Tax cheat escapes $100 million repayment thanks to flawed court documents

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The IRS vs. Ragnor Danksjold
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LARGEST TAX PROSECUTION IN HISTORY

Gonzales screws up again, or did he?
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Tax cheat escapes $100 million repayment thanks to flawed court documents

By Matt Apuzzo

ASSOCIATED PRESS

4:46 p.m. March 27, 2007

WASHINGTON – Poorly written Justice Department documents cost the federal government more than $100 million in what was supposed to have been the crowning moment of the biggest tax prosecution ever.

Walter Anderson, the telecommunications entrepreneur who admitted hiding hundreds of millions of dollars from the IRS and District of Columbia tax collectors, was sentenced Tuesday to nine years in prison and ordered to repay about $23 million to the city.

But U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman said he couldn't order Anderson to repay the federal government $100 million to $175 million because the Justice Department's binding plea agreement with Anderson listed the wrong statute.

Friedman said he could have worked around that problem by ordering Anderson to repay the money as part of his probation. But prosecutors omitted any discussion of probation – a common element of plea deals – from Anderson's paperwork.

“I've come to the conclusion, very reluctantly, that I have no authority to order restitution,” Friedman said. “I hope the government will appeal me.”

Channing Phillips, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office, which prosecuted the case in cooperation with Justice Department headquarters, said the government would bring civil charges against Anderson.

“The IRS still has ample civil remedies available to recoup the money which are, in some respects, more efficient and quicker,” Phillips said. “Combined with today's nine-year prison sentence, this was a significant victory for the government.”

That will require a new round of litigation in a court that does not wield the threat of more jail time. Prosecutors have said Anderson has money stashed away in accounts around the world, a claim Anderson denied in court.

He appeared humbled but not overly apologetic Tuesday. He took responsibility for his actions but said he never intended to defraud the government.

Anderson told the judge that his millions in unpaid taxes weren't funding an opulent lifestyle. He often used jets but for business or charity, he said, and usually he flew business class, not first class, and sometimes even coach.

“For every time I ate in a nice restaurant, I also grabbed a doughnut or a burger in an airport,” he said. “I could have wasted millions. I could have taken a limo everywhere.”

Friedman was not persuaded. He sentenced Anderson near the high end of his sentencing range.

“I do think it's important to send a message in a case like this,” Friedman said. “It's about as serious as it gets.”

Anderson started a long-distance telecommunications business in the 1980s as the industry was being deregulated. When his first company, Mid-Atlantic Telecom, merged with another company in 1992, Anderson formed corporations in the British Virgin Islands to hide the income, prosecutors said.

Authorities said Anderson used other offshore corporations to disguise his ownership in other telecommunications companies that earned more than $450 million between 1995 and 1999. He allegedly did not file federal income tax returns from 1987 to 1993.

With credit for the two years he has been jailed, he will have to serve seven years in prison and will be eligible for release in less than six years.

Among the taxes allegedly owed to the District of Columbia are use taxes, equivalent to sales taxes, on art, jewelry and wine. The indictment alleges that Anderson bought a painting by Salvador Dali and several paintings by Rene Magritte, an 18-karat gold bracelet and more than $47,000 in fine wines, then had them shipped to a Virginia address to avoid Washington taxes.

Justice Department tugged to the right

Under Bush, the department has been tainted by politics, many say.

By Tom Hamburger
Times Staff Writer

March 25, 2007

WASHINGTON — Not long after President Bush was first sworn in, White House political guru Karl Rove and his lieutenants met with officials of nearly every Cabinet agency to brief top officials on the latest polling data and issues that could influence voters and key constituencies.

But the departments of Justice, Defense and State were exempt. Given their missions — to administer federal laws, protect national security and conduct foreign policy — it was considered inappropriate to make such partisan presentations to them.

Nonetheless, suspicions that the White House's partisan political priorities may have made their way into Justice Department decision-making have grown in recent weeks.

Not only have two of eight recently fired U.S. attorneys complained that in specific cases they felt pressure to make decisions that would advance Republican political interests, but last week several former career officials in the Justice Department said they had felt similar pressures on voting rights cases.

"The political decision-making process that led to the dismissal of eight United States attorneys was standard practice in the Civil Rights Division years before these revelations," Joseph D. Rich, recently retired head of the division's voting rights section, said in a sparsely attended House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing last week.

"This connection should not be minimized," he said.

All administrations set law enforcement priorities in the Justice Department. The Clinton administration emphasized white-collar crime and drugs, and Bush has pushed for action on terrorism, border control and voter fraud. Pressuring political appointees and career workers to follow those priorities is considered appropriate.

But injecting partisan considerations into individual cases is another matter.

Some Civil Rights Division veterans — mostly Democrats — have been expressing concern for months. But last week more officials spoke out about what they described as a pattern of partisan decision-making on individual cases.

They said their superiors, who were political appointees, repeatedly bottled up cases that might harm the electoral position of Republicans while encouraging the staff to pursue matters that might damage Democrats' prospects.

Department spokesman Erik Ablin said the allegations were recycled and wrong.

"These are not new allegations. If you look at the actual records of these cases in the courts, it can't be squared with what they are saying."

Nonetheless, the critics tied their allegations to those described by two of the fired U.S. attorneys. David C. Iglesias of Albuquerque, N.M., and John McKay of Seattle have said they felt pressure from Republican officials to prosecute alleged voter fraud in their states.

Both said their offices reviewed the cases and concluded the evidence did not warrant prosecution.

The White House and Justice Department officials have said some of the fired prosecutors did not adequately pursue voter fraud and other administration priorities.

The complaining former Civil Rights Division employees may be well-intentioned, but their allegations are without merit, the officials said, pointing to stepped-up protection of voters speaking foreign languages. They also cited court decisions that they said generally supported the Justice Department in this area.

Rich, a 37-year department veteran, said a partisan litmus test in hiring and decision-making has undermined a tradition of nonpartisan professionalism in the division.

"Unfortunately, since this administration took office, that professionalism and nonpartisan commitment to the historic mission of the division has been replaced by unprecedented political decision-making," he told the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights and civil liberties on Thursday.

Rich's views were backed by other department veterans who had left the department in recent years. Many, like Rich, have joined civil rights organizations, such as the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, where Rich now works.

"The U.S. attorneys' firing confirmed my view that at the highest levels of DOJ it was decided that politics would play a role in how decisions were made," said Mark Posner, a former civil rights division attorney who contributed to a book-length report released by a civil rights group in Washington last week called "The Erosion of Rights: Declining Civil Rights Enforcement Under the Bush Administration."

The Civil Rights Division veterans focused their criticism on major voting case decisions over the last six years that they say have generally benefited the GOP.

The most recent case concerned a 2005 Georgia law that required voters to provide photo identification. Staff attorneys raised concerns about the law after the Georgia secretary of state supplied data showing that tens of thousands of voters might not have driver's licenses or other prescribed forms of identification. They said the plan could effectively disenfranchise large numbers of black voters.

The staff objections were ignored, department veterans said, and the Georgia ID rule was approved by the Justice Department 24 hours after the staff report was filed.

Rich and other former department staff have also charged that redistricting cases reviewed by the division have consistently benefited the GOP. These cases were particularly sensitive because redistricting has been a high priority for Rove and earlier GOP strategists. Republican success in redrawing congressional districts has helped increase the number of so-called safe seats for GOP candidates in recent years, especially in the South.

Delays by political appointees effectively allowed "the Republican Party in Mississippi to obtain implementation of a congressional redistricting plan that had been drawn at the party's behest," Rich said in congressional testimony.

The Supreme Court later upheld the process by which the plan was drawn up without addressing the plan's merits or whether the Justice Department delays were inappropriate.

Rich said unanimous staff objections to the Texas redistricting plan engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay were ignored, and the plan was approved with encouragement from Republican officials in the department.

