1 Boring Old Man

Why Does This Guy Still Have a Job?

Why does Bradley Schlozman still have a job at the Justice Department? Why are taxpayers still funding his professional career despite a growing body of evidence that suggests he has brought nothing but shame and scandal and rank partisanship to the department? And if Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales can’t bring himself to demand Schlozman’s resignation, can he at least question his judgment?

It’s just another example of the appalling lack of accountabilty, leadership and honor at the Justice Department.

Political Hiring in Justice Division Probed

Karen Stevens, Tovah Calderon and Teresa Kwong had a lot in common. They had good performance ratings as career lawyers in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. And they were minority women transferred out of their jobs two years ago — over the objections of their immediate supervisors — by Bradley Schlozman, then the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Schlozman ordered supervisors to tell the women that they had performance problems or that the office was overstaffed. But one lawyer, Conor Dugan, told colleagues that the recent Bush appointee had confided that his real motive was to "make room for some good Americans" in that high-impact office, according to four lawyers who said they heard the account from Dugan.

King Cheney

The following press release sent out today by Representative Henry Waxman is almost unbelievable.

The Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the National Archives, Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an "entity within the executive branch."

As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice President, the National Archives protested the Vice President’s position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse. The Vice President’s staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the President’s executive order.

In his letter to the Vice President, Chairman Waxman writes: "I question both the legality and wisdom of your actions….[I]t would appear particularly irresponsible to give an office with your history of security breaches an exemption from the safeguards that apply to all other executive branch officials."

Not an "entity within the executive branch"? What branch of government, then, does Cheney’s office belong to? I’m no constitutional lawyer, but I believe there are only three possibilities. He’s no judge, and he’s not a member of Congress. That leaves only the executive branch. Unless, of course, the veep’s office transcends the Constitution. Yes, perhaps it’s supra-constitutional. Oh heck, why don’t we just call him King? But that would create a problem: what to call the president?

What is this about? It started in the first weeks of the Administration, so it was planned. One gathers that, from the start, Cheney vowed he wasn’t going to make Nixon’s mistake and hold on to incriminating evidence – meaning that – from the start, he knew he was going to be doing incriminating things!

It’s hard to imagine that he could’ve attended the November 27^th meeting and heard about all of this for the first time. It’s almost like he’s saying, “I wasn’t there at the DoJ.” The U.S. Attorneys were fired within the week [and this was the second deadline, the first having been scrapped after they lost the mid-terms]. I can think of no reason for him to lie as he was clearly “out of the loop.” But what he says is still hard to believe, particularly since his Chief of Staff, Michael Elston, was so heavily involved in the whole show. What are we to take away from this testimony? …

President Discusses Stem Cell Research Policy

"I made it clear to the Congress that I will not allow our nation to cross this moral line…"

Specter says he’ll vote against Gonzales

"…but it’s not going to make the determination about who serves in my government," Bush said today.

Rove Aide Details Broad Political Abuses

By Jason Leopold

In January 2002, at a retreat in West Virginia, Karl Rove gave a PowerPoint presentation to at least 50 managers at the Department of the Interior to discuss polling data, and emphasized the importance of getting Oregon Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican, reelected that year.

The way to get Smith reelected to another term, Rove reportedly told the Interior Department officials, would come via the agency’s support of a highly controversial measure: diverting water from the Klamath River Basin to farms in the area that were experiencing unusually dry conditions, thereby supporting the GOP’s agricultural base.

Details of Rove’s involvement in influencing the Interior Department to reverse its policies with regard to the Klamath River basin have been previously reported. But questions about why a political operative like Rove was influencing agricultural and environmental policy decisions, possibly in violation of the law, and whether he pressured cabinet officials to reverse policy to get Republicans reelected were raised again last month during a sworn deposition Rove’s former executive assistant, Susan Ralston, gave to Congressional investigators probing Rove’s role in the US attorney scandal and his and other White House officials connections with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

A transcript of Ralston’s deposition was released on Monday by Congressman Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

According to Congressional investigators Rove used the PowerPoint presentation at the West Virginia retreat to solicit Republican donors. But Rove’s priority was to ensure that farmers in Oregon got the additional water they wanted from the Klamath River, so Senator Smith would be reelected. President Bush lost Oregon by less than one percent in the 2000 presidential election to Al Gore, according to polling results from the Associated Press.

Laying the groundwork to get Smith reelected, Rove set up a cabinet-level task force on Klamath River issues to specifically study whether diverting water from Klamath River to farmers would hurt the endangered Coho salmon population. The task force Rove set up gave the impression that the administration was going to take an unbiased look at the situation.

