The Pressure is On

Abu Gonzales on the Hot Seat

The pressure seems to be mounting in the case of eight dismissed federal prosecutors, with D. Kyle Sampson, Alberto 'Abu' Gonzales' chief of staff announcing his resignation yesterday. From the LA Times;

D. Kyle Sampson, the chief of staff to Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, is leaving the Justice Department in the first fallout from the department's bungled firing of U.S. attorneys last year, people familiar with the situation said Monday night.

Sampson, a top lawyer under Gonzales and his predecessor, John Ashcroft, had been identified by congressional Democrats as one of a handful of senior officials whom they wanted to question as part of the deepening investigation into who ordered seven federal prosecutors relieved of their duties in December and why.

The Justice Department is expected to provide further details of its handling of the matter in briefings to congressional leaders this morning, said the sources, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak and because it was a personnel matter.

The House and Senate Judiciary committees also announced Monday that they would ask President Bush's longtime political strategist, Karl Rove, to testify as part of the widening investigation into White House involvement in the politically charged affair.

Karl Rove under oath! Don't get me started. KKKarl just barely escaped sharing Scooter Libby's fate in the Plamegate investigation when he 'corrected' perjured testimony at the last minute to avoid indictment.

And from the New York Times;

Senate Democrats vowed today to get explanations, with or without subpoenas, from high Bush administration officials as revelations about the dismissal of federal prosecutors put renewed pressure on the White House.

“Just when we thought our faith could not be shaken any further, it has been,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The latest revelations prove beyond any reasonable doubt that there has been unprecedented breach of trust, abuse of power and misuse of the Justice Department.”

In fact, it looks like Schumer would like to hear from Rove, Sampson, and White House Counsel Harriet Miers in this matter. He is also calling for Gonzales immediate resignation over the scandal. The Republicans though, refuse to accept that this is a problem.

The top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, seemed to want to give the White House the benefit of the doubt, for now, but said the administration should offer explanations.

Until he lost his chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee after the November elections, Specter was the one responsible for oversight in this field. Aren't you glad he is no longer? The Justice department has traditionally been quasi-independent of the administration, and this is seen to be essential to maintaining an unbiased objectivity, which is why there is such a fuss over this. Coming on the heels of revelations of widespread FBI misuse of NSLs given them under the authority of the USA PATRIOT Act, it's hard to see how Gonzales can keep his job.

One apparently unrelated story indicates how far this may actually go , as it stirs up a stink in Washington like a dead whale on a beach. That story is the announced move of uber-criminal organization Halliburton to Dubai. They apparently don't believe an independent judiciary that isn't filled with hand-picked GOP hacks will continue to overlook the massive frauds that they have perpetrated against the American taxpayer. They should have had that get out of jail free card laminated. Not having done so they're getting out of Dodge City, with bundles of cash in their saddlebags.

Meanwhile it's getting harder and harder impossible to imagine how bubble-boy Bush continues to ignore the turmoil around him. My only surmise is this: Big Pharma owes the administration a lot for their having so enthusiastically screwed over America's sick and elderly. Like typical Mafia underlings, the pharmaceutical corporations are returning the favor in the form of primo state-of the art product.

Reminiscent of Stanislaw Lem's dystopic character Ijon Tichy (The Futurological Congress) Bush and possibly Cheney are being administered massive amounts of mind-altering chemicals so advanced that they alter not just the mind, but the subject's perceptions of the outside world. Called cryptochemistry by one of Lem's characters, this theory seems the only reasonable explanation for Bush's continuing gormlessness. As Sherlock Holmes would say, once all alternatives have been shown to be impossible, whatever is left, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth.

TAGS: Dismissed Prosecutors, Justice Department, Criminal Conspiracy
Congressional Investigations