US attorney Biscupic (Eastern Wi.) again reversed by Appeals Court - can't convict for no crime.

According to the Chippewa Herald from Wisconsin U.S. Atorney Steven Biskupic prosecuted and convicted Damien Jones, the supervisor of a voter registration drive, for something that was not a crime.

This is more of the Republican Department of Justice's effort to prove that there was extensive voter fraud in Wisconsin in the 2004 Presidential election.

Republicans repeatedly alleged that Democrats engaged in voter fraud in Milwaukee, but only five out of 14 area residents eventually charged by federal prosecutors were convicted.

U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic's record in pursuing the cases has been in the spotlight after the White House acknowledged President Bush discussed concerns about the handling of voter fraud in Milwaukee and other cities with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Biskupic has said his name was on a list of targeted prosecutors whose performance and loyalty to Bush were questioned.

The appeals court ruling shows other prosecutors have struggled with the cases, too.

Jones, who worked for Acorn, a national organization that advocates for low- and moderate-income families, was charged by the Racine County District Attorney's office with eight counts of election fraud and misconduct in office just days before the election.

As described in this post, Biscupic was on the Department of Justice list to be fired with the Pearl Harbor Day Eight. His failure was to not work hard enough to bring cases against people responsible for voting fraud. This case shows that it really wasn't for lack of trying.

That is probably why he had to go after Georgia Thompson. See also Wisconsin US attorney rammed through fake corruption case of Democrat before last Governor's election..

So add this to the efforts Steven Biscupic rammed through at the behest of Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove.

Bush and Cheney have been bin Laden's greatest supporters.

Josh Marshall points out that bin Laden was trapped at Tora Bora and surrounded. But Bush was so focused on attacking Iraq that there were not enough troops available to capture or kill bin Laden when we had him.

The CIA commander, Gary Berntsen, in charge of CIA operations at Tora Bora wrote his book, Jawbreaker and clearly explained that we had bin Laden, we knew he was there, but let him go free. This is Bush's fault. Whether it was intentional, for political purposes or simply incompetence really doesn't matter much. Any or all of those motivations are possible, but it will never be known which was most important. The motivation doesn't matter. The action makes it Bush's fault.

Josh Marshall refers to the shorter Newsweek article that explains what "Jawbreaker" said.

This failure at Tora Bora was, of course, the failure that Gen. Tommy Franks got his Medal of Freedom for keeping quiet about. George Tenet (CIA Director) got his for not telling that the CIA had carefully and repeatedly told Bush, Cheney and the White House staff that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, did not have WMDs and was no major threat to the U.S.

Franks and Bremer were two of three. At the same presentation, Jerry Bremer, who was the man in charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), got his Medal of Freedom for not telling who instructed him to disband the Iraqi Army and conduct the deBaathification of Iraq which worsened the occupation quite rapidly, as well as so many other screw-ups that were conducted by the CPA.

It's hard not to just keep going when describing the myriad failures and even treasons conducted by this administration. But letting bin Laden go free when he was in our grasp is one of the very largest screw-ups or treasons.

We're going to miss David Halberstam.

I wasn't sure what I could write here that was worthy of who David Halberstam was, but now that I have gathered my thoughts, perhaps this will help people who didn't read his dispatches out of Viet Nam. He understood what we were really doing there.

The only reason were were in Viet Nam at all is that the French pulled out, partitioned the nation, and set a national referendum to take place on reunification for 1956. This was the very height of the Red Scare from Anti-Communist American Conservatives and John Birchers, so Ike could not permit the referendum to occur. The South would approve reunification, and Ike would have to face the screams of "Who Lost Viet Nam" from the same people who were still yelling "Who Lost China." The American conservatives were convinced that Communism was a unitary ideology, and that all Communists were focused on destroying America as the center of Capitalism. This was a major element of the Domino Theory that was used to justify American involvement in Viet Nam after the French wised up and got out.

In hindsight it is now clear that the fiction of a unitary Communist front concealed the many and very powerful splits among Communist nations, not the least being that Ho Chi Minh was not going to let Chinese Communists dominate Viet Nam any more than he was gong to let the French, Japanese or Americans. In fact, the Chinese were the first, great enemy. The Vietnamese had been fighting them for over a thousand years.

Based on the Domino Theory and the fiction of a unitary Communist Front as an explanation for how we Americans were involved, President Eisenhower prevented the Referendum from occurring and sent in large numbers of military advisers to try to develop an effective South Vietnamese Army to support and legitimize the government of the Republic of Viet Nam. Then in 1961 Ike handed this can of worms off to Kennedy. David Halberstam was sent by the New York Times around that time to write about those worms and make sense of what was happening.

