New Subpoenas In The Eternal General Scandal

It's going to be interesting to watch the "Eternal General" Alberto " I-Don't-Recall " Gonzales scandal play out.

The AP is reporting that subpoenas have been issued "for testimony from former White House counsel Harriet Miers and former political director Sara Taylor on their roles in the firings of eight federal prosecutors, according to two officials familiar with the investigation."

This is where this lethargic and cumbersome scandal can possibly get much more interesting.

The following is all theory, only conjecture at this point, the evidence has yet to be unveiled.

If Harriet Miers was involved with the politicization of the justice system this could have serious implications because at one point in time Bush nominated auntie Harriet to serve on the Supreme Court, of course that bid failed.

That could have been the final nail in the casket, the cork in the bottle, the ace in the hole, the bullet that stopped the heart of our ailing democracy.

In that situation not only would the Justice Department be politicized, the Supreme Court would be as well. That scenario calls into question the other nominations of Bush that did succeed, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito.

Remember, Bush had the luxury of choosing 2 supreme court justices and if the goal was to politicize justice then the Supreme Court would have to be stacked.

Back to the here and now, the failure of the Alberto Gonzales "no confidence" vote has been nagging at me. But it was in the middle of all this fuming that I realized that Alberto Gonzales is doing himself and the plan he was involved in a great disservice by not resigning.

If the "no confidence" vote had passed and/or Alberto Gonzales had resigned it would be likely the problem would be declared as solved, life would go on and we would never be able to get to the root of and produce the evidence of what exactly happened at the Justice Department and what the ultimate goal was.

I also realized that the more Alberto Gonzales resisted resignation and the more the Bush Administration refused to cooperate the harder the Democrats would justifiably push back.

Now we have subpoenas for Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor, and we are going to eventually fully expose this fanatical plan to politicize the justice system and we are going to figure out the true and long term intentions of trying to hatch such a plan, and I am sure it isn't all daisies.

UPDATE: Why Sara Taylor is also important

Republicans More Concerned About Partisanship Than Integrity Of The Justice Department

Related :
- GOP Blocks Senate Majority From Voting No Confidence On Gonzales
- Conservatives kill Gonzales no-confidence vote

Are Conservatives still so bitter over Bill Clinton they are still willing to hold the Bush Administrations head above water while the Administration is so clearly trying to drown itself?

The Conservatives are apparently willing to do this at their own expense. Because everyone knows a drowning person is likely to pull their rescuer under if the rescuer is not a strong swimmer, and it looks like the Conservatives can barely manage to doggie paddle for themselves right now. So trying to save the Bush Administration is probably not the wisest idea.

If there is one person in Washington D.C. who deserves a "no confidence" vote it is "Eternal General" Alberto " I-Don't-Recall " Gonzales who participated in what is one of the most damaging things one can do to a democracy - politicize the justice system.

Some fury towards the mainstream media, as per usual members of the MSM were quick to repeat Conservative talking points as to why the Republicans were refusing to hold Gonzales accountable, for at the very least his stupidity and at the very worse his blatant politicization of the justice system.

One's impression from the MSM is that the Democrats are just being a pain in the Presidents behind FOR NO GOOD REASON EXCEPT PARTISANSHIP.

Well, let me tell you - after the Clinton years and Republican impeachment attempts over Clinton lying about getting a BJ, after six years of impotence in Congress when everything that was slightly Liberal was constantly berated and slandered, you know it wouldn't be such a stretch of imagination to believe that Democrats were "just being partisan" and trying to "get back" at Republicans for all of the misery including the Iraq War BUT

The truth should be told, by any intelligent standard Alberto Gonzales is either

A : a meandering fool who's memory has apparently been erased who never fully understood his role at the Justice Department
OR
B : he is a very deceptive and clever man who is wearing sheep's clothing to avoid punishment.

Well, since Gonzales is a lawyer I really have to go with "B".

By this point in time it doesn't matter whether Gonzales is "A" or "B" because being either incompetent or crooked should immediately render any person unfit for the job of the top law enforcement official in this country, dammit.

I don't care if a person is a Democrat or Republican, if they are doing the wrong thing get them out. It's that simple.

