question to push these indictments. And we know at least in the case of David Iglesias in New Mexico that Sen. Domenici's (R-NM) complaints after not being able to get Iglesias to knuckle under were directly tied to his dismissal.
Back up a bit from the sparks flying over executive privilege and congressional testimony and you realize that these are textbook cases of the party in power interfering or obstructing the administration of justice for narrowly partisan purposes. It's a direct attack on the rule of law.
This much is already clear in the record. And we're now having a big public debate about the politics for each side if the president tries to obstruct the investigation and keep the truth from coming out. The contours and scope of executive privilege is one issue, and certainly an important one. But in this case it is being used as no more than a shield to keep the full extent of the president's perversion of the rule of law from becoming known.
It's yet another example of how far this White House has gone in normalizing behavior that we've been raised to associate with third-world countries where democracy has never successfully taken root and the rule of law is unknown. At most points in our history the idea that an Attorney General could stay in office after having overseen such an effort would be unthinkable. The most telling part of this episode is that they're not even really denying the wrongdoing. They're ignoring the point or at least pleading 'no contest' and saying it's okay.
--Josh Marshall
I've had a hard time setting aside time to write considered post on the president's press conference. But I thought one of the most telling points is that even now he can't see clear to simply saying they were fired. Maybe 'fired' is too blunt a word. Maybe 'dismissed' would be better. But if you watch his statement he repeatedly speaks about their 'resignations'. Go back and watch the video and you'll see what I mean.
--Josh Marshall
Behind-the-scenes tensions among House Dems on full boil right now over tomorrow's big Iraq withdrawal bill vote.
--Greg Sargent
Did the Justice Department stifle the New Hampshire phone jamming investigation?
The Democrats made the case today in a letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT).
--Paul Kiel
An 18 day gap? Well, here's at least one email in the gap. A very, very short email, but an email.
Update: And here's a little more.
--Paul Kiel
Don't miss our video of Al Gore tearing into global warming skepticism in D.C. today.
--Greg Sargent
First DCCC ad of 2008 cycle hammers GOP Rep. Heather Wilson over Attorney Purge scandal.
--Greg Sargent
See Tony Snow today on the little issue of that 18-day gap in the emails turned over to Congress.
--Paul Kiel
We're coming up on 1500 contributors to our DC Muckraking Fundraising Drive. And we're hoping to get to 2000 by the end of the day.
As I explained yesterday, we're doing this -- trying to get people to become contributors/subscribers in the sense you do with PBS -- because we want to do more muckraking, more digging into stories like the US Attorney Purge. And to do that we need to bring on new reporter-bloggers, particularly one or more right there on Capitol Hill. Who's really pressing oversight, who's not? How is the place being run? What stories are hiding there in plain sight?
That's what we're trying to do. If you want to join us by contributing a few dollars to hire those reporter-bloggers you can click here to find out how to send a check in the mail or click the button below to make a contribution online.
--Josh Marshall
Watchdog wants answers about the Justice Department's handling of the Jack Abramoff investigation.
--Paul Kiel
The Times has a story out in today's paper suggesting that immigration enforcement issues may really have been the DOJ's main beef with San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam.
Color me unconvinced. But you be the judge.
One of the problems is that the Times' authors seem to take as granted that Sampson took up the immigration issue with Lam one or more times when in fact there doesn't seem to be any evidence he or anyone else ever did. Lam herself says they never did.
Note also the Times reference here ...
The sporadic complaints [about Lam's immigration enforcement] developed into a small crisis for the Justice Department by May 2006, when an internal Border Patrol document was leaked to the news media chastising Ms. Lam’s office for its “catch and release” approach.
May 2006, you'll remember was when all the CIA/Foggo/Hookergate mess was hitting the fan in response to Lam's investigation. So some of the suggestion here is that the bump in DOJ's interest in Lam at this time was immigration-related rather than tied to disgruntlement over here expanding corruption prosecution.
But this can play both ways.
Did the immigration stuff happen to coincide with the uptick in the Lam investigation or was there more to it?