The Supreme Court later ruled 5-4 that most of the map was proper.

Though legal actions have generally declined in the division since Bush was elected, Rich and others said that shortly before the 2004 election, the division filed a series of "friend of the court briefs" in three cases challenging ballot provisions of the federal voting statute.

"In each case, the brief supported the position of the Republican party," Rich said.

tom.hamburger@latimes.com

Justice official: You have no idea how bad it is here

Paralysis Sets In as DOJ Faces Crisis

March 19, 2007 | 1:11 PM ET |

More from chief legal affairs correspondent Chitra Ragavan:

The Justice Department is expected to release more than 400 pages of E-mails and documents by close of business today to comply with a demand from Democrats in Congress over the growing crisis regarding the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year. The crisis has engulfed the department and threatens to cut short Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's tenure.

"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.

The Bush administration is making its own calibrated calculations. A stubbornly loyal individual, the president has had trouble cutting his ties to his embattled cabinet secretaries. However, if he chooses to keep Gonzales on, he is at risk of seriously eroding political capital at a time when his administration is being criticized even by party loyalists.

But if he decides to let him go, then who can fill Gonzales's place? For one thing, who would want the job? And who could Bush find that could get Senate confirmation, since Democrats now run the show? It would have to be a seasoned insider, a consummate veteran or an elder statesman who has bipartisan respect and acceptance and a squeaky-clean record.

"The trouble," says one former official, "is that no one comes to mind."

Etc.: Doc: Jack Abramoff and the Fired U.S. Attorneys, on USNews.com

Permanent Link

Prosecutor fired before she got to Dick Cheney

Was Carol Lam Targeting The White House Prior To Her Firing?

Referring to the Bush administration’s purge of former San Diego-based U.S. attorney Carol Lam, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) questioned recently on the Senate floor whether she was let go because she was “about to investigate other people who were politically powerful.”

The media reports this morning that among Lam’s politically powerful targets were former CIA official Kyle “Dusty” Foggo and then-House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA). But there is evidence to believe that the White House may also have been on Lam’s target list. Here are the connections:

– Washington D.C. defense contractor Mitchell Wade pled guilty last February to paying then-California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham more than $1 million in bribes.

– Wade’s company MZM Inc. received its first federal contract from the White House. The contract, which ran from July 15 to August 15, 2002, stipulated that Wade be paid $140,000 to “provide office furniture and computers for Vice President Dick Cheney.”

– Two weeks later, on August 30, 2002, Wade purchased a yacht for $140,000 for Duke Cunningham. The boat’s name was later changed to the “Duke-Stir.” Said one party to the sale: “I knew then that somebody was going to go to jail for that…Duke looked at the boat, and Wade bought it — all in one day. Then they got on the boat and floated away.”

– According to Cunningham’s sentencing memorandum, the purchase price of the boat had been negotiated through a third-party earlier that summer, around the same time the White House contract was signed.

To recap, the White House awarded a one-month, $140,000 contract to an individual who never held a federal contract. Two weeks after he got paid, that same contractor used a cashier’s check for exactly that amount to buy a boat for a now-imprisoned congressman at a price that the congressman had pre-negotiated.

That should raise questions about the White House’s involvement.

UPDATE: Perhaps this was the “real problem” Sampson was referring to:

Filed under: Ethics

Posted by Faiz at 1:52 pm

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White House Backs Off on Miers Scenario

By Dan Eggen

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 16, 2007; 12:58 PM

The White House retreated today from its claim that former counsel Harriet E. Miers first came up with the idea of firing U.S. attorneys, another apparent shift in the Bush administration's evolving version of events behind the controversy.

White House press secretary Tony Snow told reporters that it was no longer clear who first initiated the idea of dismissing a large number of the 93 federal prosecutors following the 2004 elections.

"It has been described as her idea but . . . I don't want to try to vouch for origination," Snow said, referring to Miers. "At this juncture, people have hazy memories."

Snow and other administration officials have said for the past four days that Miers first suggested firing all U.S. attorneys. They have cited e-mails from a Justice Department official on the topic and the recollection of presidential adviser Karl Rove.

Officials also have said that Rove and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales opposed that idea and that Justice embarked on a more limited effort that led to the firings of eight U.S. attorneys last year.

Snow was asked whether Bush might have suggested the firings.

"Anything's possible," he said, "but I don't think so." He said Bush "certainly has no recollection of any such thing. . . . I want you to be clear here: don't be dropping it at the president's door."

Snow's remarks are the latest revision to the official chain of events surrounding the firings. The administration's account has shifted repeatedly during the past week as new e-mails and other evidence have come to light in response to congressional demands for information. A growing number of lawmakers have called for Gonzales's resignation because of his handling of the firings and their aftermath.

E-mails released late Thursday showed that the Justice Department had first advocated firing a larger number of U.S. attorneys -- up to 20 percent -- than it previously indicated. The e-mails also showed for the first time that Gonzales had discussed the idea of the firings even before he became attorney general and that Rove expressed interest in the status of the effort in January 2005.

The most serious shift in the administration's account came on Tuesday, when it released documents indicating that the White House had initiated the idea of a mass firing of U.S. attorneys and monitored the scheme's progress during the next 22 months. That was contrary to what the White House and Justice Department had said about the firings for weeks before that.

One January 2006 memo written by D. Kyle Sampson, then Gonzales's chief of staff, attributed the initial idea to Miers: "Harriet, you have asked whether President Bush should remove and replace U.S. attorneys. . . . " Snow and other officials also said Miers had first suggested the firings. Sampson resigned this week after failing to tell senior Justice officials of his extensive involvement with the White House in planning the dismissals.

But Snow was noncommittal on that point in remarks this morning, saying that "in fairness, both to the facts and also the future, I'm not going to try to characterize it."

Snow also said that "it's not even clear" whether the idea to fire all U.S. attorneys "is a recommendation as much as a musing, a possibility: Okay, we're coming into a new administration, we've just had an election -- what are some of the options? How do we think about making sure that we've got the best team available for a second term?"

Gonzales, who has rejected calls to resign, said in a news conference Tuesday that "some two years ago, I was made aware of a request from the White House as to the possibility of replacing all the United States attorneys."

"That was immediately rejected by me," he said. "I felt that that was a bad idea and it was disruptive."

The e-mails released Thursday, however, muddy the question of when Gonzales was first made aware of the idea, suggesting that Sampson spoke "briefly" with him about the idea in December 2004.

Justice spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said Gonzales has "no recollection" of discussing the prosecutors' firings at the time, while he was still serving as White House counsel and preparing for his January 2005 confirmation hearings. Gonzales first recalls such discussions taking place the following February, after he had taken over the Justice Department, Scolinos said.

All roads lead to Rove

The White House political director was clearly at the center of the partisan plot to fire U.S. attorneys, despite the administration's clumsy attempts to pretend otherwise.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Mar. 15, 2007 | The Bush administration's first instinct was to shield Karl Rove from scrutiny when Congress began inquiring about the unusual firings of eight U.S. attorneys. Among the replacements, the proposed new U.S. attorney for Arkansas happened to be one of Rove's most devoted underlings, his head of opposition research, Tim Griffin, who boasted during the 2000 presidential election about the effectiveness of the negative campaign against Al Gore: "We make the bullets!" Griffin also posted a sign in his department at Bush headquarters: "Rain hell on Al!" A letter written by the Department of Justice in late February informed Congress: "The department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin." Despite this categorical disavowal, a sheaf of internal Justice Department e-mails released this week to Congress under subpoena revealed Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff, writing in mid-December 2006, "I know getting him appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, etc." Harriet, of course, was Harriet Miers, then the White House legal counsel.

