Gonzales must resign now. "Mistakes were made."

Well, folks, wake up and smell the coffee! The GOP has been bull-dozing our government for the past six years, and the democrats are pansies when it comes to taking a position and holding it. The dems are still waffling on funding the Iraq war, and is being seen by both dems and independents as unreliable pursuers of ethics and justice. They seem afraid of their own power; rather than frontal challenge on Bush's "stay the course," they can't seem to make up their minds how and when to take action on "anything." The impeachment of Gonzales is not even on their radar screen.

Hopeless.

but more pushing from some sources:




Joe(call your Senators every day)Nation

Joe(posted a good one)Nation's last sentence says it all for me: "It is the duty of Congress to compel them and other officials to finally tell the truth to the American people."

That's exactly my point; congress hasn't been doing their jobs; it's broken - even the dem majority one.

It is hard to assign credibility to Justice investigating itself, especially considering that its head is possibly deeply involved in the matters being investigated.

CI, I think congress might do a lot more (e.g., regarding Iraq, the minimum wage, Medicare, stem cell, etc.) if the Reps in congress ceased to uphold Bush's vetoes. It is as simple as that.

So,Congress can do more if the repubs in Congress stop doing their jobs?

When the repubs controlled Congress,couldnt the same thing have been said about the dems?

CI complained that congress was not making progress. I simply explained why. The Reps have the right to do what they are doing. But, in my view, it is not good for the country.

Justice Official Says He Was Directed to Call Fired Prosecut
Justice Official Says He Was Directed to Call Fired Prosecutors
By Murray Waas
The National Journal
Thursday 03 May 2007

The chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty has told congressional investigators that phone calls he placed to four fired U.S. attorneys - calls that three of the prosecutors say involved threats about testifying before Congress - were made at McNulty's direction.

Michael Elston, the chief of staff, told congressional investigators in a closed-door session on March 30 that McNulty specifically instructed him to make the phone calls after the Justice Department's No. 2 official learned that the fired prosecutors might testify before Congress about their dismissals.

A transcript of Elston's confidential interview with the congressional investigators was made available to National Journal.

The U.S. attorneys have said that Elston, in effect, told them that if they kept quiet about their dismissals, the Justice Department would not suggest that they had been forced to resign because of poor performance.

At least one member of Congress has questioned whether the phone calls might constitute obstruction of justice.

In his interview with congressional investigators, Elston adamantly denied that he ever tried to discourage the prosecutors from testifying before Congress. He said that he was directed by McNulty to tell the fired U.S. attorneys that the Department of Justice did not have a formal position as to whether they should testify.

At least one member of Congress has questioned whether the phone calls might constitute obstruction of justice.

Elston said that McNulty directed him to place calls to fired U.S. attorneys Paul Charlton of Arizona, Bud Cummins of Arkansas, and John McKay of Seattle, all of whom said they felt pressured to keep quiet. Elston also placed a call to federal prosecutor Kevin Ryan of San Francisco, as directed, but did not speak to him. The calls were placed between January and March of this year - before details about the political motivations for the firings became public.

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee made public formal correspondence from three fired prosecutors who said they thought that Elston was trying to intimidate them into keeping quiet.

In an interview with National Journal, McKay, reacting to Elston's disclosure that McNulty directed him to make the calls, said, "Because [Elston] was the chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, I always assumed that the phone call was authorized and directed by the DAG. If Elston is telling the truth, it is all the more troubling."

McKay, who was the first of the prosecutors whom Elston called, described Elston's message to him: "The attorney general was not going to disclose that I or the other U.S. attorneys were fired or forced to resign.... 'We have no intention of naming people.'"

McKay said that Elston never specifically suggested an explicit quid pro quo whereby Justice officials would not say that McKay had been fired for cause or poor performance if McKay did not talk to the media or Congress about his firing. However, McKay said, "a reasonable person would have felt both offended and threatened" by Elston's call.