Halberstam later said that he expected to find that we were the good guys, that we were in a good fight, and that as the Generals kept telling us, we were winning. It would just take time. What he found when he compared what the guys on the ground said to what the Generals were saying was quite different.

Halberstam later wrote that the Vietnamese were willing to send every single Vietnamese in the country to their death to defeat the occupying America, just as they had been to defeat the Japanese and the French before us. The only way for America to win in Viet Nam was for us to kill everyone there. We weren't willing to do that, particularly since they were no real threat to us.

The only other way for America to win in Viet Nam was to so demoralize those who were fighting us that they would give up and at the same time create a nation in South Viet Nam with a legitimate government that had broad acceptance. That was never going to happen, particularly since the government of RVN was controlled largely by Catholics. The South Vietnamese were not going to somehow accept a government imposed on them by foreigners, no matter who the foreigners were.

Tet was proof that we couldn't win the war. In January 1968 we won Tet militarily, hands down. We destroyed the Viet Cong command structure. So the North Vietnamese stepped in and replaced it, then the Vietnamese kept on fighting. It was the worst defeat we could impose on the insurgents, and they simply absorbed it and kept fighting.

Halberstam got that. He saw how the U.S. military command was fooling itself with its little wins into thinking that the war could be won, but it couldn't. [Read "We were soldiers once, ... and young." or watch the movie and pay close attention to the epilogue. The battle for Ia Drang was November 1965.]

Halberstam figured out the lay of the land early on. The American Right-wingers don't have it yet. The 'wingers are still blaming others for the defeat in Viet Nam, when the truth was and remains that Vietnamese nationalism defeated American militarism.

The 'Wingers are even today blind people complaining because someone with functioning eyes told them to avoid the chasm. The 'wingers then went into the chasm anyway in spite of warnings. Now they want to blame the seeing people for stabbing them in the back. They don't like Halberstam because he warned them.

I don't blame the 'wingers too much. I'm a Viet Nam era vet, pre-baby boomer, and until the late 70's I blamed the press (especially TV) for our "loss" in Viet Nam. So I tried to figure out how we could have won. David was right. We couldn't have. Not without killing most Vietnamese. And we would have won --- nothing. The only way to win in Viet Nam was for us to get out. But that does not match the 'wingers definition of winning. To them "leaving" is "losing."

The basic importance of the fight is less important than the fight itself. That makes quitting the fight the same as losing. As long as the fight goes on, we have not lost, and all the American dead and wounded are heroes.

We are faced with much the same decisions and attitudes today in Iraq. Our methods of mass killing of opposing armies are ineffective against insurgents operating in small groups without uniforms and we don’t have enough trustworthy troops to literally blanket the country. We can’t break their will to fight through overpowering, demoralizing destruction. We can't create an acceptable government and impose it on them, and any efforts we make to prop up the Iraqi government are seen as imposing a foreign government on the Iraqi nation.

We also can’t outlast the insurgents because they frankly don’t have anything we want that bad. The insurgents understand that, and they prove how serious they are every time they send a suicide bomber to kill our troops or other Iraqis. If they were likely to run out of suicide bombers, maybe we could outlast them. I see no indication that they will run out of suicide bombers. In fact our very methods of warfare alienate the population and create ever more committed insurgents and suicide bombers. That is a prescription by which we can win every battle and still lose the war.

If it really mattered, like defeating the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland mattered to the British or defeating the Basque terrorists matter to the Spanish government, we could outlast them. But the Spaniards and British are not foreigners imposing a foreign regime on a nationalist country as we are in Iraq. There is nothing to be won by us in Iraq for which my grandchildren should still be fighting there twenty years from now, just as there was nothing to be won in Viet Nam.

If we get out now, perhaps in a generation we can get a relationship with the new Iraq (or Iraq nations) that is as good as we now have with Viet Nam. Maybe. Depends on the Iraqi people more than on us.

The alternative is that we will still be killing and our troops dying there in a generation.

Note: none of this has anything to do with the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. To them, Iraq is a side issue, but it is a place they can send or support a few combatants while bleeding the American military of both the ability and the will to fight. At the same time and at a very low price to our real enemies, the Americans are being forced to lose credibility world wide while al Qaeda gains credibility. Our government has become a group of self-centered incompetent corrupt fools out for their own gain, and totally unresponsive to what the American population wants. Conservatives have lost all credibility with most of the American population. The war in Iraq has brought all this about at a very small cost to the terrorists who have been trying to stoke up the sectarian warfare in Iraq.