According to Michael Kelly, a National Marine Fisheries Service biologist, that wasn’t the case. Kelly spoke out publicly in 2003 alleging that he was subjected to political pressure and ordered to ignore scientific evidence that said the plan would likely kill off tens of thousands of Coho salmon, and to support the Klamath River low-water plan Rove wanted enacted to help farmers, who Rove saw as a crucial part of the Republican constituency in the state.

In March 2002, in a sudden reversal of a long standing policy, then Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton and Senator Smith held a joint press conference in Klamath Falls and opened up the irrigation system releasing thousands of gallons of water to 220,000 acres of farmland. The policy shift left the Klamath River basin with unusually low river flows that summer and ended up killing more than 30,000 endangered Coho salmon – the largest fish kill in the history of the West. But the move, as orchestrated by Rove, ended up getting Smith reelected that November.

Using sophisticated polling results, Rove’s "Shop" identifies areas where races are close calls. Many of the names we’ve recently learned are people who have worked there – Susan Ralston, Sara Taylor, Tim Griffin, Monica Goodling. Once vulnerable races are identified, ant number of strategies are brought into play to direct the outcome – specific things like pandering to a target constituency, like this example. Trade water for votes, the hell with the fish. In other places, voter fraud suits or suits against Democrats are the order of the day. In places with large mninority populations, voter intimidation schemes get rolled out – like the Georgia I.D. Laws. And there’s always pandering to the Christian Right – like today’s veto of Stem Cell Research.

The U.S. Attorney scandal focuses on just one aspect of their activities. These Power Point presentations inside the government are another example of engaging the government itself in the political machinery of the Republican Party. I’ll bet that what we know so far is just the tip of the iceberg. But there’s already enough known to name a gaggle of Special Prosecutors. But, since they’ve taken over the Department of Justice too, at this point all we can do is listen with disbelief to the brazen abuses of power that have become a daily part of our government. It’s hard enough to even keep up with it, it’s coming so fast.

The greatest hero of Mythology, Hercules, was tasked with cleaning the Augean Stables filled with the accumulated manure of thousands of cattle. We could use such a hero now. The shit’s gotten pretty deep in the halls of Washington these days.

Casual Lawbreaking at the White House
Dan Froomkin

New evidence unearthed by House Democrats establishes that White House political adviser Karl Rove and many of his colleagues used Republican National Committee e-mail accounts for official business — even though White House policy is clear that doing so is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

How did such casual lawbreaking come to be so widespread? And why was it tolerated? Those are among the questions the White House has yet to answer satisfactorily.

1. One reason for Rove’s use of the RNC e-mail account would appear to be convenience…
2. Another reason, suggested by White House spokesman Scott Stanzel in April, is that some people may have used their non-government accounts for official business due to "an abundance of caution" in order to avoid violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits the use of government e-mail for overtly political purposes…
3. Yet another possibility, of course, is that Rove and the others chose to use the RNC e-mail accounts for official business as a way to keep their e-mail from public scrutiny, which is implicit in the use of White House e-mail accounts…

Unlike the White House, whose e-mail retention rules essentially preserve everything forever, the RNC automatically deleted most e-mails after 30 days and allowed users to manually delete whatever they felt like. The result, as I first reported in April, is that countless White House e-mails are now missing.

And as the new House Oversight Committee report points out, the White House counsel’s office — then headed by current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — was aware of these violations of e-mail policy, but chose to do nothing about it.

But in this case, there’s another reason. Recall that during the Plame Investigation, Karl Rove had denied having anything to do with being a source about Valerie Plame Wilson’s C.I.A. identity for Matt Cooper, then a correspondant for Time Magazine. Then Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, had lunch with Time Magazine’s Viveka Novak, he told him that Rove was Cooper’s source. Not long thereafter, Rove showed up in Patrick Fitzgerald’s Grand Jury with an email to Steven Hadley that he said "reminded" him that he had talked to Cooper. Apparently, you can’t be charged with perjury to a Grand Jury if you come back and tell the truth. At the time, we were all outraged that Novak had spilled the beans [as was Time Magazine who fired her where she no longer works]. But at the time, the big question was "where did that email come from?" Rove’s emails had all been subpoenaed, and this email wasn’t among them.

Well, it came from Rove’s RNC email account. Now, all emails from before that episode have been deleted. So, the likely scenerio is that Rove realized that in producing that email, he was revealing the "other" path he had for communicating with his operatives, and he quickly moved to plug this window into his wheelings and dealings. He knew that this was a way to communicate "off the radar" and had been doing that from the start.

U.S. Attorney Resignation Made on Threat of Immediate Firing

When a Justice Department official asked eight U.S. attorneys for their resignations last December, most of them went quietly (initially at least), agreeing to resign on relatively short notice and with no public fuss. But one U.S. attorney, Carol Lam in San Diego, had contentious private exchanges with Department officials about her end date.

