1 Boring Old Man

Throughout February, the people at the DOJ were apparently optimistic that they would weather the growing outrage at the firing of the U.S. Attorneys. Attorney General Gonzales and his Deputy Attorney General, Paul McNulty, had both testified, assuring the Senate Judicial Committee that the firings were routine personel issues. Many of the emails were about the newspaper articles and deliberations over various Talking Points for responses. Then came Monday, March 5th – the day before four of the fired Attorneys and William Moschella, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General were to testify. The DOJ was humming as various versions of Moschella’s Opening Statement and Talking Points were emailed back and forth for editing. Then, after lunch, William Kelly called a White House meeting about "what we are going to say about the proposed legislation and why the US Attorneys were asked to resign." They met at 5 PM. The people from DOJ are on this email. William Kelly, Fred Fielding, and Karl Rove were also there. Who knows who else?

While Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling knew that the firings had been initiated and masterminded from the White House, as did the White House participants, apparently Paul McNulty and William Moschella didn’t know that. In fact, Paul McNulty had already testified that the White House was not involved. In the meeting, Karl Rove said, "you all need to explain what you did and why you did it." That sounds like a simple point, except that the principles didn’t actually know the answer. They were "in the dark."

Goodling Shed Tears Before Revelations About Firings

A former U.S. Justice Department official and central figure in the firing of eight U.S. attorneys tearfully told a colleague two months ago her government career probably was over as the matter was about to erupt into a political storm, according to closed-door congressional testimony.

…

Margolis testified in private that he tried to console Goodling and listened to her discuss her personal life, a congressional aide said. He recalled telling a colleague that he was concerned about Goodling’s emotional state, the aide said.

…

Three hours before Goodling visited his fourth-floor office, Margolis told House and Senate investigators that Sampson dropped by to say he had information Margolis needed to know, one congressional aide said.

Margolis recounted that Sampson read his e-mail exchanges with White House aides that showed the decisions on firing the prosecutors were closely coordinated with members of the president’s staff, the aide said.

Margolis recalled that he was stunned to learn the extent of White House involvement in the dismissals, congressional aides said. Margolis testified that preparation for McNulty’s Senate testimony — which took place more than a month before his meetings with Goodling and Sampson — was based on the assumption that the White House only became involved at the end of the firing process, the aide said.

McNulty told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Feb. 6 that the White House’s only involvement was that presidential aides were informed of the decision before the U.S. attorneys were told. Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat leading the Senate investigation into the dismissals, has since said that he believes McNulty may have been misled by Sampson.

…

After Sampson left his office, Margolis testified that he went toward McNulty’s office to inform his boss and stopped because Sampson had already gone into the room carrying the binder filled with White House e-mails, the aide said.

We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time.

Karl Rove’s Coaching Session

Back on March 5, several top Justice Department officials were summoned for an emergency meeting at the White House. On the agenda: Going over "what we are going to say" about why eight U.S. attorneys had been summarily fired.

The reason for the urgency: principal associate deputy attorney general William Moschella was testifying before the House Judiciary Committee the next day.

Deputy White House counsel William Kelley sent an e-mail over to Justice early in the afternoon, saying that he had "been tasked" with pulling the meeting together, and that "we have to get this group together with some folks here asap."

The meeting was held at the White House later that day. And who did Kelley mean by "some folks here"? Well, among others, Karl Rove — the White House’s chief political operative, and the man who may very well have set the unprecedented dismissals in motion in the first place.

But after the coaching session, Moschella went out and told Congress that there was no significant White House involvement in the firings, as far as he knew…

According to a congressional aide, McNulty said he attended a White House meeting with Karl Rove, President Bush’s top political adviser, and other officials on March 5, the day before McNulty’s deputy William Moschella was to testify to Congress about the firings.

White House officials told the Justice Department group that they needed to agree on clear reasons why each prosecutor was fired and explain them to Congress, McNulty said, according to the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the transcript of McNulty’s interview hasn’t been made public.

McNulty said that White House officials never revealed during the meeting that they’d been discussing plans to replace some prosecutors with Gonzales aides, the congressional aide said.

McNulty recalled feeling disturbed and concerned when he found out days later that the White House had been involved, the congressional aide said. McNulty considered the extent of White House coordination to be "extremely problematic."

A Justice Department spokesman declined comment. A White House spokesman said the meeting wasn’t unusual. "We have meetings all the time," said Tony Fratto, who declined to say who attended the March 5 meeting.

Rove, Still In the Mix

Deputy chief of staff Karl Rove participated in a hastily called meeting at the White House two months ago.; The subject: The firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year. The purpose: to coach a top Justice Department official heading to Capitol Hill to testify on the prosecutorial purge on what he should say.

At the March 5, 2007 meeting, White House aides, including counsel Fred Fielding and deputy counsel William Kelley, sought to shape testimony that principal associate deputy attorney general William Moscella was to give the next day before the House Judiciary Committee.