The Justice Department's statement on Karl Rove was simply one part of its coverup. The department's three top officials -- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and William E. Moschella, principal associate deputy attorney general -- all testified before Congress under oath that the dismissed U.S. attorneys had been removed for "performance" reasons, not because they had been insufficiently partisan in their prosecution of Democrats or because they would be replaced by those who would be. Yet another Sampson e-mail, sent to Miers in March 2005, had ranked all 93 U.S. attorneys on the basis of being "good performers," those who "exhibited loyalty" to the administration, or "low performers," those who "chafed against Administration initiatives, etc."

The day before the e-mails were made public Sampson resigned, offering a classic fall-guy statement, claiming that he was the one who failed to inform Gonzales and other officials about the firings. Sampson, who was Gonzales' closest aide, accompanying him from the White House Counsel's Office to the Justice Department when Gonzales was appointed attorney general, had sought to become a U.S. attorney himself through the purge. And Sampson was considered to be politically adept enough to be considered a stand-in for the supposedly indispensable Rove. When it was rumored that Rove might be indicted in the Valerie Plame case, the Washington Post reported that Sampson was likely to replace him.

Sampson's abrupt departure was followed by Gonzales' bizarre press conference on Wednesday. Speaking in a passive voice that "mistakes were made," he pleaded ignorance of "all decisions" at his department, explained that it has 110,000 employees, appealed to his modest origins, and promised to oversee the investigation of his own misfeasance. His defense was the very grounds used to fire the U.S. attorneys: poor performance. He used his failure as a shield.

But the day before, Gonzales' ignorance defense had already been punctured. A White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, acknowledged that the U.S. attorneys' dismissals were preceded by a conversation between President Bush and Gonzales last October in which Bush complained that some prosecutors were not pursuing voter fraud investigations. These were, in fact, cases that Rove thought were especially important to Republicans.

Rove was the conduit for Republican political grievances about the U.S. attorneys. He was the fulcrum and the lever. He was the collector of information and the magnet of power. He was the originator, formulator and director. But, initially, according to the administration, like Gonzales, he supposedly knew nothing and did nothing.

Even after the administration alibis had collapsed, the White House trotted out Dan Bartlett, the cool and calm communications director, to engage in a bit of cognitive dissonance. There was no plot, and maybe Rove was involved in the thing that didn't happen. "You're trying to connect a lot of dots that aren't connectible," Bartlett said, adding, "It wouldn't be surprising that Karl or other people were receiving these complaints." Thus the "dots" are invisible and Rove is at their center.

To the extent that the facts are known, Rove keeps surfacing in the middle of the scandal. And it is implausible that Sampson, the latest designated fall guy, was responsible for an elaborate bureaucratic coup d'état. Nor is it credible that Gonzales -- or Harriet Miers, who has yet to be heard -- saw or heard no evil. Neither is it reasonable that Gonzales or Miers, both once Bush's personal attorneys in Texas, getting him out of scrapes such as his drunken driving arrest, could be the political geniuses behind the firings. Gonzales' and Miers' service is notable for their obedience, lack of originality and eagerness to act as tools. The scheme bears the marks of Rove's obsessions, methods and sources. His history contains a wealth of precedents in which he manipulated law enforcement for political purposes. And his long-term strategy for permanent Republican control of government depended on remaking the federal government to create his ultimate goal -- a one-party state.

"We're a go for the US Atty plan," White House deputy counsel William Kelley notified the Justice Department on Dec. 4, 2006, three days before seven of the eight U.S. attorneys were dismissed. "WH leg[islative affairs], political, and communications have signed off..."

From the earliest Republican campaigns that Rove ran in Texas, beginning in 1986, the FBI was involved in investigating every one of his candidates' Democratic opponents. Rove happened to have a close and mysterious relationship with the chief of the FBI office in Austin. Investigations were announced as elections grew close, but there were rarely indictments, just tainted Democrats and victorious Republicans. On one occasion, Rove himself proclaimed that the FBI had a prominent Democrat under investigation -- an investigation that led to Rove's client's win. In 1990, the Texas Democratic Party chairman issued a statement: "The recurring leaks of purported FBI investigations of Democratic candidates during election campaigns is highly questionable and repugnant."

A year later, Rove received a reward. Gov. Bill Clements, a Rove client, appointed him to the East Texas State University board of regents. Appearing before the state Senate's Nominations Committee, a Democratic senator asked Rove about how long he had known the local FBI chief. "Ah, Senator," replied Rove, "it depends. Would you define 'know' for me?"

Rising to the White House as Bush's chief political strategist, Rove well understood the power of U.S. attorneys to damage Democrats and protect Republicans, and he paid close attention to their selection. When U.S. senators, who recommend the U.S. attorneys for their districts, wanted a more independent-minded professional, Rove leaned on them. In 2001, he instructed Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, R-Ill., to sponsor a safe choice from within Republican state circles. Rove "just said we don't want you going outside the state. We don't want to be moving U.S. attorneys around," Fitzgerald told the Chicago Tribune on March 12. But Sen. Fitzgerald would not relent, and his nominee, Patrick Fitzgerald, an assistant U.S. attorney from New York, became the U.S. attorney in Illinois, where he successfully prosecuted Republicans, including the incumbent governor, George Ryan, for corruption, and went on to be appointed special prosecutor in the Plame case. "That Fitzgerald appointment got great headlines for you, but it ticked off the base," Rove told Sen. Fitzgerald.

In 2002, the first midterm elections of the Bush presidency, Republicans systematically raised charges of voter fraud involving Native Americans in the hotly contended U.S. Senate race in South Dakota. Though the accusations were never proved and the GOP failed to depose the Democratic senator, Tim Johnson, the campaign served as a template.

By the election of 2004, Rove became a repository of charges of voter fraud across the country, from Philadelphia to Milwaukee to New Mexico, all in swing states. In the campaign, unproven voter fraud charges, always aimed at minority voters, became a leitmotif of Republican efforts.

In Washington state, when the Democrat won the governorship by 129 votes, the state Republican Party chairman, Chris Vance, demanded that U.S. attorney John McKay tell him the status of his investigation. At that time, Vance was in constant contact with Rove. "I thought it was part of my job, to be a conduit," Vance told the Seattle Times. "We had a Republican secretary of state, a Republican prosecutor in King County and a Republican U.S. attorney, and no one was doing anything." McKay refused to have any conversation about an investigation. And he found no basis for charging anyone with voter fraud. In a Sept. 13, 2006, e-mail, Kyle Sampson identified McKay as one of those "we should now consider pushing out" -- and he was among the eight attorneys fired.

In 2006, Rove addressed the Republican Lawyers Association on the "growing problem," as he put it, of voter fraud. Every instance he cited was in a swing state. New Mexico was one of them.

Rove had heard complaints from the New Mexico Republican Party chairman, Allen Weh, about David Iglesias, the state's U.S. attorney, for his supposed refusal to indict Democrats for voter fraud. Iglesias appeared to be a dream figure for local Republicans -- the model for the movie "A Few Good Men," Hispanic and evangelical. "Is anything ever going to happen to that guy?" Weh asked Rove at a White House Christmas party. "He's gone," Rove replied. Indeed, Iglesias' firing was already a done deal.

In California, it was time for payback against U.S. attorney Carol Lam, who had prosecuted Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham in the most flagrant corruption case involving a member of Congress. Her probe was expanding to encompass the dealings of Rep. Jerry Lewis, another California Republican. On May 11, 2006, Sampson e-mailed the White House Counsel's Office regarding "the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam." Soon, she was axed, one of the eight.

Those fired were not completely "loyal," as Sampson's e-mails emphasized. But to what policies should a prosecutor be "loyal"? Two academics, Donald C. Shields of the University of Missouri and John F. Cragan of Illinois State University, studied the pattern of U.S. attorneys' prosecutions under the Bush administration. Their conclusions in their study, "The Political Profiling of Elected Democratic Officials," are that "across the nation from 2001 through 2006 the Bush Justice Department investigated Democratic office holders and candidates at a rate more than four times greater (nearly 80 percent to 18 percent) than they investigated Republican office holders and seekers." They also report, "Data indicate that the offices of the U.S. Attorneys across the nation investigate seven times as many Democratic officials as they investigate Republican officials, a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops." Thus what the 85 U.S. attorneys who were not dismissed are doing is starkly detailed.

