Bush: Felon In Chief

TalkLeft gives you more details about the "Karl Rove-Ken Mehlman/Official White House email sent out over Republican National Committee servers/incoming and outgoing email messages for 51 out of 87 different White House/government appointees purged" brouhaha.

Or, as Bush and Cheney (AND U.S. ASSAttorney General Alberto Gonzales) like to say,"WHAT U.S. Constitution? WHOSE Bill of Rights? WHAT planet are you on where you think this administration is accountable to anyone? The Presidential Records Act, like the Geneva Conventions, is quaint and not to be worried about. Go f*** yourself!"

Oh Those Missing - Read: Purged - Emails

Anon posting in Comments on my original post about this the other day points us both to this post at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington's blog as well as the comment available below this post. Here's the main post:

LIke most observers, the editorial writers at The New York Times are finding it difficult to understand why the Bush administration and the RNC can't find all the e-mails from White House staffers. The Bush administration had a legal obligation, under the Presidential Records Act, to preserve those communications. That seems not to have been a concern:

The post-Watergate law requiring the preservation of presidential records has proved to be no match for the Bush White House’s stealthy use of back-channel e-mails via the Republican National Committee’s computer system. Congressional investigators have discovered that while 88 White House staffers had accounts over at the G.O.P. computer banks, there are no e-mail archives to be found for 51 of them.

Congress has demanded that the White House and the R.N.C. provide the full e-records as it tries to figure out the story of the political purge of United States attorneys. Claims by the White House and the R.N.C. that they’re trying their best to comply are increasingly hard to believe, and we strongly urge Congress to continue the search.

We strongly urge Congress to continue the search, too. Strongly.

Now here's the comment on online collaboration:

We disagree with the NYT emphasis on e-mails. Based on Ralston's denial, it appears there is something else going on.

Question: Karl Rove didn't discuss this claim with you?
[Ralston, response]: No.Mr. Berenson
[Ralston Counsel]. Do you want to clarify that last answer?
Ralston. I don't recall. I don't have a recollection of anyone discussing with me specifically that claim.

Ralson leaves open the possibility that the GOP and WH-EOP have an online collaborative file sharing program such as SharePoint, which integrates with MicrosoftOutlook. However, this is a third-party website, which RNC could hide, say it is not a file system they own, and avoid providing it to Congress. What review has Congress does on online collaborative file sharing programs which are not related to e-mail, but could fit nicely within Ralston's denial above?

Turning The Face Of American Justice Into A Partisan Clown Parade

Anyone who watched (or read the transcript from) today's "testimony" (what Washington calls what any of us would call a bullshit session) from former Dept of Justice White House liaison Monica Goodling, who cried "5th Amendment" (and damn, I'm not sure DoJ honchos RATE that right given how they hold our lives in their filthy talons) then ran and hid, only coming out under "limited immunity", should be far more than infuriated. [bhfrik did a good piece on this here.]

What U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the White House, particularly Karl Rove and George Bush, have done is turn the highest level of justice of our nation into no less than criminal and leans heavily toward treasonous. For if the American people cannot believe in the possibility their duly elected government will behave responsibly, then we won't be much beyond where we said the Iraqi people were under Saddam Hussein.

In this case, there was no one simple infraction. We have a huge staff hired with a heavy tilt toward a law school which is considered among the worst possible in the nation (where the fundamentalist fascist form of Christianity is what they teach rather than law), that staff administered by people with no competency and then used exclusively to suppress investigations into corrupt Republicans (lawmakers, election fraud, lobbyist payoffs, et al) while forcing investigations (even when their own people reviewed the facts and found no reason to proceed with cases) of Democrats and Democrat supporters.

If we let this slide, we say, "Fine. Turn the DoJ into another wing of the extreme fascist right. It's just dandy with me if they decide to toss up a charge on me with nothing but partisan hate to back up their claims, prosecute me, and then give me the only right of ultimate appeal being the now completely partisan Supreme Court which Bush and Rove and Cheney already rigged."

Personally, I'm not willing to say that. You? [Scary part is how many Americans are far more concerned tonight with who won American Idiot... Idol.]

