How many top DoJ resignations now?

On December 7, 2006 the Bush Department of Justice (DoJ) fired eight U. S. Attorneys in a single day, stating that it was for performance reasons. This Pearl Harbor Day purge was unique in the history of the DoJ. The Washington, D.C. media made a one-day story of it, and moved on to more interesting things, like the latest from Nicole Richie or Lindsay Lohen.

The unique event and the failure of the Bush administration to provide a satisfying explanation for it must have bugged Josh Marshall, because he didn't let the issue go. Josh's refusal to let the issue go has led the Congress to look more closely at the DoJ and also to a series of interesting stories out of the Department of Justice this year. Let's look at some of the stories that have resulted from Josh Marshall's curiosity and refusal to let a good story be ignored.

Of particular interest was (and continues to be) the U.S. Attorney for San Diego, CA who had successfully investigated, prosecuted and imprisoned California Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham (for longer than any other Congressman has ever been imprisoned) and continued to investigate Cunningham's briber, Brent Wilkes as well as the Number three ranking CIA executive, "Dusty" Foggo. Carol Lam's firing has all the appearance of being an effort by the Bush administration at Obstruction of Justice.

Next we learn that the U.S. Attorney from Los Angeles, Debra Yang, had been on the list to be fired, but resigned in late November to take a Partnership at the Republican law firm which was defending Rep. Jerry Lewis as he was being investigated by (oops) U.S, Attorney Debra Yang. The partnership came along with a $1.5 million signing bonus. There is a saying in Latin America. "Plata o plomo." Silver or lead. It looks very much as though Debra Yang, a 47 year-old divorced mother of two young children was given the option of taking the signing bonus or being fired on Pearl Harbor Day with the rest.

News reports state that Rep. Jerry Lewis has decided to retire rather than run for a 16th tern, although his office denies that he has made such a decision.

Another U.S. Attorney, Paul Charlton of Arizona, was fired because he was investigating a crooked land deal by Republican Rep. Rick Renzi. While the investigation into Rep. Renzi has been slow-walked since U.S. Attorney Charlton was fired, Rep. Renzi has just recently announced that he is not going to run for reelection in 2008. That is one short step short of a guilty plea.

Two more of the Pearl Harbor Day purge, David Iglesias, fired U.S. Attorney from New Mexico, and John McKay, fired U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, present a good case that they were fired for refusing to bring flimsy indictments against Democrats that would influence an up-coming election.

The cases of Iglesias and McKay show what happened when the DoJ tried to order ethical attorneys to bring politically-motivated cases to influence elections so the Republicans could win. They refused and were fired. Then there is the unethical U.S. Attorney in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Steve Biscupic, who was on the list to be purged on Pearl Harbor Day until he brought corruption charges against Georgia Thompson who worked as a civil servant for the State of Wisconsin. This case was so weak that the Appeals Court threw it out at the end of oral argument and chastised the U.S. Attorney for even bringing it. See also NY Times gets it right! See editorial today.. Ms. Thompson was accused of a crime that had not occurred and was convicted with no evidence. But that didn't matter to U.S. Attorney Biskupic. He created an issue the Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin could use to attack the Democratic incumbent, and Biskupic kept his job when ethical attorney's were being fired. [Biskupic remains as a U.S. Attorney today.]

There are more situations which deserve close investigation, but the real set of problems all go back to the politisation and mismanagement of the Department of Justice. See my earlier article The deeper problem revealed by the US attorney Purge.

It should be no surprise when Paul Kiel at talking points memo muckraker lists the recent top level resignations from the Department of Justice.

"1) Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, today.
2) Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty announced his resignation May 14th.
3) Acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer (the Department's #3) announced that he was withdrawing his nomination for the position June 22nd.
4) Kyle Sampson, Gonzales' chief of staff, resigned March 13th.
5) Department White House liaison Monica Goodling resigned April 6th.
6) Michael Elston, McNulty's chief of staff, resigned June 15th.
7) Executive Director of the Executive Office of United States Attorneys Michael Battle, announced his resignation in mid-February.
8) Bradley Schlozman, an attorney in the Counsel to the Director staff at the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, formerly the U.S. attorney for Kansas City and a former acting assistant attorney for the Civil Rights Division, resigned mid August.