Although the existence of the White House meeting had been previously disclosed by the Justice Department, Rove’s attendance at the strategy session was not—until both Moscella and deputy attorney general Paul McNulty talked about it in confidential testimony with congressional investigators last week…

According to McNulty’s account, Rove came late to the meeting and left early. But while he was there he spoke up and echoed a point that was made by the other White House aides: The Justice Department needed to provide specific reasons why it terminated the eight prosecutors in order to rebut Democratic charges that the firings were politically motivated. The point Rove and other White House officials made is “you all need to explain what you did and why you did it,” McNulty told the investigators.

The problem, according to the Democratic aide, is that Rove and Kelley never told Moscella about the White House’s own role in pushing to have some U.S. attorneys fired in the first place.  Moscella followed the coaching by Rove and others—and made no mention of White House involvement in the firings during his March 6, 2007 testimony to House Judiciary. “They let Moscella come up here without telling him the full story,” said the Democratic staffer…

A White House spokesman dismissed the significance of the March meeting, saying it was not surprising that a deputy White House chief of staff like Rove would participate in internal discussions about the firings of presidential appointees. “It’s perfectly natural that he would be there,” said deputy press secretary Tony Fratto.

Several points:

• A White House spokesman said the meeting wasn’t unusual. "We have meetings all the time," said Tony Fratto. This is simply a lie. It was an emergency meeting called by William Kelly around lunchtime and had people at the DOJ scrambling to get there by 5:00 PM.
• The point Rove and other White House officials made is “you all need to explain what you did and why you did it,” McNulty told the investigators. The White House did it! Not the DOJ. Moschella is being told to make up an alibi for the White House.
• McNulty said that White House officials never revealed during the meeting that they’d been discussing plans to replace some prosecutors with Gonzales aides, the congressional aide said. The firing plan and the White House [Rove’s] involvement was a secret kept from people inside the DOJ.
• Michael Battle resigned on March 5th [In response to this meeting? rather than attend it?].

House passes bill to add attacks on gays to hate crime law
White House threatens veto

WASHINGTON – The House voted Thursday to expand federal hate crime categories to include violent attacks against gays and people targeted because of gender, acting just hours after the White House threatened a veto.

The legislation, passed 237-180, also would make it easier for federal law enforcement to take part in or assist local prosecutions involving bias-motivated attacks. Similar legislation is also moving through the Senate, setting the stage for a possible veto showdown with President Bush.

The vote came after fierce lobbying from opposite sides by civil rights groups, who have been pushing for years for added protections against hate crimes, and social conservatives, who say the bill threatens the right to express moral opposition to homosexuality and singles out groups of citizens for special protection.

But expressing moral opposition is not what they’re even arguing here. If they were out to express moral opposition to something, they’d be preaching sermons against murder, or robbery, things that are clearly Biblical sins, rather than something they have to comb Leviticus to even find a reference to. Or they would be preaching sermons against sins that their own believers might commit, like adultery. No homosexual person in their right mind would go to one of these crazy churches. These Christian social conservatives are arguing for the right to defame and demonmize a group of other people, to perpetuate their prejudice, and they’re asking that the law of the country actually support it. They can moralize all they want, but that’s not enough. They want to legislate this morality. In their view, their right to promulgate prejudice trumps the homosexual’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a society intolerant of Hate Crimes.

And President Bush is going to veto legislation to give them what they want so they’ll vote for Republicans? This is not Conservativism. It’s institutionalized bigotry and electioneering. We "single out groups of citizens for special protection" against the people who "single out groups of citizens for special prejudice." They’ve become the very Roman crowds that used to throw the Christians to the lions…

[TRex on Firdoglake offers another version] 

And so they came to March 2006. Things were spinning out of hand. William Moschella was being called to testify in a Senate Committee. Gonzales had already been. The Press was buzzing like a hive of bees. There was a newly formed Senate Judiciary Committee: "Preserving Prosecutorial Independence: Is the Department of Justice Politicizing the Hiring and Firing of U.S. Attorneys?" On Monday, March 5, 2006, William Kelly, Assistant White House Counsel emailed Kyle Sampson after lunch for a White House meeting that day:

They settled on five pm and carpooled over to the White House. I presume they met with Fred Fielding, Harriet Miers’ replacement as White House Counsel, William Kelly, and who else? Maybe Karl Rove? After that meeting, the only emails I know about involving Kyle Sampson have been withheld as privileged:

On Tuesday,  William Moschella, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, testified, along with the fired Attorneys. On Wednesday, it looks like they spent the day trying to figure out what to do about being called by the Senate Judiciary’s Committee’s long-named Subcommittee. On Thursday, they were checking with Alberto Gozales about what documents he’d agreed to send to the Subcommittee. At some point that week, they were apparently calling Senator Specter, a member of that Subcommittee, and working on what they were going to say to him.

I gather things didn’t go so well, because on the following Monday [March 12th], Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales’ Chief of Staff, resigned [the day before the first document dump]. Monica Goodling, Special Counsel to the Attorney General and White House Liason, stayed around until March 23rd, then went on leave, resigning on April 6th. Michael Battle, Director of the Executive Office of the U.S. Attorneys, was apparently already going or gone. Somewhere in there, Michael Elston, Chief of Staff to the Deputy Attorney General, went on extended leave. Add in Harriet Miers, White House Counsel, who left on January 31st and that makes five of the principles involved in the firings out of there like a blue streak.