If the Democrats hadn't won the midterm elections last year there is no reason to believe that the plan to use the U.S. attorneys for political prosecutions -- as they have been used systematically under Bush -- wouldn't have gone forward completely unimpeded. Without the new Congress issuing subpoenas, there would be no exposure, no hearings, no press conferences -- no questions at all.

The replacement of the eight fired U.S. attorneys through a loophole in the Patriot Act that enables the administration to evade consultation with and confirmation by Congress is a convenient element in the well-laid scheme. But it was not ad hoc, erratic or aberrant. Rather, it was the logical outcome of a long effort to distort the constitutional framework for partisan consolidation of power into a de facto one-party state.

This effort began two generations ago with Richard Nixon's drive to forge an imperial presidency, using extralegal powers of government to aggrandize unaccountable power in the executive and destroy political opposition. Nixon was thwarted in the Watergate scandal. We will never know his full malevolent intentions, but we do know that in the aftermath of the 1972 election he wanted to remake the executive branch to create what the Bush administration now calls a "unitary executive." Nixon later explained his core doctrine: "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." Karl Rove is the rightful heir to Nixonian politics. His first notice in politics occurred as a witness before the Senate Watergate Committee. From Nixon to Bush, Rove is the single continuous character involved in the tactics and strategy of political subterfuge.

Time to Go, Mr. Gonzales

By Ruth Marcus

Wednesday, March 14, 2007; A15

"I believe in accountability," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales proclaimed yesterday at a news conference that was a self-serving masterpiece of passive voice and unpersuasive platitudes. "Like every CEO of a major organization, I am responsible for what happens at the Department of Justice. I acknowledge that mistakes were made here. I accept that responsibility. And my pledge to the American people is to find out what went wrong here, to access accountability and to make improvements so that the mistakes that occurred in this instance do not occur again in the future."

Is there anyone left -- seriously, is there a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- who has confidence in Gonzales's capacity to fix this mess? Is there anyone who accepts Gonzales's CEO analogy -- and thinks that a sentient board of directors wouldn't have fired him long ago?

Let's assume Gonzales's good faith: that he truly is upset about what happened on his watch, just as he was upset last week about the FBI's cavalier mishandling of its authority to issue "national security letters," and wants to make things right.

There is no reason to believe that he is capable of making a change. The portrait of the Gonzales Justice Department that emerges from the e-mails released yesterday, and from the attorney general's own comments, is of an agency overseen by an absentee landlord, chronically clueless about what's happening around him.

This is a man whose memory is so foggy that George W. Bush -- not exactly Mr. Detail -- has a sharper recollection of their conversations than the attorney general does. The president, according to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, told Gonzales that Republicans were complaining about prosecutors failing to aggressively pursue voter fraud. Gonzales doesn't recall the conversation.

I'm sorry, is there somebody he's paying more attention to than the president of the United States?

At his I'm-accountable-but-I-didn't-know-anything news conference yesterday, Gonzales said he knew the White House had suggested canning all 93 U.S. attorneys, rejected that idea and then left things to his chief of staff. "I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on," he said. "That's basically what I knew as the attorney general."

How reassuring. But, a reporter asked, how could it be that his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, was figuring out "which U.S. attorneys to . . . let go and you not know?"

Answer: "Well, again as -- I accept responsibility for whatever happens here in this department. But I have 110,000 working in the department. Obviously, there are going to be decisions made that I'm not aware of all the time."

Translation: "I'm going to tell you I'm responsible, because that's what they tell me I have to say. But of course I'm not. It's all Kyle Sampson's fault. I'm hoping that if I say I'm accountable often enough, no one will actually hold me accountable."

Ousting a group of top federal prosecutors isn't some minor, inconsequential act. It's the sort of thing that a responsible attorney general would be deeply immersed in. Gonzales's depiction of his own marginality is the most damning evidence of his unfitness for the job.

The precise non-mistake mistake that Gonzales copped to yesterday was sharing "incomplete" -- this is Gonzales-speak for wrong -- information with Congress. Think about this: Gonzales first testified about the U.S. attorney firings on Jan. 19. His No. 2, Paul McNulty, testified on Feb. 6. Assistant Attorney General William Moschella testified March 6.

And it wasn't until this week that Justice finally figured out it hadn't figured out the whole story? If that's true -- and I'm not sure which would be worse -- why should anyone believe this crowd is capable of getting its congressional story straight in the future?

Meantime, the pages of e-mails released yesterday show how -- while Gonzales hummed happily above the fray -- his lieutenants carefully choreographed the firings, down to making sure that the relevant senators were called at precisely the same time the ousted prosecutors were to be informed of their fates, and delaying the moment of truth until they left a meeting of federal prosecutors "to reduce chatter."

When Arkansas senators balked at installing Karl Rove protege Tim Griffin in the U.S. attorney's job there, Sampson recommended that the department "gum this to death." If the senators ultimately balk, he said, "then we can tell them we'll look for other candidates . . . and otherwise run out the clock. All of this should be done in 'good faith' of course." Of course.

In his now famous "overblown personnel matter" column in USA Today last week, Gonzales wrote, "While I am grateful for the public service of these seven U.S. attorneys, they simply lost my confidence." (Or did he mean Kyle Sampson's confidence?)

It's time -- past time -- for the president to say the same, perhaps more quietly and more politely, about his friend, his counselor and his failed attorney general.

marcusr@washpost.com

Justice aide resigns over prosecutor firings

By James Vicini 53 minutes ago

A top aide to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has resigned, the Justice Department said on Tuesday, the latest fallout from the firing of federal prosecutors that has embarrassed the Bush administration and prompted calls for Gonzales to step down.

Lawmakers are investigating whether the dismissal last year of eight prosecutors, some of whom had been criticized by Republicans, was a politically motivated interference in federal prosecutions by the White House.

The Justice Department said Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Gonzales, had resigned, effective immediately. A department official said Sampson had stepped down because of his role in the firings.

Major U.S. newspapers reported on Tuesday that the White House had suggested two years ago that the Justice Department fire all of the nation's 93 U.S. attorneys, but approved the idea of dismissing a smaller group.

The eight prosecutors were fired after President George W. Bush spoke to Gonzales about complaints that some of them were not energetically pursuing voter-fraud investigations, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told The Washington Post and The New York Times.

The Washington Post said Sampson resigned after acknowledging he did not tell other Justice Department officials about the extent of his communications with the White House. His omission led Justice officials to provide incomplete information to Congress, it said.

Democrats in Congress expressed outrage.

"The White House and the attorney general have dodged Congress's questions and ducked accountability," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record), the Judiciary Committee chairman.

"I am outraged that the attorney general was less than forthcoming with the Senate while under oath," the Vermont Democrat said.

Gonzales appeared before Leahy's panel earlier this year and said politics was not a factor in the dismissals.

E-mails and internal documents indicated that then-White House counsel Harriet Miers suggested to Sampson in February 2005 that all prosecutors be dismissed and replaced, the Post said.

White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters in Merida, Mexico, that Bush made "no recommendations on specific individuals."

"THAT WAS HER IDEA"

Snow said it was Miers who questioned whether to bring in "fresh blood" after four years in office.

Although most of the ousted prosecutors had received positive job reviews, the Justice Department said they were largely dismissed because of employment-related matters or policy differences.

Republicans in several states, including some where the party suffered narrow losses to Democrats, had complained about alleged voter registration fraud in the 2004 elections.

