Native Americans and the USA Purge, Part Two

by emptywheel

Note: William Ockham argues I'm wrong about the William Mercer email not being a DOJ account--which means Mercer may just be forwarding between his two emails so it collects all the emails in one account (and in which case there is nothing nefarious about the double emails). However, that doesn't explain why he would forward the same email to himself twice, within an hour of each other, as he does below with the 12:03 and the 12:51 emails. But perhaps he is just forgetful. In any case, for the moment consider this a theory that may not stand.

I noted yesterday a very damning aspect of the timeline leading to Margaret Chiara's firing. On October 22, 2006, she appealed to Bill Mercer to intervene in the termination of the staff liaison to the Native American Issues Subcommittee. Then, as now, Mercer served two roles in DOJ: the USA for Montana and the Acting Associate Attorney General. who oversees many of the DOJ issues relating to Native American tribes. So Chiara presumably appealed to Mercer as a colleague but also as a key manager overseeing such issues.

On October 27, Chiara followed up again and, this time, Mercer answered her. He told her he'd follow up in a week--November 3--but that she shouldn't say anything about the issue to other NAIS members or to the tribes. There's no record in the document dumps that Chiara heard from Mercer on November 3. But she did speak with Mike Elston, the Chief of Staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, about a different issue. During that conversation, Elston told Chiara she "should expect contact from the White House requesting my resignation as USA shortly after the November 7 elections." The timing suggests Chiara's complaints about NAIS losing its staff liaison led directly to her firing (though it cannot be considered the primary reason, since she was targeted for firing a year and a half earlier).

Chiara seems to have regarded Mercer as a fair interlocutor on this issue, going so far as thanking him for his "effort on behalf of Indian Country."

But he's not. Mercer appears to have had an entire discussion about how to respond to Chiara. Off-line, off of his DOJ email account.

Mercer's bcc's
From time to time in the documents dumps, you find an email that a person forwards to him or herself. There's one good reason for a person to do that--if he or she was forwarding the email to a bunch of recipients via a bcc, involving those recipients in the discussion while hiding their involvement. Almost always, though, those bcc emails from the document dumps are forwarded back to the person's DOJ account (one exception I know of is an email Kyle Sampson fowards to his gmail account). And AFAIK, those bcc forwards only ever happen once in the span of a conversation.

But in this case, Mercer appears to have bcc'ed his discussion with Chiara, via a non-DOJ email, at each step of the conversation. Here's where he forwarded her first email:

Both of Mercer's DOJ accounts use the name "Bill," not William. But the recipient email on this uses William, so I'm assuming Mercer is forwarding it to an off-site email, and having a discussion using that separate email account. After Mercer forwards this email--just over an hour after she sent it--he doesn't provide Chiara any further answer. So she emails him again at the end of the week. Again, he forwards it to himself. Note his self-forward is sent at 12:03 PM.

Mercer does not answer Chiara immediately. In fact, before he responds to her, he forwards the email to himself again--presumably forwarding it to a different person or group of people. This forward is sent at 12:51 PM.

Only at 5:17 PM, four hours after he forwarded her email the first time, does Mercer respond to Chiara. At the end of the work week, he basically tells her to say nothing, that they will touch base again the following week. On Monday October 30, Mercer again forwards this email to unknown recipients.

Later on October 30, at 4:42 PM, Mike Elston calls Chiara, doesn't reach her, so leaves a message. On Friday November 3, we know, he does reach her. During that conversation, he tells her the White House will contact her to ask for her resignation.

Now, it's possible that Mercer simply forwarded and bcc'ed this series of emails to others at DOJ, people like Goodling who made the decision to get rid of the NAIS staff liaison. But we haven't seen this email thread come up on any other document discovery. So if he had this conversation with others in DOJ, they, too, probably used an offsite email account.

But it's more likely Mercer forwarded this thread to someone outside of DOJ (after all, given the amount of time he's in DC, he could have just walked down the hall to talk to people directly). It may be Karl Rove and Harriet Miers--the folks in the White House who made the decision to ask her to resign that week. But it's also possible--likely perhaps, given the way Mercer forwarded one email twice--that he was also forwarding this to people we haven't thought about yet, people not in the White House.

And whomever Mercer forwarded these emails to seemed determined to deprive NAIS of its staff, but to do so without attracting attention (or leaving any record of doing so). While we can only speculate who Mercer's bcc correspondants might be, it seems clear they wanted to hide their intentions wrt NAIS.

In a third post, I'm going to make some wildarsed speculations about what might be going on.

Comments

[Mickey]

Fascinating. Better than a summer beach mystery...

[whenwego]

So she was fired for being uppity?