Gonzo's Greaaaattt Adventure

The one glaring truth to come out of all we've seen and heard from and about U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his machinations with the Bush White House to turn federal prosecutors into the SS officers AND kangaroo partisan political party courtships is that Gonzo, much like his "bestest" pal George Bush, doesn't have a frickin' clue what his job is, cannot tell the truth even when offering countless versions of the same story.

Also like Bush, Gonzo admits no wrongdoing, uses the U.S. constitution (and other documents and provisions such as the Geneva Conventions) as toilet paper, a spitoon, and quaint and foolish items written by old men long sense dead.

Here's what The Times has to say:

There were many fascinating threads to the testimony on Tuesday by the former deputy attorney general, James Comey, who described the night in March 2004 when two top White House officials tried to pressure an ailing and hospitalized Attorney General John Ashcroft into endorsing President Bush’s illegal wiretapping operation.

But the really big question, an urgent avenue for investigation, is what exactly the National Security Agency was doing before that night, under Mr. Bush’s personal orders. Did Mr. Bush start by authorizing the agency to intercept domestic e-mails and telephone calls without first getting a warrant?

Mr. Bush has acknowledged authorizing surveillance without a court order of communications between people abroad and people in the United States. That alone violates the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Domestic spying without a warrant would be an even more grievous offense.

The question cannot be answered because Mr. Bush is hiding so much about the program. But whatever was going on, it so alarmed Mr. Comey and F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller that they sped to the hospital, roused the barely conscious Mr. Ashcroft and got him ready to fend off the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, and Mr. Bush’s counsel, Alberto Gonzales. There are clues in Mr. Comey’s testimony and in earlier testimony by Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Ashcroft’s successor, that suggest that Mr. Bush initially ordered broader surveillance than he and his aides have acknowledged.

Mr. Comey said the bizarre events in Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room were precipitated by a White House request that the Justice Department sign off on a continuation of the eavesdropping, which started in October 2001. Mr. Comey, who was acting attorney general while Mr. Ashcroft was ill, refused. Mr. Comey said his staff had reviewed the program as it was then being run and believed it was illegal.

So someone at the White House (and Americans need to know who) dispatched Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital bed. Mr. Ashcroft flatly refused to endorse the program, Mr. Comey said. Later, he said, Mr. Bush agreed to change the wiretapping in ways that enabled Justice to provide a legal rationale. Mr. Comey would not say why he opposed the original program — which remains secret — or how it was changed.

Read the rest here.

Karl Rove, GonzalesGate, And The Plot To Turn Justice Department Into Kangaroo Republican Courts

JP at Welcome to Pottersville has an excellent piece up covering many of the big - and oh so shameful, criminal, and unconstitutional let alone completely unhealthy for the America we like to believe in - issues surrounding Bush's "brain" Karl Rove, US Attorney General Alberto ("Sorry, don't ask me, ask my underlings because I gave all my power to them and cannot be held responsible for what they did.") Gonzales.

Here's a generous bit, but please, visit Pottersville to read the post in its entirety:

What kind of a country do we live in where psychopaths like Ann Coulter get free interference run for them by the FBI and the Department of Justice gets its marching orders from Karl Rove? As Blue Girl puts it in “How Very Soviet of Him?”, “What, in the name of all that is sacred and holy, motivated Karl Rove to turn the Department of Justice into the enforcement arm of the Republican National Committee?”

You have to admit that Rove has yet to exhaust his powers of breathtaking audacity in siccing Alberto’s goons on four US attorneys who’d been accused of being lax in prosecuting cases of alleged voter fraud, at least one of which (David Iglesias in New Mexico) turned out to be bogus or trumped up.

Where was Karl the Krusader when we needed him in the wake of the 2000, 2004 and 2006 elections, in which massive amounts of evidence pointed to voter fraud and attempted voter fraud? Oh, right. That would’ve led the eagle-eyed hounds of the DOJ straight to Rove’s self-bugged office.