McKay said that the message he took away from the conversation was, "If you remain silent, we will not out you as someone who was forced to resign."

McKay said that he made contemporaneous notes of his conversation with Elston, and dated them - something, he said, that was not his ordinary practice. He did so because of his concerns about what Elston was telling him, according to McKay.

Charlton said he got a similar phone call from Elston on the same day. In formal response to written questions posed to him by the House Judiciary Committee, Charlton said, "I believe that Elston was offering me a quid pro quo agreement: my silence in exchange for the attorney general's."

Cummins testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 6, at which time a contemporaneous e-mail he wrote within an hour of his phone call with Elston was released. In the e-mail, which he sent to five of his fellow prosecutors, Cummins said that the "essence of [Elston's] message" was that if any of the fired U.S. attorneys had pressed their case in the media or before Congress, senior aides to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales might "feel forced to somehow pull their gloves off" and accuse the prosecutors of ineptitude or poor management.

Cummins also wrote in his e-mail that Elston had called him because he was upset about comments Cummins had made in the press about his firing. "[Justice officials] feel like they are taking unnecessary flak to avoid trashing each of us," Cummins said in the e-mail to his fellow prosecutors. "I also made it a point to tell him that all of us have turned down multiple invitations to testify. He reacted quite a bit to the idea of anyone voluntarily testifying, and it seemed clear that they would see this as a major escalation of the conflict meriting some kind of unspecified form of retaliation."

McKay, one of the prosecutors who got the e-mail, said: "[Cummins] wanted to send a message to all of us. We got that message, loud and clear: If you talk to the press or go to Congress, the Department of Justice will not consider you a friend. I considered it an act of intimidation."

In his interview with congressional investigators, Elston said that he called Cummins and the other U.S. attorneys "at the deputy attorney general's direction" and "to reassure them that the attorney general was not going to name names."

Elston said that McNulty only wanted him to tell Cummins that the department had no position on whether he should testify: "[McNulty] also told me to be very careful when I called Bud back and to make it very clear to him the Department of Justice had no position on whether he testified or not. And that he could testify if he wanted to, or not testify. It was entirely up to him.

"And that conversation sticks in my mind because the deputy attorney general was very earnest and being very careful. And having no experience on Capitol Hill... I followed his instruction."

Congressional investigators asked Elston about an e-mail in which Gonzales's then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, wrote to other Justice Department officials that he did not think it was a good idea for Cummins to testify. Elston also told investigators, "The deputy attorney general [McNulty], I think, concurred with that."

During the interview with investigators, Elston also said that in his February 20 phone call to Cummins it was the prosecutor who expressed a desire to remain loyal to the department and to not testify. "[Cummins] said a number of things, but one of them was, 'I still want to be on the team, and I don't have any hard feelings,'" Elston testified. "'I would like to be a federal judge someday, and I didn't think the Democrats are going to nominate me.'"

In an interview, Robert Driscoll, Elston's attorney, said that the U.S. attorneys might have been mistaken in their accounts of their phone calls with his client. "From the information I have seen, none of the fired U.S. attorneys quote Mike as making any type of explicit threats, and each one focuses more on their interpretation of the conversation than [on] what Mike actually said. Their interpretations appear in some instances to be unjustified, based on their own descriptions."

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse disp'ted the notion that Elston's phone calls to the fired prosecutors could have been viewed as an attempt to keep them from testifying before Congress. At the time the first phone calls were made in January, Roehrkasse said, the issue of the prosecutors' dismissals had attracted so little attention that it would have been highly unlikely that any of prosecutors would have thought that they might be called upon to appear before Congress.

The stakes are high for McNulty if key members of Congress or investigators believe that he directed Elston to discourage any of the U.S. attorneys from testifying.

