AL-Gov: Don Siegelman might be innocent

From Harpers:

Former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman finds himself in a curious position. He was tried, convicted and sentenced on corruption charges brought by a U.S. Attorney whose husband happened to be advising Siegelman’s political opponent. In the meantime, spectacular public charges leveled by Republicans against figures in their own party have turned the tables on the prosecutors, who are now increasingly fighting a rear-guard action attempting to save their careers. Under intense Congressional pressure, the Justice Department acknowledges that its Office of Professional Responsibility has started multiple investigations into accusations of ethics lapses and illegal conduct leveled at the prosecutors and investigators they directed.

Evidence of the involvement of former senior Presidential Advisor Karl Rove continues to mount, and Rove’s denials become more strangely qualified as time progresses.
...
In Atlanta, the Court of Appeals, after issuing a series of increasingly irritated orders challenging the conduct of the trial judge, ordered Siegelman’s release from prison, remarking that his appeal had substantial prospects for success. This is particularly remarkable because the court ruled on the basis of the trial record itself, whereas the most dramatic evidence of misconduct and abuse was only unearthed after Siegelman went to prison. The disclosures link the prosecution team to illegal witness coaching and to the suppression of vital exculpatory evidence.
...
Siegelman’s appeal on the merits is proceeding with historically unprecedented support. Fifty-four former attorneys general have submitted a brief amicus curiæ in the case calling for the conviction to be thrown out.

I've been skeptical of all this Siegelman hoopla for some time. I mean, sure the prosecution was totally politically motivated and directed by the president's campaign strategist, and yes it's of a piece with the US Attorney purge, but at the end of the day a jury convicted this guy, right?

Apparently, maybe not. If this judge does overturn the conviction and Don Siegelman is shown to have been wrongly prosecuted for the second time, this is going to turn into a nightmare for the Republicans.

Imagine: Karl Rove directing the Justice Dept. to conduct a trumped up, politically-motivated prosecution of a popular Democratic governor and getting him convicted by withholding evidence and coaching witnesses.

the king is law

From the Washington Post (h/t Josh Marshall):

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

The position presents serious legal and political obstacles for congressional Democrats, who have begun laying the groundwork for contempt proceedings against current and former White House officials in order to pry loose information about the dismissals.

Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, "whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action."

This is huge news. What the president is saying here is that, since all federal prosecutors, including the one in DC, work for him, and since the only way for Congress to contest executive privilege is to refer the case to a federal prosecutor, Congress simply has no power to contest executive privilege. At all.

And what is covered under executive privilege, kids? Answer: anything the president says is covered.

Short of sending the army to occupy the Capitol building, this is just about the most flagrant action a president can take to undo the constitutional system of checks and balances. If this is allowed to stand, then presidents will no longer be subject to serious congressional oversight, because such oversight will now rely entirely on whatever the president allows to be uncovered. Furthermore, this is a full admittance from the president that the Bush Justice Dept. is simply another office in the political wing of the White House, to be manipulated to further the president's prerogative in the quickly deteriorating system of checks and balances.

This, by the way, is precisely why the US attorney purge was so important. Attorneys with integrity become dangerous and unpredictable when asked by their superiors to allow the Republic to be undermined. Something tells me Bush's shills will be a touch more reliable.

Scott Horton at Harpers has a good article on the issue here.

So what can Congress do? That's the big question from here. They have to find a way to get their case to the Supreme Court. Despite what the president expects, there is one recourse the Congress still has: inherent contempt, whereby the Congress would actually have the Sergeant-at-Arms arrest the person refusing to testify and put them in the Capitol jail (yeah, I didn't know they had those, either). And either chamber can do with a simple majority vote. Then the president's only recourse to getting his employee back would be... taking them to the Supreme Court.

Marty Lederman notes another option as well, namely filing a civil action in a federal court.

And there is, of course, a third option.

It all comes down to Speaker Pelosi and her willingness to take this to the next level.

George Bush disenfranchised the troops: the definition of "caging"

I can't believe this, from Greg Pallast, detailing the practice of "caging" as practiced by the Bush/Cheney campaign and minimized by Monica Goodling this week as "a direct mail term." It's far worse than I personally was expecting. It begins with the campaign compiling a list of likely Democratic voters by focusing on those in African American neighborhoods, and then it takes a particularly sinister turn (h/t ThinkProgress):

Here’s how the scheme worked: The RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, “Do not forward”, to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses. The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as “undeliverable.”

