<p>For those who missed it, here an example of “friendly” questioning from loyal Bushie lap dog Lindsey Graham of South Carolina:</p>
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<p>Ouch. That’s gonna leave a mark.</p>
<p>ID, at some points we should exchange PM’s about the Collins-Allen match-up. I have a bonafide inside pipeline on that one. I think Allen can take her but it’s not at the top of my list of Democratic takeovers. (Sen. Udall from Colorado, c’mon down!)</p>
<p>I think the Dems stand a better than even chance of holding all of their current seats that are up next cycle.</p>
<p>“polls don’t tell much about the truth.”</p>
<p>Uh, the polls in question were designed to measure the attitude of the electorate, not its knowledge or ignorance of some objective fact. There is no “truth” at issue except the fact that the American people are soundly on the side of the Democrats on this one.</p>
<p>Man, Lindsey Graham…is he trying to put Jon Stewart out of business? It is quite a relaxing change of pace to simply sit back and watch Republicans eat their young. If they’d shown a bit of this spine over the last six years, they’d still be running the Hill.</p>
<p>“holding all of their current seats”</p>
<p>Yes, I think they may, although of course we Illinois Democrats will have to drum up a new young star to fill Obama’s Senate seat.</p>
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<p>Do you think he’ll accept the V-P slot?</p>
<p>One more question on Abu Gonzales. How, on god’s green earth, can a person testify, “I have come to understand that I met with the President”?</p>
<p>TheDad, I agree with you about that sanctimonious hypocrite, Joe Lieberman; he is a thorn in my side, too.</p>
<p>I need a reality check: let me see if I understand what is happening - and if anyone can point to a source for the original controversy, that is - the politics behind firing the Attorneys - I’d appreciate it.</p>
<p>So as I understand this:</p>
<p>1) The Patriot Act changed the law so that instead of being approved by Congress, hiring of U.S.Attorneys (and firing) could now be done at the will of the President.
2) Some 9 U.S. Attorneys were fired.
3) Some of these fired Attorneys claimed (? source if possible?) or someone around these folks claimed that they were fired for refusing to prosecute Democratic candidates on the eve of the election. The Randy Cunningham story comes out.<br>
4) Nobody can prove the election tampering because all the emails are disappeared. Scandal about emails - is it ok to use non governmental email systems for government work, much discussion delving into details email systems; some say it’s unethical to use non gov email, some say one must in order to do any political work, much smoke…emails still missing re/ firings.
5) Abu G. hauled in for hearings, Republicans go all “harsh” on him for “handling firings poorly.” Not one Republican accuses of illegal or unethical behavior; in fact they are very very clear and careful to make sure G’s only sin is handling the firings badly.
6) Emails are still missing; folks don’t remember the original source of controversy; most of the public scratch heads and say, “Well, those attorneys do serve at the will of the Pres, what’s the big deal?”</p>
<p>Am I getting this big picture right? Did G. just, “take one for the team?” </p>
<p>Who are the newly appointed Attorneys? The ones who took the positions of the fired Attorneys?</p>
<p>Editing: here’s a link answering my own quesiton, heh.</p>
<p><a href=“Web Page Under Construction”>Web Page Under Construction;
<p>If it’s “handled better,” in the future will there be more firings (and more importantly, hirings) at the will of this President?</p>
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<p>This is so true (from someone who has been deposed a couple of times). You can recall to the best of your ability, but sometimes you just don’t recall or you recall wrongly. Then the other side pulls out a piece of paper on which there are notes that show that you have recalled wrongly and now you’re being threatened with perjury! And you sound like a putz for having had to “not recall” a number of times.</p>
<p>Having said that, I can’t help but look at the firing of those US attorneys as being payback. The administration is on its last legs (2 years) with the political tide turning against them and so they take some parting shots before they go off the national stage. Even if they had legitimate reasons for firing those attorneys, did they not realize that firing these people in the last part of their administration would look like you were firing them for political reasons? </p>
<p>And then later to say that they weren’t being fired for political reasons, only to have testimony and emails and other documents that showed that political reasons were a significant part of why they were fired?</p>
<p>And another thing that gave me pause about Alberto Gonzales: how could the AG not believe that these firings wouldn’t be politically problematic? On something like this, you would think that he would be intimately involved, not leave it to his chief of staff, Harriet and Karl. If he is being truthful, I’m concerned that he was so distanced from something so important.</p>