Which brings me to this point : What is WRONG with this country? How come politicians are THE WORST EMPLOYEES IN THE WORLD?? If anyone else did as terrible of a job as politicians do at their jobs - they would be fired or seriously demoted. Seriously.

In the real world this "I don't recall" and "I don't remember" excuse doesn't fly very far. Usually if your memory is that sketchy then so were your activities. In the real world people are distrusted for such excuses.

Having a "no confidence" vote was perfectly legitimate and it's unfortunate the Republicans did not use this as an opportunity to try to restore trust with the American people, and frankly I don't understand why they didn't use it.

Conservatives have lost a great deal of credibility in this country and I am starting to believe they are the only ones who do not realize it yet.

Is it because Republicans are in denial? Is it because they do not care if the American people no longer trust them? Do Republicans even care, if that is the case? I don't think so.

Conservatives have yet to realize the tables have turned.

Where in the 1990's the American people felt they were being lied to by Democrats about Bill Clinton and that the Conservatives were telling the truth, today it is the EXACT opposite and the issues are much more serious and complex than sexual liaisons between two consenting adults.

Today we know we are being lied to by the Republicans about George W. Bush, the Iraq War, torture, spying, oh, and politicizing the Justice Department.

The Republicans are threatening their own very existence with shenanigans like this and they should give the American people a little more credit than trying to convince us this guy who can't recall politicizing our justice system should remain in power.

Conservatives are refusing to be objective and refusing to see how seriously they would take the same situation if any political party other than the Republicans were politicizing the justice system.

Both parties need to understand that this is a country that is built on a system of checks and balances and both parties and our nations survival is dependent on this balance. As we hold others accountable and suspect for their actions, so should we ourselves to preserve the heritage of what is right about this country.

Attorney General Scandal Update

- Bradley Schlozman 101: How To Politicize The Justice Department
- Leahy To Schlozman: ‘You’re Trying To Break Gonzales’ Record’ Of Saying ‘I Don’t Recall’
- Gonzales Contradicts His Sworn Testimony About Bush’s Warrantless Spying Program
- Schlozman’s Inadvertent Confession: Any Group That Works With Minorities Is ‘Liberal’
- Schlozman Admits To ‘Boasting’ About The Number Of Republicans He Hired

U.S. Attorney General Scandal Coverage

McClatchy is proving an excellent resource for continuing coverage and archives of the Attorney General scandal, including PDF files of released documents.

Yahoo! is also offering "Full Coverage".

Subpoenas Issued For Condoleezza Rice And RNC Emails

Condoleezza Rice could have avoided avoided all of this.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman has written several letters to Condoleezza Rice requesting information regarding the Bush administration's pre-war claims about Saddam Hussein's goals of seeking Weapons of Mass Destruction. Rice has either refused or failed to respond to the letters, eleven in total.

So Waxman tried to write Rice again on March 12, 2007, after he had become committee chairman. Waxman requested that Rice at least respond to his letter by March 23. Rice refused or failed to respond and now it is over a month after the request for response deadline.

Condolezza Rice could have avoided this, bur failed or refused to.

Subpoenas were also issued for the Republican National Committee for emails and testimony regarding emails White House officials sent threw RNC email accounts that are now said to be missing.

The White House and the RNC could have avoided all of this.

One way this could have been avoided was if the White House would have refrained from trying to politicize the justice system and the RNC had not been complicit in trying to cover it up.

Furthermore, the White House should not have been using GOP-provided, nongovernmental email accounts to avoid complying with Federal law, which requires the preservation of all electronic communications sent or received by White House staff.

Related :
- Who Is Behind The 4 Years Of "Missing" Karl Rove Emails?
- Dems vote subpoenas in widening probes
- House panels vote subpoenas, immunity in probes on prosecutors, war, political activity

Alberto Gonzoles Fails To Convince His Critics

- The Attorney General's "Tremendous Credibility Problem"
- GOP Senator Calls for Gonzales to Resign
- Gonzales Lied To Senator About Plan To Install Rove Protege As U.S. Attorney
- Attorney general doesn't satisfy critics
- Alberto Gonzales is bloodied by his trip to the Senate

1,001 Ways To Say "I Don't Remember"

No one wants to see an innocent man get hung, but no one wants to see a guilty man go unrestrained either.

