1 Boring Old Man

Today’s document dump produces this jewel from Monica Goodling. It’s part of a table of various statistics about the U.S. Attorneys. Notice the last column – FedSoc – which refers to membership in the Federalist Society. This is a really big deal. The Federalist Society is a Conservative Group operating on the level of the American Enterprise Institute and equally destructive. They are behind the drive to restructure the Supreme Court. They are the source of the Bush war-cry "runaway judges" "legislating from the bench." To have Federalist Society membership as a criteria for selecting U.S. Attorneys is a blatant politicalization of the judicial branch. It’s like make membership in the Ku Klux Klan a prerequisite for City Council Membership.

Here’s the table of the U.S. Attorneys involved in this scandal. There are links on the fired Attorneys to some useful profiles from ePluribusMedia. Also check out Steven Biskupic [Wisconsin] and Rachel Paulose [Minnesota].

Lawyer: Rove didn’t mean to delete email

Karl Rove’s lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush’s chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican-sponsored server, saying Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law.

The issue arose because the White House and Republican National Committee have said they may have lost e-mails from Rove and other administration officials. Democratically chaired congressional committees want those e-mails for their probe of the firings of eight federal prosecutors.

"His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived," Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, said.

The prosecutor probing the Valerie Plame spy case saw and copied all of Rove’s e-mails from his various accounts after searching Rove’s laptop, his home computer, and the handheld computer devices he used for both the White House and Republican National Committee, Luskin said.

The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, subpoenaed the e-mails from the White House, the RNC and Bush’s re-election campaign, he added.

"There’s never been any suggestion that Fitzgerald had anything less than a complete record," Luskin said.

Any e-mails Rove deleted were the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly, Luskin said. He said Rove had no idea the e-mails were being deleted from the server, a central computer that managed the e-mail.

On Thursday, one Democratic committee chairman said his understanding was that the RNC believed Rove might have been deleting his e-mails and in 2005 took action to preserve them in accordance with the law and pending legal action.

The mystery of the missing e-mails is just one part of a furor over the firings of eight federal prosecutors that has threatened Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ job and thrown his Justice Department into turmoil.

I suggest prosecuting him for what he did, not worrying about what he says. What he says is convenient, self serving, evasive at best, and hardly compatible with everything else we know about his life in the shadows. I see no reason to bother with the White House in these investigations of his activities. Supoena him directly. If Rove wants to go to court, go to court.

Enough of his bullshit already…

Probably the most consistent characteristic of the otherwise incompetent Bush Administration is it’s ability to mount political strategies for or against something at a moment’s notice. Talking Points materialize almost instantaneously and are spread far and wide. The coordination of responses to crises great and small is rapid and has been maddeningly effective. So, how does it happen? Frankly, it’s been something of a mystery – but it smells of technology. So, in the recent weeks, we’re finally getting a glimpse into how it must work.

I don’t think there’s ever been a question about where it originates – Karl Rove is the center of the network, no matter what the medium of communication. The word, Rovian, will be with us for the rest of time, and part of what Rovian means is rapid movement of information among key people. So, we’ve known where it’s centered, something about where it goes, but we haven’t known how it flows.

So the revelation that Karl Rove has operated outside the "EOP" email system on a variety of RNC Servers tells us a lot more than just something about his involvement in the U.S. Attorney firings. It’s a window into how his system for coordinating all the Rovian goings on that have heretofor been a big mystery.

Karl Rove is no fool. He’s very unlikely to have left a paper trail, or even an email trail of his communications – at least the kind of communications that must lie at the heart of his constant orchestration of the Administration Persona and its Shadows. I would expect that he’s quite proficient at deleting his emails all by himself. I wouldn’t be surprised if key people weren’t under a directive to also delete his emails at will. Recall that his ploy with the Plame Investigation was to suddenly discover emails that didn’t show up in the supoenaed emails Fitzgerald had access to. I wonder if the retrieved email to Hadley was from this alternative RNC server [Fitz seems to have known about it, and as much as I venerate Patrick Fitzgerald, Why didn’t he tell us? Supoena him too].

The only other real possibility was that he’s conducted his business by cell phone, but I suspect that the allure of the Blackberry was too great. So, has he chronically covered his tracks by deleting email from the get go? Did he think that he could operate this alternative system without being called to task for the whole of George Bush’s Reign?

