Gonzales must resign now. "Mistakes were made."

Quote:

House Democrats Seek to Question Gonzales Aide About Fired Prosecutors

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 4, 2007; Page A03

House Democrats requested yesterday an interview of an aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, arguing that she must tell Congress which questions she is refusing to answer in asserting her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The request for a voluntary interview with Monica M. Goodling, Gonzales's senior counselor, signals that Democrats intend to challenge her refusal to testify about the Justice Department's firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

Goodling, who is on indefinite leave from Justice, has said that she will refuse to answer questions from the House or Senate judiciary committees, because Democrats have already made up their minds on the matter. She said she faces "a perilous environment in which to testify."

In a letter to Goodling yesterday, Reps. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), the House committee's chairman, and Linda T. Sanchez (D-Calif.) wrote that "several of the asserted grounds for refusing to testify do not satisfy the well-established" legal reasons for doing so and that submitting to an interview "could obviate the need to subpoena" her.

Goodling's attorney, John M. Dowd, accused the committee of attempting to use "threats or coercion" to force his client to cooperate.

"Threats of public humiliations for exercising her Fifth and Sixth amendment rights are not well taken and are frowned upon by the courts and the bar committee on ethics," Dowd said in a statement.

The fight over Goodling's cooperation comes as Gonzales prepares for testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee later this month. Democrats and some Republicans have called for Gonzales's resignation because of his department's shifting explanations for the U.S. attorney firings and the White House's role in them.

President Bush said yesterday that he is "genuinely concerned" about the former prosecutors' reputations but that there is "no credible evidence of any wrongdoing" in the dismissals.

"I'm sorry it's come to this," Bush said.

Link to Washington Post Article

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And, from Slate:

Quote:

Gonzo-Meter
Al wants to hurry up and testify.
By Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, April 2, 2007, at 3:26 PM ET

Today's Chance of a Gonzales Departure: 86.5 percent.

The talk shows were not kind to Alberto Gonzales on Sunday. On Fox, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell ducked when asked if he continues to support the attorney general. "I can honestly say the president does," said McConnell, R-Ky. The best he could do was to back giving Gonzales a chance to testify before the Senate. We're holding the Gonzo-Meter steady and high at 86.5.

That's not in dispute; the attorney general's appearance is scheduled for April 17. But his bid to testify sooner?-as the White House called for this weekend in Dan Barlett's appearance on ABC?-is going nowhere, said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who chairs the Senate judiciary committee. The Democrats in Congress are busy "interrogating" several other Department of Justice officials, Leahy explained on NBC. Those interviews are taking place privately. But the deal that Congress struck with DoJ includes transcripts. So, the Democrats can tunnel into all the misstatements and inconsistencies that have come out of Justice during the last several weeks, pore over the transcripts, and then line up quotes to trip up Gonzales when he shows up in two weeks. He'll have to do some sharp and smooth talking, which hasn't exactly been his strength till now.

You would think the Bush administration would want to put its attorney general and itself out of this misery. You'd think they want to stanch the flow of stories like this one on Sunday in the Washington Post. Amy Goldstein and Dan Eggen report that of four dozen U.S. attorney slots that have opened up because of attrition and dismissals since the 2004 election, one-third have gone to "trusted administration insiders," including "10 senior aides" to Gonzales. Some of the appointees have no experience as prosecutors or connection to the region they were sent to.

This is not the way U.S. attorneys have been chosen in previous administrations. And those administrations would have been embarrassed by such stories. But apparently not this one. The Bush administration truly seems to think it's special.

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Firing of US Attorney may have violated discrimination law Mike Sheehan
Published: Wednesday April 4, 2007
A fired U.S. Attorney is "striking back" at the Bush administration for what he feels is his improper dismissal, Newsweek reports.

"The Justice Department called David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, an 'absentee landlord' -- a key reason listed for his firing last December," write Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball for Newsweek. "Just one problem: Iglesias, a captain in the Navy Reserve, was off teaching classes as part of the war on terror."

The explanation used by aides to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for the firing of Iglesias -- that, among other things, he "was spending too much time away from the office" -- may be a further complication in the embattled Gonzales' struggle for self-preservation.

According to Newsweek, Iglesias confirmed "that he was recently questioned by lawyers for the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal watchdog agency, to determine if his dismissal was a violation" of a federal law (USERRA) barring workplace discrimination against U.S. military servicemembers.

Iglesias is filing a formal legal complaint with the agency over his termination by Justice, report Isikoff and Hosenball.