Think about it: The Department of Justice have to take its cues from a blubbery-lipped Inner Party hack like Karl fucking Rove in order to catch lazy US attorneys who couldn’t or wouldn’t prosecute ginned-up cases of voter fraud for a massive Aha! moment in time for the mid-term elections. But nary a word or an investigation into the most massive corruption of our electoral system since the good old days of Tammany Hall.

And not a single African American attorney was hired to work in the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department.

Democrats and suspected Democrats were sniffed out like escaped chain gang criminals by Monica Goodling and the other legal beagles milled out of Pat Robertson’s Regent University.

And all under the dead nose of Alberto Gonzales, a man who has done for American jurisprudence what Rush Limbaugh has done for figure skating.

On Wolfowitz and Gonzales: Volunteers To "Resign" Them On The Toes Of Our Boots?

Hey, if we can get rid of the Wolfe at the World Bank and the moronic US Attorney General with just the toes of our (steel-reinforced, please!) boots, I suspect we can find thousands if not millions of volunteers.

First them, then perhaps Rove, Cheney, and Bush!

When It's Dirty, Deluded, and Downright Despicable, Safely Assume Karl Rove Did It

[Ed. note: Hmmm... rather than the much-used excuse of "the dog ate my homework", perhaps we should just all have t-shirts which read, "Karl Rove ate our democratic government (and then shat it out all over us while ordering us to smile about it)!"]

From my posting at All Things Democrat with details provided at TruthOut:

New evidence is out that Bush's "brain" (or is it balls?), Karl Rove, not only played an already documented heavy role in the firing of federal prosecutors in remote control mode from the White House to the Justice Department (at least in theory) led by U.S. Attorney General Alberto ("I lie at the pleasure of the president") Gonzales.

It looks like Rove, besides trying to hide thousands of emails send illegally from Republican National Committee (RNC) mail servers rather than official federal government ones, also coached witnesses to lie before Congress to protect Gonzo and the Bush White House.

Re: GonzoGate, President Bush Takes Another Extended Vacation From Reality

From the White House spokesweasel re: Dubya's reaction to U.S. Attorney General's downright pathetic testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on Thursday (nods to Talking Point Memo):

President Bush was pleased with the Attorney General’s testimony today. After hours of testimony in which he answered all of the Senators’ questions and provided thousands of pages of documents, he again showed that nothing improper occurred. He admitted the matter could have been handled much better, and he apologized for the disruption to the lives of the U.S. Attorneys involved, as well as for the lack of clarity in his initial responses. The Attorney General has the full confidence of the President, and he appreciates the work he is doing at the Department of Justice to help keep our citizens safe from terrorists, our children safe from predators, our government safe from corruption, and our streets free from gang violence.

"Heluva job there, Brownie... er... Jugs... er... Brownie."

Note to Bushies: Where Have All The Federal Documents Gone?

Anyone who has ever worked in any kind of office knows that documents go missing occasionally. When the "office" is the federal government, the bureaucracy alone raises the amount of missing records exponentially high.

But what we're seeing today among the Bush Administration is a not just astounding but downright frightening and yes, criminal and deliberate loss of any document, file, record, or "fact" that the Bushies don't like or want others to see. This is not just me stating this: we've been hearing this for years from citizen and taxpayer organizations, from lawyers and constitutional and federal experts, from scientists and academicians, and even from Bush supporters and righties as well as from Bush haters and lefties.

As reported last night by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's Countdown program, there are scads of cases before the courts right now that show a global-sized laundry list of documents, records, emails, and other material required by law (and in some cases, the Constitution) to be kept and maintained safely and openly by the U.S. government that have been reported "missing" from the White House and other Bush- and GOP-led organizations.

Some of these you already know about, like the "sudden" disappearance of George W. Bush's National Guard records which Bush has claimed (if only these silly documents weren't somehow eaten by the government dog) would show he faithfully fulfilled his military service since he was able to slide off from having to serve in the Vietnam War. That we have documents that show just the opposite - that Bush partied/drank/drugged his way through what little service he performed - are not supposed to be believed; no, we're supposed to believe what he (a serial liar) says about files the people on HIS watch magically "lost."