And, finally, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Wan Kim was another notable resignation (on August 23rd), although Kim's troubles were unrelated to the firings scandal.

High personnel turnover is a symptom of a poorly run organization. It is an especially bad sign when the guys at the top are all leaving at once. This isn't politics so much as it is bad management and an attempt to politicize the DoJ. And, like Alberto Gonzales himself, the major problems of the DoJ have come out of the White House.

Gonzales took over as Attorney General on February 3, 2005. It has taken him two years and seven months to literally destroy that organization and its reputation.

It is really strange that no one in the Washington D.C. press corps was curious about the Pearl Harbor Day U.S. Attorney Purge like Josh Marshall was.

Speculations on the Gonzales resignation

I wonder if Alberto Gonzales is resigning in order to lower the level of conflict between the Executive Department and the Congress? If so, it isn't going to work. If anything, the conflict is going to increase.

Does the resignation of Gonzales make it less likely that the Department of Justice will attempt to influence the 2008 elections? I'd say that depends on the degree of openness that the DoJ is forced to undergo, especially Voting Rights Division. One commitment the Senators need to extract it the rebuilding of the Voting Rights Division and making it more transparent.

The new Attorney General needs to firmly agree that he will take Contempt of Congress cases against White House employees to Court. Gonzales has publicly stated that he would not act on such Congressional requests.

Gonzales' resignation becomes effective September 17th. I wonder if there is any significance in that date? It appears to shut out any possibility of a recess appointment by bush.

Gonzales' legacy will almost certainly be that he is responsible for the effective destruction of the Department of Justice and a sharp reduction of the DoJ's reputation for the honest enforcement of law. It may also be the complete discrediting of the theory that U.S. Attorneys can be fired for purely political reasons, and that the Attorney General sometimes has to tell the President that something the President wants done cannot be done because it violates the Rule of Law.

NY Times reports Gonzales has resigned; Good riddance

More Bush administration housecleaning as August comes to a close. The New York Times has just reported:

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

WACO, Tex., Aug. 27 — ­ Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, has resigned. A senior administration official said he would announce the decision later this morning in Washington.

Mr. Gonzales, who had rebuffed calls for his resignation, submitted his to President Bush by telephone on Friday, the official said. His decision was not immediately announced, the official added, until after the president invited him and his wife to lunch at his ranch near here.

Mr. Bush has not yet chosen a replacement but will not leave the position open long, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the Attorney General's resignation had not yet been made public.

Mr. Bush had repeatedly stood by Mr. Gonzales, an old friend and colleague from Texas, even as he faced increasing scrutiny for his leadership of the Justice Department, including his role in the dismissals of nine United States attorneys late last year and questions about whether he testified truthfully about the National Security Agency's surveillance programs. [Snip]

Mr. Gonzales's resignation is the latest in a series of high-level departures that has reshaped the end of Mr. Bush's second term. Karl Rove, another of Mr. Bush's close circle of aides from Texas, stepped down two weeks ago.

The official said that the decision was Mr. Gonzales's and that the president accepted it grudgingly. At the same time, the official acknowledged that the turmoil over his tenure as Attorney General had made continuing difficult.

"The unfair treatment that he's been on the receiving end of has been a distraction for the department," the official said.

OK. So Karen Hughes left long ago, and Karl Rove just resigned. Less well-known are Harriet Miers and Dan Bartlett who have also left.

Does Dick Cheney count as part of the Texas take-over? He was, of course, a resident of Dallas, TX in 2000 but transferred his voting residence back to Montana to avoid the problem that the Constitution does not allow the President and Vice President to both be from the same state.

It's good to see Gonzales go. America is much better for his resignation.

Specter demands answers from Gonzales by noon today

Arlen Specter (R-PA), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has demanded that the Bush administration provide a letter clarifying Alberto Gonzales' many contradictions in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee to be delivered by noon.

“Given the difficulty of discussing classified matters in public, I think it is preferable to have a letter addressing that question [of Gonzales’ veracity] from the administration … by noon tomorrow, which will be made available to the news media,” Specter wrote in the statement. “The administration has committed to producing such a letter.”

Specter expects the letter clarifying the attorney general’s testimony to be addressed to himself and Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who declined to comment on the matter.