"I want to make sure they didn't fire me because of my military duty," Iglesias told Newsweek. "When I was away from the office, it wasn't like I was going on vacation in Europe."

Excerpts from the Newsweek article, available in full at this link, follow...
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Firing_of_US_Attorney_may_have_0404.html

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3 U.S. Attorney's Lawyers Resign Posts
3 U.S. Attorney's Lawyers Resign Posts
PATRICK CONDON - AP
April 6, 2007

MINNEAPOLIS ?- Three lawyers in the U.S. Attorney's office in Minneapolis resigned their management posts, moves that gained national attention against the backdrop of claims top federal prosecutors elsewhere were fired for political reasons.

U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose confirmed Friday that John Marti, a first assistant U.S. attorney, Erika Mozangue, head of the office's civil division, and James Lackner, who heads the office's criminal division, have decided to "go back to the line to be full-time prosecutors."

She did not say why the three stepped down and indicated that she would have no further public comment. "We have work to do," her statement said.

John Kelly, deputy director of the Justice Department's executive office of U.S. Attorneys, visited Minneapolis on Thursday to try to resolve the situation, according to two aides in Washington who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. The prosecutors stepped down after Kelly's visit.

The Justice aides said it is not uncommon for the office, which oversees all 94 U.S. attorneys' districts nationwide, to make such visits to handle personnel issues.

Paulose, 34, replaced former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger after he resigned in early 2006. Before her appointment, she had served as senior counsel to U.S. Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and special assistant to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

The three resignations come as Congress investigates the U.S. Justice Department's firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year and whether the moves were politically motivated. Its findings so far have torpedoed morale at Justice Department headquarters in Washington and in U.S. attorneys' offices nationwide.

Democrats and some Republicans have called on Gonzales to resign for the botched way the firings were handled and described to Congress. On Friday, a top aide to Gonzales, Monica M. Goodling, abrubtly quit, and said she would not testify about her role in the firings of federal prosecutors.

New York Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat and harsh critic of Gonzales, said the moves in Minnesota were an example of federal prosecutors being "deprofessionalized."

"We wonder in how many other offices the same lack of confidence is taking its toll," Schumer said.

Heffelfinger was not among the eight fired U.S. attorneys and has said he left of his own accord. However, Paulose was one of 15 federal prosecutors appointed after Congress changed the USA Patriot Act to let the Justice Department fill vacant U.S. attorney jobs without judicial review. She was confirmed by the Senate in December 2006.

In a statement Friday, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse described Paulose as "dedicated to leading an effective U.S. Attorney's office in Minnesota and enforcing the laws to ensure public safety."

"Three managers have determined to go back to the line to be full-time prosecutors protecting the community they serve and the department respects their decisions," Roehrkasse said. "We are confident during this transition period that the U.S. Attorney's office will remain focused on its law enforcement priorities."

Marti, Mozangue and Lackner did not immediately return phone messages Friday.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press, citing sources it said did not want to be identified discussing staffing changes, reported that the three were unhappy with Paulose's management style.

Tim Anderson, a non-attorney who had been acting office administrator, also left his management role, the Minneapolis office confirmed. He declined to comment to the AP on Friday.
--------------------------------------

Associated Press writer Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington contributed to this report.

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The following is an excerpt from a new article on Justice in opednews.com. What is happening at Justice is nothing more than what Bush is doing to the federal government in general. He continues to appoint heads of agencies who are anti-government. This is similar to appointing the fox to run the chicken coop.

"There's more to this than meets the eye. The justice department is being stacked with extreme right wing, underskilled, partisan media theater types who are taking American Justice down an anti-immigrant, theocon road that will lead to weaker protections for the most vulnerable in society, while taking the heat off of corporate perpetrators and wealthy landlords.

Is the Minneapolis case part of the bigger attorneygate? That's something that congressional hearings should and will explore. Even if it is not clearly shown, this look inside the Bush/Gonzales justice department is ugly and shows the further deteriorization of government-- a problem that has become systemic, throughout, it seems, all levels of national government infrastructure. The brazen insertion of underskilled, incompetent partisans is weakening America and putting the nation at risk. When Grover Norquist said he wanted to starve government so it was so small he could drown it in a bathtub, we did not have the intimations that government would also be poisoned by toxic, incompetent managers as well. I guess it's easier to kill a weakened creature, and that's what the right wing leadership, under Bush is perpetrating.