At the March 6 Senate Judiciary hearing, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., asked Cummins and three others U.S. attorneys what they would have done in their capacity as federal prosecutors had they learned that an interested party in one of their investigations had tried to discourage a witness from providing information or testifying. All four said that they would have investigated the matter to determine a possible obstruction of justice.

"Mr. Cummins, let me ask you first. I'd like to ask you to put your U.S. attorney hat back on," Whitehouse said. "You're still in office, and think of a significant grand jury investigation that you led as United States attorney in your district. And consider that a significant witness in that grand jury investigation has just come into your office to relate to you that prior to his grand jury testimony he was approached about his testimony and [told]... essentially exactly the words that Mr. Elston approached you. What would your next step be as United States attorney?"

Cummins responded: "We take intimidation of witnesses very seriously in the Department of Justice and the U.S. attorney's office, so we would be very proactive in that situation."

Attempting to moderate his statement, he added: "I would qualify that by saying that at the time this discussion was had, we weren't under a subpoena; the idea of testifying was just kind of a theoretical idea out there. And I would say to the extent we talked about testimony at all, it was the idea that running out and volunteering to be part of this would not be viewed charitably by the people that it would affect."

Whitehouse pressed Cummins: "But if that sort of approach had been made to a witness in an active proceeding that you were leading, and you were extremely proactive about it, that would lead you where?"

"Well, we'd certainly investigate it and see if a crime had occurred."

"And the crime would be?"

Cummins responded: "Obstruction of justice. I think there are several statutes that might be implicated - but obstruction of justice."

Whitehouse posed the same question to John McKay, the fired U.S. attorney from Washington state.

McKay responded: "I would be discussing it with the assigned prosecutor and federal agents."

"With regard to?"

"With regard to possible obstruction of justice."

Whitehouse next put the question to David Iglesias, the fired U.S. attorney from New Mexico:

Iglesias replied: "Same answer, sir. I would contact the career [assistant U.S. attorney] and probably the FBI and talk about what's the evidence we have to maybe move forward on an obstruction investigation.

Finally, Whitehouse looked toward Carol Lam, the fired U.S. attorney from San Diego.

She answered without hesitation: "Fundamentally the same answer: witness intimidation."

BBB, Do you think the dem congress will do anything about this issue? I don't have much faith in them - yet.

Congress considers broadening Justice Department inquiry
Congress considers broadening Justice Department inquiry
By Greg Gordon and Margaret Talev
McClatchy Newspapers
Maay 6, 2007

WASHINGTON - Congressional investigators are beginning to focus on accusations that a top civil rights official at the Justice Department illegally hired lawyers based on their political affiliations, especially for sensitive voting rights jobs.

Two former department lawyers told McClatchy Newspapers that Bradley Schlozman, a senior civil rights official, told them in early 2005, after spotting mention of their Republican affiliations on their job applications, to delete those references and resubmit their resumes. Both attorneys were hired.

One of them, Ty Clevenger, said: "He wanted to make it look like it was apolitical."

Schlozman did not respond to phone calls to his home Sunday. But he denied the allegations in an earlier phone interview with McClatchy Newspapers and through a department spokesman. In the interview he said he "tried to de-politicize the hiring process" and filled jobs with applicants from "across the political spectrum."

Attention is turning to Schlozman after the announcement last week that the Justice Department opened an internal investigation to determine whether Monica Goodling, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' White House liaison, illegally took party affiliation into account in hiring entry-level prosecutors. The department's inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility are conducting that inquiry jointly.

Federal law and Justice Department policies bar the consideration of political affiliation in hiring of personnel for non-political, career jobs.

A congressional aide, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that the House and Senate Judiciary Committees want to look beyond Goodling to see whether other department officials may have skewed recruiting and hiring to favor Republican applicants. Investigators have heard allegations that Schlozman showed a political bias in hiring and hope the department will permit him to be interviewed voluntarily, the aide said.

Sen. Claire McCaskell, D-Mo., told National Public Radio last week that she wants to hear testimony from Schlozman because "more answers under oath need to be given."