Gonzales was appointed attorney-general in early 2005 after serving as White House counsel by Bush, with whom he had worked closely for many years in their home state of Texas. Sampson had also worked for the White House after Bush's 2000 election, overseeing legal appointments in the administration.

Over the weekend, top Democrats said Gonzales should resign.

Sen. Charles Schumer (news, bio, voting record) of New York, a member of the Senate Democratic leadership, renewed his call for Gonzales to step down and urged Bush to step up and "clarify his role in this whole matter."

"The cloud over Justice Department is getting darker and darker, and only the president can dispel it," Schumer said.

"Today's resignations by his chief of staff does not take the heat off the attorney general, it raises the temperature," he added.

Gonzales, who was White House counsel during Bush's first four years in office, did not mention the firing of the prosecutors in a statement.

"Kyle Sampson has served as a key member of my team," Gonzales said. "I am very appreciative for his service, counsel and friendship during the last six years."

(Additional reporting by Tom Ferraro and Matt Spetalnick)

No One is Above the Law: New DOJ Leadership Neede

JURIST Contributing Editor David Crane of Syracuse University College of Law, former Chief Prosecutor for the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone and a former senior inspector general in the US Department of Defense, says that in the wake of revealed misuse of authority by the FBI under the Patriot Act - compounding other missteps related to prisoners of war, torture, political pressure on district attorneys, arrogant abuse of power related to national security and violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - new leadership is needed in the US Justice Department, and in the FBI in particular...

---

As Chief Prosecutor of the international war crimes tribunal in West Africa called the Special Court for Sierra Leone, I told the people there that no one is above the law. It was a statement I staked my personal and professional reputation on to prove to a horrified and beaten-down population that the law is the cornerstone of any free and democratic nation. As an American lawyer I used the United States as the example of how we hold our senior leaders accountable for their transgressions.

On Friday, FBI Director Robert Mueller stated that he was the one in charge and should be held accountable for the apparent misuse of an important, yet intrusive law enforcement tool: national security letters. Absolutely, he should be held accountable. This Department of Justice, under the leadership of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, has not served our republic well. From missteps related to prisoners of war, torture, political pressure on district attorneys, to arrogant abuse of power related to national security, including violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and this recent misuse of authorities under the Patriot Act, the chief law enforcement office of the United States has bungled his job.

The cornerstone to this great nation is the law. We are in our second Cold War, an ideological struggle with religious criminals who seek to dominate an entire ancient religion for their own personal agenda. Civilization can only win this struggle by holding fast to the rule of law, using it as the ultimate weapon against those who seek to harm us. When we step away from that principle we begin to move down a very dark path indeed.

Both Gonzales and Mueller admitted publicly that members of our FBI broke the law. Those who did should be appropriately dealt with under the law. Yet the report hints of systemic problems, lack of oversight, sloppy administration and follow-up. It even appears that there was some intent to under-report the use of national security letters. This is a leadership and management issue at the highest level.

As a former senior inspector general in the Department of Defense and someone who has lead and managed federal and international organizations, large and small for over three decades, I know when an agency is poorly led. The FBI and the Justice Department are poorly led. This recent report by the Inspector General of that department shows this fact.

New leadership is needed in the Justice Department. As these violations of law and policy were under the watch of Robert Mueller, he should resign. No one is above the law, not even the Director of the FBI.

Congress should show leadership, as well and oversee more closely the Attorney General. The term “trust, but verify” is so apt here to ensure that the rule of law is followed in our own Justice Department. How many times can you forgive, overlook, or second-chance conduct that clearly steps away from a document that boldly declared centuries ago: “We the people of the United State, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice…”

David Crane

David M. Crane is a professor at Syracuse University College of Law, and former founding Chief Prosecutor for the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone (2002-2005). He previously spent over 30 years in US federal government service as a Senior Inspector General, Department of Defense, Assistant General Counsel of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Waldemar A. Solf Professor of International Law at the United States Army Judge Advocate General’s School.

Overblown Personnel Matters: PAUL KRUGMAN - The Purge

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
THE NEW YORK TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Overblown Personnel Matters

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 12, 2007

It is surprising how fast the truth is emerging about what Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, dismissed just five days ago as an “overblown personnel matter.”

Nobody is surprised to learn that the Justice Department was lying when it claimed that recently fired federal prosecutors were dismissed for poor performance. Nor is anyone surprised to learn that White House political operatives were pulling the strings.

What is surprising is how fast the truth is emerging about what Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, dismissed just five days ago as an “overblown personnel matter.”

Sources told Newsweek that the list of prosecutors to be fired was drawn up by Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, “with input from the White House.” And Allen Weh, the chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party, told McClatchy News that he twice sought Karl Rove’s help — the first time via a liaison, the second time in person — in getting David Iglesias, the state’s U.S. attorney, fired for failing to indict Democrats. “He’s gone,” he claims Mr. Rove said.

After that story hit the wires, Mr. Weh claimed that his conversation with Mr. Rove took place after the decision to fire Mr. Iglesias had already been taken. Even if that’s true, Mr. Rove should have told Mr. Weh that political interference in matters of justice is out of bounds; Mr. Weh’s account of what he said sounds instead like the swaggering of a two-bit thug.

--MORE--

US Attorney scandal...of NH phone-jamming

Hey--what about the US Attorneys who didn't get fired? Paul Krugman is asking (free link here)--and it's a good question. Check out the US Attorney in charge of the NH phone-jamming, Thomas J Colantuono. Does Gonzales give prizes for slow response to Republican dirty tricks? It took Colantuono's people more than a year before the FBI questioned their top/only suspect in the NH phone-jamming, a crime by Republicans.

But in other matters, Colantuono could move fast. Just before the 2004 elections, he moved fast to block Democrats from questioning phone-jamming suspects--and fast again to file corruption charges against a NH Democrat.

In 2006, right after the Democrats' landmark electoral victory, Colantuono also moved fast to shut down his phone-jamming enquiries, making a guilty plea deal with the last defendant that gave the Feds nothing and the Republicans everything.

When Republicans commit crimes, Colantuono moves sloowwwwwly:

Nov. 5, 2002: During a tight race for a US Senate seat, phone lines to 5 get-out-the-vote operations run by NH Democrats around the state, and one GOTV operation run by the Manchester Firefighters' Association, are swamped by repeated hang-up phone calls from Idaho. Republican John Sununu wins the Senate seat.

Feb. 7, 2003: Union Leader headline "Dirty tricks: Federal officials alerted by police to alleged GOP phone jamming". Article names Chuck McGee, Allen Raymond, GOP Marketplace, and Mylo Enterprises, the company owned by Shaun Hansen.

Feb 20, 2003: Union Leader reports that GOP Marketplace has shut down its website in anticipation of investigation; their lawyer says no federal investigators have contacted them.

December, 2003. More than a year after the phone jamming, FBI first interviews Chuck McGee.

More timeline here

When Democrats have problems, Colantuono moves fast:

On June 10, 2004, NH State Senator Burt Cohen dropped out of the US Senate race against incumbent Judd Gregg (R, NH) after controversy surfaced about Cohen's campaign manager Jesse D Burchfeld. Cohen's withdrawal so close to election left Democrats without a credible candidate. In November of 2004, Gregg defeated his opponent "Granny D" Haddock (aged 94) by a 66 to 34% margin--and Burchfield pled guilty to making false statements to the FCC.

The problem surfaced in June, 2004, but by August, 2004 (well in time for the 2004 election) Colantuono had sent out a press release describing the charges against Jesse Burchfeld, with liberal mention of Democrat Burt Cohen.

Yes, within two months after a Democrat's problem surfaced, Colantuono could not just investigate but file charges.

2004 was a Presidential election year, as you may recall (and Mrs. Colantuono's innovative pro-GOP tactics made local news). And, in 2004, US Attorney Colantuono could move fast not just to start enquiries but also to block them.