I’d actually bet he did think that. For six years, he’s operated in a world almost devoid of effective oversight. Except for whistle blowers and supoenas, he’s been behind a modern digital analog of the Russian "Iron Curtain." At issue, will it work? Can he be busted for not having emails available to supoena? I think he can, but not so long as he gets to stay behind his firewall. I think he’s going to have to be brought out into the light of day, supoenaed into a Congressional Hearing, maybe even one that is an investigation with his name in the title.

Some time next week would be fine with me.

And as long as he’s there, why not ask him about voter fraud. He made a speech about that to the National Association of Republican Lawyers – the one where he evoked images of an evil empire of guys with mirrored sunglasses. Maybe he could share with us his evidence, and how he came to be such a champion of sanitized politics… 

Countless White House E-Mails Deleted

Countless e-mails to and from many key White House staffers have been deleted — lost to history and placed out of reach of congressional subpoenas — due to a brazen violation of internal White House policy that was allowed to continue for more than six years, the White House acknowledged yesterday.

The leading culprit appears to be President Bush’s enormously influential political adviser Karl Rove, who reportedly used his Republican National Committee-provided Blackberry and e-mail accounts for most of his electronic communication.

Until 2004, all e-mail on RNC accounts was routinely deleted after 30 days. Since 2004, White House staffers using those accounts have been able to save their e-mail indefinitely — but have also been able to delete whatever they felt like deleting. By comparison, the White House e-mail system preserves absolutely everything forever, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.

The White House yesterday said it has no idea how many e-mails have been lost.

… when I asked Stanzel to read out loud the White House e-mail policy, it seemed clear enough to me: "Federal law requires the preservation of electronic communications sent or received by White House staff," says the handbook that all staffers are given and expected to read and comply with.

"As a result, personnel working on behalf of the EOP [Executive Office of the President] are expected to only use government-provided e-mail services for all official communication."

The handbook further explains: "The official EOP e-mail system is designed to automatically comply with records management requirements."

And if that wasn’t clear enough, the handbook notes — as was the case in the Clinton administration — that "commercial or free e-mail sites and chat rooms are blocked from the EOP network to help staff members ensure compliance and to prevent the circumvention of the records management requirements."

With the email story and the attorney firings, we know what they’ve done, we have a good idea what they’re doing now,  and there’s a clear law and procedure for following that law. The ball is in our court to make this one stick ["Our" means the Senate, the House, the Democrats, the Progressives, the bloggers, the Media, and everyone else who loves this country].

If we’re going to cure cancer, we have to follow the rules: early detection, aggressive therapy, high levels of vigilance. If there is going to be an "it" in this story [a Watergate "it"], this is "it." 

Well, "Were I a betting man, I’d bet that Karl Rove’s emails have been destroyed, and they’re working on making him blameless for their destruction," is looking like a pretty good call [see White House E-Mail Lost in Private Accounts – Messages May Have Included Discussions About Firing of Eight Prosecutors] – sort of predictable, actually.

But this one strikes me as a paradigm for the Bush Administration’s tactics – the confirmation of Rachel Paulose in Minnesota:

But what did the Senate do after receiving her nomination on August 3, 2006? Nothing. The Judiciary Committee did not vote on her nomination. They did not send her nomination to the full Senate for a confirmation vote. Instead, on the last day of the 109th Congress, Bill Frist, then Senate Majority Leader of the Republican controlled Senate, asked that the Judiciary Committee be "discharged" from further consideration of Ms. Paulose’s nomination. This from the congressional record on December 8, 2006:

Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate immediately proceed to executive session to consider the following nominations on today’s Executive Calendar: Calendar Nos. 62, 63, 407, 670, 783, 900, 901, 904, 1000, 1001, 1002, 1003, 1004, 1005 through 1008, 1010, 1011, 1012, 1013, 1014, 1017, 1018, 1019, 1020, 1021, 1022, 1023, 1024, and all nominations on the Secretary’s desk. I further ask consent that the following committees be discharged from further consideration of listed nominations and the Senate proceed to their consideration en bloc: Judiciary Committee, Rachel Paulose PN1905; Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Paul Schneider PN2127; Foreign Relations, Dianne Moss PN1846, foreign service promotion lists PN 2097, PN 2130, and PN 2085. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

With that discharge resolution, a rarely used procedure in the United States Senate, Bill Frist brought Ms. Paulose’s nomination to the floor without any committee hearing or committee vote. A few hours later the United States Senate confirmed Ms. Paulose’s nomination along with over a hundred other nominations before heading out of town and before a new Democratic Senate took over.