I'm going to have to read the transcripts more than once after the hearing is finished before I can come to my own conclusion. Initial impressions of the first part of the hearing are below.

Republican Senator Arlen Spector told Gonzales near the beginning of his hearing that “I’d like you to win this debate, but you’re going to have to win it.”

Indeed, for someone who spent weeks preparing to testify Attorney General Alberto Gonzales seemed ill prepared for the hearing.

-"I have no recollection of how that occurred."
-"I don't recall."
-"I don't recollect."
-"I'm having trouble recalling."
-"I don't recall being aware"
and my personal favorite - "I don't recall remembering."

And any other combination of words that can express a person not remembering something.

Over 50 times before the lunch break Gonzales claimed that he had no memory of events that had transpired surrounding the forced resignations of US attorneys.

For someone who is in charge of the Justice Department Alberto Gonzales seemed to know and recollect remarkably little about what was happening in the Justice Department and what he did or didn't do or when he did or didn't do it.

Does Gonzales have that bad of a memory? Does he really have that little of involvement at the Justice Department? I find all that pretty hard to believe, and if his memory is that bad I can hardly see how he is fit to serve in such a high office.

Furthermore it was painful and confusing trying to listen to Gonzales explain himself. Many of his own statements seemed to contradict and eat themselves reminding me of "doublespeak".

To risk sounding presumptuous it does appear at times (specifically in his interaction with California Democrat Diane Feinstein) as if Gonzales is playing dumb and stalling for time. After all Gonzales is an attorney so he knows all the tactics. He also knows that each member only has a limited amount of time to question him.

We are getting nowhere slowly.

The hearing was expected to resume at 2 PM. You can watch it on this link at C-SPAN.

Gonzales Does The Double Talk Dance

Watch the Gonzales hearing at C-Span 3.

Gonzales has already contradicted himself several times.

Developing ...

Analysis: Rove Flap Gives Dems Ammo

The AP Reports :

The fight over documents has gone to red alert. The White House acknowledges it cannot find four years' worth of e-mails from chief political strategist Karl Rove. The admission has thrust the Democrats' nemesis back into the center of attention and poses a fresh political challenge for President Bush.

Read Full Story

Related :
- Who Is Behind The 4 Years Of "Missing" Karl Rove Emails?
- Impudent Bush : I will oppose any attempts to subpoena

Who Is Behind The 4 Years Of "Missing" Karl Rove Emails?

Related:
- Rove E-Mail Sought by Congress May Be Missing
- Missing E-Mail May Be Related to Prosecutors
- Deleting embarrassing e-mails isn't easy, experts say
- Impudent Bush : I will oppose any attempts to subpoena

I don't want to hear that five million emails were lost. I don't want to hear that four years of Karl Rove's emails have magically disappeared from the face of the earth.

I don't want to hear that the five million missing emails and the recent attorney purge are unrelated. I don't want to hear it because I simply don't believe it.

If the emails are missing, it is only because someone doesn't want the emails to be found.

There are also questions being raised about White House use of GOP-provided, nongovernmental email accounts to avoid complying with Federal law, which requires the preservation of all electronic communications sent or received by White House staff .

The White House and The Republican National Committee are being investigated by The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who are trying to determine if the missing emails are connected to the attorney purge.

Robert Luskin, Rove's lawyer is claiming that Rove believed that his emails were being stored on other machines and that he did not intentionally delete emails.

But Democrats aren't buying the explanations, and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Senator Patrick Leahy stated to following on the Senate floor of the missing emails :

"You can't erase e-mails, not today," ... "They've gone through too many servers. Those e-mails are there -- they just don't want to produce them. It's like the infamous 18-minute gap in the Nixon White House tapes."

