The Next Hurrah

So Much for Sampson's "Aggregator" Myth

by emptywheel

I love when Murray's been quiet for a long time, because it means his next story will be a doozy. And this one doesn't disappoint. The actual jist of the story--that Alberto Gonzales delegated all authority for hiring and firing of political appoints to Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson--doesn't surprise me. The delegation of authority, thereby providing top Bush allies like Cheney and Gonzales with plausible deniability even while allowing a program clearly bordering on (if not passing into) illegal territory, is something that has been going on for some time. There is a twist here--by delegating this authority, Gonzales also allowed the process to be taken over by the White House.

A senior Justice Department official, who did not know of Gonzales's delegation of authority until contacted by National Journal, said that it posed a serious threat to the integrity of the criminal-justice system because it gave Sampson, Goodling, and the White House control over the hiring of senior officials in the Justice Department's Criminal Division, which oversees all politically sensitive public corruption cases, at the same time that they held authority to hire and fire U.S. attorneys.

"If you are controlling who is going to be a U.S. attorney and who isn't going to be,... firing them outside the traditional process... and the same people are deciding who are going to be their supervisors back in Washington... there is too much of a potential for mischief, for abuse," the official said. [my emphasis]

I'm most fascinated by the way this is going to change the tenor of the USA scandal.

Changes in NAIS Membership

by emptywheel

We've been talking a lot about the role of the Native American Issues Subcommittee (NAIS) to the USA Purge here. If you haven't already, go read through that post for background--and pay particular attention to mbw's comments, as she is the blogosphere's resident expert on how BushCo has attempted to cheat Native American tribes (again).

In this post, I'd like to take a close look at what has happened to the membership of the NAIS in just the last year. I've taken email addressees from two of the emails included in the document dumps below and compared them in this table.

3/22/06 (OAG562)	2/24/07 (ASG417)
Chiara W/MI	Chiara W/MI
Sperling E/OK	Sperling E/OK
O'Meilia N/OK	O'Meilia N/OK
Charlton AZ	Knauss AZ
Moss ID	Moss ID
Iglesias NM
Heavican NE*
Mead WY	Mead WY
Mercer MT	Mercer MT
Bodgen NV
Wrigley ND	Wrigley ND
Lampton S/MS	Lampton S/MS
Scott E/CA	Scott E/CA
Suddaby N/NY	Suddaby N/NY
Immergut OR
O'Connor CT	O'Connor CT
Shappert W/NC	Shappert W/NC
Washington W/LA	Washington W/LA
Larson N/IA
Rhodes S/AL	Rhodes S/AL
Richter W/OK	Richter W/OK
Tapken SD	Jackley SD
	Eid CO
	Cohen AK
	Sullivan W/WA
	Tolman UT

Remember, the February 24 email came just ten days after Tom Heffelfinger's resignation, so count him in the list of people on the list to be fired as well). I've put an asterisk by Michael Heavican because he resigned to become Nebraska's Chief Justice, so there's no reason to believe his departure is related to the purge, but he is gone. Karin Immergut remains the USA of Oregon.

The other names in red, though, have left under suspect circumstances in the last year. (In Chuck Larson's case, his AUSA replaced him, but then resigned just one month later.)

Keep reading for more background on those in blue, replacement members of NAIS that speak volumes about where Alberto Gonzales would like to see NAIS go.

Piling On The GOP

by DemFromCT

Something's in the water. From the LA Times to the OC Register to 60 Minutes, you can't avoid the stories of a GOP in trouble, mostly over Iraq. This is Dick Polman in the Philly Inquirer, nicely summing up the situation:

By launching a war of choice for dubious reasons, and without the requisite resources to win the peace, he has been the chief architect of his own political demise. Simply put, most Americans have gotten fed up with his empty assurances: "It's slowly but surely making progress" (July 2003); "We're making steady progress" (September 2004); "Iraq has made incredible political progress" (September 2005); "Iraqis are making inspiring progress" (October 2005); "There's progress" (January 2006).

So it's no surprise to discover that, in the latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, Bush's war stewardship is viewed favorably by a mere 27 percent of the citizenry.

In a British-style parliamentary system, he would be gone by now. But even a politically weakened American commander in chief can still play a strong hand - which is why, at least for now, the congressional Democrats are doomed to fail in their current bid to legislate an end to the war.

Public sentiment is irrelevant; all that matters, in this hardball political moment, is the stubborn stance of the Decider and the math on Capitol Hill. Bush will veto any spending bill that contains a pullout timetable, and the Democrats lack the votes to override him. Later this spring, they'll probably wind up giving him the war money he wants, absent any pullout timetable, in part because they don't want to be tarred as being "against the troops," particularly on the eve of an election year. (Indeed, a CBS News poll reported this month that only 9 percent of Americans favor cutting off all the war money.) So, looking down the road, it's a cinch bet that our soldiers will still be dying on the day Bush fobs off the disaster on his successor.