This immigration policy 'crisis' blew up on May 18th 2006. That's when the aforementioned border patrol document was leaked -- just days after the resignations of CIA Director Porter Goss and his deputy Dusty Foggo and the searches of Foggo's home and CIA office.
But why then exactly? We know who 'leaked' the document. It was Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Lam's critic, according to the AP story that first reported on the leaked report. Apparently it had been written the previous August, upwards of a year earlier.
Issa had been on the border issue since 2004. But his focus on Lam in particular seemed to notch up in the summer of 2005, around the time the Cunningham investigation got started. And he was a close political ally of Cunningham, whose district borders his. When Cunningham announced he wouldn't be standing for reelection in July 2005, Issa said "I know this was a difficult decision for a committed public servant like Duke Cunningham. But I fully support it and hope it allows him to concentrate on cooperating with the current investigation while continuing to serve the people of his district." A few weeks earlier he was calling Duke's home sale scam "a mistake in judgment."
This is a murky story no doubt. But there's plenty of reason to believe that rather than being the reason for disgruntlement with Lam, the immigration issue, from the start, was the best available cudgel to use against her for her aggressive pursuit of the Cunningham case.
--Josh Marshall
Now, there's a pro-Clinton, anti-Obama version of the Apple 1984 ad. Somehow ... well, I guess just watch. At least in this case I don't think anyone will doubt that the creators weren't professional video editors.
--Josh Marshall
For the White House, the most damaging force thus far in the US Attorney Purge story has been the group of fired US Attorneys themselves. And as a knowledgeable observer pointed out to me this morning, one of the key hints in President Bush's press conference yesterday afternoon was the attempt to make peace and quiet however many of the US Attorneys they can.
Along those lines, see this clip out of this morning's Las Vegas Review-Journal ...
Two weeks after firing him as chief federal prosecutor in Nevada last December, Justice Department officials were preparing to offer Daniel Bogden a new job as an immigration judge, according to documents examined on Tuesday.The overture came from a top deputy to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who confessed on the day of the firing he was having second thoughts about removing Bogden as U.S. attorney in the state.
Subsequent discussions about the post went nowhere when it became clear there were no openings in Nevada, Bogden confirmed Tuesday.
A spokesman for Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said this week that Justice officials are in new talks with Bogden about opportunities to "restore his reputation" after his dismissal as part of a widening scandal engulfing the Bush administration.
Bogden declined to comment on the discussions.
Bears watching.
--Josh Marshall
Today's Must Read: with the Bush Justice Department, you're a star today, canned tomorrow.
--Paul Kiel
Many, many thanks. You've gotten us off to a great start in our DC Muckraking fundraising drive. In our first 24 hours more than 1300 TPM Readers have contributed to help us put more reporters on the beat digging into the muck in the nation's capital. For more information on what we're trying to do, see last night's post here.
--Josh Marshall
Shades of Rose Mary Woods? An 18 day gap?
I think a commenter in our document dump research thread may have been the first to notice that the emails released by the Justice Department seem to have a gap between November 15th and December 4th of last year.
(Our commenter saw it late on the evening of the dump itself -- see the comment date-stamped March 20, 2007 02:19 AM in the research thread)
The firing calls went out on December 7th. But the original plan was to start placing the calls on November 15th. So those eighteen days are pretty key ones.
Mike Allen spotted it this evening in the Politico.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader RW puts down his wager ...
My Purgegate bracket goes like this: Wed-Thurs. Stonewalling and statements. Fri. morning—secret negotiations. Fri. Afternoon, 4:30. White House agrees to allow testimony under oath for all persons requested, claims victory. 12:35 PM Saturday—Gonzales resigns, stating that he felt his continuing presence was hindering the Administration’s efforts to protect American from the terrorists.
Yours?
--Josh Marshall
You did not let us down. Last night we posted this thread over at TPMmuckraker where TPM Readers who share and discuss what they'd found in the DOJ 'Attorney Purge' document dump. So far the thread has a whopping 628 comments. And they've been extr