One of the former Justice Department employees, Clevenger, is pursuing a whistleblower suit alleging he was wrongly fired for exposing mistreatment of employees by his Special Litigation Section chief.

Clevenger and the other lawyer recounted Schlozman's odd handling of their job applications in the spring of 2005. Clevenger said his resume stated that he was a member of the conservative Federalist Society and the Texas chapter of the Republican National Lawyers Association. The other applicant's resume cited work on President Bush's 2000 campaign, said the attorney, who insisted upon anonymity for fear of retaliation.

They said Schlozman directed them to drop the political references and resubmit the resumes in what they believed were an effort to hide those conservative affiliations.

Clevenger also recalled once passing on to Schlozman the name of a friend from Stanford as a possible hire.

"Schlozman called me up and asked me something to the effect of, `Is he one of us?'" Clevenger said. "He wanted to know what the guy's partisan credentials were."

Schlozman, who recently completed more than a year's service as interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City that was marked with controversy, has drawn harsh criticism over his conduct as the top deputy in the Civil Rights Division starting in 2003 and a term of roughly seven months as its acting chief beginning in the spring of 2005.

Several former department lawyers assailed his treatment of senior employees and his rollback of longstanding policies aimed at protecting African-American voting rights. They blame him for driving veteran attorneys, including section chief Joseph Rich, to resign from their posts.

Rich recently told Congress that 15 of the 35 attorneys in the voting rights section have resigned since 2005. Former employees of the Voting Rights Section told McClatchy of at least eight hires since then of employees with conservative political connections.

The Boston Globe, which obtained resumes of civil rights hires under the Freedom of Information Act, reported Sunday that seven of 14 career lawyers hired under Schlozman were members of either the Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association.

Rich, who left the agency on April 30, 2005, and now works for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told McClatchy Newspapers that Schlozman was "central to implementation of the politicization of the Civil Rights Division" and said he treated career lawyers with "disdain" and "vindictiveness."

His former deputy, Robert Kengle, told McClatchy that "Schlozman was never wrong and to even raise that possibility was asking for retribution."

Schlozman's hiring favored lawyers "with one primary characteristic - links to the Republican Party and right-wing groups," said David Becker, who left the section the same day as Rich.

"The lawyers hired by Schlozman, in virtually every case, had very little litigation experience, lesser academic credentials and, if they had any civil rights experience, it was in opposing the enforcement of civil rights laws," Becker told McClatchy.

One of those hired, Joshua Rogers, had been a law clerk for Mississippi federal Judge Charles Pickering, whom President Bush nominated for an appeals court judgeship over objections from civil rights groups.

Shortly after assuming his new job, Rogers was the lone dissenter in a staff recommendation that the department oppose a new Georgia law requiring every voter to produce a photo identification card - a law later found unconstitutional by a federal judge.

Schlozman said in the interview that staff "were only treated professionally" while he was in the Civil Rights Division and that in hiring, "I didn't care what your ideological perspective was."

He pointed to the recruitment of Mark Kappelhoff, a former counsel for the liberal American Civil Liberties Union, to head the division's Criminal Section, and to the promotion of Chris Coates, a former ACLU voting counsel, to serve as the top deputy chief of the voting section.

Rich and other lawyers said politics had little or no bearing on Kappelhoff's job - overseeing prosecution of human trafficking and police misconduct. They said Coates seemed to grow more conservative after his superiors passed him over for a promotion in favor of an African-American woman, and he filed a reverse-discrimination suit.

Interesting that the answer to your question is another cut and paste.

I don't think that BBB was replying to CI.

The Dems are probably doing as much as they can by having hearings and exposing the corruption. Any legislation would probably be vetoed.