Sen. Specter is rather clearly upset with AG Gonzales' testimony to the Senate, but since he is a Republican he has not appeared free to directly challenge the administration. His personal conflict has been played out in public. He has made statements challenging Gonzales, but continues to vote with the Republicans on the committee.

This demand for a letter appears to be another effort to resolve his conflict without abandoning the Republican Party. It appears to be a dramatic move, but probably will have no real effect on the situation.

I can't say I feel especially sorry for Sen. Specter. He is just another enabler of the radical right-wing Bush Cheney regime, but unlike (for example) Ex-Rep. Tom DeLay and Sen. Inhofe (R-OK), Sen. Specter doesn't seem to get much pleasure from the antics, idiocy, and misuse of power by members of the Bush Administration. He just doesn't do anything to stop them. As I say, he is a Bush/Cheney enabler.

Attorney General Gonzales: Lying or bad memory?

The Washington Post has decided to publish an article on one of the burning questions today rolling through and over the city of Washington D.C.

Whether Gonzales has deliberately told untruths or is merely hampered by his memory has been the subject of intense debate among members of Congress, legal scholars and others who have watched him over the years. Some regard his verbal difficulties as a strategic ploy on behalf of a president to whom he owes his career; others see a public official overwhelmed by the magnitude of his responsibilities. [Snip]

Gonzales told senators earlier this year that allegations that he had been untruthful "have been personally very painful to me." But Gonzales's critics on and off Capitol Hill say he has had trouble with the truth for more than a decade, pointing to a controversy over Gonzales's account of why Bush was excused from jury duty in 1996 while serving as the governor of Texas.

The article does a lot of reporting on what has been said by both Gonzales' supporters and his detractors, so there is a lot of "On the one hand... then on the other hand..." type statements. But it is very difficult to conclude that the Truth can be found by taking the arguments from both sides and splitting the difference. Consider his history.

Alberto Gonzales spent, two years at the Air Force Academy, then resigned and went on to graduate from the single finest University in Texas, Rice University of Houston. Then he went on to get a law degree from Harvard, joined one of the top law firms in Texas (Vinson and Elkins) where he became a partner. This is not the career pattern of a man with memory and verbal problems.

...scrutiny of Gonzales increased dramatically this year as a result of Democrats' aggressive investigations into the Justice Department's firings of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. Gonzales has particularly come under fire for his shifting explanations of his role in the dismissals and for his statements that he could not recall a host of details about the firings.

At a Senate hearing in April, for example, Gonzales said more than 60 times that he could not recall events or facts related to the firings, including a final, high-level meeting in his office at which the dismissal plan was formally approved.

Lying successfully requires an excellent memory and a thorough understanding of whatever is being lied about. Without knowing what is really going on, good lies cannot be crafted that do not give themselves away through contradictions. Gonzales does not appear to have been caught in any extremely obvious personal contradiction, though a lot of people have come forward to disagree with his statements. If he is lying, then he is carefully preparing to lie by making sure that he has plausible deniability for most of what he says. Again this strongly suggests that his errors in testimony are intentional, not accidental or the result of a memory or verbal impairment.

Did he suffer some mental disease such as Alzheimer's since then? He left Vinson and Elkins in 1994 to become Bush's General Counsel when Bush was elected Governor of Texas and he is now age 51. If he has some memory or verbal problem which has developed since 1994 it has only become noticeable when he walked into the Senate for hearings after he was confirmed to the job of Attorney General.

There is an attempt to pass the problems off by saying that "Gonzales's strengths 'may lie elsewhere, but they are not in management.'" While Attorneys are notoriously poor managers, and Gonzales has clearly demonstrated that his management skills lie in the low range for that profession, his statements to the Senate are a result of his strengths as one of the better Attorneys in the nation acting to give testimony. It is much more likely that he has structured his job in order to make what he says to Congress more credible or more difficult to disprove than it is that he is a poor manager.

Or to say it another way, he may be a poor manager, but it is because he has structured his job to provide that as an excuse for those lies he gets caught in rather than poor management being the reason for his refusal to tell the truth to Congress. It takes an extremely bright, competent and well-trained attorney to build a large structure of lies and then build - on top of that structure - systems of plausible deniability.