<p>I’m from the SD area and when I heard that Carol Lam was fired, I can tell you that the first thing that came to mind was that she was being fired because she was entirely too SUCCESSFUL in prosecuting Randy Cunningham, not that she was not prosecuting enough illegal aliens crossing the border.</p>
<p>“nuances of daily conversations”</p>
<p>this is a lawyer, who can’t remember a whooolllleeeeee lot</p>
<p>would you want a lawyer who can’t remember meetings and discussions he had with you?</p>
<p>would you want a doctor who does that, or an engineer, yet some want to give this guy with a collosusoly bad memory a pass</p>
<p>this guys spent DAYS and DAYS practicing for this and he don’t remember? </p>
<p>I hope your kids come home and start this I don’'t recall garbage, “you told me not to go out? I don’t recall”,</p>
<p>ellemenope, how does it change your analysis in light of the rules I mentioned earlier? Gonzales had every opportunity to take advantage of these before he spoke at the first press conference:</p>
<p>“it is 100% kosher, legally, to refresh your recollection with records while you’re testifying. You’re also allowed to study your datebook and so forth to get your story straight before you come in. Furthermore, an executive like an attorney general can’t function without a secretary who organizes his schedule, places his calls, etc., often a terrific one with a mind like a steel trap, and it’s not against the rules to talk to her about your memory of what happened and see if she rings any bells. You do NOT have to rely purely on free recall in a vacuum.”</p>
<p>My dad’s been running a law firm for over 30 years. He frequently calls me by my sisters’ names and vice versa, he couldn’t tell you when Father’s Day falls without looking it up, and he can enjoy the same movie several times because he never remembers the ending. But you better believe that he remembers everyone he has ever fired over the course of his career, and what the final straw was with every single one. This despite the fact that he has mostly fired, you know, secretaries and file clerks and stenographers, not the most powerful and high-profile attorneys in America. If Gonzales et al are telling the truth that they don’t recall why they fired powerful executives FIVE MONTHS ago, even after reviewing every record they kept, then the only conclusion I can draw is that they give the nation’s justice system less attention and care than my father gave to firing a secretary in 1983. And that’s pathetic.</p>
<p>Psshht, edit timeframe has passed.</p>
<p>Gawd I love Wikipedia (I know, it’s not considered a legit reference but I’ll still start here every time I want to really learn about something):</p>
<p>“…legal scholars have stated that firing attorneys to block investigations and pursue political retribution could violate the duty of the President to faithfully execute the laws under the constitution and could be construed as “corrupting” a government proceeding in violation of federal law…” </p>
<p><a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_controversy[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_controversy</a></p>
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<p>Of course. But, it goes beyond the bribery conviction of Cunningham. The others involved in the bribery – all centered around Defense and CIA contracts – were #3 at the CIA Dusty Foggio and the main briber Brent Wilkes. Wilkes entertained congressmen and government officials (including Porter Goss, who promoted his good friend Foggio to #3 at CIA) at notorious Washington poker parties, complete with hookers). Then, we have the other briber (who plea bargained along with Cunningham) Mitchell Wade. An upstart defense contractor whose very first contract for his brand new company was a $140,000 deal with Vice President Cheney’s office. He parlayed that into getting an the government suppliers list and a multimillion deal to supply bottled water to the CIA in Iraq. All this mess is why Porter Goss suddenly stepped down from CIA. In short, these were the pigs feeding at the Iraq trough.</p>
<p>Of course, we now know about DOJ’s Kyle Sampson memo on May 11, 2006 saying that “the big problem is Carol Lamm”. Coincidentally, this memo was written one day after Lamm notified Justice that she was obtaining search warrants for Brent Wilkes and Dusty Foggo.</p>
<p>As a side note: Lamm indicted Wilkes and Foggo on her last day as US Attorney.</p>
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<p>And then there is David Ignatius in New Mexico. Sen. Domenici and Rep Wilson call him to pressure him to file voter fraud charges against Democrats before the election. Domenici complains to Rove and Bush. Rove and Bush complain to Gonzales. Ignatius’ name is added to the list to be fired immediately after the election.</p>