David Halberstam was one who recognized this pattern of conservatives in the Viet Nam War. The conservatives refused then to recognize what Halberstam wrote. So now we are living thorough it again, brought in large part to us by retreads from the Nixon administration who refused to recognize the real cost/benefit calculus of the Viet Nam War. Same pattern. Different enemy. Different part of the world. But it's the fight that matters to the 'wingers. They'll keep sending soldiers to kill and die just so they can keep on bragging "We're number one!!" and they'll continue to define getting out of Iraq as defeat.

The conservatives won't forgive Halberstam for being correct.

Advance copy of speech by Rham Emanuel to Brookings

Rham Emanuel is scheduled to give a speech at the Brookings Institute today. TPM Cafe has posted an advance copy.

It is an indictment of Republican control of the federal government,covering everything from the U.S. Attorney scandal to the Katrina response disaster.

And the [U.S. Attorney] scandal has created a new context for viewing and evaluating scandals in the Bush Administration. Americans have learned just how the Bush Administration works and are discovering that under President Bush, no function of the federal government is free from the influence of politics.

And this is no accident. It’s all by design. The incidents I will list today are not a laundry list of one offs or isolated cases of corruption. There is a common denominator. Instead of promoting solutions to our nation’s broad challenges, the Bush Administration used all the levers of power to promote their party and its narrow interests.

The key to his speech is the indictment of the Republican Party for politicizing the entire federal government apparatus to place the government at the service of the Republican Party. Rham attributes the general incompetence and corruption the Republican Party has displayed to the process of politicizing the government.

I'll let him speak for himself. I really like what he is saying.

It's going to be a really interesting election season - but looooonng.

McCain to announce for President today

John McCain is scheduled to announce the opening of his campaign for the Republican nomination for President today. His stand on the Iraq war and his rather anemic fundraising effort in comparison to those of other Presidential aspirants has alrady given the impression that he is already an also-run to both Guliani and Romney within the Republican Party. But of the Republican field, MeCain has been the potential candidate with the greatest appeal to independent.

It is going to be interesting to see what happens to his campaign. (From the Washington Post by way of MSNBC.)

First thing Joe Klein has written I agreed with in a long time.

Joe Klein is kind enough to reproduce Dick Cheney's recent speech - and then translate.

Rep. Renzi was involved in the US attorney removals

AP brings new details on how Rep. Renzi was involved in the removal of U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton. (See details here.) From teth AP story:

Brian Murray, Renzi's top aide, issued a statement late Tuesday acknowledging that shortly after the local media reported that the congressmen was being investigated, he called Charlton spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle.

"I called Mr. Hornbuckle seeking information about press accounts which appeared just weeks before Election Day alleging a pending indictment," Murray said in a statement. "I left him a message asking for information about these allegations, but I was called back and told they would not comment."

Hornbuckle refused to comment Tuesday. [Snip]

The disclosure is one of several examples of phone calls made by members of Congress to federal prosecutors.

The Senate ethics committee has opened a preliminary inquiry into a call by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., to then-U.S. attorney David Iglesias, who like Charlton also was later fired. Iglesias says Domenici wanted to know whether indictments that would help Republicans would be returned before the November elections. Told no, Domenici hung up, Iglesias said.

The House ethics committee has also been asked to investigate a separate call from Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., to Iglesias.

For his part, Renzi said the leaked stories and conjecture about the land deal were wrong.

"None of them bear any resemblance to the truth," Renzi said.

Law enforcement officials confirmed in October that they were scrutinizing a land deal that benefited a Renzi friend and business associate who was also a campaign donor. Last Thursday, the FBI raided a Sonoita, Ariz., insurance business owned by Renzi's wife, Roberta.

Renzi has denied any wrongdoing. His lawyer did not return several calls for comment Tuesday.

According to state records and officials involved in the land deal, Renzi helped promote the sale of land that netted his former business partner, James Sandlin, $4.5 million.

The property eventually was to be part of a swap in which potential buyers could exchange it for land owned by the federal government. Such deals are common in the West, where the government owns vast tracts. Renzi had said he wanted to prevent encroaching development near the Fort Huachuca Army post and to protect the environmentally threatened San Pedro River.