An email released to Congress last week shows just how heated those discussions got. When Lam delayed announcing her date of resignation — wanting more time to tend to several high profile cases, the expanded Duke Cunningham investigation among them –, Justice Department officials prepared to have the president fire her immediately.

The email was amongst those (pdf) released by the Justice Department to Congress last week. Writing to William Kelley, an attorney in the White House counsel’s office, Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales‘ former chief of staff and the orchestrator of the U.S. attorney firings, wrote:

FYI – our USA in SD is refusing to resign (though we’ve given her until 5pm eastern); recommendation that she be removed immediately should be over to you by the end of the day.

The January 16th email was written just as the U.S. attorney firings controversy was beginning to simmer. On January 12th, The San Diego Union-Tribune first reported Lam’s firing. The next day, the paper quoted the head of the San Diego FBI office as saying "I guarantee politics is involved” in Lam’s firing. And on January 16th, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) made her way to the Senate floor to announce her concern and suspicion about the U.S. attorney firings (which had just become public).

If Lam had not announced her resignation that day, apparently, the Justice Department would have moved to have her fired — something that can only occur by presidential order. Lam, however, gave in and announced on January 16th that she would be stepping down February 15th.

The announcement followed a number of apparently acrimonious discussions Lam had with Michael Elston, the chief of staff to the deputy attorney general. As Lam detailed in written testimony to Congress, Elston had warned Lam since early January that her requests for more time based on "case-related considerations" was "’not being received positively’" at the Department. He told Lam to “stop thinking in terms of the cases in the office," that she had to depart in "a matter of weeks, not months," and that "these instructions were ‘coming from the very highest levels of the government.’"

The email released last week shows just how close the "highest levels of the government" came to firing Lam when she insisted on an "orderly transition" (her words) for pending investigations.

When I read this post on TPM Muckraker, I was surprised. I’d missed it when I read through these emails. There it is in black and white. The call from the DoJ to the White House to fire Carol Lam on the spot if she wouldn’t go peacefully immediately. Something about that doesn’t sound right to me. So I went back and looked at the email traffic from that day – January 16th, 2007. Here the emails are [arranged top to bottom to make them easier to read]. It seems that Senator Dianne Feinstein talking about the firings on the Senate floor that morning got their undivided attention at the DoJ:

Kyle Sampson’s immediate response was to directly imply that the firings were performance related [which he, interestingly, calls the "high road"]. At this point, he seems to be under the impression that the White House is in the game and will fire Carol Lam if she doesn’t go along with their program.

So William Kelley writes Harriet Miers and says the DoJ is pushing back [wanting some back up].

Reckon she went upstairs and talked to the Chief[s]?

Sounds like Harriet isn’t too interested in taking any kind of action at all, leaving Kyle et al high and dry. Imagine that. Kelley delivers the news…

Already tried that one. It didn’t fly.

The DoJ is feeling the heat. Phones are ringing. Lam apparently gives in. Sampson recontacts Kelley. He wants to give a reason for the firings – the stronger version [performance related?]. A thinly disguised plea for some help…

No help coming. It seems to me the White House is covering its own ass here – taking no action, and leaving Kyle Sampson and the DoJ out in the cold to explain these firings – with no explanation to give. The White House said "no" to claiming that the U.S. Attorneys were fired for performance reasons, and "no" to their not following the Administration’s agenda. So, even though it was a White House operation [put on hold until the White House Legal, Political, and Communications people had signed off on it], when Feinstein brought it out in the open, Harriet Miers didn’t want to back up the DoJ. She’d already resigned two weeks previously. I doubt she wanted any more dirt on her hands. In fact, I doubt she would make any decision on her own. I smell a Bush-or-Rove influence here.

And so, from the time things became public with Feinstein’s speech on the Senate floor [January 16th, 2007] until they went to the White House the night before Moschella’s testimony in a Senate Hearing [March 6th, 2007], the DoJ  limped along with various statements of what the firings didn’t mean – implying performance by not really stating it. I guess they had plans on how to handle the Senators, but it never occurred to them that the Press, the blogosphere, and the American people would get involved. They forgot about us in their planning. And they seemed to have no clue about what a Democrat Majority in Congress could or would do. So on the eve of Moschella’s testimony [March 5th, 2006], Karl Rove basically told the DoJ they were on their own. You are going to have to tell them why you fired them. Kyle Sampson resigned within the week.

So, I disagree a bit with Paul Kiel’s take on all of this [above]. I think it’s about Kyle Sampson’s mistaken impression that the Administration would back him up, or that Alberto Gonzales would back him up. Like Scooter Libby, he was out there on his own, but he didn’t know it. When he said, "…our USA in SD is refusing to resign (though we’ve given her until 5pm eastern); recommendation that she be removed immediately should be over to you by the end of the day," I think he thought they’d fire her, but I don’t. If Bush did fire her, he’d have to say why, and admit to the White House involvement.