But the Democrats are prodding Bush anyway and will continue to do so, because they have the wind at their backs.

They know they'll lose the current skirmish, but so what?

Okay, okay, mainstream and not surprising (but on the mark). So who did this one?

General Petraeus is a wonderfully commanding figure. But if the enemy is in the nature of a disease, he cannot win against it. Students of politics ask then the derivative question: How can the Republican Party, headed by a president determined on a war he can't see an end to, attract the support of a majority of the voters? General Petraeus, in his Pentagon briefing on April 26, reported persuasively that there has been progress, but cautioned, "I want to be very clear that there is vastly more work to be done across the board and in many areas, and again I note that we are really just getting started with the new effort."

The general makes it a point to steer away from the political implications of the struggle, but this cannot be done in the wider arena. There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican Party will survive this dilemma.

Yep, that'd be Bill Buckley, asking if Republicans can survive Iraq (the answer, Bill, is no). Hey, what about about this one?

"So," said Hagel, "when I hear people say, 'Well, if we leave them to that, it will be chaos.' What do you think is going on now? Scaring the American people into this blind alley is so dangerous."

These judgments come from someone credited with rebuilding Nebraska's Republican Party who has a lifetime American Conservative Union record of 85.2 percent. Hagel represents millions of Republicans who are repelled by the Democratic personal assault on President Bush but deeply unhappy about his course in Iraq.

Ah, that'd be Robert Novak. You see, when the Democrats voted to end the war in Congress, it changed everything. It opened the floodgates and allowed everyone who isn't a dead ender (the 33% of the population who think Iraq will be judged a success) to be honest about where things stand. Whether it's on the left or the right or the center, George Bush has the support of only the GOP, and that only because they don't know how not to support him (see Novak's comments about backing him because Dems don't). But what's lost in all of this is that the Bush dead enders do not matter. They cannot win national elections on 33% support. And they cannot win future elections when the third of swing voters in the electorate agree with Democrats and disagree with Republicans on the issues  - virtually all the issues. Making the dead enders happy is the job of the Republican primary candidates, but it's not the job of those who want to be elected next time around.

That's the making of a realignment election. And the way this is going, that's what's shaping up in 2008. George Bush's legacy may well be not just the ruin of Iraq, but the ruin of the GOP, as Buckley suggests. From the LA Times:

When voters five years ago were asked which party they identified with, neither Democrats nor Republicans held an advantage. Now 50% of voters say they are aligned with the Democrats, and 35% with Republicans, according to a survey released last month by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

And in New Hampshire, nonpartisan pollster Dick Bennett said the atmosphere was so sour that he was having a tough time getting Republicans to participate in surveys. The war, high gas prices and unhappiness with the Bush administration have dampened their interest sharing opinions, he said.

A few years ago, "they would make arguments in favor of the president, and they don't anymore," Bennett said. "They don't defend the president on anything."

Now, the GOP can claim W will be soon history. Again, the LA Times:

"No question, the president's gone through a rough patch. But the central figure for the Republicans next year is not going to be George Bush," said Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Don't you believe it. America will not be forgiving this President any time soon, and the GOP knows it. How utterly conventional of us to say so, but the fact is, it's the truth. So,while the Dems will certainly need to do everything right to win, Bush has given the GOP every reason to lose.

                                                        

Rove Makes the NYT Lose Its Appetite

by emptywheel

Did you ever have the experience--in your wild days of college, perhaps--when you had such a bad experience at a party that you swore you'd never go back to that particular party again? Often as not, the bad experience had everything to do with the boy you were foolishly spending your time with at the party. Sure, the party itself stunk; it was too crowded, and served shitty beer. But add in the monumentally bad experience with one particular guy, and you swear off the party for life?

Well, I think that's what happened to the gray lady last weekend. Amid all the reports of Rove shying away from Sheryl Crow at the White House Correspondant's Dinner, there was the detail that Rove was sitting--nay, had been invited, and had accepted the invitiation to sit--at the NYT's table.

Just a few feet from the podium, Rove was found at The New York Times table, in discussions with the likes of D.C. Bureau Chief Dean Baquet and columnist Maureen Dowd. When asked why the paper, which often battles the White House, chose to invite Rove, Dowd said, “I don’t do the inviting anymore.”

Well, apparently the gray lady felt pretty darn violated by the experience, because she has sworn off the party for good.