But Renzi never introduced legislation in Congress to complete the swap for the new owners. [Snip]

The raid on Renzi's business happened the same day that Rep. John Doolittle, R-Calif., temporarily stepped down from the House Appropriations Committee. Doolittle is under scrutiny for his ties to former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

At best, Rep. Renzi is looking at an Ethics probe because of Brian Murray's phone call to the U.S. Attorney's office to talk about the investigation.

Renzi (R) won his 2004 reelection by 51.4% to Ellen Simon (D) 43.8% with David Schlosser (L) 4.8% picking up half of the difference. ( Arizona Congresswatch.)Any time an incumbent wins by less than 55% he is vulnerable. He was already in trouble in the election of 2006.

How the word got to Rove and Sampson to fire U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton is not yet clear, but it should be out soon. He and Doolittle are both in real trouble, and there being the two of them at the same time will probably make things worse for each of them.

Rep. Rick Renzi resigns from all other committee assigments.

Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker reports that Arizona Rep. Rick Renzi has annoounced that he will resign from all other committee assignments. He previously resigned from his seat on the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

The Politico reports that Rep. Renzi has also asked that he not be included in the Retain Our Majority Program, which raises money for the GOP's most vulnerable incumbents. That move strongly suggests that Renzi does not plan to remain in Congress much longer.

[h/t to TPM.]

Click on the label "Renzi" to see my prior reports on Rep. Renzi.

Today is a miserable weather day.

Right now it is raining and thundering. The sky is overcast. The radio has announced that there is a sever thunderstorm warning here, as well as a tornado warning for the county 50 miles north of me. Since four tornadoes hit the Dallas-fort Worth area a little over a week ago, one of them taking out the grocery story 2 miles north that I frequently shop(ped) at, I am taking it seriously.

So is my Westie. He hates thunder and he hears tornado conditions long before I do. He has spent the last three hours barking at the sky and the thunder, interspersed occasionally with the more frantic bark that he goes into when tornado conditions are near. (False bark, so far.) As a terrier he is a small dog with a terrific bark.

Think I'll close up shop here so that the lightening doesn't take out my computer and grab a novel. I need to read something that drags me in and pulls me along, unlike a history book which is a much more subtle pleasure, but is harder to block out the thunder and the barking.

Besides, it's not like last week in which each hour brought something more interesting or newsworthy than the previous hour. I really don't think Alberto Gonzales will resign today, and no Congressmen will be arrested. Their investigations seem to be at a stage a bit earlier than that. [But not much longer.]

Toyota to become largest car seller in world this year.

Toyota sold more automobiles than any other car manufacturer in the world in the first quarter of the year, displacing General Motors from the rank of number one car seller in the world. It is expected that at the end of the year, Toyota will have the crown for the year.

This is the result of the different strategies the car manufacturers chose. GM chose to sell big cars that were gas hogs. That was the strategy that fed into the U.S. desire for large cars, bolstered by low gas prices. Toyota chose to sell fuel efficient high reliability automobiles. The recent sharp increase in gasoline prices caused the change in which was number one.

My question - what in God's name did GM executives think would happen to them when (not "if" because it was certain to happen) when gasoline prices increased? Why did they stick to such a short-term and clearly time-limited strategy? They had to realize that they were trading the future of their company for increased sales each quarter that gasoline prices were low.

Were they that tied to the quarterly price of their stock on the financial markets? If that is the case, then Capitalism is a system of long-term economic suicide. Managers cannot trust the decisions that they are being pressured into making by the pressure of the financial markets.

I've got some ideas. I don't think that the strategic decision was made once and never changed. I suspect that the decision was something that happened as the company moved into particular market niches in competition to the foreign car companies, and then they never felt they could make the sacrifices in the short term that would be required to become competitive in the long term. That's a guess. I feel more certain that the strategic decisions were the result of a number of things that led to them, and that changing was too expensive.

Anyone have any idea?

Dave Letterman skewers George Bush beautifully

Al Franken was on the Dave Letterman show a few weeks ago and told Dave "I'm a satirist. You're a clown, and a very good one." That was not an insult. It was two very distinct categories of comedy, and the labels were being applied by a very intelligent comedian who has deeply studied the art.

That comment struck my curiosity bone. I think I understand what it means to be a "satirist," but what does it mean to be a "clown?"

Dave Letterman displayed the answer to my question for all to see at the 2007 white House Correspondents Dinner on April 21. Here is the U-tube. As Nolo at Indict Dick Cheney says "suffer through the first 30-or-so-seconds of tony snow, because letterman nails it!"