His only remaining excuse might be mental illness. But if that is the case, it demonstrates itself only when he sits in the Senate witness chair. I don't think that medicine has identified a Senate-specific memory or verbal illness. I see no way to draw any conclusion other than that he is lying to protect himself and Bush.

NY times: Gonzales lied - also Bush expansion of Executive Privilige Unconstitutional, wrong

I rarely link to or even read New York Times editorials because of their overreaching subscription wall. If they want me to read something, it should be on the net for free without a time limit. Today's editorial is apparently meant to be read, however, since it is not behind the wall. It can be read here.

So why bother? Well,it covers two very current situations. First is regarding the lies Alberto Gonzales told Congress in his position as Attorney General.

When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wanted the USA Patriot Act renewed in the spring of 2005, he told the Senate, “There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse.” But The Washington Post reported yesterday that just six days earlier, the F.B.I. had sent Mr. Gonzales a report saying that it had obtained personal information it should not have.

Then further down the NY Times editors move on to Bush's demand that "Executive Privilege" be expanded to cover what Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, and Sara Taylor, a former top aide to Karl Rove know about the potentially criminal behavior of Attorney General's office in the case of the purge of the U.S. attorneys.

Mr. Bush’s claim is baseless. Executive privilege, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is a judge-made right of limited scope, intended to create a sphere of privacy around the president so that he can have honest discussions with his advisers. The White House has insisted throughout the scandal that Mr. Bush — and even Mr. Gonzales — was not in the loop about the firings. If that is the case, the privilege should not apply.

Even if Mr. Bush was directly involved, Ms. Miers and Ms. Taylor would have no right to withhold their testimony. The Supreme Court made clear in the Watergate tapes case, its major pronouncement on the subject, that the privilege does not apply if a president’s privacy interests are outweighed by the need to investigate possible criminal activity. Congress has already identified many acts relating to the scandal that may have been illegal, including possible obstruction of justice and lying to Congress.

The White House argues that its insistence on the privilege is larger than this one case, that it is protecting the presidency from inappropriate demands from Congress. But the reverse is true. This White House has repeatedly made clear that it does not respect Congress’s constitutional role. If Congress backs down, it would not only be compromising an important investigation of Justice Department malfeasance. It would be doing serious damage to the balance of powers.

This is a pretty important statement for the newspaper of record to make on the day that Miers and Taylor are set to go before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify and yet have been directed by Bush not to testify. The Bush administration is an out-of-control runway Presidency making Unconstitutional demands of Congress and of the American people.

It is only the Republican Senators and Congressmen who are placing loyalty to their political party above loyalty to America and the Constitution which is holding up the totally necessary action of impeachment of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and as became very clear when his lies to Congress were just exposed, Alberto Gonzales.

It is the anti-Constitutional and anti-American behavior of the Republican politicians which is extremist, not the totally appropriate demands for impeachment of Bush, Cheney and Gonzales. The behavior of these self-serving Republican politicians must be considered for retribution when the next election occurs in November 2008 (and later for those Senators not up for reelection until 2010 and 2012.

This New York Times editorial demonstrates the need to remove these cancers on the body of American government and politics as rapidly as possible.

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See also:

• Gonzales lied under oath to the Senate
  posted Tuesday, July 10, 2007.

Gonzales lied under oath to the Senate

John Solomon of the Washington Post, using documents received from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act, reports that the Attorney General lied to the Senate.

As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.

Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Articles of Impeachment similar to those being prepared against Bush and Cheney need to also be prepared against the Attorney General - and quickly.

An impeachable crime has already been committed. Further hearings on the nature of civil rights abuse need to be held, but the impeachable offense of lying to the Senate under Oath should cause Gonzales to be removed immediately.

More corruption in the politicized Department of Justice

It seems that U.S. Attorneys and their assistants were not the only jobs in the Department of Justice (DoJ) that Gonzales, Rove(?) and company were politicizing. They were also placing unqualified people into the job of Immigration Judge. It got bad enough that so that they shut down appointments as Immigration Judge last December and the DoJ Inspector General opened an investigation of the procedures used for choosing new Immigration Judges.