According to a congressional aide, McNulty said he attended a White House meeting with Karl Rove, President Bush’s top political adviser, and other officials on March 5, the day before McNulty’s deputy William Moschella was to testify to Congress about the firings.

White House officials told the Justice Department group that they needed to agree on clear reasons why each prosecutor was fired and explain them to Congress, McNulty said, according to the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the transcript of McNulty’s interview hasn’t been made public.

McNulty said that White House officials never revealed during the meeting that they’d been discussing plans to replace some prosecutors with Gonzales aides, the congressional aide said.

McNulty recalled feeling disturbed and concerned when he found out days later that the White House had been involved, the congressional aide said. McNulty considered the extent of White House coordination to be "extremely problematic."

A Justice Department spokesman declined comment. A White House spokesman said the meeting wasn’t unusual. "We have meetings all the time," said Tony Fratto, who declined to say who attended the March 5 meeting.

Hoon admits fatal errors in planning for postwar Iraq

A catalogue of errors over planning for Iraq after the invasion, and an inability to influence key figures in the US administration, led to anarchy in Iraq from which the country has not recovered, the British defence secretary during the invasion admits today.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Geoff Hoon reveals that Britain disagreed with the US administration over two key decisions in May 2003, two months after the invasion – to disband Iraq’s army and "de-Ba’athify" its civil service. Mr Hoon also said he and other senior ministers completely underestimated the role and influence of the vice-president, Dick Cheney.

"Sometimes … Tony had made his point with the president, and I’d made my point with Don [Rumsfeld] and Jack [Straw] had made his point with Colin [Powell] and the decision actually came out of a completely different place. And you think: what did we miss? I think we missed Cheney."

Giving the most frank assessment of the postwar planning, Mr Hoon, admits that "we didn’t plan for the right sort of aftermath".

"Maybe we were too optimistic about the idea of the streets being lined with cheering people. Although I have reconciled it in my own mind, we perhaps didn’t do enough to see it through the Sunni perspective. Perhaps we should have done more to understand their position."

He said history would have to decide whether the coalition should have anticipated the Sunni-Shia violence. "Given what we know now, I suppose the answer is that we should, but we did not know that at the time."

The British Defense Secretary is at least willing to say what all of us know – that in the first couple of years of the war, the man making the calls was Dick Cheney. And his calls were uniformly bad calls – informed more by his paranoid personality than by anything coming from the actual situation of any experience with such matters. In the First Gulf War, he looked good. How else could he look? We went in with a full force, a great general, got the job done, then came home.

I think Cheney really thought he could turn Iraq over to the Iraqi National Congress and Amhad Chalabi, and then set up U.S. drilling operations for his oil company. That’s the deepest thought he ever put into it. It was a wrong thing to do, invading Iraq. But to then do it badly is beyond belief. None of these guys will look very good in the history books, but Dick Cheney will be the star culprit. We owe it to the world to impeach him, if only as a way of saying we’re sorry…

DoJ Official to Cummins: Circumventing Senate Was "White House Plan

Cummins writes of a conversation he had with Michael Elston, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, in late January, the day after Alberto Gonzales had testified to the Senate. Gonzales had said, among other things, that the Justice Department would seek a presidential nomination for the U.S. attorneys in every district. Cummins had called Elston to contest this idea, because "it appeared to [him] that there was no intention to put Tim Griffin through a nomination." Elston disagreed…

Elston rejected that notion and assured me that every replacement would have to be confirmed by the Senate. I told him if that was the case, then he had better gag Tim Griffin because Griffin was telling many people, including me, that officials in Washington had assured him he could stay in as USA pursuant to an interim appointment whether he was ever nominated or not. Elston denied knowing anything about anyone’s intention to circumvent Senate confirmation in Griffin’s case. He said that might have been the White House’s plan, but they “never read DOJ into that plan” and DOJ would never go along with it. This indicated to me that my removal had been dictated entirely by the White House. He said Griffin would be confirmed or have to resign. I remember that part of the conversation well because I then said to Elston that it looked to me that if Tim Griffin couldn’t get confirmed and had to then resign, then I would have resigned for nothing, and to that, after a brief pause Elston replied, “yes, that’s right.”

Remember that emails show that Kyle Sampson didn’t want Bud Cummins testifying to Congress because he worried that Cummins would testify that Griffin had been blabbing about the Patriot Act provision.

I’ve reproduced the Sampson email because it’s the most damning – both evidence that they planned to circumvent the Senate and that they wanted to cover up that they were planning to circumvent the Senate.

 

It’s insulting that they think we’re this damned gullible. We have a rule, "innocent until proven guilty." I guess that that rule implies, "guilty, after being proved guilty." What Sampson was saying is "I don’t want him to testify. He might tell the truth."