As long as Bush is in charge, this will continue, as evidenced by the three interim appointments he made this week of people the congress had already rejected."

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Who's the Boss?
How Pat Robertson's law school is changing America.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Saturday, April 7, 2007, at 6:52 AM ET

Monica Goodling has a problem. As senior counsel to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Justice Department liaison to the White House, Goodling no longer seems to know what the truth is. She must also be increasingly unclear about who her superiors are. This didn't used to be a problem for Goodling, now on indefinite leave from the DoJ. Everything was once very certain: Her boss's truth was always the same as God's truth. Her boss was always either God or one of His staffers.

This week, through counsel, Goodling again refused to testify about her role in the firings of several U.S. attorneys for what appear to be partisan reasons. Asserting her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, Goodling somehow felt she may be on the hook for criminal obstruction. But it was never clear whose truths she was protecting or even whose law seems to have tripped her up. She resigned abruptly Friday evening without explanation.

Goodling is an improbable character for a political scandal. She's the mirror opposite of that other Monica?-the silly, saucy minx who felled Bill Clinton. A 1995 graduate of an evangelical Christian school, Messiah College, and a 1999 graduate of Pat Robertson's Regent University School of Law (This seems to be her Web page), Goodling's chief claim to professional fame appears to have been loyalty to the president and to the process of reshaping the Justice Department in his image (and thus, His image). A former career official there told the Washington Post that Goodling "forced many very talented, career people out of main Justice so she could replace them with junior people that were either loyal to the administration or would score her some points." And as she rose at Justice, according to a former classmate, Goodling "developed a very positive reputation for people coming from Christian schools into Washington looking for employment in government."

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Start digging, and Goodling also looks to be the Forrest Gump of no comments: Here she is in 1997, fielding calls from reporters to Regent's School of Government admissions office. Asked whether non-Christians were admitted, she explained that "we admit all students without discrimination. We are a Christian institution; it is assumed that everyone in the classes are Christians." Here, in 2004, she's answering phones at the Justice Department about whether then-Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement knew about the abuses at Abu Ghraib when he told the Supreme Court that the United States does not torture. Said Goodling, in lieu of taking the Fifth: "We wouldn't have any comment." (Jenny Martinez, who argued against Clement that day at the court, suggested to Salon's Tim Grieve: "When Mr. Clement said to the court that we wouldn't engage in that kind of behavior, either he was deliberately misleading the court or he was completely out of the loop." Sound familiar?)

Goodling is only one of 150 graduates of Regent University currently serving in this administration, as Regent's Web site proclaims proudly, a huge number for a 29-year-old school. Regent estimates that "approximately one out of every six Regent alumni is employed in some form of government work." And that's precisely what its founder desired. The school's motto is "Christian Leadership To Change the World," and the world seems to be changing apace. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft teaches at Regent, and graduates have achieved senior positions in the Bush administration. The express goal is not only to tear down the wall between church and state in America (a "lie of the left," according to Robertson) but also to enmesh the two.

The law school's dean, Jeffrey A. Brauch, urges in his "vision" statement that students reflect upon "the critical role the Christian faith should play in our legal system." Jason Eige ('99), senior assistant to Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell, puts it pithily in the alumni newsletter, Regent Remark: "Your Résumé Is God's Instrument."

This legal worldview meshed perfectly with that of former Attorney General John Ashcroft?-a devout Pentecostal who forbade use of the word "pride," as well as the phrase ."no higher calling than public service," on documents bearing his signature. (He also snatched the last bit of fun out of his press conferences when he covered up the bared breasts of the DoJ statue the "Spirit of Justice"). No surprise that, as he launched a transformation of the Justice Department, the Goodlings looked good to him.

One of Ashcroft's most profound changes was to the Civil Rights Division, launched in 1957 to file cases on behalf of African-Americans and women. Under Ashcroft, career lawyers were systematically fired or forced out and replaced by members of conservative or Christian groups or folks with no civil rights experience. LINKIn the five years after 2001, the civil rights division brought no voting cases on behalf of African-Americans. It brought one employment case on behalf of an African-American. Instead, the division took up the "civil rights" abuses of reverse discrimination?-claims of voter fraud or discrimination against Christians. On Feb. 20, Gonzales announced a new initiative called the First Freedom Project to carry out "even greater enforcement of religious rights for all Americans." In his view, the fight for a student's right to read a Bible at school is as urgent a civil rights problem as the right to vote.