Also among the lost is much of the evidence the feds supposedly built against "terror" suspect Jose Padilla (seems like important data to lose, no?) as well as countless other never-charged detainees at Gitmo and elsewhere.

We also have many thousands of supposedly "lost" emails that reference the firing of federal prosecutors case (aka GonzalesGate or AttorneyGate or GonzoGate) with heavy White House involvement.

And I could literally go forward for the next few days just listing here the documents we "know" (because the government has claimed so) have been lost on the Bush Administration's watch.

How damned convenient. And criminal.

Got Memory? Senators Question U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Though His Answers Are Pretty Equivocal

OK, which of you could/was quite at utterly incredulous about the testimony of the U.S. Attorney General Alberto "Fredo" Gonzales today. The whole damned thing was damned pitifully worm-lame, from the 74+ times he suggested HE couldn't quite recall or quote or do much as else.

Mr. Gonzales has no big fans among even the Republicans, one of whom suggested he either resign or re-acquaint himselfith rules and ethics OR "go homr to spend more time with his obligatory family.

It's Bush's Way Or The (Hell) Highway

From Stranger at Blah3:

One step closer to Constitutional Crisis. They ain't budging.

White House Counsel Fred Fielding, in a letter today, told Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, that the White House has not budged in its refusal to allow the panels to question several White House aides, including Karl Rove, about what they know regarding the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys, moving the two sides closer to a constitutional battle over the scandal.

Fielding also appears to be trying to head off an attempt by Conyers to obtain e-mails and documents from the Republican National Committee regarding the firings. Roughly 50 White House officials, including 22 curent aides, used e-mail accounts controlled by the RNC to send messages, including some related to the prosecutor firings, and Conyers asked RNC Chairman Mike Duncan to turn over those records today.

Fielding also said that "it was and remains our intention to collect e-mails and documents from those accounts as well as the official White House e-mail and document retention systems" as part of a broader deal with the two committees on staffer testimony.

Fielding has offered to allow Rove, former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and other Bush aides to be questioned by committee investigators, but only behind closed doors, and not under oath. Fielding also won't allow any transcript of those interviews to be made. Conyers and Leahy have rejected the offer as woefully inadequate, and while both committees have authorized subpoenas for Rove, Miers and the others, only Conyers has issued up until now and those were for documents only.

Presidential temper tantrum?

More Of The Effects Of U.S. Attorney Gate/GonzalesGate

From Make Them Accountable:

An April 11 article in The Washington Post on the House Judiciary Committee's decision to subpoena hundreds of Justice Department documents related to the U.S. attorney firings noted that Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) has "joined other members in demanding records and additional information about a federal public corruption case" in Wisconsin. Regarding the case, the Post reported only that a federal appeals court in Chicago ordered a former state employee to be "released after overturning her conviction." The article did not report that Georgia Thompson -- who was not identified by name -- was convicted on charges brought by a Bush-appointed U.S. attorney just before the 2006 election, that Wisconsin Republicans used her conviction to attack Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle (D) during the campaign, that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit took the highly unusual action of ordering the defendant released during oral argument because of the lack of evidence to support the conviction, and that Feingold and five other senators have requested information about the case to investigate whether "politics may have played an inappropriate role" in the prosecution.

Gee, Monica BadThanger... Goodling Quits Department of (In)Justice

Bet she already has a very, very, very sweet job lined up with some right wing think tank or legal firm. Meanwhile, Al Gonzales is spending his vacation practicing, "I don't recall" and "I serve at the pleasure of the president... and not in a gay kinda way either."

Perhaps Bush's Monica Has No Right To Invoke The Fifth Amendment

For the past two weeks, there has been much talk that Monica Goodling, the holier-than-thou Department of (In)Justice lawyer who thinks she sits at the right hand of God and Bush, can/cannot invoke her 5th amendment right against self-incrimination AND keep her job. But Democrats now question whether she has any right to invoke the 5th at all.

From TPM Muckraker:

But in the letter today from committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and subcommittee Chair Linda Sanchez (D-CA), they wrote that Democrats weren't convinced that Goodling was invoking the Fifth for valid reasons. Goodling's lawyer John Dowd had cited earlier comments by Democrats to show that they had "reached conclusions" about the matter under investigation.