Senate panel wants to question Justice Department official
Senate panel wants to question Justice Department official
By Greg Gordon and David Goldstein
McClatchy Newspapers
5/8/07

WASHINGTON - The Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday asked a former acting Justice Department civil rights chief to answer accusations that he was a central figure in a broad Republican strategy to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning minorities.

The committee, which has been investigating the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, asked Bradley Schlozman to appear voluntarily and describe his activities as a senior civil rights official and later as a U.S. attorney for Kansas City, Mo. Schlozman was a U.S. attorney there for one year.

"We believe the committee would benefit from hearing directly from you in order to gain a better understanding of the role voter fraud may have played in the administration's decisions to retain or remove certain U.S. attorneys," the panel's chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, the senior Republican on the committee, wrote Schlozman.

They noted that White House political guru Karl Rove voiced concern to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last year about voter fraud in three states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. After that conversation, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico was added to the list of top prosecutors to be replaced. Two other fired prosecutors - in Arizona and Washington state - have said they believed their ousters were prompted in part by failure to aggressively pursue voter fraud cases.

A person familiar with the congressional inquiry, who insisted upon anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information, described Schlozman as a central figure because he ties together "all of the threads" of the investigation.

According to the person, Schlozman "cleaned out" career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division, replaced them with partisans and was involved in using "vote suppression mechanisms" of voting rights laws, including supporting actions to pare lists of registered voters and backing state laws that toughened voter identification requirements before the 2006 congressional election.

In recent weeks, McClatchy Newspapers has recounted this broad effort to use the power of the Justice Department to affect the outcome of the 2006 election. McClatchy found that, as U.S. attorney, Schlozman brought voter-fraud indictments days before the election against four people who were registering voters for a liberal group in Kansas City. The hotly contested election resulted in Missouri Republican Sen. Jim Talent's defeat, handing control of the U.S. Senate to Democrats.

The House of Representatives and Senate Judiciary committees already have questioned at least 14 former Justice Department officials in the broadening inquiry.

Former Justice Department civil rights lawyers have alleged that the legal campaign was aimed at making it harder for poor African-Americans, who tend to vote for Democrats, to meet voting requirements.

They've also accused Schlozman of illegally tilting the Justice Department hiring process to favor applicants with Republican or conservative credentials, such as membership in the Federalist Society, while he was its civil rights chief.

Schlozman was unavailable for comment Monday. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said the department had received the committee's letter and is reviewing it. In an extensive statement, he said that the agency enforces the law "based on evidence, not partisan politics," and that U.S. attorneys are expected to bring "election and voter fraud cases where evidence of such fraud exists."

Leahy and Specter noted that Schlozman succeeded former U.S. attorney Todd Graves. They cited news reports that said Graves refused to endorse a Justice Department suit against the state of Missouri last November. The suit alleged that the state wasn't doing enough to prevent voter fraud by removing names of ineligible people from voter registration lists.

The committee is interested in reports that department officials considered adding Graves to the department's list of U.S. attorneys to be replaced, the letter said.

Leahy and Specter asked Schlozman to make himself "available ... for interviews, depositions or hearing testimony" and bring documents related to the investigation.

Both the House and Senate committees have threatened to issue subpoenas if Justice Department and White House officials don't cooperate with their inquiries.

It's a foregone conclusion that the Justic Department and this administration are not going to "cooperate" in any investigation. All their documents and emails will disappear.

I honestly hope they do so. It would be a clear case of Obstruction of Justice.

Cycloptichorn

It's only an obstruction of justice if the right congress and public demands it.

Well, hell, Conyers and Leahy are making the right noises about it, and have authorized and issued subpoenas. If they keep it up, it will go the way we want.

Cycloptichorn

Noise about issues concerning this administration isn't enough - as has been shown by past "noises." However, I'm willing to give Conyers and Leahy the benefit of the doubt to see if any more comes out of their "noise." I give it a 30/70 chance of more coming out of it.

At this point, Bush is eager to keep Gonzo in office. He doesn't want him to leave and write a self-serving, and critical, book as did Tenet.