Tucked inside Frank Rich's Sunday column in the New York Times is indication that the newspaper will no longer play ball with the annual White House Correspondents Association dinners in Washington, which he calls "a crystallization of the press's failures in the post-9/11 era." He writes that the event "illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows....

"After last weekend's correspondents' dinner, The Times decided to end its participation in such events," wrote Rich.

I guess the gray lady's friends weren't friend enough to warn her off of Karl Rove. No doubt that's because they all still think he's one of the cool kids. But the gray lady, at least, says she has learned her lesson.

 

 

The Next Open Thread: Polling Edition

by DemFromCT

So many GOP scandals, so little time. So let's change the subject and talk about polling. From Scott Rasmussen:

At this early stage of Election 2008, the public is siding with Democrats on the key issue of the day—Iraq. Fifty-seven percent (57%) of Likely Voters either want to bring home the troops from Iraq immediately or have a firm timetable for withdrawal. In the showdown over the Iraq funding bill, most Americans favor the legislation passed by Congress. Fifty-two percent (52%) oppose a Presidential veto. Looking down the road, just 33% of voters now believe history will judge the U.S. mission in Iraq a success. Forty-three percent (43%) of voters believe that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should resign.Fifty-seven percent (57%) favor raising taxes on the wealthy. 

Of course, the main topic there is the Hillary vs Obama horserace, but that's of less interest this early on. For those who care, Obama has moved ahead in polling, though Craig Crawford thinks in the end it's all about who has bigger cojones on terrorism.

Remember, what's good for America is good for the troops. What's on your mind?

What Bush and Iraq Mean For The GOP: Disaster In 2008

by DemFromCT

There is a 'lay of the land' (always a snapshot and never a guarantee) story in the LA Times that captures a bit of what we have been telling you here, lo, all these months.

President Bush's unpopularity and a string of political setbacks have created a toxic climate for the Republican Party, making it harder to raise money and recruit candidates for its drive to retake control of Congress.

Some of the GOP's top choices to run for the House next year have declined, citing what Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) called a "poisonous" environment. And Republicans' fundraising edge, an important advantage over the last five years, has dwindled.

...

"The reality is the Republican brand right now is just not a good brand," said Tim Hibbitts, an independent Oregon pollster. "For Republicans, the only way things really get better … is if somehow, some way, Iraq turns around."

Jennifer Duffy of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report said the party was "desperately in need of some Prozac."

The GOP is having trouble with cash and candidates, according to the article. Just wait... between Bush, Iraq, Gonzales and the scandals bubbling up there's little good news on the horizon. The reality is, to agree with Hibbitts at a core level and not just as a marketing analysis, that the Republican brand right now is just not a good brand. They are advocating a toxic mix of poor judgment and incompetence (Iraq and Katrina response) while pushing ideology over skill and professionalism (Gozales, Rove and political minders in the agencies).

Every wistful look at Ronald Reagan (be prepared for a regular dose between now and 11/08) is an admission of a weak bench today. And the coalescing CW around the idea that Iraq will do to Republican branding on national security what Hoover did to the GOP on economics (ruin it for the next 40 years) is a remarkable comment on the  GOP's chances down the road (see today's Sunday shows).

Americans want out of Iraq. The GOP has an albatross around its neck. And comments about how 'Dems are divided'  are so much smoke and mirrors. The GOP is in disarray, and they've got no clear path as to how to get out of the hole they are in.

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.

Native Americans and the USA Purge, Part One

by emptywheel

As a Michigander still wondering why Margaret Chiara got fired, I keep coming back to Chiara's role on the Native American Issues Subcommittee (NAIS). After all, if Chiara were fired for investigating powerful Michigan Republicans, those Republicans would likely hail from Grand Rapids, the center of all Republican evil in MI (think Dick DeVos, one of the GOP's top donors nationally, and all his friends). And those very same Republicans have been fighting for years to prevent a local tribe from building a casino in their neighborhood. Some of the last hurdles for the casino fell in place just before Chiara announced her resignation (after which one of the more crooked Republicans in question did a 180 on local casinos to advocate setting up a competing casino). Finally, about the only thing that has appeared in the document dumps on Chiara pertain to her role in the NAIS. And, as presumably-ousted USA Tom Heffelfinger pointed out, five out of the ousted USAs were on the NAIS.

Heffelfinger said he's been trying to understand why he might have been targeted. "The only thing I can think of is my advocacy on behalf of Native American issues," Heffelfinger said.

He noted that five of the eight U.S. attorneys who were fired had served on a subcommittee that works on American Indian issues; Heffelfinger had chaired the group.

Heffelfinger said he pushed aggressively -- without success -- for a seat on the Attorney General's Advisory Committee, which meets about monthly in Washington.