The reasons and final outcome are not yet known, but we know a lot more than a short time ago. Go read EmptyWheel for more details.

Here is what is wrong with the NSA domestic spying program

Kevin Drum provides the best description I have yet seen of the core reason why we should be shocked at the story of Gonzales trying to coerce then AG Ashcroft to reapprove the NSA domestic spying program even when he was zonked out in intensive care.

We still don't know what the program is or more important, what it was.

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.

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..

Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed all emails to and from Rove by Gonzales

From Laura Rozen:

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday subpoenaed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to turn over all e-mails to or from White House political adviser Karl Rove in connection with the controversy over the firings last year of eight U.S. attorneys.

The subpoena suggests that the congressional inquiry is focusing on Rove and whether he shaped the firings and hirings of U.S. attorneys and whether the purge was influenced by GOP concerns about corruption probes and investigations of voter fraud in battleground states during the last election.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said he took the step only after Gonzales twice declined to turn over such e-mails voluntarily. The subpoena gives Gonzales a May 15 deadline. If he does not comply, Leahy said, he will be asked to appear before the panel to answer questions.

I'm betting that even if Gonzales turns over all the emails to and from Rove, there will me none that are incriminating. That's because the DoJ had Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling as what I am calling "consigliares" and that in the White House Harriet Miers functioned the same way for Rove. That's why Sampson, Goodling and Miers are gone now, and if they are indicted and tried they will fall on their swords like "Scooter" Libby did for Dick Cheney.

Though Goodling might be a weak link. Her effort to "lawyer up" and the lawyer's comments that she would refuse to testify to the Senate for fear of a "perjury trap" suggests that she realized what her function was to be the fall guy. She's only about 34, and Sampson is only 37. That is awfully young to accept the sacrifice of your future because your boss has to be protected from his criminal activity.

[See the McKlatchy story 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.

David Iglesias filed Hatch Act complaint April 3rd.

The discussion of the U.S. Attorney Purge has begun to include reports of an investigation of violations of the Hatch Act recently. Now Think Progress has published a report of an interview with fired U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, David Iglesias. Mr. Iglesias says he filed a complaint against Gonzales, McNulty, Sampson and Goodling on april 3, 2007 and has spoken to the Office of Special Counsel’s (OSC)chief Scott Bloch who has begun the investigation.

Mr. Iglesias' complaint is that he was fired from a Hatch Act protected job for refusing to conduct politically-motivated investigations. Mr. Iglesias believes that his complaint may be what has led the OSC to look at the actions of Karl Rove.

Iglesias also said that while evidence of Rove’s potential illegal actions is currently only circumstantial, “I believe if OSC digs in, they can get direct evidence.”

[T]he Justice Department papers everything. I mean, the most minute issue has an incredible researched and memoed product. There has to be a paper trail. I haven’t seen it yet. If it’s not at the Justice Department, it has got to be at the White House.

Finally, Iglesias said he believes that Monica Goodling — former counsel to Alberto Gonzales and the Justice Department’s liaison to the White House — holds the “keys to the kingdom” in terms of uncovering the roots of the U.S. Attorney purge, since she can describe the communication that took place between the White House and the Justice Department.

Yesterday the House Judiciary Committee voted to grant immunity to Monica Goodling, which prevents her from taking the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying for fear that she would be convicted for her testimony.

The OSC "Hatch Act" investigation is one more front on which the White House has to defend itself. There are so very many fronts now. I am sure that Dick Cheney is having a lengthy "deja vu" experience returning to feelings he must have had in the embattled Nixon White House before Nixon resigned.

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.

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.

White House working to limit voter turnout.

The Purge of the U.S. attorneys is closely related to efforts by the White House to reduce the number of lower income and minority people on the voters rolls. The effort to keep likely Democratic voters from being successfully registered or from voting is also the reason for the Republican complaints about organized voting fraud after each of the elections since 2000. Now we have another report on this effort to prevent voters from opposing Republicans by using the Justice Department. The report comes from McClatchy Newspapers:

By GREG GORDON of McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates, according to civil rights advocates and a former administration official.

The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.

Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.

Questions about the administration's campaign against alleged voter fraud have helped fuel the political tempest over the firings last year of eight U.S. attorneys, several of whom were ousted in part because they did not bring voter fraud cases important to Republican politicians.