If you are going to place a young, inexperienced "best buds" of Monica Goodling as a United States Attorney you will need a compliant United States Senate that does not take its "advice and consent" responsibilities under the United States Constitution very seriously. Mr. Bush had such a Senate in the 109th Congress.

Here’s Why They Used a Discharge Petition to Approve Paulose

Well, there’s a reason they used such an unusual way to get someone confirmed. You see, the White House was panicking that the Senate would put 2 + 2 together.

At around 9:30 in the morning on December 7, AGAG’s Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson and Bill Kelley (in the White House) started calling Republican Senators to inform them the USAs for their states would be approved. Somone in the White House (Karl Rove?) was also calling the "political lead" for the states with no Republican Senators: CA, MI, and WA. Sampson called Senator Kyl, and Kelley called Senators Ensign (who seems to have been pissed) and Domenici (whose Chief of Staff was "happy as a clam").

But then, at 11:19, Kelley emailed Sampson in a panic.

Our leg folks are all up in arms that we are doing this on the last day when things can be gummed up by unhappy Senators. There’s no way to pull back til tomorrow, is there? I should have flagged the timing for them earlier — but they never raised the issue of timing until things were underway.

To which Sampson replied:

Too late, right? Calls to USAs are happening as we speak. And Sens. Kyl and Domenici already have been notified (and are ok). Do they think Sen. Ensign will be concerned (I don’t)? And none of these USAs has been promoted by a House member.

To which Kelley responded:

I told them it is too late, but I said I would confirm with you. I think it is clear that they are overreacting, and I’ve told them that. I don’t know if Ensign is close to the Nevada guy, but I would think he’d welcome a new patronage opportunity.

Note to mainstream media: Next chance you get, ask Senator Ensign whether he thinks our justice system is best served when USA appoints are considered just one more "patronage opportunity."

So there’s a reason they approved Rachel Paulose using a discharge petition. They suspected they couldn’t get her appointment approved any other way. And they weren’t about to let it get gummed up in a Democratic Congress. Because if it had, we might well have prevented the chaos that has resulted.

Our government for six years – a Frat Boy, a Paranoid Fascist, an Obligatory Criminal, and a Brain-Dead Congress. What could be worse? That their constituents re-elected them in 2004.

Voting for George Bush and his cronies in 2000 was understandable, though in retrospect, it was a big mistake. Voting for George Bush in 2004 was irresponsible. I wasn’t excited by John Kerry either – not because of his competence or his integrity, but because of his persona. I worried that he couldn’t rally us to get the job that needed doing done.  But voting for George Bush in 2004 was still irresponsible.

One of the unclear issues for me right now is something that’s not talked about very much. Has Karl Rove so taken control of the Republican Party that he’s destroyed it as a legitimate Conservative force in our country? Starting with Nixon, the Republican Party has deteriorated progressively in following the American system of government – playing it straight. About the only "straight-ish" Republican Administration since Nixon was George H.W. Bush. Reagan himself might have been "straight," but he was so divorced from the machinery that the mice played havoc. Perhaps the most damning piece of Iran-Contra was the fact that he genuinely didn’t even know about it. So, we’ve had 26 years out of the last 38 with a President representing a Party run by deceit, deteriorating by the year. If the Republican Party is to represent a dominantly Conservative sentiment in the country, it’s internal reform of the Republican Party that matters. Just electing Democrats isn’t enough…

Well, I Guess GWB43.com Really Is the Smoking Gunch

 

We just need to figure out how to get our geeks into the servers to prove it.

 

Bush aides’ use of GOP e-mail probed

The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.

 

Though honestly, this feels like a trial balloon to me. I think they’re just trying this to see what kind of response they get.

…

So I’m not sure this is their final story. But for now, nothing could make them look more like bozos.

Here’s some thoughts about why I doubt this is the final word. This article is a long article peddling the story–which has been peddled already to the LAT and WaPo–about e-mails intended for the use of political business. The "we want to avoid Gore’s illegal calls" bs.