That's how a clown par excellence pokes fun at George W. Bush.

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.

New example of Bush incompetence

From Rick Perlstein we get another of the many, many tales on FEMA incompetence under the Bush admininstration.

During the Katrina/Rita disastors, FEMA ordered the evacuation of two cities in Southwestern Louisiana. Those were Lake Charles and Sulpher. The evacuation lasted nearly two weeks, during which time FEMA went on TV and advertised a 1 800 number that evacuees could call to get an emergency $2,000 directly deposited to their bank account. No questions, no restrictions, just call and collect the money.

Now someone seems to have decided that the way it was handled at the time was a little too "loosey goosey", so officials are asking some (but not all) recipients of the money to provide documentation proving they were residents of those evacuated areas and other things. That's really not an entirely bad idea, but shouldn't those questions have been asked before the money was handed out?

Whoever decided to implement the plan in the first place had no clue what they were doing. Now they are pestering some people to try to find out howm badly they screwed up, and then they will try to collect the money back.

Now that the horses are out, they want to shut the barn door. The lesson here is that people who don't believe in government and have no experience in it should not be placed in decision-making jobs within government. As far as I can tell this applies to all conservative Republicans.

Details on Rep. Renzi corruption.

Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah concisely explains the corrupt land swap for which Arizona Rep. Rick Renzi is being investigated by the FBI.

It is becoming more clear that U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton was most likely removed by Gonzales' DoJ because of this corruption investigation. Charlton's objection to the Death Penalty and his efforts to get approval to tape record confessions by criminals (currently prohibited by DoJ policy) were excuses that Gonzales dreamed up to justify the real reason Charlton had to go.

---

Addendum 3:25 PM
The Wall Street Journal weighs in with a front page story on the details of the questionable and almst certainly corrupt land swap.

---

So far we have:

• Carol Lam - removed as U.S. Attorney in San Diego because of her investigations into corrupt Republican Congress persons Duke Cunningham and John Doolittle, and
  
• Debra Yang - U.S. Attorney of Los Angeles bought off with a lucrative job (at the law firm which represents Rep. Jerry Lewis no less) and a $1.5 million bribe signing bonus because she was investigating - you guessed it - Rep. Jerry Lewis. Now we have
  
• Paul Charlton - U.S. Attorney of Arizona removed as he was investigating Rep. Rick Renzi, Republican of Arizona.

Prior posts can be found by clicking on the labels "Lam," "Yang" and "Renzi."

Question for Gonzales; Who decided? Does anyone know?

Gonzales' answer; It was consensus, aggregated by Kyle Sampson and approved by me. I was responsible.

As I wrote previously, what Gonzales established clearly in his Senate testimony was that he couldn't effectively manage a dog fight, let alone the Department of Justice with over 100,000 employees. Dahlia Lithwick at Slate very neatly describes what
Gonzales told the Senate:

The other unfortunate trope of the morning is the attorney general's incessant invocation of the "consensus judgment of the senior leadership" and the "collective concerns of the senior leadership" as the basis for all these U.S. attorney firings. Every time he's asked who made the ultimate decision here, Gonzales trots back to the fuzzy gray oracle of "senior leadership." That fits almost perfectly with Kyle Sampson's repeated claim last month that he never made a decision; he was merely the "aggregator" of everyone else's recommendations and say-sos. How gloriously mechanical: The "consensus judgments of the senior leadership" are fed to the "aggregator," who in turn passes them along to the AG who, as he claims, made a final decision without reviewing any criteria for the firing or any written document. It seems that at no point in this "process" or "project" did any human brain fire an actual neuron that triggered the message to terminate an actual U.S. attorney. Sen. Dianne Feinstein picks up on this theme toward the end of the day when she notes, "We still don't know who selected the individuals on that list. Somebody had to. A human being had to." [Emphasis is mine - Editor.]

The short version: When asked who made the decision to fire each U.S. attorney, Gonzales replied "It was a consensus decision of all of us." Then when asked if he would resign, Gonzales replied: "No. I have a lot more that I am working on that needs to be finished."

The only decision he has made for which responsibility can clearly be assigned to him is to use a political consensus decision-making process that makes no one except the top manager responsible. It also means that he does not and cannot know the criteria or the details of the decisions being made, so he denies blame for the bad decisions. He takes responsibility for the decisions to fire the U.S. Attorneys, but he can't be blamed for those decisions. They were consensus decisions.