"It gives you direct access to the attorney general on a regular basis, not intermittently like I had," he said.

Of the dozen or so "subject matter committees" the U.S. attorneys have formed, the only one that never had a seat at the attorney general's table during in the Bush administration was the Native Americans issues subcommittee, Heffelfinger said. "And I thought that was inappropriate."

Well, Friday's document dump contains a good deal of support for this argument. But more importantly, it reveals certain behaviors on the part of Bill Mercer that suggest all sorts of things about the centrality of Native Americans to the USA purge. In this post, I'll just lay out the timeline. In a later post, I'll talk about Bill Mercer's role in all of this.

Is Tim Griffin Going to Leave?

by emptywheel

Honest question here. Is Tim Griffin going to leave his post of USA for Eastern AR? Or is he just planning on staying, effectively accepting a permanent PATRIOT Act USA appoint, and hoping no one will notice?

Tim Griffin officially took over the USA position around December 20 (just one day after Sampson suggesting "gumming to death" his ongoing nomination). If his appointment were treated like a normal interim appointment lasting 120 days, then his term would have expired sometime around April 20. Yet there he is, still gracing the USA AR website as "United States Attorney," and we've heard nothing about a replacement nominee. To add insult to injury, Gonzales and Senator Pryor met last Wednesday. US News reported that Pryor told Gonzales to resign--but it did not say whether there was any discussion of giving Arkansas a real USA.

You see, I'm not sure it was ever made clear whether Griffin's appointment in December was an indefinite PATRIOT Act appointment, meaning he can stay as long as Bush is "pleasured" with his presence. Or whether (as the gumming comment suggested), BushCo was just going to fudge the process, all the while proclaiming they were committed to having a Senate-approved USA in the office.

Griffin's announcement that he would not seek Senate approval on February 16 was equally vague on this point.

More On Political Minders

by DemFromCT

From the WaPo:

The Justice Department is removing political appointees from the hiring process for rookie lawyers and summer interns, amid allegations that the Bush administration had rigged the programs in favor of candidates with connections to conservative or Republican groups, according to documents and officials.

The decision, outlined in an internal memo distributed Thursday, returns control of the Attorney General's Honors Program and the Summer Law Intern Program to career lawyers in the department after four years during which political appointees directed the process.

Like the CDC and other areas of government traditionally non-politicized, this administration has done a bang-up job of ruining the reputation of one agency after another, specifically over ideology and the practice of allowing "conservative or Republican groups" to dictate hiring practices and to silence embarrassing science. Some recent examples: this was from Wired (2/07):

Congress continued to probe allegations Wednesday that the Bush administration tried to muzzle government scientists on climate change and suppress scientific research, including a comprehensive report in 2000 on global warming's impact on the United States.

and this was from the prestigious science journal Nature from 2/06:

US scientists fight political meddling
Nobel laureate attacks government's suppression of research findings.

The rift between US scientists and the administration of President George W. Bush widened last weekend, as Nobel-prizewinning biologist David Baltimore used the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)in St Louis to denounce government suppression of scientific findings.

Speaking last Saturday to a packed conference room, Baltimore — the president-elect of the AAAS — urged scientists to challenge perceived censorship of their research. Tensions between the Bush administration and researchers have been high for years, but Baltimore said he had recently grown convinced that the problem cannot be shrugged off as the usual battles between science and politics.

This is not politics as usual... this is something else altogether. You'd have to go back to the late USSR to find such insidious and pervasive placement of political minders in every facet of government. Testimony at a Henry Waxman-led committee hearing:

However, Mr Piltz told Congress even he was taken aback by the extent of the political interference, in technical reports, public meetings as well as exchanges with the media, in which scientists were assigned minders from the administration.

In the survey of 1,600 government scientists by the Union of Concerned Scientists, 46% had been warned against using terms like global warming in speech or in their reports. The scientists interviewed were working at seven government agencies, from Nasa to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Forty-three percent of respondents said their published work had been revised in ways that altered the meaning of scientific findings. Some 38% said they had direct knowledge of cases where scientific information on climate was stripped from websites and printed reports.

One can't help but think that Alberto Gonzales is hanging on as long as he can because of programs like this at DOJ, and their inevitable exposure once the career people are back in charge. The damage has been done, however. For all the press about call girls and massages (and you can't make this stuff up), the real embarrassment is this administration's war on science, truth and (in this case) Justice.

The pattern seems widespread. Maybe our friends in the press would like to call a few agencies that they have contacts with to see what's going on there. As Bush's political power and credibility wanes, more is going to come out... and it will not be just at Justice, and it will not be pretty.