I’m still obsessing on the process that lead to the firing of the U.S. Attorneys in light of Sampson’s and Gonzales’ testimony. Since there are no emails or documents from Gonzales, everything has to be by inference. In his testimony, Kyle Sampson said that the idea of firing Attorneys dated from 2005, though we pick […]
Patrick Fitzgerald was criticized for only bringing charges for perjury and obstruction of justice against Scooter Libby. Here, we have a new version of the same situation. In spite of a ton of emails and other evidence, all we really know about is the underlings, and that there’s an obvious attempt to obstruct the investigation. […]
… and the pollen here is ferocious, so I’m spending the weekend hiding inside. I was passing the time re-reading the email dumps from the DOJ, and I keep running across things I missed the first time around. I’ve only recently caught up with who Michael Elston is [Paul McNulty’s Chief of Staff]. He’s the […]
… knew about this, but I’d missed it. This is from Kyle Sampson’s memo of December 4th, 2006, three days before the firing of the U.S. Attorneys [entitled "USA replacement plan.doc"]. In Step 1, Sampson talked about what to say to the Senators and "Political leads." It included, "We will look to you, Senator/Political lead, […]
QUESTION: Was the President disappointed in the testimony? MS. PERINO: Is the President? No. QUESTION: But what about the fact that even Republicans now are coming out and calling for the Attorney General to resign? MS. PERINO: There is no doubt that there were many members from both sides of the aisle who had expressed […]
emptywheel [my favorite blogger] has an interesting take on the testimony yesterday [The Gonzales Strategy]. It’s basically a Conspiracy Theory. In her scenerio, the Republican criticism of Gonzales is a specific ploy to justify Republicans turning on him for incompetence and deflecting attention away from the underlying plot. She says: So, as I said, Gonzales’ […]
I haven’t much kept up with the plight of Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank. I will admit to knowing next to nothing about the World Bank or his girlfriend Shaha Ali Riza who he apparently muscled into a job in our government. But I do know about Paul Wolfowitz and about his girlfriend’s lawyer, […]
What have we learned this week about the DOJ this week? We already knew about the political firing of eight U.S. Attorneys. We already knew that the political architects have all fled: Kyle Sampson, Harriet Miers, Monica Goodling, and Michael Battle have resigned. Robert McCallum, the one who undermined Sharon Eubanks’ Tobacco case, was appointed […]
Gonzales Testifies Before Senate Panel LEAHY: Mr. Attorney General, late last week, the White House spokesperson claimed an unknown number of e-mails, including those of Karl Rove, from both White House accounts and apparently those sent or received using political Republican National Committee accounts, were lost. And Mr. Rove’s attorney, in the investigation that led […]