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?

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.

One Of Gonzales' Purged Federal Prosecutors Speaks Up

David Iglesias, one of the federal prosecutors given the ax by the Bush Administration and U.S. Flunky er... Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, writes in The New York Times' OpEd page "Why I Was Fired", with a (very LARGE) snip below.

WITH this week’s release of more than 3,000 Justice Department e-mail messages about the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors, it seems clear that politics played a role in the ousters.

Of course, as one of the eight, I’ve felt this way for some time. But now that the record is out there in black and white for the rest of the country to see, the argument that we were fired for “performance related” reasons (in the words of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty) is starting to look more than a little wobbly.

United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although we receive our appointments through the political process (I am a Republican who was recommended by Senator Pete Domenici), we are expected to be apolitical once we are in office. I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political.

Politics entered my life with two phone calls that I received last fall, just before the November election. One came from Representative Heather Wilson and the other from Senator Domenici, both Republicans from my state, New Mexico.

Ms. Wilson asked me about sealed indictments pertaining to a politically charged corruption case widely reported in the news media involving local Democrats. Her question instantly put me on guard. Prosecutors may not legally talk about indictments, so I was evasive. Shortly after speaking to Ms. Wilson, I received a call from Senator Domenici at my home. The senator wanted to know whether I was going to file corruption charges — the cases Ms. Wilson had been asking about — before November. When I told him that I didn’t think so, he said, “I am very sorry to hear that,” and the line went dead.

A few weeks after those phone calls, my name was added to a list of United States attorneys who would be asked to resign — even though I had excellent office evaluations, the biggest political corruption prosecutions in New Mexico history, a record number of overall prosecutions and a 95 percent conviction rate. (In one of the documents released this week, I was deemed a “diverse up and comer” in 2004. Two years later I was asked to resign with no reasons given.)

When some of my fired colleagues — Daniel Bogden of Las Vegas; Paul Charlton of Phoenix; H. E. Cummins III of Little Rock, Ark.; Carol Lam of San Diego; and John McKay of Seattle — and I testified before Congress on March 6, a disturbing pattern began to emerge. Not only had we not been insulated from politics, we had apparently been singled out for political reasons. (Among the Justice Department’s released documents is one describing the office of Senator Domenici as being “happy as a clam” that I was fired.)

Guess When Gonzalez Goes Bye-Bye And Win A Year of Free Ice Cream!

Hey, who (except me, who doesn't like ice cream) would pass up an offer of free (I would assume, the quite premium Ben & Jerry's) ice cream for a whole year?

True Majority, a progressive organization started by Ben & Jerry's founder, Ben Cohen, has initiated a contest that amounts to something of a pool:

The person who correctly guesses WHEN (not if) U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez becomes Gone-Gone-Gonzalez gets that ice cream deal.

Click here to play!

Now this would make for a very sweeeeet ending to GonzalezGate. Sadly, however, the corruption will continue long after the lackluster, bootlicking Gonzalez Goes-Goes-Gone because Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rice, etc will still remain in power.

Why GonzalezGate/Purging of U.S. Attorneys Matters To Us All

While more Americans are beginning to pay attention to the case of several federal prosecutors with the (In)Justice Department being hand-picked by the Bushies to be fired simply because key people in the White House (namely, Bush, Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, and then presidential attorney-turned-U.S. Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez) did not feel these prosecutors would "tow" the Republican/Bushie line, I believe the mainstream media is doing a piss poor job of explaining just WHY Americans should care.

True, this is another incidence of great corruption and abuse of power. Sadly, however, and particularly with the Bush Administration, these scandals come faster than your next fast food order.

However, here's what I believe to be the core issue here:

First, yes, the appointment of the U.S. attorneys for 93 different regions that serve under the one U.S. Attorney General is indeed a political appointment. This means they serve at "the will" of the president. However, it is very rare to see these federal prosecutors targeted for removal DURING an administration. Normally, the changeover occurs at the beginning of an administration.

BUT - and here's the core issue - while the federal prosecutors are politically appointed, they are SUPPOSED to operate separately from politics. In other words, they may be there at "the pleasure of the President", but they are supposed to apply the law and conduct investigations fairly, and in a non-partisan matter.

While the Bushies like to say the so-called GonzalezGate is nothing more than any other president does, this is simply NOT true. Aside from Bushie urban legend, there has NEVER been a time - not even on Nixon's watch and you'll recall he FIRED a special prosecutor to try to stop an investigation into his and the GOP's corrupt electoral practices - when a sitting president so far into a two-year-term has decided, "OK, this prosecutor isn't Republican enough" or "this prosecutor won't go after this innocent person just because WE don't like that person."

That's the critical point; what the Bushies sought to do here is make it MUCH easier for the feds to go after ANY ONE OF US purely on partisan palaver. Write something the government doesn't like, get hauled into court. Do something they don't like and WHAM, there you go into federal court.

If we allow the White House and the (In)Justice Department to get away with these actions, we are basically saying, "OK, the political witch hunts can go full tilt."

I don't want that. Do you?