The lists of soldiers of “undeliverable” letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida, to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters’ registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted.

It was an attempt to use African Americans' service to their country to rob them of their right to vote. Tim Griffin, one of Rove's flying monkeys, allegedly led such a caging effort in '04. He's now the U.S. Attorney for the state of Arkansas.

Subpoenas, now with immunity!

Nice.

voter fraud fraud

Ya know how many of us have been opining that the scary part of this US Attorney purge isn't the people who got canned, but potentially why didn't the other attorneys suffer the same fate? Well...

Stewart and Oliver on Gonzales' testimony

Via Crooks and Liars. It's so freakin' funny because it's absolutely true. I'm not sure it's even caricature, and Oliver's depiction of Gonzales' "options" in how to handle the testimony is precisely what many have been saying.

misusing your post

To review: the Bush Administration appointed their head opposition researcher to chief prosecutor for the state of Arkansas the same year Hillary Clinton decides to run for president.

AG chief of staff admits Gonzales lied to Congress

There's going to be an impeachment over this, I can all but guarantee it. From ThinkProgress:

Today, under questioning from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sampson said, under oath, that he “shared information with anyone who wanted it.” Specifically, Sampson said he did share information with McNulty and Moschella prior to their testimonies before Congress. Schumer responded: “So the Attorney General’s statement is wrong, is false. How could it not be?” Sampson froze. Ultimately, he acknowledged Gonzales’s statement is “not accurate.”

Gonzales testified to Congress that Sampson didn't tell anyone in the Dept. what really happened in the Attorney purge, and that's why Congress got conflicting accounts between himself and others in the dept. Thinkprogress has the video, and I suggest you watch it: the most damning evidence of Gonzales' wrongdoing, in my mind, is seeing Sampson's face when Schumer springs the trap. It was pretty smart: Schumer put Sampson on his heels using Gonzales' testimony and made him defend himself against (Gonzales') charges of incompetence. The only way Sampson could defend it was by contradicting Gonzales' testimony. The look on his face when Schumer flips it around and says "So the Attorney General's statement is wrong, is false" shows pretty clearly that the gravity of what he just admitted is very serious.

Thank God for Pat Leahy

Pat Leahy learns former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee Arlen Specter a thing or two about backbone.
Imagine the pathetic whitewash that would've ended this whole scandal under Arlen Specter's bootlicking leadership.

miscarriage of justice

The US Attorney purge scandal is turning out to be a lot bigger than anyone thought, partly because, like the Jack Abramoff scandal, every turn opens up a new, heretofore unknown scandal within the scandal. The scandal of firing Carol Lam right after her indictment of the former 3rd in command of the CIA shifted to news that 7 other attorneys had been fired at the same time to news that they were all high-performers (just how high, we're beginning to find out) to David Iglesias' wild ride. A couple of days ago, however, a whole new and chilling aspect of this scandal dawned on people: if these 8 were fired because they wouldn't manipulate their offices to help the GOP, what does that say about the other 85?

We're starting to find out. From ePluribus Media:

We compare political profiling to racial profiling by presenting the results (January 2001 through December 2006) of the U.S. Attorneys' federal investigation and/or indictment of 375 elected officials. The distribution of party affiliation of the sample is compared to the available normative data (50% Dem, 41% GOP, and 9% Ind.).

Data* indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.

What you're beginning to see form is a miscarriage of justice on a level normally only seen in 3rd world banana republics. It shouldn't even have to be said, but when a political party is allowed to manipulate the very justice system itself, the rule of law, the underpinning of our entire system of government and the sum total of its legitimacy, is undermined.