[enough]

This is fasinating. I can't wait for the 3rd post.

mswsm has an informative post on this topic at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/28/165814/698

[emptywheel]

enough

Yup, I saw it--he (she?) and I were working on these at the same time, I think.

[orionATL]

well

the first things that comes to mind with "indians" is
abramoff, but he was in the pokey at that time.

the second is gambling.

and with gambling comes the thought of the gambling scandal in wisconsin - democrat side only, of course.

haven't i heard mercer's name echoed in a different room of the doj's great scandal mansion?

[ezekielle]

mswsm and ew:

From your blogs to Waxman's ears/godspeed . . .

[undecided]

orionATL--

The third thing that should come to mind after gambling, is money-laundering.

I'm beginning to see why McCain initially received so much support from members of Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaign staff.

McCain is dirty.

[oldtree]

these folks talk and work within a system they know is not only broken, but they show they are a part of a conspiracy to use it for their gains.
let's get past the main issues

the money coming from indians. those poor redskins can't deal with all that money. it is partly ours if we can steal it.
and that persons employed by our government to protect and serve the native american people, were using them to make themselves and other people money, without any apparent concern for those that they are empowered to protect.

and they are so cavalier about it that they put it in emails. they put specifics of the conspiracy in email, but talk privately about other aspects of the deeper crimes. are they so insulated that they don't care about being a part of such a conspiracy? are these supposedly educated people so smart that they don't think that the little pieces of evidence add up to indictments and imprisonment for themselves?

this is not a republic or democracy. it has no resemblance. it does sound like the machinations of a crime family though. It seems that each of the fired USA's went along with the program to defeat their political enemy and put money in their pockets, or look the other way if someone was doing it. We look at the 8 as some kind of heroes for talking. they only did so when someone said something bad about them. they did nothing to protect the law and the people of this country.

sorry, more treason, more day to day operations that are criminal activity. US Attorneys. How could you trust a single one of them today? the ones that got to stay one haven't been brought in to testify about their involvement in cover ups and voter frauds and such yet. we are concentrating on the ones that spoke up only to protect their bruised egos.

what have we become?

[AZ Matt]

As someone who lives on an Indian Reservation this is all very interesting to me. I not sure I understand why they did this apart from their desire to rid themselves of USA's they didn't like. Trust between the Tribes and Feds is usually hard to get and maintain. They prefer to work with people they know and it takes a long time to build trust. Now, they are trying with the administration to totally screw Cobell. The Abramoff e-mails about the Tiguas totally screwed the Republicans with the Tribes. Ya, there will still be some who give but not like before.

McCain puzzled me when he the Indian Affairs committee. He did not press as far as he should have on the Abramoff issue. The Mississippi Chactaw might have tempered his resolve on this due their big donation through Abramoff in the past. Most tribes respected McCain. IS he dirty? Don't know the answer to that but if he is... so long tribal donations.

[pseudonymous in nc]

On the tech: these are all forwards from a 'synchronised handheld', using Motorola's variation on the Blackberry theme. So I'm not sure if Mercer is bcc:ing in those emails, or just making sure stuff that's on his mobile email ends up... somewhere else.

In AZ, the recommended replacement was Diane J. Humetewa, a Hopi tribe member and a tribal liaison for the AZ US Attorney's office.

[bmaz]

AZ Matt - Thats an interesting question about McCain, "Is he dirty?" My read on McCain has always been (and I've watched him since the jerk plopped his carpetbag down in our fair state) is that everything is always, with no exception, about himself. His own relentless self agrandizing is all that matters; the money is secondary, a means to an end. He married Cindy Hensley not for the money, but the power her father could bring to bear. Same with his affiliation with Charlie Keating. He is dirty, but it is a different shade of dirty. He will sell out his own family to advance his own power trip; ask his first wife.

[William Ockham]

ew,

Unfortunately, I believe you are completely wrong on this one. Bill Mercer has two DOJ email acccounts and he forwards stuff between the two. Take a look at ASG356. When he prints them, one says Bill Mercer (ODAG) and the other says Bill Mercer (USAMT).

[AZ Matt]

pseudonymous in nc,

People here at Hopi were proud to see her recommended for the position by both Kyl and McCain. The DoJ I don't think was thrilled as they rejected her. I would be curious to know who they wanted in there to pull Renzi's balls out of the fire.

[enough]

There are emails from Michael Elston (ODAG) to the William W. Mercer account.

See http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/OAG878-914-20070323.pdf

[simpleaccounts]

Greeting;

Do rules ,which governs use of e-mails for governmental work, address self-forwarding?