Bingo! I think we have our 9th fired US Attorney
May 08, 2007 -- 11:07 PM EDT
by Josh Marshall
The Hill

Bingo! I think we have our 9th fired US Attorney -- and one replaced in short order by one of the Bush DOJ's prime 'vote fraud' scammers.

As noted earlier, there are a handful of other US Attorneys who resigned in 2006 under what now appear suspicious circumstances, especially given who subsequently replaced them.

Two cases in particular are those of Thomas Heffelfinger in Minnesota (replaced by Rachel Paulose) and Todd Graves (replaced by Bradley Schlozman). Recently we learned that Heffelfinger and Graves both showed up on the DOJ firing lists not long before they resigned. Heffelfinger pretty categorically denied being fired, all the smoke notwithstanding. Graves gave a cryptic quote suggesting something might have been up.

Now, the prime reporter on this slice of the US Attorney Purge story has been Dave Helling at the Kansas City Star. Tonight, with his colleague Steve Kraske, Helling has a big scoop. It's oddly buried in the piece which is unfortunately behind a subscription wall. So bear with me.

The first revelation in the story is that staffers for Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), though supposedly not the senator himself, approached the Bush administration in 2005 and suggested that it might be wise to remove Graves from his post after his four year term expired because of his wife's involvement in a controversial 'fee office' patronage scheme in Missouri. The fee office story is a whole complicated can of worms in itself. But for present purposes it appears that these concerns had nothing to do with Graves' resignation in March 2006. Graves says no. Bond's office says no, etc.

But here's the key. The article says that Bond did become directly involved in Graves's situation in early 2006. Bond's spokesman Shana Marchio said in a statement: "Senator Bond … upon (Graves') request personally called the White House to gain Todd extra time to wrap up case work before his departure."

Now, though it's not said directly, I think there's no way to interpret this statement other than to conclude that the White House and/or the Justice Department fired Graves and Bond, at Graves's request, tried to intercede on his behalf for a little more time.

A bit further down in the piece there's this ...

A person in Bond's office who asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the discussions said the White House rejected Bond's efforts on Graves' behalf because of "performance" concerns. E-mails from the Justice Department and the White House have used similar language in discussing the other U.S. attorneys who were fired.
Okay, I think we now know that Todd Graves was fired. The on and off the record statements out of Bond's office don't allow any other conclusion. I suspect the article does not state the fact directly because Graves himself wouldn't cop to it directly. But he did say this ...

Graves said he doesn't know why he would have been a target for removal, but he suggested his "independence" may have played a role.
"When I first interviewed (with the Department)…I was asked to give the panel one attribute that describes me," Graves said. "I said independent. Apparently, that was the wrong attribute."


As I said, I think we now know that Graves was the ninth fired US Attorney. There were already eight. And I strongly suspect there are more. But Graves stands out because of the man who replaced him, Bradley Schlozman, who we profiled in Tuesday's episode of TPMtv. Schlozman's entire tenure at DOJ has been dedicated to turning back the clock on minority voting rights in the United States and more broadly to suppressing Democratic vote turnout. And there's evidence that Graves was sacked because he wouldn't do Schlozman's bidding in pushing his voter suppression agenda in western Missouri.

Gonzales goes to the Hill Thursday and Schlozman follows on May 15th. Graves's firing deserves much more scrutiny.

Senate Committee Schedules Hearing with Schlozman
Senate Committee Schedules Hearing with Schlozman
By Paul Kiel - May 8, 2007, 5:59 PM
The Hill

The Senate Judiciary Committee has invited Bradley Schlozman to testify before the committee in a hearing next Tuesday, May 15.

As laid out in a letter by Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and ranking member Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) yesterday, the committee wants to question Schlozman about his efforts to push allegations of voter fraud while a political appointee overseeing the Civil Rights Division and later as a U.S. attorney in Kansas City.