August 11, 2004: US Department of Justice Attorney Todd Hinnen, who obtained guilty pleas from McGee and Raymond that mention an unnamed "official in a national political organization", will be pulled off the phone-jamming case.

October 11, 2004: Josh Marshall identifies James Tobin as the (still unindicted) Republican official mentioned by Hinnen.

October 15, 2004: James Tobin resigns as Bush-Cheney New England campaign chair.

October 21, 2004: Twenty minutes before Democrats are set to depose to interview phone-jamming witnesses for their civil suit, the DOJ intervenes to shut down their investigation for six months.

But--slow again--James Tobin was not indicted until December 2004, safely after the Presidential election. And his trial was scheduled, once again post-election, in December of 2005.

And--fast again--US Federal Attorneys for NH and Idaho moved fast in 2006, to accept a deeply-flawed guilty plea from their very last phone-jamming defendant.

So, if you're wondering how the Bush Justice Department would like all its US Attorneys to act...

Will somebody notice that it's almost a year that Colantuono's many ties to the GOP prompted a request to Gonzales for a special prosecutor on the NH phone jamming?

URL

Gonzales starts to lose it

After Tough Week, Gonzales Says He Remains Focused

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 11, 2007; A09

Excerpt

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales met privately with top members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday to offer an olive branch, but he did not seem too happy about it.

Gonzales had agreed to let Congress limit his powers and interview Justice Department officials as part of an escalating battle over the firings of eight U.S. attorneys. He knew that another scandal on FBI abuses was about to break and that some GOP lawmakers were hinting that he was in over his head.

"What else do you want us to do?" the normally taciturn Gonzales asked in exasperation, according to several officials with knowledge of the meeting.

Crooked Democrats: Story and Documents

The Political Profiling of Elected Democratic Officials: When Rhetorical Vision Participation Runs Amok

Donald C. Shields and John F. Cragan

18 February 2007

Our ongoing study of the Bush Justice Department (to be published in 2008) investigates the implications of the Bush/Ashcroft/Gonzales Justice Department's blended religious -fundamentalist and neo-conservative rhetorical vision. The study views the impact of the Justice Department's vision on the fight against public corruption and reveals the non-proportionate political profiling of elected Democratic officials.




--MORE--

Gonzales, Mueller Admit FBI Broke Law

Saturday March 10, 2007 1:01 PM

By LARA JAKES JORDAN

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The nation's top two law enforcement officials acknowledged Friday the FBI broke the law to secretly pry out personal information about Americans. They apologized and vowed to prevent further illegal intrusions.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales left open the possibility of pursuing criminal charges against FBI agents or lawyers who improperly used the USA Patriot Act in pursuit of suspected terrorists and spies.

The FBI's transgressions were spelled out in a damning 126-page audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. He found that agents sometimes demanded personal data on people without official authorization, and in other cases improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances.

The audit also concluded that the FBI for three years underreported to Congress how often it used national security letters to ask businesses to turn over customer data. The letters are administrative subpoenas that do not require a judge's approval.

``People have to believe in what we say,'' Gonzales said. ``And so I think this was very upsetting to me. And it's frustrating.''

``We have some work to do to reassure members of Congress and the American people that we are serious about being responsible in the exercise of these authorities,'' he said.

Under the Patriot Act, the national security letters give the FBI authority to demand that telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses produce personal records about their customers or subscribers. About three-fourths of the letters issued between 2003 and 2005 involved counterterror cases, with the rest for espionage investigations, the audit reported.

Shoddy record-keeping and human error were to blame for the bulk of the problems, said Justice auditors, who were careful to note they found no indication of criminal misconduct.

Still, ``we believe the improper or illegal uses we found involve serious misuses of national security letter authorities,'' the audit concluded.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller said many of the problems were being fixed, including by building a better internal data collection system and training employees on the limits of their authority. The FBI has also scrapped the use of ``exigent letters,'' which were used to gather information without the signed permission of an authorized official.

``But the question should and must be asked: How could this happen? Who is accountable?'' Mueller said. ``And the answer to that is, I am to be held accountable.''

Mueller said he had not been asked to resign, nor had he discussed doing so with other officials. He said employees would probably face disciplinary actions, not criminal charges, following an internal investigation of how the violations occurred.

The audit incensed lawmakers in Congress already seething over the recent dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys. Democrats who lead House and Senate judiciary and intelligence oversight panels promised hearings on the findings. Several lawmakers - Republicans and Democrats alike - raised the possibility of scaling back the FBI's authority.

``It's up to Congress to end these abuses as soon as possible,'' said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee. ``The Patriot Act was never intended to allow the Bush administration to violate fundamental constitutional rights.''

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the audit shows ``a major failure by Justice to uphold the law.''

``If the Justice Department is going to enforce the law, it must follow it as well,'' said Hoekstra, of Michigan.

The American Civil Liberties Union said the audit proves Congress must amend the Patriot Act to require judicial approval anytime the FBI wants access to sensitive personal information.

``The attorney general and the FBI are part of the problem, and they cannot be trusted to be part of the solution,'' said ACLU's executive director, Anthony D. Romero.

Both Gonzales and Mueller called the national security letters vital tools in pursuing terrorists and spies in the United States. ``They are the bread and butter of our investigations,'' Mueller said.

Gonzales asked the inspector general to issue a follow-up audit in July on whether the FBI had followed recommendations to fix the problems.

Fine's annual review is required by Congress, over the objections of the Bush administration. It concluded that the number of national security letters requested by the FBI skyrocketed in the years after the Patriot Act became law. Each letter issued may contain several requests.

In 2000, for example, the FBI issued an estimated 8,500 requests. That number peaked in 2004 with 56,000. Overall, the FBI reported issuing 143,074 requests in national security letters between 2003 and 2005.

But that did not include an additional 8,850 requests that were never recorded in the FBI's database, the audit found. A sample review of 77 case files at four FBI field offices showed that agents had underreported the number of national security letter requests by about 22 percent.

Additionally, the audit found, the FBI identified 26 possible violations in its use of the letters, including failing to get proper authorization, making improper requests under the law and unauthorized collection of telephone or Internet e-mail records.

The FBI also used exigent letters to quickly get information - sometimes in non-emergency situations - without going through proper channels. In at least 700 cases, these letters were sent to three telephone companies to get billing records and subscriber information, the audit found.

^---

On the Net:

The report is at: http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/FBI/index.ht

m

Justice Department: http://www.usdoj.gov

FBI: http://www.fbi.gov

White House Bows on Attorney Reforms

Thursday March 8, 2007 11:01 PM

By LAURIE KELLMAN

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration, bowing to an uproar over its firing of eight federal prosecutors, won't oppose legislation changing the rules for replacing them, senators said Thursday.

``The administration would not object to the bill,'' said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., referring to legislation to remove the administration's power to fill the vacancies without Senate confirmation. He spoke with reporters after a meeting involving Judiciary Committee senators and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Schumer, Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, the panel's senior Republican, said Gonzales also agreed to let five of his top aides involved in the firings talk with the committee.

The committee was prepared to authorize subpoenas for the officials.

Six of the eight ousted prosecutors told House and Senate committees on Tuesday that they were dismissed without explanation. Some said the dismissals followed calls from members of Congress concerning sensitive political corruption investigations.

Others said they felt threatened that the Justice Department would retaliate against them for talking with reporters and providing lawmakers with information about their dismissals.

Department of Injustice: PAUL KRUGMAN

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
THE NEW YORK TIMES
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Department of Injustice

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 9, 2007

The politicization of the Justice Department was a key component of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a permanent Republican lock on power.

For those of us living in the Garden State, the growing scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors immediately brought to mind the subpoenas that Chris Christie, the former Bush “Pioneer” who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, issued two months before the 2006 election — and the way news of the subpoenas was quickly leaked to local news media.