<p>People say there’s no evidence. Well, that’s right. We have the Justice Dept White House liason talking the fifth. Gonzales playing micky the dunce. Nobody in the Dept of Justice will say who added the names to the list for firing, why they were added, or even when they were added. Collective amnesia. Stonewalling on turning over documents (there’s still a three week gap immediately before the firings). We have the White House refusing to allow Rove or Miers to talk to Congress, “losing” all of Rove’s e-mail, and claiming some kind of bogus executive privledge on all remaining White House and RNC e-mails. We’ve seen all this before. A stone wall is a stone wall.</p>
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<p>He knew. They all knew. Samson circulated a detailed plan (basically a coverup blueprint) for handing the flack that included a manufacturered list of “performance issues” for each fired attorney, detailed plan for stringing Senators along (especially Pryor in Ark.) with the desire to hold confirmation hearings when the real plan was to use the new provisions not requiring confirmation, etc. The plan explicity states that the goal was just to gummy up the story and run out the clock.</p>
<p>This is why Sen. Pryor (and the other Senators) are so furious. When they saw the e-mail detailing the plan, they recognized that the DOJ had been working the plan on them.</p>
<p>That, and the fact, that a politicized DOJ with politically-motivated prosecutors is a scary, scary thing for partisan politicians. Great when your party is bringing politicized prosecutions against the other side of the aisle, but these guys know that the pendulum can swing the other direction after any given election. Go to the C-SPAN video of the afternoon session and watch the two rounds of questioning by RI Sen. Whitehouse, starting at 28 minutes and again at 1 hour:45 minutes. He gives two amazing ten minute political science lectures on structural institutions that get right to the heart of why prosecutor independence is such a vital part of our political system.</p>
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<p>It goes beyond that. Remember, Rove was making a concerted effort to turn the federal bureacracy into an arm of the Republican National Committee. He was sending his Deputy to various Departments giving Power Point presentations on key congressional races and asking how the Department could further Republican election chances.</p>
<p>A major component of Rove’s political strategy has always been vote suppression in Democratic districts. He’s famous for circulating false voting instruction pamphlets and other “dirty tricks” for voter suppression. That’s why “voter fraud” prosecutions were such a hot topic. The Bush DOJ has gutted the voter rights enforcement division. Rove was counting on DOJ to bring voter fraud cases before the Nov 2006 election…cases that were all targeted at minority districts. The headlines associated with these cases suppress the vote.</p>
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<p>When I was in law school, a Constitutional Law professor made an off-the-cuff comment in class one day that has come to mind often over the years in a variety of contexts:</p>
<p>“All the interesting questions are institutional ones: Who decides what?”</p>
<p>“All the interesting questions are institutional ones: Who decides what?”</p>
<p>Yep. From talking to my daughter about her intro American Politics course, it was clear that the professor focused on that exact question.</p>
<p>Sen Whitehouse’s main point was having the country’s top law enforcement division (Dept of Justice) be a political arm is a structural weakness in our system. However, that strong informal tradition has evolved to protect against this weakness with a system of the decentralized US Attorneys culled from, and ultimately answerable to, local communities. And a long-standing tradition of appointing these prosecutors and then leaving them alone to do their jobs with a significant degree of independence. That’s why Iglaseius was so stunned by Domenici’s strong-arm phone call. The public confidence that grows from this independence is crucial to the system. That public confidence is what differentiates our legal system from that in, say, Iraq.</p>
<p>Whitehouse presented a stunning pair of charts detailing the number of people at the White House and DOJ who were authorized to initiate discussion of specific cases (four in the White House and three at DOJ) under Clinton’s policy memo and the number under the Bush policy memo (thousands at the White House and hundreds at DOJ).</p>
<p>“that strong informal tradition has evolved to protect against this weakness”</p>
<p>Amen, and something analogous has happened in the judiciary. While life tenure and the rules against salary reduction go a long way to create judicial independence, they have the inevitable down side that a judge who wants to be a political rogue or totally lazy can do so with few legal repercussions. But a tradition of professionalism has developed whereby the bench is universally viewed as an almost sacred responsibility, and the judges put tremendous social pressure on one another to live up to the ideals of the bench. The result is that even though all the federal judges have a theoretical incentive to slack off hard and get away with it, the federal bench is one of the most uniformly hard-working and dedicated groups of professionals I’ve ever seen in action.</p>