Conyers and Sanchez aren't buying it. "The fact that a few Senators and Members of the House have expressed publicly their doubts about the credibility of the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General in their representations to Congress about the U.S. Attorneys' termination does not in any way excuse your client from answering questions honestly and to the best of her ability," they wrote.

I'm with the Dems. Monica gets no "get out of jail free" card by invoking protection for herself she would grant to no one else.

Let this Monica "go down", but in a less pleasant way than Lewinsky.

Karl Rove's Protege Got Federal Prosecutor's Job But With NO Qualifications

Here's this that just arrived from Democracy in Action:

White House defenders now acknowledge that politics may have played some role in the firing of eight federal prosecutors, but they still insist that the first replacement -- J. Timothy Griffin -- measures up as a talented and experienced prosecutor.

New evidence, however, suggests that Griffin's courtroom experience is less impressive than his official biography and top Republicans assert.

For the full story on the legal credentials of Karl Rove's protege, go to Consortiumnews.com at http://www.consortiumnews.com.

Damning DoJ-Federal Prosecutor Purge Emails

Truthout has some of the scathing emails from participants in GonzalesGate, a/k/a AttorneyGate starring Bush, our U.S. Attorney Gonzales, Karl Rove, and a cast of thousands of partisan-playing incompetents.

The Injustice of a U.S. Attorney General Who Cannot Tell The Truth, Any Truth

Former Bush Administration U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, a man with no qualifications for the job but his prissy self-righteousness (something the Bushies prefer to actual good, honest, and competent people, quite obviously) seems so atrocious for his title that it was hard to imagine a worse human being to lead the Justice Department. Yet, somehow, Bush found worse to replace Ashcroft: his buddy, a man who has never tried or prosecuted a single case as lawyer, the disgraceful, imcompetent, and perjuring Alberto Gonzales.

Responding to Congressional testimony yesterday by a former senior aide, Gonzales met the statements with yet more perjurous lies to Congress today regarding the Karl Rove-Bush Administration purging of federal prosecutors who would not act solely as partisan water carriers for the Bush-led GOP.

Today, there is this Times editorial on the matter of Kyle Sampson's testimony:

It is no wonder that the White House is trying to stop Congress from questioning Mr. Rove, Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, and other top officials in public, under oath and with a transcript. The more the administration tries to spin the prosecutor purge, the worse it looks.

Matt Drudge And New Online Politico Joined At The Hip

Have you heard much about the new online political "magazine" called Politico? I first saw the links for it several weeks ago; only after that did I begin to read and hear lots of mumbling about Politico being less than fair to those not of the red power tie persuasion (I'm still divided myself; I do think I see more Republican bias though I have seen them mock GOPers, too).

But here's what Glenn Greenwald writes today of Matt Drudge and Politico being joined at the hip (that's GOT to hurt):

The new online political magazine, The Politico, is a pernicious new presence in our media landscape. As I noted the other day, it really is nothing more than the Drudge Report dressed up with the trappings of mainstream media credibility. Today, Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News writes on his blog about what is merely the latest episode (of many) proving how closely coordinated The Politico is with The Drudge Report. It is not hyperbole to say that the former is all but an arm of the latter.

Last night, The Politico's Mike Allen published a petty, trite hit piece on Barack Obama -- entitled Rookie Mistakes Plague Obama -- claiming that Obama "has also shown a tendency toward seemingly minor contradictions and rhetorical slips" and referencing "imprecise or incomplete statements by Obama over the years." As Bunch noticed, Allen's story was "highlighted on the Drudge Report no later than 18 minutes after it was filed by Allen (how does he do it!)." Drudge continues prominently to promote The Politico's story today:

As I noted earlier this week, The Politico has instantaneously become one of the most-linked sites (I would guess the single most-linked) on The Drudge Report. Drudge links produce a volume of traffic unlike any other. Central to the business and political plan of The Politico is, quite transparently, overt courting of Matt Drudge and active cooperation with him.