We may agree or disagree on that proposition, but it certainly explains how Goodling came to confuse working to advance Gonzales' agenda with working to advance God's. But while God may well want more prayer in the public schools, it's not clear He wanted David Iglesias fired on a pretext. In an excellent 2005 article about Regent in the American Prospect Online, Christopher Hayes points out that more than two-thirds of the students at Regent identified as Republicans, and only 9 percent identified as Democrats. As he concludes, "what students are taught at a place like Regent, or even Calvin and Wheaton, is to live out a Christ-centered existence in all facets of their lives. But what they learn is to become Republicans."

Is there anything wrong with legal scholarship from a Christian perspective? Not that I see. Is there anything wrong with a Bush administration that disproportionately uses graduates from such Christian law schools to fill its staffing needs? Not that I see. It's a shorthand, not better or worse than cherry-picking the Federalist Society or the bar association. I can't even get exercised over the fact that Gonzales, Rove, and Miers had their baby lawyers making critical staffing decisions for them. The babybaby lawyers had extremely clear marching orders.

No, the real concern here is that Goodling and her ilk somehow began to conflate God's work with the president's. Probably not a lesson she learned in law school. The dream of Regent and its counterparts, like Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, is to redress perceived wrongs to Christians, to reclaim the public square, and reassert Christian political authority. And while that may have been a part of the Bush/Rove plan, it was, in the end, only a small part. Their real zeal was for earthly power. And Goodling was left holding the earthly bag.

At the end of the day, Goodling and the other young foot soldiers for God may simply have run afoul of the first rule of politics, codified in Psalm 146: "Put no trust in princes, in mere mortals in whom there is no help."

A version of this article also appears in the Outlook section of the Sunday Washington Post.

Joe(makes you sick, doesn't it?)Nation

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Joe
Joe, thanks for that.

BBB

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WASHINGTON - Joining a growing list of Republicans, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Sunday that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should consider resigning. The possible presidential candidate said the botched firing of U.S. attorneys has destroyed Gonzales' credibility as the nation's top law enforcer.

"I think the country, in fact, would be much better served to have a new team at the Justice Department, across the board," Gingrich said. "I cannot imagine how he is going to be effective for the rest of this administration. ... They're going to be involved in endless hearings."

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Joe, I also thank you for that enlightening piece. The situation at Justice is worse than I thought.

This is a real pity, because Justice use to be, in general, the height of professionalism. Its young attorneys were usually the honors grads of the top law schools, who did a great job in representing the interests of the country. I gather that this has changed, and that the present focus is on representing the interests of Bush and the Republicans.

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Gonzales aides frustrated with his poor performance
Gonzales Crams for a Senate Grilling
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
April 16, 2007 issue

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has virtually wiped his public schedule clean to bone up for his long-awaited April 17 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee?-a session widely seen as a crucial test as to whether he will survive the U.S. attorney mess. But even his own closest advisers are nervous about whether he is up to the task.

At a recent "prep" for a prospective Sunday talk-show interview, Gonzales's performance was so poor that top aides scrapped any live appearances. During the March 23 session in the A.G.'s conference room, Gonzales was grilled by a team of top aides and advisers?-including former Republican National Committee chair Ed Gillespie and former White House lawyer Tim Flanigan?-about what he knew about the plan to fire seven U.S. attorneys last fall. But Gonzales kept contradicting himself and "getting his timeline confused," said one participant who asked not to be identified talking about a private meeting. His advisers finally got "exasperated" with him, the source added. "He's not ready," Tasia Scolinos, Gonzales's public-affairs chief, told the A.G.'s top aides after the session was over, said the source. Asked for comment, Scolinos told NEWSWEEK: "This was the first session of this kind that we'd done."

One problem is that Gonzales is increasingly isolated. Top DOJ lawyers have decreed he can't talk about the U.S. attorney firings with Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and his staff, who are key witnesses in an internal Justice inquiry into whether DOJ officials misled Congress. (Any consultation could be viewed as an attempt to "coordinate" their stories.)

With his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, forced to resign, Gonzales has no trusted aide who both knows the facts about the firings and has political skills, according to a top DOJ official who asked not to be named talking about internal matters. Courtney Elwood, a former deputy to Dick Cheney's chief counsel David Addington, who is now working for Gonzales, has taken on a bigger role, shutting down responses to most inquiries from Congress and the news media because she views the firings flap as a purely "legal" issue.

