Did Rove and Gonzo Flee Siegelman Backlash?

Why did Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzalez choose now to get out of Dodge?

I have long believed that once the purged U.S. Attorneys, Carol Lam in particular, were able to get their stories out to the media the clear obstruction of justice by Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales would lead to their ouster, possibly their arrest. Lam's story in particular looks like it goes right into Dick Cheney's bank account.

But could they have run like hell because another, yet (natioanlly) unknown scandal was close to breaking?

Let's think back: When the purge became a large news story many observers made the point that while firing eight (that number moves around a lot) perfectly competent, in some cases exemplary, U.S. attorneys for a variety of ruthless political purposes is appalling, the damage done by the other eighty-odd loyal Bushie U.S. Attorneys was the real story.

Enter un-fired Alabama U.S. Attorney, Leura Canary. Wife of a notorious state politico William Canary. Confirmed with the first crop of Bush USAs in 2001, Leura Canary went on to prosecute former Democratic Alabama Governor (1999-2003) Don Siegelman. Siegelman (website) is in prison right now serving seven years after his conviction on federal corruption charges in 2006.

When Siegelman lost his 2002 re-election campaign to Republican Rep. Bob Riley, the margin was incredibly slim. Six thousand votes materialized in the dead of night giving Riley a three thousand-vote victory.

After years of continued, bitter partisan sparring between Riley and Siegelman, Canary was brought in with, according to a whistleblower, orders from Karl Rove and the backing of the Justice Department.

Now one of the key witnesses against Siegleman is up for sentencing in his plea deal, and the judge, perhaps compelled by distrust of Alberto Gonzales's Justice Department, suddenly doesn't want to allow that witness to walk despite the prosecution's recommendation.

From Harpers:

The House Judiciary Committee and its staff are continuing their preparations for hearings looking into serious irregularities surrounding the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman, now imprisoned in Texas. As hearings loom ever more likely in Washington, the anxiety level in the U.S. Attorney’s Office run by Mrs. William Canary seems to be reaching the breaking point. Is a mild sedative in order?

How else to explain the latest bizarre eruption in the Courtroom of Judge Mark Everett Fuller? At a hearing to sentence former Siegelman aide Nick Bailey, who cooperated with the prosecution and who the prosecution wanted to let off without time, Judge Fuller disagreed, insisting that Bailey serve time. Then Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Feaga offered this, as reported by the Associated Press:

(more)

The judge either didn't like Bailey's face or he thought this whole thing stunk bad, because he sent Baily up for 18 months.

Along the way, Canary recused herself from the case, but now Congress has subpoenaed her recusal papers and continue to investigate.

If Rove is made to sit down with Congress, this will come up and I will be monitoring the situation.

Hard to say exactly how hard Siegelman got screwed in this. He was convicted by a jury--though that jury had an emailing problem--so maybe he was a crook. Either way, independent judgment had no part in this prosecution. The integrity of the system was destroyed so Rove and Riley could eliminate a popular political adversary who was the only viable Democrat in a very red state.

Incidentally, Shit Daisy and Gonzo made it out of town ahead of the storm, and surprisingly, all anyone can talk about is toe-tappin' Larry Craig. Amazing how that months-old story just happened to leak the day after Gonzo absconded.

While Rove and Gonzo have reason to dread the outrage this story could generate, I'm thinking the accumulated damage sustained by both men on many fronts led them to the realization that their jobs were untenable. Of course, publicly leaving office doesn't mean you can't keep doing that job. Not in this administration.

Oh, and as bad as the misconduct is in this story, you'll likely never hear about it again.

AUDIO: If you didn't get all that, because I didn't get all that and I wrote it, Thom Hartmann tells the entire epic his way over the course of his first two segments of today's show.

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TAGS: Alberto Gonzales, Karl Rove, Don Siegelman, Thom Hartmann

Giant Sucking Sound in Washington - Turd Blossom Flushes

Jon Stewart's take:

And some words from Bill Moyers:

"...Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually incurious draft-averse naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him as God’s anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber even oil derricks and jack rabbits. Using church pews as precincts Rove turned religion into a weapon of political combat -- a battering ram, aimed at the devil’s minions, especially at gay people.

It’s so easy, as Karl knew, to scapegoat people you outnumber, and if God is love, as rumor has it, Rove knew that, in politics, you better bet on fear and loathing. Never mind that in stroking the basest bigotry of true believers you coarsen both politics and religion. At the same time he was recruiting an army of the lord for the born-again Bush, Rove was also shaking down corporations for campaign cash. Crony capitalism became a biblical injunction.