A simple statistic isn't necessarily proof, as we all know the numbers can be manipulated, but new revelations prove even more damning. One of the big corruption cases of the Bush Administration was the New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal, where the NH GOP paid a company to inundate the Democratic party's GOTV lines on election day. From TPM Muckraker:

In a detailed, 10-page letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) signed by Kathleen Sullivan, chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, and Paul Twomey, a lawyer for the Democrats, they argue that the investigation, which targeted prominent operatives in the Republican Party, was stalled and mishandled.
...
One of the reasons the investigation was stalled, Democrats argue, is that "all decisions had to be reviewed by the Attorney General himself" -- first John Ashcroft and then Alberto Gonzales. To back up that claim, the Democrats say that lawyers working on the case were told by prosecutors that delays in the case were due to the extreme difficulty in obtaining authorization from higher levels at DOJ for any and all actions in the case.
...
The Democrats' other grievances, which they lay out in the letter, are 1) that the Justice Department bogged the investigation down by assigning only one FBI agent to the case -- and that agent was part-time 2) that the DoJ's refusal to prosecute the organziations responsible for the jamming, the New Hampshire Republican Party and the Republican National Committee, violated Justice Department guidelines, and 3) the DoJ failed to follow leads that led to higher-level Republican involvement.

Then there's the issue of a certain landmark case against one of the GOP's most infamous supporters. From The Washington Post (c/o Josh Marshall):

The leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said yesterday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government's racketeering case.

Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's office began micromanaging the team's strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government's claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.

She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said.

"The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said," Eubanks said. "And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public."

If that didn't give you a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, you need to have your outrage-o-meter recalibrated. Here we have the Bush Administration tampering with the justice system to throw cases for powerful donors. How many other cases are there where something like this happened? How many other times have Bush's appointees subverted justice to protect powerful friends, or the Administration itself?

update on the US Attorney purge

So far as I can tell, the Administration's defense now is: the White House advisors never talked to the President, and he'll go to the mat to make sure they don't have to swear to Congress that nothing happened, because if they have to swear then that means the truth (which is that nothing happened) won't be discovered. The nothing that happened, happened at the pleasure of the president in accordance with standard practice. And it's all Justice's fault.

a primer on the coming constitutional crisis

Here is a quick-and-dirty rundown of the constitutional issue of congressional subpoenas and the full implications of W's willingness to burn the whole house down, from Kagro X at dKos. A sampling:

Realize that the resolution of this stand-off will determine the extent to which the Congress is able to investigate everything that's still on their plate. If they lose this showdown, they lose their leverage in investigating NSA spying, the DeLay/Abramoff-financed Texas redistricting, Cheney's Energy Task Force, the political manipulation of science, the Plame outing... everything.

The entirety of the Dems tenure in congressional leadership has been building up to this confrontation. In my opinion, it was inevitable. They've let this bull run amok in our china shop for far too long under the cowed GOP leadership and the cowed Dem leadership before that.

It's time for the corraling.

a government so dysfunctional it might drown on its own

It appears the light suddenly shining in on the Justice Dept. from the US Attorney purge is causing some internal problems. From U.S. News and World Report's blog:

The Justice Department now says the document dump will contain closer to 2000 documents.

"You have no idea," said one Justice official, "how bad it is here."

The fear that virtually any piece of communication will have to be turned over has paralyzed department officials' ability to communicate effectively and respond in unison to the crisis, as has the fact that senior Justice officials themselves say they still don't know the entire story about what happened that led to the crisis. So they are afraid that anything they put down on paper could be viewed as lies or obfuscation, when in fact, the story is changing daily as new documents are found and as the Office of Legal Counsel conducts its own internal probe into the matter.

The paralysis will affect the calculations that Gonzales must make this week as to whether he should stay or go. If Gonzales doesn't resign, there's little doubt that he will get few of his initiatives through for the rest of his tenure and that his people will spend months churning out documents at the behest of angry Democrats who will be investigating virtually anything that moves. But this could also give Gonzales an exit strategy, officials say. He could say that while neither he nor his subordinates did anything wrong, he has decided to resign for the greater good of the department and for justice at large.

Hmm, the Dems will investigate "anything that moves?" Even bad news is great news for the Bush Administration since it gives Gonzales "an exit strategy?" Later it says Bush is "stubbornly loyal" (as we can see from this purge, or from the disappearance of virtually his entire staff after the '04 election?). Amazing that people would deign to say USNWR has a rightwing slant!

