"say it slowly for the folks in Lubbock"

At least he won't be on the football team. From the Austin American-Statesman:

Alberto Gonzales, who resigned as the Bush administration’s embattled attorney general nearly two years ago, has lined up a fall-semester teaching spot at Texas Tech University, the university confirmed today.

Gonzales, who was Gov. George W. Bush’s lawyer, Texas secretary of state and then a Texas Supreme Court justice before joining Bush in Washington, will be working in the university’s political science department, teaching a “special topics” course on contemporary issues in the executive branch, according to Dora Rodriguez, a senior business assistant in the department.

They couldn't get the George W. Bush Presidential Readin' Barn, so I guess this was the consolation prize. God I hate my alma mater sometimes.

resemblance?

I'm just sayin'.

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.

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.

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 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.