There’s a saying, "honor among thieves." I don’t think Bush, Cheney, or Rove do "honor." Lord knows, I’m not trying to work up any sympathy here for Kyle Sampson or Scooter Libby. They’ve made their own beds. But what I am saying is that "… email released last week shows just how close the ‘highest levels of the government’ came to firing Lam" might be what Kyle Sampson thought, or expected, or wanted, but it doesn’t take the character of our leaders into account. Like most bullies, they talk a good game, but when the going gets tough, they cover their own asses and let their front men take the hits. In my youth, such people were called chickens…

TPM Muckraker

Last week, Hans von Spakovsky testified before the Senate Rules Committee that he’d been something of a wallflower when he worked at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. His critics had it all wrong, he said. Despite claims that he’d led the Department’s efforts to overturn the voting rights section’s traditional work protecting African-American voters — using the division’s power instead to spread the myth of voter fraud and purge state voter rolls — von Spakovsky said that he’d merely been there in an advisory capacity. People asked his opinion and he gave it, that’s all.

But those who actually worked under him in the voting rights section say otherwise, calling him the de facto head of the section.

And in a letter to the Senate Rules Committee yesterday (the committee is considering von Spakovsky’s nomination to be a commissioner at the Federal Election Commission), a group of former voting rights professionals in the Department laid out the numerous areas where von Spakvosky had been less than forthright in his testimony. You can read the letter here.

GAO Examines Signing Statement Cases

The Bush administration sometimes fails to follow all provisions of laws after President Bush attaches "signing statements" meant to interpret or restrict the legislation, congressional examiners say.

Lawmakers who asked the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study said it was further proof that the Bush White House oversteps constitutional bounds in ignoring the will of Congress.

"Too often, the Bush administration does what it wants, no matter the law. It says what it wants, no matter the facts," Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., said Monday. Byrd and House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., requested the report.

Signing statements, in which the president appends bills he is signing into law with statements reserving the right to revise, interpret or disregard provisions on national security and constitutional grounds, have become a major sticking point in the power struggle between Congress and the White House.

Conyers made signing statements the topic of his committee’s first oversight hearing after Democrats took over control of Congress in January.

The limited GAO study examined signing statements concerning 19 provisions in fiscal year 2006 spending bills. It found that in six of those cases the provisions were not executed as written.

In one case the Pentagon did not include separate budget justification documents explaining how the Iraq War funding was to be spent in its 2007 budget request. In another, the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not submit a proposal and spending plan for housing, as Congress directed.

The White House, in issuing the statements, has argued that the president has a right to control executive branch employees and officers, that he has authority to withhold from Congress information sometimes considered privileged or that Congress should not interfere with his constitutional role as commander in chief.

The GAO report, which did not assess the merits of the president’s arguments, said signing statements go back at least to President Andrew Jackson, while citing other congressional studies that such statements have become increasingly common since the Reagan administration.

Byrd and Conyers said Bush has issued 149 signing statements, 127 of which raised some objection. They said the statements often raise multiple objections, resulting in more than 700 challenges to distinct provisions of law.

The GAO said signing statements accompanied 11 of the 12 spending bills in 2006, singling out 160 specific provisions in those bills.

Signing Statements have been Bush’s way of declaring Congress null and void. They were brought to our attention by Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe – who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the issue. I recall reading that Cheney’s Office [A.K.A. "the OVP"][A.K.A. David Addington] goes over every Congressional action and is intimately involved in the drafting of these "Signing Statements" which invalidate the Congress. Here’s what Savage has to say today. Scattered among the "MSM" are reporters who have done their jobs – Charlie Savage is one of them:

US agencies disobey 6 laws that president challenged

The revelation that investigators had found six laws that were disobeyed within the small sample prompted angry words from the other lawmaker who commissioned the GAO study, Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Robert Byrd , Democrat of West Virginia. He called Bush’s signing statements a "power grab" that undermined Congress’s authority to write the laws.

"The White House cannot pick and choose which laws it follows and which it ignores," Byrd said. "When a president signs a bill into law, the president signs the entire bill. The administration cannot be in the business of cherry-picking the laws it likes and the laws it doesn’t."

But Erik Ablin , a Justice Department spokesman, said, "We reject allegations that the administration is ignoring or selectively following the law."

Bush’s use of the device became the subject of widespread controversy in 2006 following his challenge to a high-profile torture ban the White House had tried to defeat in Congress.

Since Democrats took over Congress, Bush has not issued a signing statement. But Fratto said the reason for their absence is that Congress has sent few major bills to the president’s desk, not because of any policy change.