The subpoenas were issued in connection with allegations of corruption on the part of Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who seemed to be facing a close race at the time. Those allegations appeared, on their face, to be convoluted and unconvincing, and Mr. Menendez claimed that both the investigation and the leaks were politically motivated.

Mr. Christie’s actions might have been all aboveboard. But given what we’ve learned about the pressure placed on federal prosecutors to pursue dubious investigations of Democrats, Mr. Menendez’s claims of persecution now seem quite plausible.

In fact, it’s becoming clear that the politicization of the Justice Department was a key component of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a permanent Republican lock on power. Bear in mind that if Mr. Menendez had lost, the G.O.P. would still control the Senate.

For now, the nation’s focus is on the eight federal prosecutors fired by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In January, Mr. Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that he “would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney for political reasons.” But it’s already clear that he did indeed dismiss all eight prosecutors for political reasons — some because they wouldn’t use their offices to provide electoral help to the G.O.P., and the others probably because they refused to soft-pedal investigations of corrupt Republicans.

--MORE--

Senate Republicans Deliver Sharp Criticism of Gonzales; New Attorney General Soon?

Senate Republicans Deliver Sharp Criticism of Gonzales
Senators Say Attorney General Fired Prosecutors Without Explanation

By Paul Kane and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 8, 2007; 3:36 PM

Senior Senate Republicans today delivered scathing criticism of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales for his handling of the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, joining Democrats in chagrin that the prosecutors were dismissed without adequate explanation.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested that Gonzales's status as the nation's leading law enforcement officer might not last through the remainder of President Bush's term, pointedly disputing the attorney general's public rationale for the mass firings.

"One day there will be a new attorney general, maybe sooner rather than later," Specter said at a committee hearing where a new round of subpoenas to the Justice Department was considered.

After the meeting, Specter declined to elaborate on that remark, but told reporters that most of the blame for the ongoing controversy rests with the attorney general. "It's snowballing, mostly with the help of the Department of Justice," he said.

Two of the Justice Department's most vocal defenders on the issue, Sens. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), also had sharp words for senior Justice Department officials who attacked the credibility of the prosecutors publicly by saying they performed poorly at their jobs.

"Some people's reputations are going to suffer needlessly," Kyl said. "Hopefully we can get to the point where we say, 'These people did a great job.'"

Sessions said the firings were handled in an "unhealthy" manner. "They really should have talked with these people in far more detail," he added.

Kyl and Sessions said, however, that the evidence does not yet point to a widespread conspiracy to oust the prosecutors for political motives. Both said it was within Bush's right to ask for the resignations of the eight prosecutors.

The remarks from a trio of top Republicans marked the strongest criticism so far from Bush administration allies in the controversy. Senior Democrats on the panel continued to sharply criticize the firings.

The eight prosecutors were dismissed last year, seven of them on Dec. 7. The Justice Department has said that all but one were fired for "performance" issues, including failing to adhere to Bush administration policy on a number of matters. The other was removed to make way for an ally of White House political adviser Karl Rove.

One of the U.S. attorneys, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, has charged that he was let go after a conflict with Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) and Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R.-N.M.) over a corruption investigation involving Democrats that his office was pursuing. He has testified to Congress that both called him shortly before the 2006 election to pressure him on the timing of indictments. Domenici and Wilson have acknowledged phoning Iglesias but said they were not trying to sway his investigation.

Specter said that an op-ed article by Gonzales that appeared in USA Today yesterday, in which he said the firings were an "overblown personnel matter," only served to exacerbate the problem. "I hardly think it's a personnel matter, and I hardly think it's been overblown," he said.

He read portions of the Gonzales article, pausing to critique each one. He added that the suggestion that the attorney general had lost "confidence" in the prosecutors needlessly suggested they performed poorly at their jobs.

"There will always be a black mark against them," Specter said.

Committee Republicans objected to issuing subpoenas to force the testimony of Gonzales's inner circle of aides, instead arguing that the panel should continue to negotiate for their testimony on a voluntary basis. Democrats agreed with that idea, saying they would be willing to conduct interviews in private if that produced information they are seeking about the decision-making process behind the mass firing.

Also today, a liberal-leaning advocacy group formally requested a third ethics investigation in the controversy. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) asked the House ethics committee to investigate allegations that a top aide to Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) called the U.S. attorney in Seattle to inquire about a vote fraud case.

Former U.S. attorney John McKay said Hastings's chief of staff called him shortly after a hotly disputed gubernatorial race inquiring about the pending inquiry, but McKay said he cut the call short. Hastings and his former aide, Ed Cassidy, have characterized the call as routine and appropriate.

CREW's executive director, Melanie Sloan, said that Hastings, ranking member of the House ethics panel, "attempted to use the criminal justice system to interfere with a gubernatorial election."

Hastings and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio), who chairs the House ethics committee, declined comment. They said they were forbidden from talking about any internal issues on the panel, which is officially called the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct.

CREW has also filed requests for probes of Domenici and Wilson. The Senate Ethics Committee has announced a preliminary inquiry into the Domenici call.

The battle over fired US attorneys

from the March 08, 2007 edition

Eight lost their jobs, leading Democratic lawmakers to try to rein in presidential powers.

The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON

The Bush administration's controversial firing of eight US attorneys sets up a major clash between the White House and the new Congress, as Democrats step up efforts to rein in new presidential powers.

At issue is whether the Justice Department's decision to replace these top federal prosecutors was a political purge and, if so, what Congress can do about it.

As a start, lawmakers are revisiting a last-minute provision added to last year's reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act at the request of the Justice Department. It gives the president authority to replace a US attorney without going back to the Senate for confirmation. At the time, no lawmaker noticed. But dramatic testimony Tuesday from fired attorneys, who appeared only after Congress began issuing subpoenas, is fueling a push to strike the provision.

The back-to-back Senate and House hearings also raised questions about whether three Republican lawmakers tried to influence public corruption investigations, in violation of congressional ethics rules.

"This week, the House and Senate have launched hearings into two scandals – the neglect of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the firing of several US attorneys by the Bush administration – that profoundly demonstrate just how important it is that Democrats have restored broad and vigorous oversight," said House majority leader Steny Hoyer, in a statement on Wednesday.

A first move is to revoke the single sentence in the USA Patriot Act that allows the president to replace a US attorney without Senate confirmation.

"For over 150 years, the process of appointing interim US attorneys has worked with virtually no problems. Now, just one year after receiving unchecked authority in a little-known section added to the Patriot Act last spring, the administration has significantly abused its discretion," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California at Tuesday's Senate hearing.

Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill sponsored by Senator Feinstein that limits the term for an interim appointment to 120 days – returning the law to what it was prior to the reauthorization of the Patriot Act.

"That's to create an incentive to go to the Senate for confirmation," says Feinstein. If a nominee is not confirmed by the Senate in 120 days, the appointment would be made by the district court.

So far, Senate Republicans have blocked moves to take the bill to the floor for debate. But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle predict that this week's hearings will give the bill more traction.

What emerged from the hearings are two starkly different versions of events.

No one disputes that the president has the right to remove political appointees.

"Each of us was fully aware that we served at the pleasure of the president and that we could be removed for any, or no, reason," said Carol Lam of San Diego, in a joint statement for herself and other fired US attorneys who appeared before Senate and House Judiciary panels. "In most of our cases, we were given little or no information about the reason for the request for our resignations. This hearing is not a forum to engage in speculation, and we decline to speculate about the reasons."

But in a full day of questioning, lawmakers pressed witnesses on whether they felt pressured to lay off corruption cases against Republicans – or step up prosecutions of Democrats.

Ms. Lam, who served as US attorney from 2002 until this year, declined to speculate on whether she had been fired because of her prosecution of former GOP Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham for corruption.

