Miers, Taylor will appear before Senate Judiciary Committee today

Laura Rozen reports that the Senate Judiciary Committee is requiring both former White House Counsel Harriet Meirs and Karl Rove's former White House aide Sarah Taylor to appear before the Senate today. Since President Bush has declared that they cannot testify because of "Executive Privilege", the Senators will require both to declare the privilege.

This could lead to an interesting confrontation between the Senate and the White House. Stay tuned.

DoJ and White House withholding letters and emails

Murray Weiss reports that Kyle Sampson drafted and sent letters to the Senate that left out Karl Rove's part in replacing Arkansas U.S. Attorney Bud Cummings with his aide and protege, Timothy Griffin.

"But an earlier e-mail from Sampson to Oprison" [an associate White House counsel] "that has already been made public indicates that the two men discussed Rove and then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers as being at the forefront of Griffin's nomination."

There are also other emails and documents that the White House is withholding from Congress.

Several of the e-mails that the Bush administration is withholding from Congress, as well as papers from the White House counsel's office describing other withheld documents, were made available to National Journal by a senior executive branch official, who said that the administration has inappropriately kept many of them from Congress.

The senior official said that Gonzales, in preparing for testimony before Congress, has personally reviewed the withheld records and has a responsibility to make public any information he has about efforts by his former chief of staff, other department aides, and White House officials to conceal Rove's role.

"If [Gonzales] didn't know everything that was going on when it went down, that is one thing," this official said. "But he knows and understands chapter and verse. If there was an effort within Justice and the White House to mislead Congress, it is his duty to disclose that to Congress. As the country's chief law enforcement official, he has a higher duty to disclose than to protect himself or the administration." [editor - highlighting is mine.]

The item highlighted above is confirmation of my earlier assertion that Al Gonzales has been playing a role. He knows everything that has happened and why, and his statements to the contrary are the equivalent of the small child standing next to the broken cookie jar looking up and saying "What? I don't know how that happened." Gonzales is playing his role to protect the White House.

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Some of my prior discussions of Alberto Gonzales' testimony can be found here, here and here.

Prior reports by Murray Waas reported in the National Journal can be found here.

Murray Waas - Gonzales delegated US atty firings to Sampson, Goodling

I wondered what Murray Waas was doing since "Scooter" Libby was convicted. Now we know.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales signed a highly confidential order in March 2006 delegating to two of his top aides ... extraordinary authority over the hiring and firing of most non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department. [Snip]

In the order, Gonzales delegated to his then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, and his White House liaison "the authority, with the approval of the Attorney General, to take final action in matters pertaining to the appointment, employment, pay, separation, and general administration" of virtually all non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department, including all of the department's political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation. Monica Goodling became White House liaison in April 2006, the month after Gonzales signed the order.

The existence of the order suggests that a broad effort was under way by the White House to place politically and ideologically loyal appointees throughout the Justice Department, not just at the U.S.-attorney level. Department records show that the personnel authority was delegated to the two aides at about the same time they were working with the White House in planning the firings of a dozen U.S. attorneys, eight of whom were, in fact, later dismissed. [Snip]

An original draft of Gonzales's delegation of authority to Sampson and Goodling was so broad that it did not even require the two aides to obtain the final approval of the attorney general before moving to dismiss other department officials [From Murray Waas, published April 30, 2007 in the National Journal.]

This explains Gonzales' total lack of understanding of the process by which the U.S. Attorneys were fired on Pearl Harbor Day of 2006. Gonzales was establishing plausible deniability for himself. Then when he appeared before the Senate, he allowed himself to look like a total doofus rather than point to this letter delagating the authority to Sampson and Goodling. Looking like an idiot or an incompetent must have been easier than explaining why he signed this document.

The choices for Gonzales at the Senate testimony have been to

• Look like an idiot and incompetent, (he's not)
• appear to be a total failure as a manager, (possible) or
• protect the White House involvement in the firings and the politicization of the Department of Justice. (My bet.)

This also explains why the emails [See the January 9, 2006 email from Kyle Sampson to Harriet Miers. Presumably the process of politicizing the Department of Justice preceded the effort at covering it up.] discussing the firings went from Sampson to the White House Counsel, Harriet Miers, without even a Cc to Gonzales. Miers, of course, worked closely with Karl Rove and President Bush. Neither of them wanted to be addressed in such documents, so their only contact would have been verbal. Again, plausible deniability.

Harriet Miers, Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling have all resigned from the government, Sampson and Goodling over the U.S. Attorney firings and Miers for "personal reasons."

More to come on this I am sure.

The US attorney purge came from the White House

From the NY Times:

By DAVID JOHNSTON and ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, March 12 — The White House was deeply involved in the decision late last year to dismiss federal prosecutors, including some who had been criticized by Republican lawmakers, administration officials said Monday.

Last October, President Bush spoke with Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to pass along concerns by Republicans that some prosecutors were not aggressively addressing voter fraud, the White House said Monday. Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, was among the politicians who complained directly to the president, according to an administration official.

The president did not call for the removal of any specific United States Attorneys, said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman. She said she had “no indication” that the president was aware that a process was already under way to identify prosecutors who would be fired. But a few weeks later, the Justice Department forced out seven prosecutors.

White House officials consulted with the Justice Department in preparing the list of United States attorneys who would be removed, Ms Perino disclosed.

The idea of dismissing federal prosecutors originated in the White House more than a year earlier, White House and Justice officials said Monday.

In early 2005, Harriet Miers, then the White House legal counsel, asked a Justice Department official whether it would be feasible to replace all United States attorneys when their four-year terms expired, according to the Justice Department. The proposal came as the administration was considering which political appointees to replace in the second term, according to Ms. Perino.

Ms. Miers sent her query to D. Kyle Sampson, a top aide to Mr. Gonzales, the Justice officials said. Mr. Sampson, who resigned Monday, replied that filling so many jobs at once would overtax the department. He suggested replacing a smaller group, according to e-mail messages and other memorandums compiled by the Justice Department.

Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, also had rejected the idea of replacing all the prosecutors, Ms. Perino said. But as Ms. Miers worked with Mr. Sampson on devising a list of attorneys to oust, Mr. Rove relayed to her complaints he had received that the Justice Department was not moving aggressively on voter fraud cases.

The role of the president, his former White House counsel and his chief political adviser in the prosecutor shakeup likely will only intensify the calls by Congress for a deeper investigation into the matter. The episode has erupted into the worse crisis of Mr. Gonzales’s tenure, and provoked charges that the dismissals were a political purge that threatened the historical independence of the Justice Department.

So this wasn't just a rogue DoJ operation. It came from Bush through Harriet Miers.

My question - Why would Bush want to change ALL the US attorneys? Were they too bound by the law, and not enough by loyalty to the Bush regime?

This was going to be politically difficult. They knew that going in, and they delayed the actual firings because the US attorneys were together at a meeting. The White House waited until they had gone home so that they couldn't immediately start talking ot each other.

One speculation I might offer is that the US attorneys as a group were too loyal to the law and not enough to Bush. The Big-hammer solution is fire them all. But the problems of replacing all of them would be very difficult, so they scaled down to a sample of just under 10%. The most obstreperous ones (Carol Lam, David C. Iglesias, and John McKay?) would be gone, and the rest would get the message and be more compliant to "requests" from the Party.

Whatever the reason, we can all be certain that it was for the benefit of Bush and to the detriment of the United States.