Letters to the Editor
-
Trash
It's a shame this is getting thrown out with the trash. It's a good story.
-
Still...
not against the law or even unethical.
-
@ tiberius
Keep livin in la la land pal.
Obstruction of justice (in this case, in all of its literal and metaphorical tenses). Violations of the Hatch Act. Probably some FEC laws violated too.
But you keep your head in the sand. Really, it'll be better for you in the end.
-
No, perhaps tiberius IS right
Neither the discussion of firing U.S. attorneys, nor their actual dismissal, is likely illegal on its face.
However, as was pointed out ad nauseum during the Lewinsky affair, lying under oath IS illegal, and impeachable to boot.
Being a political process, the bar for impeachment is different, and in a real way, lower than for purely legal matters. As we all should have learned during Watergate, it's the COVERUP, stupid. It's patently obvious that many in the Bush administration have lied their rear ends off, from Gonzalez' early denials of involvement, to claims by him and many others that they "couldn't remember", during investigation of this matter.
-
It's pretty obvious
That the purpose of the purge was to create a justice department unfairly prosecuting democrats for the purpose of republicans winning elections. I mean, how many dots do we need before we start connecting them? The rove-ian presentations to the various federal offices of districts Republicans needed to win. The prosecutor purge. Fundraising. Gerrymandering.
It is a conspiracy to use Federal property and Federal Resources for electioneering on the grandest scale possible. In direct violation of the Hatch Act. And, lying under oath is purjory, and stymying investigations is obstruction of justice.
Like the Lewinsky affair, if we throw enough at them, something's gotta stick. They got purjory about sex. I wonder what'll stick for us?
-
You should all read my posting regarding Robert Kennedy Jr.
The firiings were about those attorneys NOT going after Dems for allegid voter frud. Bush and his nihilists wanted them to erect "walls" so minorities couldn't vote. That is it in a nut shell my friends. Poor prople vote for Dems, the rich for GOP knuckleheads.
-
You should all read my posting regarding Robert Kennedy Jr.
The firiings were about those attorneys NOT going after Dems for allegid voter frud. Bush and his nihilists wanted them to erect "walls" so minorities couldn't vote. That is it in a nut shell my friends. Poor prople vote for Dems, the rich for GOP knuckleheads.
-
MAYBE not against the law . . .
it's looking more and more like obstruction of justice was the primary underlying impetus for the Attorneygate purges.
The Bud Cummins firing in Arkansas may be the key. Cummins was in the midst of investigating Missouri Governor Matt Blunt (idiot offspring of Congressman Roy Blunt - longtime DeLay lackey and general bottom feeder) for corrupt practices involved in the use of license bureau franchises as political favors.
Why, you might ask, was the US Attorney from the Eastern District of Arkansas investigating Missouri's governor?
One reason might be is that Blunt made a gift of a license bureau franchise to the wife of Todd Graves, the US Attorney for the Western District of Missouri - so Graves couldn't very well investigate the BFF who had given his wife a $3 million dollar enterprise.
When Karl Rove and the fascist crooks from the West Wing are finally forced to turn over the 5,000,000 e-mails - quite a story will be revealed.
-
The Minnesota DA Quit
The reason that the DA from Minnesota wasn't fired was that he quit, apparently on his own, saving Gonzales from having to fire him.
But, the story doesn't end there. The successor was an attorney, with prior Minnesota connections, who had worked close to Gonzales for a whole six weeks. The transition was marked by an "investiture" ceremony fit for a bishop -- to which the prior DA was conspicuously not invited. Then it hit the papers that all three of the department heads resigned. Now, a senior attorney from Justice in D.C. is in the office to help on running the office.
If you want to read all about it, see the past few weeks of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
-
There are others...
One example is Tom DiBagio, the U.S Attorney from Maryland. As the New York Times reported recently, he was forced to resign after he began to investigate corruption related to the republican governor of Maryland. At one point, the Governor's Chief of Staff called up DiBagio and essentially threatened him. DiBagio indicted that he viewed the contact as a personal threat to him and immediately reported it to the Justice Department. You know the rest. The threat was ignored and DiBagio was forced out, killing the investigation.
This is important for a number of reasons. First, it fits the established pattern for the Bush Justice Department, in that if you investigate fellow republicans, you're fired. Second, it undercuts one of the key elements of the Attorney General's testimony last week.
You see, Alberto Gonzales got a little clever when he told a Senate panel that David Iglesias should have reported improper contacts with Sen. Dominici and Rep. Wilson to the Justice Department immediately, even going so far as to imply that the failure to report the conversations was a contributing factor in his dismissal. But we already know from DiBagio's case that when a U.S. Attorney tries to report an improper contact from a republican official (Gov. Erlich) he is then forced to resign under pressure.