…Something’s not right–it’s as if they’ve got half the incriminating emails destroyed, but are doubtful they’ve destroyed everything, so they’re telling this story in hopes of buying time.

Now, perhaps this is just a stalling tactic, to stave off the time they tell use they’ve lost everything from Karl Rove for the last 3 years. But something is weird about the manner of this announcement.

But this time, a rat’s the only possible thing to smell. Congress has a perfectly legitimate reason to ask for the emails from these non-government servers. They have an ongoing investigation. They have solid evidence that these servers were used for communications that are pertinent to their investigation. There’s a clear law about the preservation of a paper trail for the Executive Branch. These servers can’t possibly be covered by Executive Priviledge.

So now the Administration/RNC is stalling, bargaining, obfuscating, etc. No big surprise. Either they’ve got the emails [damning], or they’ve partially destroyed the emails [also damning], or they’ve destroyed them all [damned damning]. There’s really no way to spin their way out of this without taking a big hit. So they are taking whichever of these three options is true and brainstorming how to play it to make it look innocent – which is really impossible. They’re going to have to play it to minimize the damage – barely possible.

My guess is that Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson were just the first rats to jump ship. Were I a betting man, I’d bet that Karl Rove’s emails have been destroyed, and they’re working on making him blameless for their destruction. But another possibility is that this came up too fast for them to react safely without shades of Ollie North and Fawn  Hall shredding as fast as they could in the Iran-Contra days. They may be stuck with trying to keep them in hiding – shades of Nixon’s White House Tapes. But I’ll bet the gap is a lot longer than 18 minutes [Rosemary Woods] or 18 days [DOJ emails].

So, Marcy smells a rat. I smell a rat. And it’s because there’s a big old rat in these stories. A big old two-legged rat…

I generally have little interest in the celebrity stories – Anna Nicole Smith; Who’s getting divorced/married/rehabed in Hollywood; What Paris Hilton is up to [or down to]. It’s just not my thing. And I’ve felt that about this Imus story, but I do have a thought about it. I occasionally find myself someplace where the radio is playing in the background. Here in North Georgia, it’s usually Rush Limbaugh or Neal Boortz. But I go other places where it’s Don Imus, or Air America. As polar as my personal politics, I’ve been surprised that I don’t like talk radio – no matter what they’re saying. It seems to me that it relies on Contempt.

The same thing is true of the blogs. I don’t like the ones that live in the contemptuous domain [even though all of us get there every once and a while, myself included]. Contempt is a dangerous emotion. When you feel contempt for something, that thing is all bad – it has no redeeming characteristics. I often think of Karl Rove’s speech to the New York Conservatives in June 2005 when I hear contempt. While it wasn’t delivered with fiery rhetoric, it dripped with contempt as he relegated Democrats and Liberals to utter extinction.

So, to Don Imus. He’s being criticized for a racial slur, but that falls on a steady diet of contempt. Even though he’s much more likely to articulate my side of things than the right wing pundits of hate like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, I find Imus’ contemptuous dialog divisive. If anything, right now we need a meet between Liberals and rational Conservatives to neutralize the constant stream of contempt from Bush, Cheney, and Rove – each delivered in different ways, but with equally lethalality. America was not founded on contempt, and it hasn’t helped us thrive.

Talk radio, in my opinion, has been a negative force in our culture. I won’t miss Imus, and frankly hope his counterparts from both sides either change their act of find a way to become equally obsolete along with him. We have no obligation to Imus or any of his breed to perpetuate the venom. His pleas for forgiveness sound ludicrous in the face of the hoardes of people he’s slammed during his career…

There’s something new in the blogging world – something pretty good. Josh Marshall’s blog, Talking Points Memo, grew into TPM Cafe, then TPM Muckracker. Now there’s TPM Media. Today’s [now daily] Youtube video explains what he’s about with this expansion. Josh has a fine track record. It was his persistence that got the U.S. Attorney scandal on the radar. It was his appeal to readers that got the D.O.J. emails parsed so quickly. He is to the U.S. Attorney scandal as Marcy Wheeler [emptywheel] is to Plamegate or eRiposte is to the Niger forgeries. His idea with TPM Media is a way to pull the forces of the blogsphere into a more powerful force for change – sort of “political junkie power.” Today, he shows where his group’s office is in New York [tastefully decorated with a single lava lamp].