Despite how hard Chitra Ragavan is trying to spin this as bad PR for, of all people, Democrats, what this snippet actually shows is the spectacularly poor administrative skills of this administration, and of Attorney General Gonzales in particular. How could staffers be so concerned about whether they're distributing "lies and obfuscation," unless they actually are lying and obfuscating in their emails? Is Justice now so mired in deceit, obstruction, and political intrigues that it's incapable of functioning while responsible parties are conducting oversight? Is it really so poorly run, and has corruption, incompetence, and corner-cutting so deeply infested the dept. on Gonzales' watch, that the staff no longer feels confident that it knows the difference between legal and illegal procedure? The friggin' Dept. of Justice?

Apparently so: it's not just in their intra-dept. communications, people. It's in their handling of criminal suspects as well.

It's interesting to look at the relationship between these stories: we're actually starting to see an economy of corruption, how it engenders and then feeds off of incompetence and secrecy. The 3 have a symbiotic relationship, and I'm finding more and more that you don't find one without the others.

As Joel Salatin (of The Omnivore's Dilemma fame, and in a different context) said, light and fresh air are the best sterilizers in the world.

Dear Attorney General Gonzales

Far be it for me to give such a learned, accomplished lawyer as yourself a lesson in criminal law, but FYI: when you "give inaccurate information" to Congress, and you do it right after being sworn in, there's an actual, technical term for it: perjury.

Thanks for being such a sport,
el ranchero

the Gonzales 7

Even though Walter Reed is getting all the attention (and by the way, as if that story isn't bad enough, Salon is reporting that the Bush Administration is sending injured troops back to Iraq), it is the US Attorney purge scandal that has the most significant ramifications for the government. I first touched on the scandal here, and providing a touch of background, but I really just wanted to focus on a small part of the mess in New Mexico. Today, I want to pull the camera back and show "the big picture" (and wow, is it ever big on this one).

TPMMuckraker, by the way, is far and away the best place to go for information on this scandal, and I strongly recommend taking a stroll down their website.

The scandal deals with the firings of 8 US Attorneys, all Republican, all Bush appointees, from around the country. US Attorneys serve "at the pleasure of the president," meaning they have all the job security of a union agitator at Wal-Mart, but the issue is that 4 or 5 of them (Carol Lam in California, John McKay in Washington state, David Iglesias of New Mexico, and Bud Cummins of Arkansas) have admitted that they were leaned on to overprosecute Democrats or underprosecute Republicans before they were ultimately canned, at least a couple of said instances having clearly been attempts to sway the '06 midterm elections.

First of all, it is increasingly likely that these attorneys were actually conscientious exceptions of a much larger pool of pushed prosecutors. From an academic study of corruption prosecutions by US Attorneys, via ePluribus Media :

Data* indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven (7) times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.

The performances of these 7 oddballs, with the exception of Nevada's Daniel Bogden, didn't mesh with the greater pattern very well.

Secondly, the Administration's touch is all over this scandal. Shall we count the officials involved? Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is not only the boss of these 7, but was the one who did the firing. He was empowered to replace the attorneys with anyone he wanted (and without congressional approval) thanks to a little-known provision to, you guessed it, the USA PATRIOT Act, inserted by an Arlen Specter staffer unbeknownst even to Specter himself (or so we're expected to believe, anyway). One of the attorneys, Bud Cummins of Arkansas, was fired by then-White House counsel Harriet Miers. Karl Rove was urged by the NM GOP chief to can Iglesias, about whom he simply quipped "He's gone" (Not long before Rove's entry into the scandal, it had been reported that the Justice Dept. fired the attorneys "with input from the White House", and more details since have come out about Turdblossom's involvement). Deputy White House counsel William Kelly is being requested for an interview on the matter by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The scandal could also taint a number of congressional Republicans, as well. Aside from Arlen Specter (who is all over this scandal), Heather Wilson, Pete Domenici, John Kyl, and Doc Hastings, who you may remember was placed by Tom Delay to head the Ethics Committee after it had proven, shall we say, "troublesome" under Joel Hefley.

Amongst all this chaos of sleaze, however, there is a hard core. A "center" of the controversy. The point that provides the necessary perspective for all the other points. It's the story of a trial in San Diego of a comically corrupt congressman named Duke Cunningham. After his conviction, the prosecutor got one of his bribers, Mitchell Wade, to snitch on some other people involved. Then, just before the firings, the prosecutor rolled out indictments for defense contractor Brent Wilkes and the former executive director of the CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo.