Civil rights advocates contend that the administration's policies were intended to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority voters, who tend to support Democrats. By filing state and federal lawsuits, civil rights groups have won court rulings blocking some of its actions. [Snip]

Voting laws

Former Justice Department lawyers, public records and other documents show that since President Bush took office, political appointees in the Civil Rights Division have:

Approved Georgia and Arizona laws that tightened voter ID requirements. A federal judge tossed out the Georgia law as an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of poor voters, and a federal appeals court signaled its objections to the Arizona law on similar grounds last fall.

Issued advisory opinions that overstated a 2002 federal election law by asserting that it required states to disqualify new voting registrants if their identification didn't match that in computer databases, prompting at least three states to reject tens of thousands of applicants mistakenly.

Done little to enforce a provision of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act that requires state public assistance agencies to register voters. The inaction has contributed to a 50 percent decline in annual registrations at those agencies, to 1 million from 2 million.

Sued at least six states on grounds that they had too many people on their voter rolls. Some eligible voters were removed in the resulting purges.

Carol Lam, US attorney of San Diego was apparently asked to resign because she was too active in pursuing criminal cases against crooked Republican politicians like Duke Cunningham and John Doolittle. The US attorney of Arkansas was asked to resign so that a political operative who was an aide to Karl Rove could take the job and get some experience as a real attorney to put on his resume. The others were asked to resign because of complaints that they had not brought cases against Democrats just before the election or were not bringing voter fraud cases that Republican politicians thought that they should be able to take to court.

Then there is US attorney Biskupic of Milwaukee, WI who was removed from the list after (because?) he brought a high profile case against a Wisconsin civil servant for steering a state contract for travel services to a travel firm owned by a family which apparently donated political money mostly to Democrats. This case became the only real issue the Republican candidate to defeat the existing Democratic Governor from being reelected, but when the case reached the Appeals Court the Appeal Justices literally threw it out of court, saying that it was not based on any evidence and that the Prosecutor provided no credible evidence that any crime had been committed. Not only was she not shown to get any personal benefit from giving the contract to the travel agency (a requirement to prove fraud) and no evidence that she knew that the family that owned the travel agency were supporters of the Democratic Party, the agencies' bid was the low bid submitted.

The Executive Department generally and the Department of Justice have been so politicized by the Bush administration, including Alberto Gonzales, that it may take years to rebuild the government after Bush leaves office. This report is just one more of the many, many ways the Republicans have worked to destroy America.

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Addendum 8:11 PM CDT.
Digby has a great deal more about the Republican effort to use false accusations about voter fraud to reduce Democratic voter turnout. As usual his reporting is thorough, well-sourced, and well-written. Go enjoy it.

Firedoglake liveblogs the Gonzales hearings

For more on the Senate hearings with Alberto Gonzales, Firedoglake is liveblogging them. Here are this morning's hearings, presented with the earliest at the bottom of the list and the last at the top:

• Alberto Gonzales testimony, Part VIII
• Alberto Gonzales testimony, Part VII
• Alberto Gonzales testimony, Part VI
  [Lunch break]
• Alberto Gonzales Testimony, Part V
• Alberto Gonzales Testimony, Part IV
• Alberto Gonzales Testimony, Part III
• Alberto Gonzales Testimony, Part II
• Alberto Gonzales Testimony, Part I
• Just warming up?

Today's Senate Hearings with Attorney General Gonzales

I have been listening closely to the Senate Hearings on NPR in which Attorney General Gonzales is being grilled on the firings of the US attorneys. The questions (with the exception of those by Sen. Cornyn the "box turtle [*]" pretending to be a Senator from Texas) have been sharp and direct.

Gonzales' responses have been imprecise, frequently going off on tangents that appear to have only the twin purposes of making the Attorney General look better and using up the time each Senator has to ask questions, and often contradictory. My impression is that Gonzales was not involved in the process of running the office. He made "decisions" primarily based on the recommendations of his subordinates - and though he dares not say so, probably at the direction of Bush and Rove from the White House. He repeatedly testified that he did not ask his subordinates the basis of their recommended decisions.