Greed and God won four elections in a row - twice in the lone star state and twice again in the nation at large. But the result has been to leave Texas under the thumb of big money with huge holes ripped in its social contract, and the U.S. government in shambles - paralyzed, polarized, and mired in war, debt and corruption."

Stewart and Moyers really get right to it. Stewart demanding that Rove ask for forgiveness, and Moyers with "..war, debt and corruption." After much ado, I now get to it.

Adios, mofo. You are no boy wonder, genius, brain, nor do you bear any resemblence to any blossom, turd or not. The amount of work you have created for us to fix this Country, so dear to me and others, is beyond belief. It's not just monetary, which is a tragedy on its own. Restoring civil discourse in the country and returning it away from this fragile splintering state which YOU devised for it will take untold and heroic efforts to repair.

The worst thing you have done is to write the playbook to keep everyday ordinary electorate polarized so that you and people like you may turn this country into a personal treasury to plunder, and you have not minded one whit that it has cost so much American blood, much less Iraqi blood. History will indeed judge you.

TAGS: Turd Blossom, Greed, Dumb Ass, Jon Stewart,

Privilege, Schmivilege

Constitutional Crisis Looming Over Prosecutors Case?

All of the top officials in the Department of Justice who were supposed to be responsible for the dismissals of seven US Attorneys have been brought before the Senate Judiciary committee.

All have been asked "who knew?", "Why were they fired?" and "who made up the list?"

All of them have responded, "not me", "I don't remember", and "ask somebody else please." Those who have responded thusly so far include:

• Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
• his (now former) Deputy AG J. Paul McNulty
• his chief of staff Kyle Sampson
• Mc'Nulty's chief of staff Michael Elston
• Monica Goodling, liaison between Gonzales and the White House.
  
• Michael Battle, Director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys

The mere depth of Goodling's involvement raises a number of red flags. Prior to her rise in the DoJ's executive branch, "Ms. Goodling worked alongside Tim Griffin as an opposition researcher for the Republican National Committee during the 2000 presidential campaign." (Wikipedia) There isn't a more partisan position in politics than opposition researcher, and Goodling is a legal featherweight who graduated from the 'fourth tier' Regent College. And yet, for some unexplained reason;

Goodling's authority over hiring [was] expanded significantly in March 2006, when Attorney General Gonzales signed an unpublished order delegating to Goodling and Kyle Sampson, Gonzales's then chief of staff, the power to appoint or dismiss all department political appointees besides United States attorneys (who are appointed by the President.)

But I digress. I just found some of those details about Goodling's career to be especially fascinating, and thought it important to point out that the authority Gonzales secretly vested in her was supposed to be in the office of Michael Battle. One other point of digression. Other than Gonzales, all the DoJ officials on the list above have resigned since the Purge Scandal investigation began. Although they may still be coming to work for all I know. All have exhibited a stunning collective amnesia worthy of the very worst soap opera plotlines, so they probably don't remember their own resignations.

The main point I was trying to get at, and I've made it before, is that there is a consistant denial that anyone at the DoJ was involved in the dismissals - leaving only one logical conclusion. The orders for the dismissals really didn't originate at DoJ, but in the White House. Further, that they were developed not out of any official government business, but from purely partisan Republican political maneuvering. The evidence for this conclusion is overwhelming. We have the testimony of fired US Attorney David Iglesias concerning the improper interference in his duties by Senator Pete Domenici and Congresswoman Heather Wilson. We have the parallel story from Seattle's US Attorney John McKay. We have the dismissal of Bud Cummings in Arkansas to make way for Goodling's old boss Tim Griffin. We have the fact of Griffin's criminal involvement in voter suppression through the drawing up of 'caging lists.' We have the obstruction of justice entailed in the parallel case of the missing emails.

Behind it all we have the 'untouchable' KKKarl Rove, whom all of the above jumped 'under the bus' to protect. This scandal is vastly dirtier, and reaches much further, than the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Milhouse Nixon.

Richard Nixon 'stonewalled' any investigations into his illegal White House excursions by invoking executive privilege. A privilege that the administration of George W. Bush now is invoking, both in the Prosecutors' case, and in the NSA wiretapping scandal. The thing is, executive privilege is NOWHERE MENTIONED IN THE CONSTITUTION. So where the heck did Nixon, and after him Reagan and GW Bush, get the idea?