That prosecutor was the recently-fired US Attorney Carol Lam of San Diego.

The issue of Lam's firing as a way to derail her ever-evolving investigation into the hydra-like circle of GOP corruption should be the focal point of all discussion of the issue, as it's where the Administration and the party at large had the most to lose, and thus the most incentive to act, and it's where the greatest effect will be felt. From Josh Marshall:

Now let's cut to the chase, the big story at the heart of all of this: San Diego and the firing of Carol Lam.

Given what we know about New Mexico and Washington state, it simply defies credulity to believe that Lam -- in the midst of an historic corruption investigation touching the CIA, the White House and major Republican appropriators on Capitol Hill -- got canned because she wasn't prosecuting enough immigration cases. Was it the cover? Sure. The reason? Please.

I'm not sure Lam would have been canned simply for prosecuting Cunningham. His corruption was so wild and cartoonish that even a crew with as little respect for the rule of law would have realized the impossibility of not prosecuting him. But she didn't stop there. She took her investigation deep into congressional appropriations process -- kicking off a continuing probe into the dealings of former Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis. She also followed the trail into the heart of the Bush CIA. Those two stories are like mats of loose threads. That's where the story lies.

I have a feeling they'll offer up Gonzales' head to placate the Democrats before they'll reinstate Lam. Prosecutors who give primacy to the rule of law are trouble in this administration.

"especially immigration and illegal drugs"

For those of you who've been living under a rock (or perhaps abroad?), in January a dozen or so US Attorneys were quietly fired under questionable circumstances. One had issued indictments for several Republicans, including the guy who was, by all accounts, the big cahuna in the Duke Cunningham scandal, only a couple of weeks beforehand. The attorneys will be testifying to Congress this week about the (questionable) circumstances of their firing.

One case that has become the exemplum for the entire scandal is that of the US Attorney for the state of New Mexico. It appears that, at some point during the week before the November midterms, he was contacted by two lawmakers trying to get him to speed up an indictment of a state Democrat on corruption charges. It now appears that those two lawmakers were Rep. Heather Wilson (who, you may remember, just barely survived her re-election by 875 votes out of nearly 211,000), and Senator Pete Domenici. As if it even needs to be mentioned anymore, they're both Republicans.

This weekend, both the White House and Sen. Domenici have gone into full damage control mode, as this scandal could get pretty big. And here's where I'd like to put in my 2 cents that, so far, no one else seems to have noticed. The White House/Domenici tactic from here is to paint the attorney as someone who's performance necessitated his ouster, rather than his partisanship. It also has nothing to do with filling posts with cronies or deepening the rather drained and wanting GOP bench.

We've talked a lot about "dog whistle politics" and GOP racist code in this wee corner of the blogosphere, and I feel like I'm starting to get a feel for it, and am learning where to look for it and when to expect it. Domenici, suddenly mired in bad press and staring down the barrel of his own re-election in '08, needs someone, to give him a break and come to his aid: GOP voters, those who really understand him and what New Mexico's problems are and why this attorney needed to go.

Everyone feel primed and ready?

From Sen. Domenici's statement:

During the course of the last six years, that already heavy caseload in our state has been swamped by unresolved new federal cases, especially in the areas of immigration and illegal drugs. I have asked, and my staff has asked, on many occasions whether the federal prosecutors and federal judiciary within our state had enough resources. I have been repeatedly told that we needed more resources. As a result I have introduced a variety of legislative measures, including new courthouse construction monies, to help alleviate the situation.

My conversations with [the US Attorney] over the years have been almost exclusively about this resource problem and complaints by constituents. He consistently told me that he needed more help, as have many other New Mexicans within the legal community.

My frustration with the U.S. Attorney’s office mounted as we tried to get more resources for it, but public accounts indicated an inability within the office to move more quickly on cases.[emphasis mine]

Why was the highlighted snippet so important to add? What bearing does it have on his larger point? Ahh, more important to the question (remember your audience) is, what kind of US Attorney would be neglectful of immigration and drugs cases in New Mexico and would be constantly asking for more government aid and more American dollars to do a job that, one would assume, other US Attorneys have done without extra it?

Meet United States Attorney David Iglesias.