Long knives out for Federal Prosecutors

C-Span has a decent breakdown of events HERE!

squinney wrote:

C-Span has a decent breakdown of events HERE!

At the above link it's worth downloading the Documents. Part one around page 12 starts getting interesting.

"Liberal sympathizers"? The more you talk, McG, the more I picture you wearing an armband.

The Justice Department Needs to Learn to Share
By Paul Kiel - March 14, 2007, 6:24 PM

Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson was supposedly fired because he's not a good communicator -- namely, he failed to tell others at the Justice Department that he had been consulting the White House for nearly two years about the firing of U.S. attorneys before it happened. Because Sampson didn't spread the word, the story goes, Justice Department officials gave false information to Congress. But it's apparent that Sampson wasn't the only one with knowledge of his contacts with the White House.

As Gonzales put it yesterday, "the mistake that occurred here was that information that [Sampson] had was not shared with individuals within the department who was [sic] then going to be providing testimony and information to the Congress."

Setting aside for the moment the implication that Sampson lied to the officials who then gave false information to Congress, let's look at one of those instances of false information.

In late February, Richard Hertling, the acting Assistant Attorney General, wrote a letter to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in which he claimed that the "Department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint [Karl Rove's former aide Timothy] Griffin."

Sampson, meanwhile, wrote in an email in December that getting Tim Griffin appointed was "important to Harriet, Karl, etc." And emails from last summer show that Rove's deputy was intimately involved in getting Griffin installed as the U.S. attorney for Arkansas.

So maybe Hertling didn't ask Sampson (the man at the department supposedly in charge of the purge) or Sampson lied to him.

But there's somebody else who knew: Monica Goodling, the Justice Department's liaison to the White House.

The emails show Goodling going back and forth with Sampson and Rove's deputy Scott Jennings about how to install Griffin without kicking up too much fuss. In an August 18th email (which has Jennings cc'ed), Goodling writes that they have a "senator prob" with Griffin's possible nomination -- meaning that one of Arkansas' senators had raised an objection to Griffin's nomination. That's followed by a paragraph brainstorming how to get Griffin in anyway.

Goodling's job at the Justice Department was to communicate with the White House -- and the emails show that Sampson even emailed drafts of correspondence to Goodling before sending it on to the White House.

So did she also do a poor job of communicating the White House's role in the purge to others?

ps... removing folks who or ideological or procedural impediments and putting loyalists into positions of power (judiciary and elsewhere) has been a common behavior of this administration. Rove, Abramoff, Reed and Norquist have utilized this strategy mercilessly since their college republican days.

blatham wrote:

ps... removing folks who or ideological or procedural impediments and putting loyalists into positions of power (judiciary and elsewhere) has been a common behavior of this administration. Rove, Abramoff, Reed and Norquist have utilized this strategy mercilessly since their college republican days.

It has been common for every administration. Sheesh, where have you been, blatham? Now it is suddenly a crime to be a politician? If you are a Republican, that is. It is I am sure very legal to be a Democrat. It may become mandatory the way things are going.

Hey, grow up, people!!

It has been common for every administration. Sheesh, where have you been, blatham? Now it is suddenly a crime to be a politician? If you are a Republican, that is. It is I am sure very legal to be a Democrat. It may become mandatory the way things are going.

Hey, grow up, people!!

There's nothing "customary" about firing a slate of U.S. attorneys during the middle of a president's time in office. While Bill Clinton asked for the resignations of all sitting U.S. attorneys when he first took office, it's not at all typical for presidents to remove U.S. attorneys in the middle of their presidencies. As former Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson acknowledged in a January 2006 memo to Harriet Miers, the last two-term presidents -- Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton -- "did not seek to remove and replace U.S. attorneys they had appointed whose four-year terms had expired, but instead permitted such U.S. attorneys to serve indefinitely under the [U.S. Code's] holdover provision."

okie wrote:

It has been common for every administration. Sheesh, where have you been, blatham? Now it is suddenly a crime to be a politician? If you are a Republican, that is. It is I am sure very legal to be a Democrat. It may become mandatory the way things are going.

Hey, grow up, people!!

Suddenly? It is suddenly a crime to remove people from their positions and replace them? Oh, that's right you said it was just fine for Clinton to remove people in the travel office. You did say that, didn't you?

When Dale was confronted during the audit about some of the missing petty cash, he produced nearly $2,800 in cash the following day, which he claimed to have found in an envelope in his desk. (Curiously, he had withdrawn $2,500 in cash from a personal account the same day the auditors began to ask about the petty cash.) It was the surprise appearance of the envelope of cash that, according to congressional testimony, got the FBIinvestigation going in earnest. Dale's trial, replete with evidence of mismanagement and worse -- including his diversion of $54,000 in refund checks to his own account in a bank near his home in Maryland -- received little attention other than in The Washington Post, which provided regular reporting about it, although there was a spate of stories on his acquittal. The jury appears to have been persuaded by Dale's insistence that he did not spend the money on anything but legitimate expenses, although the records to prove this were missing. While the verdict established his innocence of any crime, widespread reporting of the facts presented in the prosecution's case might have diminished his status as a beleaguered hero.

Parados, I confess I am not familiar with travelgate anymore. It was so long ago. I do not recall the things you purport to have happened. And I don't feel like researching it now to verify what you claim.

If the Clintons did it to clear out corruption, then they should have cleared themselves out and went back to Arkansas.

By the way, how come Congress never gets called on the carpet for lying to the president?

Parados, the popularity of Congress is not that hot, for good reason.

Parados, I confess I am not familiar with travelgate anymore. It was so long ago. I do not recall the things you purport to have happened. And I don't feel like researching it now to verify what you claim.

If the Clintons did it to clear out corruption, then they should have cleared themselves out and went back to Arkansas.

By the way, how come Congress never gets called on the carpet for lying to the president?

Parados, the popularity of Congress is not that hot, for good reason.

Our ongoing study of the Bush Justice Department (to be published in 2008) investigates the implications of the Bush/Ashcroft/Gonzales Justice Department's blended religious -fundamentalist and neo-conservative rhetorical vision. The study views the impact of the Justice Department's vision on the fight against public corruption and reveals the non-proportionate political profiling of elected Democratic officials.

We presented the preliminary data through August 2004 at the Southern Speech Communication Annual meeting in April 2005 in Baton Rouge and as a refereed panel paper with data through December 2004 at the November 2005 annual meeting of the National Communication Association.
We compare political profiling to racial profiling by presenting the results (January 2001 through December 2006) of the U.S. Attorneys' federal investigation and/or indictment of 375 elected officials. The distribution of party affiliation of the sample is compared to the available normative data (50% Dem, 41% GOP, and 9% Ind.).
Data* indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.
Our paper explores the role of the fourth estate and others in detecting such profiling and concludes that what is really needed is transparency, the highlights of which are noted below.

New unreleased e-mails from top administration officials show that the idea of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys was raised by White House adviser Karl Rove in early January 2005, indicating Rove was more involved in the plan than the White House previously acknowledged.

Congressman Dana Rohrbacher became the latest Republican to say Gonzales should go, reports CBS News White House correspondent Jim Axelrod.

"For the Justice Department to be effective before the U.S. Senate, it would be helpful" if Gonzales resigned.
-Senator Gordon Smith, R-OR