My question is this - why didn't any Senator follow up with the AG and point to DiBagio's experience and ask why his report of improper contacts wasn;t taken seriously. And given that we know what happened when DiBagio "followed procedure" - it was a front page story in the New York times, after all - why isn't the Attorney General facing any sanctions for telling an obvious lie to the Senate last week about David Iglesias? Or has the Senate concluded that the AG is just so damn stupid that he wouldn't recognize the truth if he ran into it on the highway?
-
Let's review...
"Senior congressional aides who have seen unedited internal documents say the Bush administration considered firing at least a dozen U.S. attorneys before settling on eight late last year.
The four who escaped dismissal came from states that the White House considered political battlegrounds in the last presidential election: Missouri, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
And the one who was discharged from the Western Deistrict of Michigan was NOT from a 'battleground state'?
Two of the four said they resigned voluntarily before eight U.S. attorneys were fired on Dec. 7. Two continue to serve as federal prosecutors.
The latest revelation could provide new fodder to critics who contend that politics, not policy or performance, played the determining role in the firing decisions. At the very least, it opens new avenues of inquiry for investigators from the House of Representatives and Senate Judiciary Committees.
The White House and the Justice Department have denied repeatedly that politics played any role in the firings.
I don't know what to say about that. If the filings WERE "political," so what? What I want to know is whether any of the firings were ILLEGAL. This story gets us nowhere closer to that issue. It seems that this entire story is, and will remain, about nothing.Somebody needs to tell the Angry Left that they need to "Move On"...
The congressional aides, who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to discuss the information publicly, on Friday confirmed to McClatchy Newspapers that former U.S. Attorney Todd Graves of Kansas City, Mo., and U.S. Attorney Thomas Marino of Scranton, Pa., were among the 12 whose jobs were in jeopardy.
So we have congressional aides doing something we KNOW is wrong; disclosing unauthorized leaks. But we're going to keep on after the administration over something that has not been shown to have been a crime, and for which no crime is even imaginable?
Graves resigned in March to return to private legal practice. Marino kept his job as the chief federal prosecutor in central and eastern Pennsylvania.
Aha! The old "purge", Bush-style. The Philadelphia Gulag. The White-shoe Archipelago. Some kinda purge...
Graves said Friday he was surprised to learn that he had been considered a possible target for dismissal, but he expressed relief that he was no longer with the Justice Department.
"The current environment at the department can only be described as toxic. ... What is going on now in D.C. is a three-ring circus, and I don't want anything to do with it," he told The Kansas City Star.
Okay, and with that kind of loyalty to the administration, this is the kind of guy they should be keeping as their US Attorney?
Marino didn't respond to requests for comment Friday.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse declined to discuss any of the redacted names. He said the Justice Department withheld the names of prosecutors who had been considered for possible dismissal to protect their reputations and "their ability to function effectively as U.S. attorneys or professionals in other roles."
McClatchy previously identified two other prosecutors who were dropped from the final list: former U.S. Attorney Thomas Heffelfinger of Minneapolis and U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic of Milwaukee. Heffelfinger resigned in February to go into private legal practice. Biskupic remains at his federal post in Wisconsin.
It's not clear why any of the four prosecutors who were dropped from the list were initially targeted or what led to their reprieves. Biskupic and Heffelfinger have said that they were unaware that they were at risk of losing their jobs.
Wow, what a toxic, fearful atmosphere. They were "unaware."
The administration has declined to disclose the full list of U.S. attorneys who had been considered possible targets for dismissal, but redacted documents that the administration released to Congress left no doubt that other prosecutors had been targeted.
The names of three possible targets were edited out of a Jan. 9, 2006, internal Justice Department e-mail, leaving blank spaces on a list that included four prosecutors who were later forced out. But some congressional investigators were allowed to review unedited department documents.
Well now there is a policy that needs to be reviewed. Because apparently, when you let "some congressional investigators" review documents, they turn them into McClatchey news stories.
I say the one clear investigation that needs to be undertaken is to find the "senior congressional aides" who fed this story, anonymously, because they "were not authorized" to say what they did.
In Missouri, a traditional battleground state, Graves won good reviews from law enforcement officials and local prosecutors before he announced his decision to step down. The Bush appointee came under fire from Missouri Democrats in 2005 when Republican Gov. Matt Blunt awarded a $2.6 million no-bid contract to Graves' wife, Tracy, allowing her to run a state motor vehicle fee office.
The family connection to Blunt became a problem for Graves when the governor was caught in a corruption investigation involving state contracts. Graves recused himself, and Cummins, the top federal prosecutor in neighboring Arkansas, took over. He ultimately dropped the case without issuing any indictments.
Graves was replaced by an interim prosecutor until U.S. Attorney John Wood, a distant cousin of Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., took the job in April.
In Pennsylvania, Marino had considered stepping down earlier this year to run for his old job as a state district attorney in Lycoming County. He decided against it and continues to serve as a federal prosecutor.
Sheeesh! And this is a hot story at Salon?