<p>That kind of tradition of professionalism, and of enforcement of standards through sheer pride in the job, isn’t written into law, just as it isn’t with US attorneys. But those traditions are almost as powerful as the law in preserving what’s great about our justice system. Mucking around with those traditions for short-term political gain has the potential to cost this country dearly in the long run. We won’t even realize the value of what we’ve lost until it’s gone.</p>
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<p>That’s why this US Attorney case is such a big deal. Many of the fired attorneys were among the most respected federal prosecutors in the country. The signal sent to their peers when two bit political hacks like Goodling can fire them for penny-ante political reasons is chilling.</p>
<p>The system already has a mechanism for adherence to broad policy perspectives – the traditional replacementof all US Attorneys at the beginning of each new administration. This, however, was an entirely different scenario.</p>
<p>The Lamm case shows the value of decentralized prosectution. In every one of these districts, there are limited court resources…only enough judges and courthouses to bring “x” number of cases. California has toughter gun statutes than the federal statutes. So Lamm had an informal agreement with the system in her district to allow state courts to handle gun prosecutions, allowing the federal system to handle other types of crime where the state system was less efficient. Those are exactly the kinds of local priority determinations that have to be made in each of these 93 districts. </p>
<p>There are a lot of ex US Attorneys in the halls of Congress, all of whom are saying, “that could have been me.”</p>
<p>BTW, a more interesting part of the US Attorney story may be looking at some of the prosecutors who were initially on the early lists (like Fitzpatrick) and then removed.</p>
<p>The case getting a lot of attention is US Attorney for Milwaukee Steve Biskupic. He was initially listed, but indicted a mid-level career state-goverment purchasing agent in January 2006, got a conviction, and put the woman in jail starting in June 2006. Republican candidates then used this conviction to beat the sitting Democratic governor over the head in his November re-election campaign.</p>
<p>Last month, a US Appeals Court reversed the conviction within hours after oral arguments, emphatically stating that there wasn’t even evidence of a crime (the woman had selected a Wisconsin travel agency – the low bidder – over an out-of-state agency when the two were tied after a long points-based bidding and evaluation process). The Appeals court, again, hours after the oral arguments and before their written opinion, ordered the woman immediately released from prison that day.</p>
<p>Links to the newspaper stories and the courts written opinion here:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003075.php[/url]”>http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003075.php</a></p>
<p>Needless to say, the Senate Judiciary Committee is interested in knowing how Steve Biskupic got removed from the firing list, who removed him, and whether this frivolous corruption case rushed to trial before the election played a role in his resurrection (a Regent Law School legal term). The Committee has invited Biskupic to testify.</p>
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<p>Hanna, all I can tell you is what I experienced. Of course, I was asked to recall things from 15 years ago. Yes, you look at mounds of material, but who knows what’s important to look at. And even if you see a paper, it still may not refresh your recollection. </p>
<p>Did you have a meeting with Mr. A on March 22, 1986? Not that I recall. Well, here’s your timesheet that shows you billed for a meeting with Mr. A. I still don’t recall it…Here’s your notes from that meeting. It still isn’t coming back to my recollection…</p>
<p>When you know that you might become part of a lawsuit over an action (such as firing an employee), you document the heck out of everything. But most people don’t take fabulous notes at every meeting, and don’t have vivid memories of every meeting, especially if it seems to be a mundane thing (at the time).</p>
<p>The fact that the AG thought these firings were a mundane thing, something he didn’t need to get heavily involved with, is mind-boggling. Either that, or he was laying the groundwork for a “plausible denial” defense. </p>
<p>The AG says, “I take responsibility for this screw up,” but then nothing happens? Why doesn’t he fire himself? Heaven knows, he’d fire an underling that screwed up that much.</p>
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<p>I have heard O’Connor, Kennedy and Breyer speak over the years. They are very, very impressive people with fabulous minds and I always left feeling better about the Supreme Court after hearing them. </p>
<p>(Never heard Clarence Thomas speak…)</p>
<p>Can you imagine Harriett Meiers on the Supreme Court? Dodged a bullet on that one…</p>