In response to the same questions, US Attorney David Iglesias told lawmakers he had been contacted by Rep. Heather Wilson and Sen. Pete Domenici, both New Mexico Republicans, who wanted to know whether he planned to indict a local Democrat for corruption before last November's elections. "I suspect they believed that I was not a help to them during the campaign, and I just started to kind of put the dots together," he told the Senate panel.

Both lawmakers acknowledge the phone calls to Mr. Iglesias but deny that they tried to influence an ongoing investigation – a violation of ethics rules. Another witness, former US Attorney John McKay in Seattle, said a former aide to Rep. Doc Hastings (R) of Washington called to ask whether he would convene a grand jury to investigate voter fraud in the 2004 governor's race. Congressman Hastings chaired the House ethics committee in the 109th Congress.

In testimony before the House panel, Justice Department official William Moschella told lawmakers that no US attorneys were "removed [or] asked or encouraged to resign in an effort to retaliate against them." He also testified that the Justice Department never intended to use interim appointments to "circumvent the Senate confirmation process."

The sharp questioning was to be expected, observers say.

"Many of those US attorneys had very strong evaluations from the Justice Department, so it shouldn't be surprising that they're questioning why they were fired," says Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

Republicans on both panels say they are troubled by the way the Justice Department handled the firings, especially its decision to inform seven US attorneys on the same day without citing a reason for the firings.

"To replace seven United States attorneys all at once is not exactly a discreet thing to do," said Sen. Arlen Specter (R) of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

On Tuesday, Sen. Jon Kyl (R) of Arizona, who has been opposing moves to rewrite the rules on interim appointments of prosecutors, said he would have no objection to the bill proceeding if federal district courts were removed from the nomination process.

By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer

Attorney General to Democratic leaders: Bugger off

By ROBERT D. NOVAK

14 hours, 35 minutes ago

Excerpt

PROBING GONZALES

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has indicated he is too busy to answer letters from Democratic congressional leaders about his firing seven U.S. attorneys involved in probes of public corruption, though a lower-level Justice Department official rejected their proposals.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel, House Democratic Caucus chairman, had written Gonzales two letters suggesting that he name Carol Lam, fired as U.S. attorney in San Diego, as an outside counsel to continue her pursuit of the Duke Cunningham case. Asked by Melissa Charbonneau of the Christian Broadcasting Network about this column’s report that Gonzales did not respond, Gonzales said: “I think that the American people lose if I spend all my time worrying about congressional requests for information, if I spend all my time responding to subpoenas.”

Richard A. Hertling, the acting Justice Department lobbyist, responded Wednesday, 22 days after Emanuel’s letter. He contended “the Justice Department would not ever seek the resignation of a U.S. attorney if doing so would jeopardize a public corruption case” and rejected naming Lam as a special prosecutor.

US Attorney David Iglesias Fired After Failing To Break The Law For Republican Lawmakers

Related
White House Backed U.S. Attorney Firings, Officials Say
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Over the past six years or so, your frozen correspondent has been gazing in horror at the multi-pronged evisceration campaign being waged by the administration against the country's legal system. It began almost as soon as the so-called president took office, with the abrogation of binding international treaties; it got much worse shortly after 9/11 with the midnight passage of the so-called USA PATRIOT Act; and we've been running downhill ever since.

Difficult as it may be to imagine, the attacks seem to be more frequent and more serious than ever lately. Cornered animal syndrome? Part of a larger plan? A mere targeting of opportunities? All of the above? I don't know, but in any case it's very ugly.

One prong of the campaign -- a relatively recent one, or at least one which has come to light recently -- is the firing of US attorneys, apparently for political reasons.

On Thursday, McClatchy published a fine piece on a suddenly former US attorney, David Iglesias of New Mexico. And it appears that Iglesias lost his job -- despite being a Republican evangelical Hispanic veteran -- for failing to bow to improper pressure from a couple of Republican legislators.

Here's a quick excerpt: Sources: GOP lawmakers tried to influence federal investigation

Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico pressured the U.S. attorney in their state to speed up indictments in a federal corruption investigation that involved at least one former Democratic state senator, according to two people familiar with the contacts.

The alleged involvement of the two Republican lawmakers raises questions about possible violations of House of Representatives and Senate ethics rules and could taint the criminal investigation into the award of an $82 million courthouse contract.

The two people with knowledge of the incident said Domenici and Wilson intervened in mid-October, when Wilson was in a competitive re-election campaign that she won by 875 votes out of nearly 211,000 cast.

What timing! Unbelievable? Not!

David Iglesias, who stepped down as U.S. attorney in New Mexico on Wednesday, told McClatchy Newspapers that he believed the Bush administration fired him Dec. 7 because he resisted the pressure to rush an indictment.

According to the two individuals, Domenici and Wilson called to press Iglesias for details of the case.

Wilson was curt after Iglesias was "non-responsive" to her questions about whether an indictment would be unsealed, said the two individuals, who asked not to be identified because they feared possible political repercussions. Rumors had spread throughout the New Mexico legal community that an indictment of at least one Democrat was sealed.

Domenici, who wasn't up for re-election, called about a week and a half later and was more persistent than Wilson, the people said. When Iglesias said an indictment wouldn't be handed down until at least December, the line went dead.

Amazing? There's an awful lot more!

Please click here to read the whole article.

Larisa Alexandrovna, never known for holding her tongue, draws the only logical conclusion: Alberto Gonzales must be removed from office (with my emphasis, here and below):

Seriously, can someone make a citizen's arrest or something? Rep. Heather Wilson and Senator Pete Domenici allegedly (giggle) attempted to force indictments against Democrats in order to have a smear tool for their losing campaigns. When that did not work, their pal Alberto -- should be disbarred -- Gonzales allegedly (giggle) fired the federal prosecutor for not playing political ball with the legal system. Why is this man still in a position of authority. Congress, anyone?

Now my guess is that these two gang members of Congress did not just come up with the idea on their own and separately. So if I am correct, then that would make their activities a conspiracy and Gonzales a co-conspirator for using his position to retaliate against his staff for not violating the law, allegedly (giggle). Again, why is this man in a position of authority when he has broken the law over and over again? Congress, anyone?
...
I tend to think that tampering with a federal investigation is probably a criminal offense, despite also being an ethical violation. After all, it is not like some random person demanded this. This is a Senator and a member of the House in the US government allegedly (giggle) demanding an indictment for political reasons.

One more time and in concert: Alberto Gonzales must be removed from office and disbarred. Demand it. Call your members of Congress and demand oversight of this criminal element tainting the Department of Justice.

Whoa! Did she ever hit the nail on the head that time! I couldn't have said it nearly as well myself.

And Larisa is much less "conspiratorial" than I am, so if she says it's a conspiracy...

Andrei at The American Street goes even farther. Rightly so, IMVHO: And The Horses They Rode Up On

What Congress also needs to do is to expel the two of its members from New Mexico who backed this illegal dismissal. Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson should be returned to civilian life — and then indicted for obstruction of justice. Congress can do this by a two-thirds vote, and has done so before in cases of far less oppression than this.

Yes, I know those wimps will probably only settle for censuring them at most — but think of this as a negotiating tactic. Always ask for more than you expect to get, or you’ll never get anywhere with those spineless poll-watchers. As for me, it’s a moral issue: we cannot have a free small-”r” republican country with scum like these two serving in our legislative bodies. Yes, we should close Guantanamo, but Marion, Illinois is still available for them.

That's beautiful! Thanks to Andrei, Larisa, and McClatchy.

I think you should take Larisa's advice (at the very least). You do know how to contact your "elected" representatives, don't you? If not ... here's the House of Representatives (find your rep using the search box at the top left corner) and here's the Senate (find your senators using the box at the top right).

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[see also]

Michael Gisick in the Albuquerque Tribune: U.S. attorney: Politics drove me from office

[link] by Winter Patriot @ 3:00 AM