What Alberto Gonzales has to deal with in testimony today

Josh Marshall brings together a lot of recent news about how many U.S. Attorneys have actually been fired by the Department of Justice (DoJ) and what the DoJ has told various people (especially the effected Senators) about the firings. The overall pattern shows that the DoJ has been presenting a coordinated set of lies, and continues to be both lying and hiding the truth. The scope of the lies and evasions is only just now coming into focus.

Josh first points out TPM Muckraker’s scoop on the firing of Kansas City U.S. Attorney Todd Graves. Sen. Kit Bond (R – MO) was told he was fired for "performance" reasons but told Graves himself that they merely wanted to give someone else the job. [Note: This is the same thing they told Arkansas U.S. Attorney Cummings when they replaced him, but evidence is coming out that Cummings was more likely fired because his investigation of the Republican Missouri Governor was getting too close to criminal action.] In an excellent editorial published May 10, 2007, the New York Times says "From the facts available, it looks like a main reason for installing Mr. Schlozman was to help Republicans win a pivotal Missouri Senate race.

Josh Marshall then summarizes what we know and what it means:

Now there are reports on the story from WaPo and the Post-Dispatch. Beyond the details of Graves' ouster and replacement by Bradley Schlozman, which we've been discussing for several days, there are two key points to focus on here. The first is that the congressional investigation has been going on for some three months. And the Department of Justice has repeated stated that eight US Attorneys were fired. That was clearly false. And there's a second point. We now know of several cases in which US Attorneys appeared on DOJ firing lists and then by supposed coincidence just happened to resign. The Graves revelation now puts the weight of evidence strongly in the favor of the conclusion that few if any of these resignations were unforced. No proof yet. But that has to be the assumption.

And there's one more point with respect to tomorrow's testimony by Attorney General Gonzales. There's been a lot of back and forth and speculation about all the faulty memories, the fact that virtually every senior official at DOJ has denied any role in actually choosing the names on the firing list and all the various claims of privilege. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is all of a piece. For three months the White House and the clique around Attorney General Gonzales have been involved in a concerted effort to cover up what happened here. And the intensity of the effort points to how bad the real story is. This has been obvious to anyone who has been following this story closely since January. But the fact that the DOJ has been collectively lying about the number of fired US Attorneys for all these months just confirms how true it is. Consider this: with all the document dumps, no emails or documents relating to Graves' firing? How can that be? The truth is that we still know very little about what happened here. Very little.

As of right now, no one in the Department of Justice will take credit for placing the names of U.S. Attorneys to be fired on the list that Kyle Sampson made very clear in his testimony to Congress that he aggregated rather than controlled. The number of people telling this story, the extended period of time and tightly coordinated nature of the lies and evasions clearly demonstrates that this is not the result of a few rogue individuals attempting "CYA" to protect their individual skins because of personal infractions. This is department-wide policy, carefully scripted, directed, coordinated, then practiced and performed like a stage play. It is group action designed by the office of Alberto Gonzales. We will see Alberto performing the role of "jester" today in the hearings held by the House Judiciary Committee. But that is only the carefully scripted and rehearsed role he is playing for the audience. It is not him.

Al is fighting a clear defensive action. He is defending the White House personnel who directed the activities. His sole purpose now is to keep the questions focused on the actions of members of his Department of Justice for as long as he can. That will keep the investigators and the holders of hearings from going after Harriet Miers (resigned Presidential Counsel) as well as Karl Rove and his staff. Winning means stretching out the time so that the hearings do not get to the White House before January 2009 when the new President is installed.

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See previous post Fired US attys say criminal cases will result from the firings..

US attorneys who investigate Republicans have been pushed out

The State of Missouri has long had a system in which some driver's license offices were operated by private contractors rather than by the state itself. This has been a system of patronage, allowing the Governor to give his political friends control of these offices, some of which gross as much as $700,000 a year. But according to the Springfield Business Journal this was not good enough for Matt Blunt, the current Governor. This has resulted in an FBI investigation.

Jack Cardetti, Missouri Democratic Party spokesman, said Blunt improperly gave his political supporters control of the state’s 183 driver’s license offices during his administration’s mid-2005 privatization initiative. [Snip]

The FBI probe may validate Cardetti’s accusation that Blunt abused his power by forming a system of umbrella companies established through Kansas City law firm Lathrop & Gage LC to run the state’s licensing network.

Cardetti speculates that Blunt’s scheme is to line his own pockets with revenues from the license offices through mysterious funding channels.

This FBI investigation was being supervised by Todd Graves, U.S. Attorney for Western Missouri. From Fired Up Missouri we get more of the story, by way of the recent DoJ document dumps.

In a January 9, 2006 email from DOJ Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson to White House Counsel Harriet Miers, he outlines U.S. Attorneys who are targets for ouster. Two of the names in the email have been redacted from the version released by DOJ to Congressional investigators.

In the email, he also suggests that those listed should be given the chance to leave on their own so that they can "save face."

None of the above obstacles are insuperable. First, a limited number of U.S. Attorneys could be targeted for removal and replacement, mitigating the shock to the system that would result from an across-the-board firing. Second, the Department of Justices Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys (EOUSA) could work quietly with targeted U.S. Attorneys to encourage them to leave government service voluntarily; this would allow targeted U.S. Attorneys to find work in the private sector and “save face” regarding the reason for leaving office, both in the Department of Justice Community and in their local legal communities.

In March, Graves abruptly resigned his position as U.S. Attorney, saying he wanted to get more involved in the 2008 presidential election, a project we have heard nothing about since.

In April, when Sampson presented an updated list of targeted U.S. Attorneys, he makes reference to the fact that two of the names included in his original list of targets for ouster have already left government service. [Snip]

In the intervening period, only three U.S. Attorneys left office, and one of them went on to become a U.S. Magistrate, so clearly, Todd Graves was one of the redacted names.

So it looks like Todd Graves was removed because he was investigating the corruption of a Republican Governor. But like Debra Yang, he went quietly into the private sector.

It is interesting that the January 9, 2006 email to Harriet Miers and Bill Kelly (both on the White House staff) lays out a quiet way to fire the non-political U.S. Attorneys. Two conclusions can be drawn from this email. First, the White House knew exactly what was going on. Harriet Miers was the Counsel to the President. Second, something must have happened to cause the Department of Justice to change from this quiet and gradual method of firing U.S. Attorneys. That "something" was probably the shock of the November 2006 election returns. For the Democrats to gain control of the Senate was a real long shot going into November, yet they did. What the White House and the Republicans had been doing to win elections was clearly not enough, so they had to step up their actions.

So they bribed Debra Yang to quit, and fired the U.S. Attorneys removed in the Pearl Harbor Day Massacre.

But doing it all at once exposed their plan. The current imbroglio with Alberto Gonzales would not have occurred if the DoJ had not fired so many U.s. Attorneys all at once. Even then it was a near thing. The mainstream media was going to drop the issue, but Talking Point Memo kept picking at it until became clearly a lot more than just a "minor personnel issue."

The above report and analysis is still just a part of the tip of the iceberg. This just points the direction we need to be investigating.

If anyone has material on other U.S. Attorneys beside those in the Pearl Harbor Day Massacre, Debra Yang and Tod Graves, please email me or leave a comment.