"There's nobody quarterbacking this," said another frustrated administration official, who asked not to be identified for the same reasons. "The department is in a state of paralysis." But Gonzales remains determined to make his case. He is spending hours alone in his office, poring over documents and calling members of Congress; his staff is planning "murder board" sessions later this week where outsiders may be brought in to play the roles of Judiciary chair Sen. Patrick Leahy or Sen. Chuck Schumer. Gonzales is likely to start out next week's hearing with a more expansive mea culpa. "The attorney general definitely regrets how this situation has been handled," said Scolinos. "But he firmly believes that nothing improper was done."

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17995971/site/newsweek/

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This whole thing could be cleared up with just one sentence by President Bush...
"All of the fired US attorneys were fired at my direction".

That would end the whole matter,because the President does not have to have a reason to fire somebody.
Every attorney serves at the "pleasure of the President".
If he isnt pleased,they get fired.

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A major issue here is what was done by the US Attorneys who were not fired. Here is a comment by Paul Krugman on this point.

There's a lot of talk now about a case in Wisconsin, where the
Bush-appointed U.S. attorney prosecuted the state's purchasing
supervisor over charges that a court recently dismissed after just 26
minutes of oral testimony, with one judge calling the evidence "beyond
thin." But by then the accusations had done their job: the unjustly
accused official had served almost four months in prison, and the case
figured prominently in attack ads alleging corruption in the Democratic
governor's administration.

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mysteryman wrote:

This whole thing could be cleared up with just one sentence by President Bush...
"All of the fired US attorneys were fired at my direction".

That would end the whole matter,because the President does not have to have a reason to fire somebody.
Every attorney serves at the "pleasure of the President".
If he isnt pleased,they get fired.

No, that wouldn't have cleared it up. The DoJ said the WH had nothing to do with the firings. It only would have pointed out the lies told by DoJ officials. The same lies that are being investigated now.

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Mysteryman wrote:

Quote:

This whole thing could be cleared up with just one sentence by President Bush...
"All of the fired US attorneys were fired at my direction".

That would end the whole matter,because the President does not have to have a reason to fire somebody.
Every attorney serves at the "pleasure of the President".
If he isnt pleased,they get fired.

I always like it when Mysteryman posts something. It's an indication to me of the kind of thinking that has brought this nation very close to being an authoritarian dictatorship.

Americans, for over two hundred years, have usually been pretty fierce about learning and understanding the reasons behind their president 's actions. That's usually why presidents end up with their mug on tv reading the citizens a speech or you see him standing up at a news conference answering questions. The folks like Mysteryman don't want anybody questioning the president. They want him unfettered and unbound. They would like to have a dictator for a president so that they wouldn't have to do any thinking or questioning themselves.

One of the founding fathers, I forget which one, bemoaned the "lazy patriots", the ones who supposedly were part of this democracy but who would rather not be bothered as to the how and why their government proceeded. Bush's backers are the new generation of their ilk.

--------
Oh, and remember I keep saying this is NOT about who got fired which is/was bad enough, it's about who kept their jobs and why. Here's the rest of Krugman from yesterday. Read it and call your Senator.

April 9, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Sweet Little Lies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Four years into a war fought to eliminate a nonexistent threat, we all have renewed appreciation for the power of the Big Lie: people tend to believe false official claims about big issues, because they can't picture their leaders being dishonest about such things.

But there's another political lesson I don't think has sunk in: the power of the Little Lie ?- the small accusation invented out of thin air, followed by another, and another, and another. Little Lies aren't meant to have staying power. Instead, they create a sort of background hum, a sense that the person facing all these accusations must have done something wrong.

For a long time, basically from 9/11 until the last remnants of President Bush's credibility drowned in New Orleans, the Bush administration was able to go big on its deceptions. Most people found it inconceivable that an American president would, for example, assert without evidence that Saddam and Al Qaeda were allies. Mr. Bush won the 2004 election because a quorum of voters still couldn't believe he would grossly mislead them on matters of national security.

Before 9/11, however, the right-wing noise machine mainly relied on little lies. And now it has returned to its roots.

The Clinton years were a parade of fake scandals: Whitewater, Troopergate, Travelgate, Filegate, Christmas-card-gate. At the end, there were false claims that Clinton staff members trashed the White House on their way out.

Each pseudoscandal got headlines, air time and finger-wagging from the talking heads. The eventual discovery in each case that there was no there there, if reported at all, received far less attention. The effect was to make an administration that was, in fact, pretty honest and well run ?- especially compared with its successor ?- seem mired in scandal.