[William Ockham]

Let me explain this in more detail. Bill Mercer is the USA for Montana. Bill Mercer also works at Main Justice in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General. The "Mercer, William H." account is his ODAG mailbox (Bill.Mercer2@usdoj.gov). The "Mercer, Bill" account is his USAMT account (BMercer@usdoj.gov). The reason he has two accounts is that whoever set up their Exchange Server assumed that each employee would have a single role within the organization. This is a very common mistake. So, when you have somebody with roles in two seperate parts of the organization, they end up with two mailboxes. Outlook will only let you connect to one Exchange mailbox at a time. The end result, Mercer has to forward his mail back and forth between these two accounts.

Below, I've included a copy of an email that shows both addresses resolved. What's not obvious is that there are different aliases for the ODAG Account. You need to compare ASG012 TO ASG198 to see that the proper alias for the ODAG account is "Mercer, William H." and the USAMT is "Mercer, Bill"

-----Original Message-----
From: Otis, Lee L
To: Mercer, Bill (ODAG) ; Mercer, Bill (USAMT)
CC: Elston, Michael (ODAG)
Sent: Tue Apr 04 18:27:33 2006
Subject: FW: TPs on Issa's Catch-and-Release question

[Mickey]

Sherlock Wheeler

[emptywheel]

WO

Can you point to one besides this where he's forwarding the info? The one you point to is other people emailing to both accounts, which is something else entirely.

Furthermore, what explanation would there be for him to email teh same email from one to another email account twice?

[orionATL]

friar will -

can't assess the technical give and take,

but i sure was interested to learn,

from these two e'wheel posts,

that five of the fired u.s. attny's were associated with indian affairs.

that's the striking new info for me.

and isn't the new u.s. attny for minnesota - rachel palouse - indian?

who knows what's up,

this could be about gambling,

money laundering,

oil

or industrial metals,

or it could be coincidence.

but these bastards love money and sub rosa deals,

so i'm betting on "no coincidence" at least.

[Mickey]

I don't want to discount Ockham's [Razor], but I think I'd keep going if I were you, Marcy. Margaret Chiara is unexplained. Heffelfinger, himself, points to the N.A.I.S. [which by the way doesn't seem to be doing anything right now as someone posed in the last thread]. Something's rotten in the State of Indian Country, and your line of thinking seems to be the first that aims at what. So, keep going with the "wildarsed speculation." Being wrong, finding it out later, and admitting it is the highest virtue - one our Administration Band of Thieves never learned.

[emptywheel]

Well, I'm happy to concede I was wrong about this being an external email. And I think it possible that he's just trying to consolidate his emails in one place. But that still doesn't explain forwarding the same email twice in an hour. Further, I think it fair to say that Mercer was less than forthcoming on how he was treating Chiara.

[lolo]

EW,

I ran across a pdf of abramoff emails. Have you seen these yet?

http://www.newsfollowup.com/docs/abramoff_attach_1.pdf

lolo

[William Ockham]

ew,

Compare ASG408 and ASG409 to ASG 326. It is pretty clear that Sandra Sanchez sent Charlton's contact info to the USAMT account and Mercer then forwarded it to his ODAG account. One thing to notice is that he almost always does his forwarding from his mobile device. That makes a lot of sense because he can look at his USAMT account on the mobile while looking at his ODAG account on his PC. I know that if I were in his situation, that's what I would do.

This little investigation made me notice a couple of probably trivial things. The DOJ switched from BlackBerries to GoodLink devices sometime between June and October 2006. The other is that Sandra Sanchez got an email from Paul Charlton that was titled "Termination Public Financial Disclosure Report SF 278 for USA" and retitled it "Contact Information for Paul Charlton" before she forwarded it on. That's one of the gotchas of Outlook and Exchange that most folks don't know about.

[bmaz]

The Cobell litigation is a royal mess. There are procedural disputes, and rulings, that will insure appeal grounds that will play out until the next of never (Notably the removal of Judge Landreth, who made several correct rulings but used such damning language in so doing he was forcefully removed) but it will never be over before the Bushies are out of office; so my first reaction is that they really don't care about Cobell in the least, and any Indian tie in to Purgegate must be on some gambling or land scam they see benefit in. That is a pretty superficial thought, so I may well be missing something.

[tejanarusa]

Wow. I skimmed mbw's dkos post, mentioned in part one, and though I'm still confused on this (new to me) issue, it's really interesting. The tech stuff about the emails is over my head, but I never would have guessed the Indian trust accounting and litigation was going to end up being part of this whole thing.
The Bushies truly have their tentacles into everything, don't they? EW, you go! wherever you feel it necessary. I don't doubt that if it turns out you're on the wrong path, you'll recognize it and correct course. Whew. Just can't keep up...