1 Boring Old Man

Controversial U.S. Attorney Heads Back to D.C.

After his controversial tenure at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Bradley Schlozman was rewarded by being installed as the U.S. attorney for Kansas City. His time as U.S.A. there, which ended only a week ago, is notable mostly for his decision to bring four "voter fraud" indictments shortly before the election last year. (We’ll have more on that later.)

But Schlozman isn’t done at the Justice Department. In fact, he’s headed back to Washington to work at the office that supervises U.S. attorneys all over the country. A Justice Department spokesman told CBS Investigative Producer Laura Strickler that Schlozman will be "an attorney in the Counsel to the Director staff at the Executive Office for United States Attorneys." It’s not clear exactly what that means, and the spokesman did not indicate precisely what Schlozman’s duties would be. The EOUSA serves as the liaison beween U.S. attorneys all over the country and DoJ leadership in Washington…

This scandal is monsterous. Not that falsifying intelligence to start a war isn’t monsterous. Not that revealing the identity of a C.I.A. Agent isn’t monsterous. Not that the regular use of secrecy to run the government isn’t monsterous. But this one is actually focused on disenfranchizing voters [much like the "old south" in the era of segregation] as a matter of Republican Party policy. While it may be true that some Party members  believe they are simply reacting to some kind of Democratic Party voter fraud, it’s becoming clear that the`Adminstration perpetrators know exactly what they’re doing – trumping up voter fraud to do some voter fraud of their own.

Right now, the Department of Justice is so infiltrated that it’s probably impossible to prosecute these people in a way their deceit deserves, and the best we can do is paralyze the scheme. It’s an almost unimaginable situation – a Department of Justice that has to be neutralized to prevent any more damage to our system. It’s the Deparment in charge of protecting our system. When the pundits said early on that this story had legs, we had no idea how long those legs really were.

Watch now Josh Marshall’s commentary and rerun of Rove’s speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association:

And check out what they’re giving out in their awards ceremony:

^{Former RNLA President Craig Burkhardt presents former Attorney General Edwin Meese III a Lucite containing “chads” from Florida}