Even in the post-9/11 environment, little lies never went away. In particular, promoting little lies seems to have been one of the main things U.S. attorneys, as loyal Bushies, were expected to do. For example, David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, appears to have been fired because he wouldn't bring unwarranted charges of voter fraud.

There's a lot of talk now about a case in Wisconsin, where the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney prosecuted the state's purchasing supervisor over charges that a court recently dismissed after just 26 minutes of oral testimony, with one judge calling the evidence "beyond thin." But by then the accusations had done their job: the unjustly accused official had served almost four months in prison, and the case figured prominently in attack ads alleging corruption in the Democratic governor's administration.

This is the context in which you need to see the wild swings Republicans have been taking at Nancy Pelosi.

First, there were claims that the speaker of the House had demanded a lavish plane for her trips back to California. One Republican leader denounced her "arrogance of extravagance" ?- then, when it became clear that the whole story was bogus, admitted that he had never had any evidence.

Now there's Ms. Pelosi's fact-finding trip to Syria, which Dick Cheney denounced as "bad behavior" ?- unlike the visit to Syria by three Republican congressmen a few days earlier, or Newt Gingrich's trip to China when he was speaker.

Ms. Pelosi has responded coolly, dismissing the administration's reaction as a "tantrum." But it's more than that: the hysterical reaction to her trip is part of a political strategy, aided and abetted by news organizations that give little lies their time in the sun.

Fox News, which is a partisan operation in all but name, plays a crucial role in the Little Lie strategy ?- which is why there is growing pressure on Democratic politicians not to do anything, like participating in Fox-hosted debates, that helps Fox impersonate a legitimate news organization.

But Fox has had plenty of help. Even Time's Joe Klein, a media insider if anyone is, wrote of the Pelosi trip that "the media coverage of this on CNN and elsewhere has been abysmal." For example, CNN ran a segment about Ms. Pelosi's trip titled "Talking to Terrorists."

The G.O.P.'s reversion to the Little Lie technique is a symptom of political weakness, of a party reduced to trivial smears because it has nothing else to offer. But the technique will remain effective ?- and the U.S. political scene will remain ugly ?- as long as many people in the news media keep playing along.

Joe(And send a copy of this to all the major media and ask what do they think?)Nation

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GOP activist: There is concern about what may be in these e-mails RAW STORY
Published: Monday April 9, 2007

A "back-channel e-mail and paging system" used by Republican operatives has become a White House "headache" now that Democrats are demanding answers, according to a report in Monday's LA Times.
damn voters
_________________
"A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be...surer of the noose than a private homicide"
- H. G. Wells

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blueflame
Polykiloposter

Joined: 27 Aug 2004
Posts: 16773
Location: key west
Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2007 10:15 am Post subject:

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Six US Attorneys pull 'double duty' in DC; Some serve as Gonzales aides RAW STORY
Published: Tuesday April 10, 2007

Six US Attorneys pull "double duty" in Washington, DC, with some serving as aides to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, which "take them away from regular duties in their districts for months or even years at a time, according to officials and department records," an article in Tuesday's Washington Post reports.

"Acting Associate Attorney General William W. Mercer, for example, has been effectively absent from his job as U.S. attorney in Montana for nearly two years -- prompting the chief federal judge in Billings to demand his removal and call Mercer's office 'a mess,'" Dan Eggen writes. "Another U.S. attorney, Michael J. Sullivan of Boston, has been in Washington for the past six months as acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He is awaiting confirmation to head the agency permanently while still juggling his responsibilities in Massachusetts."

Eggan continues, "The number of U.S. attorneys pulling double duty in Washington is the focus of growing concern from other prosecutors and from members of the federal bench, according to legal experts and government officials. The growing reliance on federal prosecutors to fill Washington-based jobs also comes amid controversy over the firings of eight other U.S. attorneys last year. One of them, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, was publicly accused by the Justice Department of being an 'absentee landlord' who was away from his job too much."

Along with Mercer and Sullivan, the paper also singles out Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who headed up the CIA leak probe; Mary Beth Buchanan from the Western District of Pennsylvania, who also serves as the acting director of the Office of Violence Against Women; Connecticut's Kevin J. O'Connor, who has served as associate deputy attorney general since December 2006; and Chuck Rosenberg from the Eastern District of Virginia, freshly promoted to Gonzales' Chief of staff.

Excerpts from article:
link

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House panel subpoenas Gonzales

Quote:

WASHINGTON - The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed new documents Tuesday from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as part of its investigation into the firings of federal prosecutors, with panel chairman saying he had run out of patience.