Presidents have argued that executive privilege is a principle implied in the constitutionally mandated separation of powers. In order to do their job, presidents contend, they need candid advice from their aides — and aides simply won't be willing to give such advice if they know they might be called to testify, under oath, before a congressional committee or in some other forum.

Not surprisingly, there is one crucial word left out of this explanation that is required to have it make any sense. That word is CRIMINAL. The only suppression of the 'candid' advice of aides that requires them to be protected from scrutiny is in a case where what they are advising is illegal and unconstitutional. Or maybe just bonehead stupid. Think about it. If the advice you are giving is good advice, and legal, why would you want to hide it? In my mind, the idea that everything an aide tells the President will eventually become public knowledge would be much more likely to improve the quality of that advice. IOW, it's a bullshit argument.

Anyway, subpoenas have been issued by the Senate seeking documents and testimony from White House officials, and those subpoenas have been ignored. Some in regards to the Prosecutors' Purge scandal, some over the illegal NSA warrantless wiretapping program. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy has vowed he will take Bush to court. In fact, here's the letter Leahy and House Judiciary chairman John Conyers sent to White House Counsel Fred Fielding on Friday, demanding, "the White House 'immediately provide us with the specific bases for your claims regarding each document withheld via a privilege log...and a copy of any explicit determination by the President with respect to the assertion of privilege.' ".

TPM has the letter from Fielding asserting the privilege here. Think Progress has the best piece on the implications of the conflict. In fact, this piece contains one of the juiciest tidbits to come out of this whole affair, and should be read in its entirety.

Fielding attached a legal memorandum written by Solicitor General Paul Clement, laying out the legal basis for the executive privilege claim... In his letter, Clement reveals what investigators have suspected from the very beginning — that the White House was intimately involved in the attorney scandal. Upon examination of the White House documents, Clement writes:

Among other things, these communications discuss the wisdom of such a proposal, specific U.S. Attorneys who could be removed, potential replacement candidates, and possible responses to congressional and media inquiries about the dismissals.

The White House had “said that Mr. Bush’s aides approved the list of prosecutors only after it was compiled.” President Bush himself said that “the Justice Department made recommendations, which the White House accepted” regarding the removal of the attorneys.

If you don't have the time to follow the link to Think Progress, well SHAME ON YOU, but you at least MUST read this excerpt they cite from a Marcy Wheeler article on Clement's conflict of interest in this matter.

Paul Clement, as you’ll recall, is the guy currently in charge of any investigation into the US Attorney firings, since Alberto Gonzales recused himself some months ago...And now, he’s the guy who gets to tell the President that he doesn’t have to turn over what might amount to evidence of obstruction of justice in the Foggo and Wilkes case, among others.

This whole affair sets up what the media always refer to as a Constitutional Crisis, but I don't like that characterization. I think the crisis would be if the congress didn't confront the White House over illegal, even criminal activity.

Bush has been in contempt of Congress since his inauguration in January 2001. Nowhere has that been so prominent than in his assertion of 'unitary executive' powers as delineated (in a series of internal memoranda) by John Yoo, another one-time Department of Justice misfit. Let me make my feelings on the 'Yoo Doctrine' clear. If this theory were ever to be officially announced, that really would be a constitutional crisis, because it is nothing less than an outright declaration of a Bush dictatorship. The thing is, the administration has been acting from day one as if the Yoo doctrine were official.

Anyway, there now seems little possibility that Bu$hCo™ will be able to ignore these subpoenas for very long. Law professor Jonathan Turley lays out the bottom line on Countdown (Video available in yet another excellent article from Think Progress.) And here's what that bottom line entails for the White House.

As Columbia University law professor Michael Dorf points out, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Nixon that, “where the President asserts only a generalized need for confidentiality, [executive privilege] must yield to the interests of the government and defendants in a criminal prosecution.”

And from Turley:

[with respect to the NSA program] -- that was a clearly criminal act that the president called for — that under federal law, it’s a federal crime to do what the president has ordered hundreds of people do. Now, if we’re right, not only did he order that crime, it would in fact be an impeachable offense... They don’t want to recognize that this president may have ordered criminal offenses, but they now may be on the road to do that, because the way Congress can get around the executive privilege in court is to say we are investigating a potential crime.

And Raw Story has some transcript from a different portion of the Countdown piece. And a rather more complete video, in a larger window.

"This administration, I have to say, has a certain contempt for the law," said Turley. "They treat it like some of my criminal defendents used to treat it. ... They come up with any argument that might work. ... It's a sort of shocking development. ... But at the end of the day, they will lose, and they're making the situation worse."