Yet he stated repeatedly that he takes responsibility for the decisions he made. Senator Lindsey Graham nailed it when he asked (paraphrased) "Is it fair to say that you depended on your subordinates to have good reasons for the decisions they recommended and never questioned the basis they used for those decisions?" When Gonzales replied "Yes." Sen. Graham went on "And you never considered that some of the US attorneys you were firing might be on the list because they somehow raised the ire of someone on your staff?"

At this point Gonzales stumbled and then agreed that the scenario Sen. Graham presented was possible.

Then towards the end of this mornings' session Attorney General Gonzales was asked if, considering his credibility problems with members of Congress, it might be best if he resigned, Gonzales energetically stated that he did not think he should resign. That he had a great deal more [unspecified] to offer the Department of Justice and he wanted to stay on to accomplish those things.

When the Senate Committee adjourned for lunch, one NPR reporter made a point of stating that while hearings like this often were contentious and highly emotional, this was the first time that many of the Senators involved appeared to pity Gonzales more than simply be angry with him. The pity, the reporter continued, was because of the feeling that had frequently been mentioned on the Hill that Gonzales was a "Dead man walking."

That is my impression so far. For more on the hearings, go to TPM Muckraker. See also Gonzales And The Profound Lie by Rick Perlstein.

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Addendum 2:17 PM CDT
I rarely ever agree with Byron York at the Corner of NRO, but this time he has it right.

The major problem with his testimony is that Gonzales maintains, in essence, that he doesn’t know why he fired at least some of the eight dismissed U.S. attorneys. When, under questioning by Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, Gonzales listed the reasons for each firing, it was clear that in a number of cases, he had reconstructed the reason for the dismissal after the fact. He didn’t know why he fired them at the time, other than the action was recommended by senior Justice Department staff.

I will say I don't think this is the major problem with his testimony, it certainly sits close to the top of Gonzales' many, many problems.

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[*]An old Texas joke.
What do you know if you are driving in the country and see a box turtle sitting on top of a fence post? Several things. You know:

• he has no purpose there,
  
• he didn't get there by himself, and
  
• he can't get down by himself.

"Box turtle" is one of the nicer things that Sen. John Cornyn has been called.

US attorney Iglesias (NM) was fired after Bush decided to accomodate Sen. Domenici

The sequence of events that put David Iglesias (U.S. attorney, New Mexico) on the list to be fired in December included a demand by six term Senator Domenici (NM- R) of Bush that he direct Gonzales to fire him. The story is reported today in the Albuquerque Journal (and is excerpted by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.)

Alberto Gonzales thought highly of David Iglesias, and told Sen. Domenici that he would only fire Iglesia if George Bush told him to. So Sen. Domenici called Karl Rove and asked him to go to George Bush and get Iglesias fired. Karl did so, and President Bush then directed Alberto Gonzales to fire him. Iglesias was fired as part of the eight U.S. attorneys fired In December 2006.

It's clear that Iglesias was fired for not bringing indictments against Democrats just before the November 2006 election. Iglesias was unwilling to give in to the pressure from both Sen. Domenici and Rep. Wilson to bring purely political cases to indictment in the manner done by Steve Biscupic of Wisconsin.

My previous post on the David Iglesias story is here:

• Ex-New Mexico US attorney David Iglesias is not happy
  March 20, 2007

My previous posts on the Steve Biscupic story:

• US Atty Biscupic (Wisc) saved his job by prosecuting Georgia Thompson
  April 14, 2007
• Georgia Thompson was convicted by right-wing media
  April 13, 2007,
• NY Times gets it right! See editorial today.
  April 09, 2007, and
• Wisconsin US attorney rammed through fake corruption case of Democrat before last Governor's election.
  April 06, 2007.

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Addendum 12:41 PM
Josh Marshall ties up all the loose threads and tells what is important about the Iglesias firing story:

No one disputes that Domenici's call to Iglesias was at best inappropriate. But there's been a lack of direct evidence that Iglesias's refusal to bow to political pressure led directly to his firing. Now we have have that evidence. And it's not Kyle Sampson or even Alberto Gonzales who Domenici went to to get sign off for Iglesias's ouster. It was right to the president. And the available evidence now points strongly the conclusion that the final decision to fire David Iglesias. [was made by George W. Bush.]