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Newt comes out against Al, and more bad news for the attorney general.
By Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Monday, April 9, 2007, at 2:04 PM ET
Today's Chance of a Gonzales Departure: 86 percent
(Previously: 83 percent)

Newt Gingrich thinks Alberto Gonzales should resign. "I cannot imagine how he is going to be effective for the rest of this administration," he said over the weekend. You'd think that, having called Spanish the "language of living in the ghetto," Gingrich might be sufficiently worried about the Hispanic vote to have the attorney general's back. Instead, he's jumped onto the short but growing list of Republicans who have come out against Gonzales and Bush. Not a good sign. Nor is the sudden resignation on Friday of former Gonzales aide Monica "I take the Fifth" Goodling. We move the meter back up to 86.

We also don't like Gonzales' chances because having reconfigured his entire schedule to attend his prep sessions, he now looks to be screwing them up. According to Newsweek, his aides aren't letting him go on TV because at internal questioning sessions, he contradicts himself and gets mixed up about the timeline of events leading up to the U.S. attorney dismissals. To boot, because of DoJ's internal ethics investigation into the matter, Gonzales can't talk to his deputy, Paul McNulty, about who did what when. So he's holed up by himself, with nary a public event scheduled, spending hours going over documents. Newt is right: This isn't the way to honcho national law enforcement.

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Meanwhile, the Pandora's box of the DoJ scandal seems to have no bottom. The department at first said that former New Mexico U.S. attorney David Iglesias was fired in part for "absentee landlordism" because he had to travel to fulfill his commitments as a reserve officer in the military. But it's illegal to discriminate on the job against members of the military, so now a federal agency is investigating.

Before their dismissals, Iglesias and fired Washington State prosecutor John McKay refused to indict Democrats on what they viewed as unsupportable corruption charges. In Wisconsin, U.S. attorney Steve Bikuspic may have been more accommodating. Before the 2004 election, he went after state employee Georgia Thompson for awarding a contract to a contributor to the campaign of her boss, Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle. Thompson was sent to jail. Republicans cried corruption and made great hay with the Thompson charges in campaign advertising. Doyle won anyway. When Thompson appealed her conviction, judges on the Seventh Circuit last week sprung her from prison, immediately after oral argument and even before issuing a ruling. One of the judges on the panel accused the government of relying on evidence that was "beyond thin." Is this really the grist the Bush administration wants to give liberal editorial pages?

And in other bad news for the Justice Department, it appears that three of the top deputies in Minnesota were less than delighted with their new boss, Rachel Paulose. They stepped down on Friday, allegedly over differences with the new U.S. attorney, who is (a) 34, (b) a former aide to Paul McNulty, and (c) was given an interim U.S. attorney gig last year.

Somehow, none of this damage seems to be enough to push Gonzales out before he testifies to Congress on April 17. If he's smart, he'll use his day to make a fuller apology. But then what?-how do you inspire confidence about such an utterly un-confidence-inspiring series of events?

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What word to describe that deer-in-headlights situation Gonzales has found himself in? "Quaint", I think.

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Joe Nation wrote:

Mysteryman wrote:

Quote:
This whole thing could be cleared up with just one sentence by President Bush...
"All of the fired US attorneys were fired at my direction".

That would end the whole matter,because the President does not have to have a reason to fire somebody.
Every attorney serves at the "pleasure of the President".
If he isnt pleased,they get fired.

I always like it when Mysteryman posts something. It's an indication to me of the kind of thinking that has brought this nation very close to being an authoritarian dictatorship.

Americans, for over two hundred years, have usually been pretty fierce about learning and understanding the reasons behind their president 's actions. That's usually why presidents end up with their mug on tv reading the citizens a speech or you see him standing up at a news conference answering questions. The folks like Mysteryman don't want anybody questioning the president. They want him unfettered and unbound. They would like to have a dictator for a president so that they wouldn't have to do any thinking or questioning themselves.

One of the founding fathers, I forget which one, bemoaned the "lazy patriots", the ones who supposedly were part of this democracy but who would rather not be bothered as to the how and why their government proceeded. Bush's backers are the new generation of their ilk.

--------
Oh, and remember I keep saying this is NOT about who got fired which is/was bad enough, it's about who kept their jobs and why. Here's the rest of Krugman from yesterday. Read it and call your Senator.