At least for once, they're making the situation worse for themselves, not for everybody else. And I love that phrase, "at the end of the day, they will lose." It sounds like hopeful news for a change, even to my pessimistic ear.

For further reading, Station Agent has this post up at Ice Station, likening the confrontation to a gunfight in the western movie Tombstone.

TAGS: Prosecutors' Purge, NSA Wiretapping, Stonewalling, Constitutional Crisis

Pardon Everyone

If I had the kind of health care that our politicians have, I'm sure my doctor would tell me not to watch cable news anymore. It wouldn't stop me, because I have this delusional fantasy that one day, things will, all of a sudden, change.

One day I'll turn on CBS Evening News and all of a sudden it's 1987, and Dan Rather's there reporting on the impeachment of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush for their involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal and everything that's happened since has been a bad dream.

Our current reality is not reality. It can't be. Jon Stewart, only a decent comedian before Indecision 2000, looks like a founding father now for merely describing things accurately. The biggest audience goes to the biggest liar. That would be Bill O'Reilly. There's only two camps regarding O'Reilly, those who watch his show loyally and adhere to his every word as if it were the Gospel, and those who want to throw up at the site of his face and the sound of his voice. Talking about this guy is a waste of time. He's become a hollow signifier for the Cooperate Owned Media as a whole. Like Coulter before him, O'Reilly bashing has no remaining currency, even in the liberal blogosphere. He sucks, we get it. It's been illustrated every way possible.

Yet he persists. He lives. He's still there cashing checks and farting through his mouth into the microphone. We know he's a liar. He had as much to do with this bogus neocon adventure as the people who did it, because without some media cover, they never could have managed to start this illegal war.

Earlier this week O' Reilly put the cherry on his legacy when he claimed that his show doesn't cover Iraq very much because correspondents in Iraq can't get the real story and by the way, no one cares. "Do you care," he asked, "if another bomb if another bomb went off in Tikrit? Does it mean anything? No, it doesn't mean anything."

You would think after seeing that steaming slab of ignominy plastered on my TV that I would not soon feed at the troth of cable news. But like Al Gore says, television's seductive. How could I not tune in last night and see what the talking heads had to say about the judge's ruling that Scooter had to go to prison pending his appeal? This case is so straight forward that a Republican prosecutor appointed by John Ashcroft, a Bush-appointed judge and a jury all agreed that Scooter obstructed justice and perjured himself. No pro-Libby spinning can possibly happen without tossing out our legal system and reality itself.

I decided not to go to O'Reilly on this one. After the Iraq display, I'm done monitoring that noise. Media Matters has a stronger stomach than I do. No, this was a job for MSNBC.

If the media suddenly decided to be based on, I don't know--JOURNALISTIC STANDARDS--the most likely candidate to start that trend would probably be MSNBC. These people allow a lot of truth to come out of Keith Olbermann's mouth. Chris Matthews has his moments of clarity and he's never been a cheerleader for the war.

At 7pm, I turned on Hardball. Matthews, however, wasn't there. In his place--no one. Oh, there was a body there, but it was a cold, dead man with no personality or presence at all. Someone named Mike Barnicle. Probably a good guy, but why he's on TV I have no idea.

Who does Barnicle bring on to discuss the possible pardon of Scooter Libby? Pat Buchanan and some random, high powered neocon lobbyist named Ron Christie. He used to work for Libby. Want some idea of the nonsense Christie was slinging? Take a look at this blogpost he wrote praising Joe Lieberman's courage.

Some diligent YouTuber posted much of what ensued on Hardball. The Christie-Buchanan debate begins about three minutes into this clip.

You'll notice that the one making sense in this clip is Pat Buchanan. The lifelong conservative supervillian is now representing the "left" side of this crucial political debate.

After seeing that, I give up. Let's do it Ron Christy's way. Pardon Libby. Go for it. While you're at it, go ahead an pick out anyone you'd like and stick them in prison--Plame, Wilson, Fitzgerald, that Al Gore has been a real nuisance. You guys are already going after Michael Moore. End the pretense of rule of law and democracy and lets just do this the neocon way.

Pardon Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Rice, bin Laden, the whole family. Pardon Tim Griffin, Karl Rove, Sara Taylor and Kyle Samson. We can dissolve Congress and you can just appoint whoever you want to any position you like. Then there's no need for these elaborate election stealing schemes.