Message to Alberto: Sorry Fredo. It doesn't work that way. You are responsible for what you failed to do as well as what (if anything) you intended to do or think you did. You established the process of consensus decisions. If they were bad decisions, you are directly responsible for them. That's true even if you are unaware that the decisions were being made and don't know who made them.

So Alberto (Fredo) Gonzales succeeded very clearly in establishing his own incompetence and unfitness to hold the job of U.S. Attorney General. The one other thing he succeeded at was totally avoiding any discussion of the role of the White House in the mess he has made of the Department of Justice. (Gee. Maybe he deserves the "Medal of Freedom." Like Tenet, Franks and Bremer, Gonzales hasn't blamed failures at and guidance from the White House for the problems he faced either.)

Senator Whitehouse stepped into this latter void, and presented his chart of who at the White House is allowed to make direct contact with the Department of Justice and inquire about on-going cases. Ms. Lithwick reproduces the chart at the end of her column.

Since the Bush White House permits 417 individuals to directly contact individuals in the DoJ, as opposed to four in the Clinton White House, it looks like the Bush administration isn't able to tell who to hold responsible for specific decisions either.

Barney Frank exposes the Republican despicable tactics

Barney Frank is well known as probably the smartest man in the the House of Representatives, and he is able to make his mind known when he wants to. This is good.



Thanks to Atrios.

Did Republicans pay Debra Yang $1.5 million to stop the investigation of Rep. Jerry Lewis?

James Risser is asking this question over at dKos now. Regular readers here will remember that I was asking this question previously here and here last month. Mr. Risser has tracked the story of Debra Yang back a way. Here is part fo what he dug up regarding Ms. Yang:

"Here is her tangled story, an iceberg-tip view of the Rep. Jerry Lewis scandals which she was investigating as a US Attorney, and the treacherous firm of Bush Crime Family consigliere in Los Angeles who serve as Defense Council for Rep. Lewis, the same firm where Yang currently receives her blood-money.

We will soon enough get to her official bio from the firm that paid her $1.5 million, Gibson Dunn in Los Angeles--the same firm that, coincidentally enough, was defending Rep. Jerry Lewis of California. Let me say that again so there is no confusion: She was in charge of the case against Rep. Jerry Lewis. He is being defended against these charges by Gibson Dunn in Los Angeles. Ms Yang received $1.5 million from the firm defending Rep. Lewis, Gibson Dunn, to leave the Justice Department where she was prosecuting Rep. Lewis. And, remarkably, this is the second time that Jerry Lewis has hired a former US Attorney to handle his defense. Thanks to the fine work of TPMuckracker from June 2006, we find that Lewis did the same thing with Robert Bonner, a member in good-standing of the Bush Crime Family since Daddy Bush made Bonner his Drug Czar in the 1990s through the present!

His lead lawyer is Robert Bonner, a man with a long, impressive CV -- featuring one clincher: Bonner used to run the U.S. Attorney's Office that's now investigating Lewis.

Who better to handle an investigation concerning the revolving door between Lewis' office and that of his lobbyist pal Bill Lowery than a man who's switched sides himself?

Bonner headed up the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California from 1984 through 1989 before he went on to serve as a judge in that district. That same office is conducting the investigation of Lewis.

Mr Bonner is a partner at Gibson Dunn in their Los Angeles office in the same practice group as Ms Yang where he has recently been called to do some work for the Bush Crime Family. Once you are in, you only get out at death. But, the money is good, if you can stand it: In 2006, Rep. Lewis rang up a $971,000 legal bill; that sort of money adds up after a few years.

From 2003 through December 2005, Mr. Bonner served as the first Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency of the Department of Homeland Security responsible for managing, controlling and securing the United States' borders, while facilitating global trade and travel.

Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Bonner created the unprecedented Container Security Initiative (CSI) and the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) – both continue to revolutionize the security and more efficient movement of trade around the world. At the same time Mr. Bonner focused on securing international supply chains from the terrorist threat, he also pursued and implemented a national border control strategy to secure America’s borders. This strategy consists of a centralized command structure, rapid response capability, and a defense-in-depth, while relying upon highly-trained personnel, strengthened infrastructure and improved technology.

This is how the San Bernardino County Sun announced it on June 13, 2006:

Robert Bonner, former head of the U.S. Attorney's Office Central District of California, leads a group of attorneys that include former Santa Monica congressman Mel Levine, former federal Solicitor General Ted Olson and Joe Warin of the Los Angeles- based firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP.

Lewis' new legal team was confirmed Thursday by another new Lewis hire, spokeswoman Barbara Comstock, a former Department of Justice spokeswoman. Comstock also worked for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff.