When we last saw Mike Allen, he was falling all over himself in praise of Drudge on Drudge's radio show. Immediately thereafter, Allen published a story with Drudge-like inaccuracy claiming that "it is now a virtual certainty that Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty . . . will also resign shortly" and that Gonzales' resignation would either occur at the same time or a day before -- a story which The Politico changed the following day (once Bush made clear that Gonzales would not resign) to conceal Allen's inaccuracies without indicating in any way that the story had been changed.

Allen, who was Time's White House correspondent before joining The Politico, has a relationship with the White House and with George Bush so affable that the President actually went out of his way at a recent Press Conference deliberately to plug The Politico while exchanging in giggly chatter with Allen...

The rest is here.

"Bush's Monica Problem"

Ironic, no, that another Monica has cropped up with another president; the so-called "adult" president who claimed he would bring back the moral rectitude of the White House after the Clinton years. Ah, but this is no blowjob between consenting adults now, is it?

Before I quote from Dan Froomkin's column today on this Monica, let me note that I've heard from a LOT of people in the last 24 hours since the announcement that Al Gonzales' liaison to the White House from the Department of (In)Justice would plead the 5th; all say that this for them means this Justice Dept and White House are dirty as hell. And let me add that most of these same folks were hardly convinced before that the purging of the U.S. Attorneys/federal prosecutors fell into a gray area for them, where they were not certain actual wrong had been done.

Now to Froomkin:

Will another presidency be tripped up by another Monica?

As suspicions about the White House role in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys last year continue to deepen, one of the people who could shed light on what happened -- Monica Goodling, the Justice Department's White House liaison -- has suddenly decided to clam up, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Juries in criminal cases are sternly lectured not to assume guilt when a defendant takes the Fifth. It is, after all, a Constitutional right.

But when a fairly minor player in what had heretofore not been considered a criminal investigation suddenly admits that she faces legal jeopardy if she tells the truth to a Congressional panel? Well, in that case, wild speculation is an inevitable and appropriate reaction.

For one, it's not at all clear what she's trying to say. Undeniably, if she chose to lie to the panel, she could face perjury charges. Her recourse, therefore, would appear to be to tell the truth.

So is she saying that if she told the truth, she would have to admit a crime? What crime?

Or is she saying something else: That she'd have to admit someone else's criminal behavior? Well, that's not something you can take the Fifth to avoid. Sorry.

Or is she just afraid of being grilled by an antagonistic bunch of congressmen? Well, that's not something you can take the Fifth to avoid either.

In my column yesterday, I wrote that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is almost certainly still getting his marching orders directly from the West Wing. I speculated about which Justice and/or White House aides were charged with delivering those orders. It's widely known that the White House has in many cases turned over the micromanagement of Cabinet officials to untested youngsters whose paramount qualification is that they follow orders.

Bush Boy may be going dow-dow-down-downnnnnn on this.

"Who's Scripting Gonzales?"

Dan Froomkin asks this question and it's an apt one when you look back at two or more of his "public appearances" where the U.S. Attorney General appears to be a man of limited intellect and seems to work at coming off rather slavish to the president.

Each time he appears, in fact, he seems less and less capable, which leads people to wonder who else engineered the purging of the federal prosecutors from the Attorney General's office, since good ole Al doesn't seem capable of much subterfuge.

Why did Attorney General Alberto Gonzales go before the television cameras two weeks ago and deny that he knew anything about last year's firings of U.S. attorneys, when -- as we just learned from yet another Friday-night document dump -- he approved them during an hour-long meeting in November?

Did that meeting not make an impression? Did he choose to lie about it? Was he secretly drawing a distinction between giving his approval and knowing anything about what he had given his approval for?

Or was he just reading whatever was put in front of him?

It's no secret in Washington that Gonzales is not an autonomous player. His entire career has been as an enabler of George Bush. He does what he's told.

When he was White House counsel, for instance, he was widely seen as being under the thrall of vice presidential counsel David S. Addington on such signature issues as torture and presidential power.

It's not as obvious who has been his minder since he became attorney general two years ago. But presumably either he or, more to the point, the staffers who write his speeches and draw up his talking points still get their marching orders directly from the West Wing.