And you don't need to wait for the next natural or unnatural disaster to activate your slimy little sleeper provision to take power. Do it now.

What sleeper provision?

From WorldNetDaily:

President Bush President Bush has signed a directive granting extraordinary powers to the office of the president in the event of a declared national emergency, apparently without congressional approval or oversight.

The "National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive" was signed May 9, notes Jerome R. Corsi in a WND column.

It was issued with the dual designation of NSPD-51, as a National Security Presidential Directive, and HSPD-20, as a Homeland Security Presidential Directive.

The directive establishes under the office of the president a new national continuity coordinator whose job is to make plans for "National Essential Functions" of all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments, as well as private sector organizations to continue functioning under the president's directives in the event of a national emergency.

"Catastrophic emergency" is loosely defined as "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions."

(more)

Here's the catastrophic emergency: Bush is President. It's the worst national catastrophe yet. Thousands of Americans are dead because of that fact and Bush's next victim is Democracy itself. So, spare us the sneak attack and just do it.

Pardon us. Pardon us so we don't have to live through the agonizing lies of the COM. Most importantly, pardon us from our responsibility to stop you. The founders of this country lived up to that responsibility, but things are different now.

Joel Hirshhorn of OpEdNews wrote a piece called, "Americans Unready to Revolt, Despite Revolting Conditions":

For a nation that was built on a revolt against oppressive governance by the British, something has been lost from our political DNA. We apparently no longer have the gene for political rebellion. It has been bred out of most of us. And those of us that urge a Second American Revolution are seen as fringe, nutty subversives.

(more)

So, go ahead, W. Call off the media. Cancel the news. Fire the actors posing as anchors because we don't need them anymore and just put on jugglers, sword swallowers, belly dancers, dancing bears, clowns stuffed into Volkswagens and magicians sawing hot chicks in half.

Oh, and get Paris Hilton out of jail, we need something to pay attention to while Bush, Cheney and Grover Norquist are drowning the constitution in the bathtub.

TAGS: Media, Scooter Libby, American Revolution, Bill O'Reilly

Iglesias Makes a Strong Case

Finally, Someone Who Can Handle the Truth

This Interview with David Iglesias at Truthout.org is very interesting. Iglesias talks about what questions he thinks should have been asked of Monica Goodling in her testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and why. Then he goes into the circumstantial evidence that answers the most important question, which thus far has been dodged by the administration so much they are starting to resemble a game of Whack-A-Mole.

Why Were These Prosecutors Fired? And by whom?

Iglesias, of New Mexico, is perhaps the most prominent of the US Attorneys asked to resign on Dec. 7, 2006. This is because he blew the whistle on Sen. Pete Domenici (R-otten to the core) and Rep. Heather Wilson for improper contacts they made over voter fraud cases they wanted filed before the 2006 mid-term elections. Using the timing of four of the dismissals, including his own, he shows that the real reason for them was that they made someone in the West Wing of the White House angry. And he seems to have formed a solid opinion of who that someone might be.

Iglesias told me that, while we still do not know how he and his colleagues were placed on the termination list, he does believe a "smoking gun" exists that will lead directly to Karl Rove and blow the scandal wide open.

"I believe somewhere on an RNC computer - on some server somewhere - there's an email from Karl Rove stating why we need to be axed," Iglesias told me in an hour-long interview.

Iglesias said Rove, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and perhaps other officials are likely responsible for placing his name and the names of his colleagues on a list of US attorneys to be fired, because he had refused to launch federal investigations and prosecute individuals purely for partisan reasons.

"If the Justice Department didn't have anything to do with placing presidential appointees such as me and my colleagues on a list to be terminated, the only other possible place would be the White House," Iglesias said. "Harriet Miers, Karl Rove or some of their underlings."

That last paragraph shows a nice, clean use of the process of elimination. If the list didn't originate in the DoJ, there is only one other possibility. The West Wing. Not only does Iglesias put together a good circumstantial case that shows where this investigation should be directed, but in doing so he proves beyond a shadow of a doubt one other thing. He sure as hell wasn't fired for being stupid. It would be such delicious irony if he could be allowed to prosecute Rove - but it ain't gonna happen, because Iglesias has more integrity than the entire administration put together.

About the subtitle: I presume you know that Commander David Iglesias was the Navy JAG that the Tom Cruise character in A Few Good Men was based on. If not, you know now.


TAGS: David Iglesias, Prosecutors Purge, Karl Rove, NAILED!!