Lewis and his ties to lobbyist and former San Diego congressman Bill Lowery are part of a federal criminal investigation that has reached San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Numerous local government agencies have been subpoenaed for records regarding Lewis and lobbying firm Copeland Lowery Jacquez Denton & White.

Lewis, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, which oversees $900 billion in federal outlays, has not been charged with any crimes or wrongdoing.

Bonner's past clients include former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, who served three years in federal prison for tax evasion.

This is not a nice story, but the facts support it.

What the White House and the Department of Justice have been doing as part of the politicization of the U.S. Attorneys is to pressure them to bring the kinds of bogus cases against Democrats that Biscupic did to Georgia Thompson of Wisconsin or to buy out those U.S. Attorneys who were getting too close to corrupt politicians. Then at least some of the ones who would not cooperate or allow themselves to be bought off were fired in the Pearl Harbor Day Massacre.

The source of this conspiracy is in the White House, which is why Bush is yelling "Executive Privilege" and trying to stretch it to cover documents that were intentionally not using the official system of emails to avoid legal retention requirements.

Expect the Bush White House to fight any efforts to get White House personnel to testify, or to get them to turn over significant documents.

What do we call the US attorney purge?

I'll go along with Mark Klein. I'll call it the "Pearl Harbor Day Massacre" or the PHDM for short.

What were the results of yesterday's Senate Hearings with Gonzales?

According to TPM Muckraker the Department of Justice took the less from the Hearing to be "Hey! Only one Senator called for Gonzales' resignation!"

This, of course, ignores the fact that the Senate cannot, by itself, remove the Attorney General. Even his impeachment must occur in the House, and only after that would the Senate have any power to remove Gonzales.

What I learned is that Alberto Gonzales has several problems. The first is that he has no idea how to manage an organization. He does not know how to inform his subordinates what he wants to have happen, as his repeated statements that he thought that the U.S. attorneys "knew" what the Department of Justice considered to be significant about their performance, but was totally unable to explain how they should know that. Combined with his inability to set goals for his subordinates was his repeated description of what he was told by Kyle Sampson. Alberto "presumed" that what he was told by Mr. Sampson was "the consensus of the Department of Justice Staff," he is admitting that he is unable to tell who he has made responsible for any given task. Gonzales is looking for consensus on those decisions, and so he has abandoned all ability to hold any individual who works for him responsible for a task, a decision, or the implementation of a decision. This is also displayed by his lack of understanding that there should have been some process for evaluating US attorneys if he was going to take personnel actions. Sen. Lindsey Graham nailed this one. Any decisions to fire someone were made by miscellaneous staffers who felt that the person to be fired had somehow "crossed" him or her, and that led to that US attorney's name being added to the list which Kyle Sampson was "aggregating."

Lawyers have a reputation for being poor managers. Alberto Gonzales should have his picture placed along side any such descriptions. Nothing in Gonzales' career suggests that he has any experience or training in management technique. His testimony yesterday demonstrates quite clearly that he has no clue how to manage anything.

A related problem is that even as an attorney he has no experience in criminal law. Even his time as a Supreme Court Justice in Texas was entirely focused on non-criminal Law. The Texas Judicial system has a separate top court for appeals of criminal cases, called the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Since he apparently surrounded himself with young ideologically -motivated "true-believers" he had no expertise to support him when his experience did not guide him in proper decisions and decision-procedures as he attempted to lead the Department of Justice.

In short, Alberto has neither the management nor the leadership skills required to lead the U.S. Department of Justice. His only qualification for the job was his close association with George W. Bush. That simply wasn't enough, and the strong questioning he got yesterday displayed his total unfitness for the job he is currently filling.

His second problem is that the Bush administration is totally politically-oriented, and he has adapted well to that environment. Given his lack of leadership skills, management skills and experience in criminal law, if he had surrounded himself with experts in those areas and then added his political intuitions he might have had a chance. Unfortunately for him (and for America) his choice about his immediate staff has been disastrously bad. Kyle Sampson (as his Chief of Staff) has demonstrated no strong management skills himself. Monica Goodling is quite young, and is a strong Christian Conservative. She appears to have served as a political-correctness Commissar for Alberton, ensuring that personnel who were brought into the DoJ were sufficiently Fundamentalist Christian and Conservative to be hired. As a graduate of Pat Robertson's fourth tier law school and being very young she had no real experience in criminal law. She is a symptom of the problems Alberto Gonzales has brought to the Department of Justice. It will be very interesting to see what the response is to her testimony before the Senate or House after she is give immunity for her testimony.