April 9, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Sweet Little Lies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Four years into a war fought to eliminate a nonexistent threat, we all have renewed appreciation for the power of the Big Lie: people tend to believe false official claims about big issues, because they can't picture their leaders being dishonest about such things.

But there's another political lesson I don't think has sunk in: the power of the Little Lie ?- the small accusation invented out of thin air, followed by another, and another, and another. Little Lies aren't meant to have staying power. Instead, they create a sort of background hum, a sense that the person facing all these accusations must have done something wrong.

For a long time, basically from 9/11 until the last remnants of President Bush's credibility drowned in New Orleans, the Bush administration was able to go big on its deceptions. Most people found it inconceivable that an American president would, for example, assert without evidence that Saddam and Al Qaeda were allies. Mr. Bush won the 2004 election because a quorum of voters still couldn't believe he would grossly mislead them on matters of national security.

Before 9/11, however, the right-wing noise machine mainly relied on little lies. And now it has returned to its roots.

The Clinton years were a parade of fake scandals: Whitewater, Troopergate, Travelgate, Filegate, Christmas-card-gate. At the end, there were false claims that Clinton staff members trashed the White House on their way out.

Each pseudoscandal got headlines, air time and finger-wagging from the talking heads. The eventual discovery in each case that there was no there there, if reported at all, received far less attention. The effect was to make an administration that was, in fact, pretty honest and well run ?- especially compared with its successor ?- seem mired in scandal.

Even in the post-9/11 environment, little lies never went away. In particular, promoting little lies seems to have been one of the main things U.S. attorneys, as loyal Bushies, were expected to do. For example, David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, appears to have been fired because he wouldn't bring unwarranted charges of voter fraud.

There's a lot of talk now about a case in Wisconsin, where the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney prosecuted the state's purchasing supervisor over charges that a court recently dismissed after just 26 minutes of oral testimony, with one judge calling the evidence "beyond thin." But by then the accusations had done their job: the unjustly accused official had served almost four months in prison, and the case figured prominently in attack ads alleging corruption in the Democratic governor's administration.

This is the context in which you need to see the wild swings Republicans have been taking at Nancy Pelosi.

First, there were claims that the speaker of the House had demanded a lavish plane for her trips back to California. One Republican leader denounced her "arrogance of extravagance" ?- then, when it became clear that the whole story was bogus, admitted that he had never had any evidence.

Now there's Ms. Pelosi's fact-finding trip to Syria, which Dick Cheney denounced as "bad behavior" ?- unlike the visit to Syria by three Republican congressmen a few days earlier, or Newt Gingrich's trip to China when he was speaker.

Ms. Pelosi has responded coolly, dismissing the administration's reaction as a "tantrum." But it's more than that: the hysterical reaction to her trip is part of a political strategy, aided and abetted by news organizations that give little lies their time in the sun.

Fox News, which is a partisan operation in all but name, plays a crucial role in the Little Lie strategy ?- which is why there is growing pressure on Democratic politicians not to do anything, like participating in Fox-hosted debates, that helps Fox impersonate a legitimate news organization.

But Fox has had plenty of help. Even Time's Joe Klein, a media insider if anyone is, wrote of the Pelosi trip that "the media coverage of this on CNN and elsewhere has been abysmal." For example, CNN ran a segment about Ms. Pelosi's trip titled "Talking to Terrorists."

The G.O.P.'s reversion to the Little Lie technique is a symptom of political weakness, of a party reduced to trivial smears because it has nothing else to offer. But the technique will remain effective ?- and the U.S. political scene will remain ugly ?- as long as many people in the news media keep playing along.

Joe(And send a copy of this to all the major media and ask what do they think?)Nation

Please show me how mu post was authoritarian?
The President has the power to fire the US attorneys if he chosses.
EVERY President has had that power.
They do not have to explain their reasons for firing people.

So,you can question the President all you want,with my blessing.
But he doesnt have to explain why he fired someone,and nothing you can say will change that.

One thing I will point out though.
By demanding explanations from the President about why he fired someone,or by passing legislation blocking his authority to appoint or fire someone,you are also denying the next dem President the same authority.
Be careful what you wish for,you might get it.

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Quote:

Please show me how mu post was authoritarian?
The President has the power to fire the US attorneys if he chosses.
EVERY President has had that power.
They do not have to explain their reasons for firing people.

The president has to explain to the American people anything they ask.

You don't seem to realize that he is a servant.

Cycloptichorn

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Gonzales must resign now. "Mistakes were made."

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