Why do these guys leave an email trail?!

Glenn touches upon why these particular actors may have felt safe, in his earlier response to me.

But generally: when I was fresh out of law school, my first job was doing document review for extremely large-scale corporate litigation. If I was left with one principal impression from that experience, it was "I can't believe the kinds of things people say in emails."

There was one particularly amusing bit of discovery that my colleagues and I were forced to disclose to the other side: two pharmaceutical reps engaged in a series of x-rated emails that can only be described as virtual sex via email. One of the participants at one point asked "Aren't you worried about putting all this in email?" to which the other replied "Oh, who's ever going to read this stuff?!"

That's when I instituted what I call my "New York Post" rule: before hitting send on any email, I always ask myself "Would I be comfortable if this email was published on the front page of tomorrow's New York Post?"

Wouldn't it run against a defense attorney's oath to be an Officer of the Court to take a client with Di Rita's trail of outright lies and falsehoods?

Not at all. First, there is no ethical bar to an attorney representing any criminal defendant, even the most notorious (and I'm speaking as a prosecutor).

Second, since there is a Constitutional right to counsel, without defense attorneys we couldn't convict the guilty.

Theoretically speaking, of course.

The question remains does Di Rita really have any defense to offer that wouldn't get laughed out of court in under 30 seconds?

Beats the hell out me. I never cease to be amazed by the...creative legal defenses conjured by my esteemed friends in the defense bar!

That's if anyone ever gets indicted over this. I have no particular reason to believe it will come to that.

No one's ever been able to satisfactorily explain to me why, for instance, the President hasn't been indicted for numerous federal felony wiretapping violations.

The rule of law doesn't exactly seem to be, uh, too vigorously applied to members of thie administration, if I may be forgiven the rather monumental understatement.

Actually, it's not "just like" at all.

Last time I checked, Glenn wasn't using taxpayer money to run this blog.

A good response to a post that is fantastically stupid, even by Shooter242's standards.

The other critical and obvious way one is not "just like" the other is that the DoD program was conceived and executed to manipulate the media with an unseen hand, as per the admissions of its own participants.

Even if one is annoyed with or disagrees with Greenwald's work here it's hard to conceive of how it is in any way similarly "manipulative."

I was thinking that this scandal might be the final nail in the coffin of that old "liberal media" myth.

Shooter, if you're not too busy trying to extract Brian Scheetz's boot out of your ass, please tell me:

1. Do you still content the media have a liberal bias?

2. If so, how do you account for their willing participation in this DoD program, and

3. If you contend that they did not willingly go along -- that they were duped by DoD -- if they have an anti-Bush agenda, then why are they not now screaming from the treetops about it?

Yeah boy, putting "Retired Army General" in front of someone's name is the perfect way to hide an affiliation with the Pentagon. Whatever were they thinking? LOL.

The operative word here, boy, is "retired." If this was truly an above-board PR campaign, wouldn't they have used active military personnel, or spokesmen like Di Rita themselves?

So, your entire defense of this program boils down to a contention that it was not covert? Are you sure you want to climb all the way out on that slender branch? Let's see:

"It was covert. As Barstow's piece states, the 75 retired military officers who were recruited by Donald Rumsfeld and given talking points to deliver on Fox, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and MSNBC were given extraordinary access to White House and Pentagon officials. However, "The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon."...

"According to the Pentagon's own internal documents...the military analysts were considered "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" who would deliver administration "themes and messages" to millions of Americans "in the form of their own opinions." According to one participating military analyst, it was "psyops on steroids."

"It was done "through the undisclosed use of third parties." In their television appearances, the military analysts did not disclose their ties to the White House, let alone that they were its surrogates. The military analysts were used as puppets for the Pentagon. In the words of Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and for Fox News military analyst, "It was them saying, 'We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you."

http://www.prwatch.org/node/7261

Please reconcile your contention that this was not covert with the statements, above, from the program participants themselves who appear to disagree with you.