So overall I consider Gonzales' testimony yesterday to have been a disaster for him and for Bush. It really clarified how badly the DoJ has been politicized. If Gonzales does not resign (and I seem to recall reading that his wife opposes his resignation) then I don't think Bush will ask for his resignation. In that case, the DoJ is going to become effectively non-functional until the end of the Bush term.

I would not want to be a Republican running for election or reelection in 2008.

FBI raids personal business of Arizona Rep. Rick Renzi.

From Roll Call:

By Susan Davis
Roll Call Staff
Thursday, April 19; 10:04 pm

In a second blow to House Republicans this week, the FBI raided a business tied to the family of Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) Thursday afternoon as part of an ongoing investigation into the three-term lawmaker.

Richard "Rick" Renzi is the Republican Representative who represents Arizona's first Congressional District. He was first elected in 2002, and appears precocious in that he has been under federal investigation for corruption since at least October 2006.

The business that was raided was the Patriot Insurance Agency. This is the insurance agency originally started by Rick Renzi (as Renzi & Company) and which has been listed as belonging to his wife since Renzi became a Congressman. Since Rep. Renzi and his wife have 13 children, I wonder how much time she has to actually operate the business.

Interesting facts about Rep. Renzi include the fact that his father is a retired Major General who is presently the executive vice president of Mantech International. This is a firm which provides information technology services to a number of intelligence and defense-related federal government agencies. Ft. Huachuca, Arizona is the home of the Army's Intelligence School. Roll Call also states that Rep. Renzi has stepped down from the House Intelligence Panel. According to Congressopedia Rep. Renzi was a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in the 109th Congress (2005 & 2006.)

The website Beyond DeLay describes Rep. Renzi's possibly corrupt actions using his power as a Congressman to enrich his family like this:

In 2003, Rep. Renzi sponsored legislation that dealt hundreds of millions of dollars to his father’s business while, according to environmentalists, devastating the San Pedro River. A key beneficiary of Rep. Renzi’s legislation was ManTech International Corp., a Fairfax, Virginia based defense contractor where Rep. Renzi’s father, Retired Major General Eugene Renzi, is an executive vice president. The company, which has an office in Sierra Vista, Arizona, was the largest contributor to Renzi’s 2002 congressional campaign and the second largest in his 2004 campaign.

If Rep. Renzi accepted campaign contributions from ManTech in exchange for pushing through legislation benefiting the company, he would be in violation of federal bribery laws. His actions on behalf of his father may have also violated conflict-of-interest rules and the requirement that
Members of the House conduct themselves “at all times in a manner that reflects creditably on the House.”

Wikipedia also states that he was involved in the US attorney purge. Paul Charlton, US Attorney for Arizona, was on of those fired by DoJ on December 7, 2006. NPR has this story on Paul Charlton.

Paul Charlton of Phoenix, Ariz. — Charlton said he resigned over policy disputes. Moschella says Charlton disagreed with Justice Department guidelines on the death penalty and the tape-recording of FBI interviews.

The reason for firing Paul Charlton that has gotten the most press appears to be his pressure on the DoJ to get permission to tape record confessions, since he was losing convictions because of the absence of such recordings. The Phoenix Business Journal does point out that

Congressional Democrats have expressed concern over the reasons behind the ousters. Charlton's office was looking into Flagstaff Congressman Rick Renzi's involvement with a real estate deal and former Tucson Congressmen Jim Kolbe's interaction with male pages.

The coincidence that Charlton's name was added in October 2006 to Sampson's list of US attorneys to be fired is suspicious. October is when reports that Charlton was investigating Renzi's apparently corrupt activities reached the newspapers.

This may well be another case in which the firing of the local US attorney was conducted in order to protect a Republican Congressman from a corruption investigation. It is not clear to me from the media reports that this is the case, however. That could well be because Arizona is not a place that a lot of national reporters visit much, and local reporters simply aren't digging real deeply into the national aspects of the local story. If that's the case then the raid on Rep. Renzi's Insurance Agency will quickly change the motivations of local reporters.

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The website Beyond Delay is a product of the investigations of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). It is their report on the twenty most corrupt Representatives and Senators, plus five who don't quit meet the requirements to be on the list. The list does not appear to have been updates since the election of 2006, since at least five on the list of twenty were not reelected - or in Sen. Frist's case, did not run for reelection.