Leahy is more right than wrong, McClatchy reports that :

"If Karl Rove or other White House staffers tried to delete sensitive e-mails from their computers, experts said, investigators usually could recover all or most of them."
...
It's like "removing an index card in a library," said Robert Guinaugh, a senior partner at CyberControls LLC, a data forensic-support company in Barrington, Ill. "You take the card out, but the book is still on the shelf."
...
"People think they can delete e-mails, but that's not always the case," Guinaugh said.
...
As an investigator works, he may run across evidence that someone had installed scrubbing software or changed the date and time that a file was created.

"That would be suspicious," Guinaugh said. "It might indicate that something nefarious was going on."

First the White House claimed the attorney purge was not politically related but performance related.

Closer inspection has proven that performance was not the basis of the firing of eight U.S. Attorney's, political loyalty was.

The attorney's were rated to determine whether or not they were, using Karl Rove's own words "loyal Bushies".

To the White House, US Attorney allegiance to the Republican Party and to George W. Bush was (and is) far more important than any allegiance to United States law.

Now the White House is claiming that the reason Rove & Co. used RNC email accounts instead of White House email accounts was because they were politically related emails.

Politically related emails that are now magically missing. Four years of them. Five million of them.

Are we are really supposed to believe these missing politically related emails sent threw the RNC to avoid federal law on White House record keeping are not related to the politically related firing of eight US Attorneys that the White House claims is not politically motivated?

Do they really expect intelligent people to swallow that pill using the poisoned Kool-Aid they have so artfully provided for us?

My intuition and skepticism are telling me the emails have gone missing because someone wanted those emails missing.

Furthermore, I am willing to bet there is much more in those missing emails than just the information about the attorney purge.

Given that the five million missing emails are pre-2005 there is likely to be other important emails in the batch besides emails regarding the attorney purge. This could include emails regarding the invasion of Iraq and the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to the press - all more good reasons to try to make the information disappear.

In the days and weeks to come more information will become available, and I doubt any of it is going to indicate that the Bush Administration is a pious and effective Administration.

As the pressure builds it is likely that the White House and it's loyalist will continue to lash out, just like many cornered animals will do. Their anger and refusal to fully cooperate (while claiming to cooperate) only makes them look more guilty to average Americans.

Everyday this scandal gets bigger and more complicated.

More and more comparisons are being made between the missing emails and the 18 1/2-minute gap in the Richard Nixon audio tapes about the Watergate break-in.

[Fact: Did you know Karl Rove worked on the Richard Nixon reelection campaign? Vice President Dick Cheney first served as a Nixon intern and then served under former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who served in various positions under Nixon. Many people who work for Bush once worked for Nixon. That's not very surprising, is it?]

Hopefully the emails can be recovered even if the cronies went to great lengths to hide or destroy them.

Impudent Bush : I will oppose any attempts to subpoena White House officials

The Bush Administration recently purged eight U.S. attorneys, a move that has caught the attention of the mainstream media and Democrats, many of which feel the firing of several attorneys who had preformed well on the job, was at the very least, suspicious.

The American public is starting to catch on, especially when the Los Angeles Times and others are reporting that

"Senate Democrats signaled Sunday that of the eight U.S. attorneys abruptly fired by the Bush administration, the case in San Diego is emerging as the most troubling because of new allegations that U.S. Attorney Carol Lam was fired in a direct attempt to shut down investigations into Republican politicians in Southern California."

A DoJ official commented that "real problem we have right now with Carol Lam." when it was learned that "Lam notified Washington of search warrants in a Republican corruption case"

It doesn't help either when The Washington Post is reporting that David C. Iglesias, who was one of the other attorneys was fired after he had been "heralded for his expertise" by the Justice Department "which twice selected him to train other federal prosecutors to pursue election crimes."

Which blows to pieces the Bush Administrations original claim that the attorneys were purged because of poor performance.

Iglesias alleged crime? Apparently Republicans were not happy with Iglesias because he failed to prosecute Democrats for voter fraud because “we didn’t have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt,” Iglesias stated on FOX.

“Prosecutors can’t just prosecute on rumor and innuendo. I set up only one of two election fraud task forces in the country. In fact, the Justice Department asked me to speak at an election fraud seminar as a result of those task forces.” Iglesias also says that his firing was a "political hit" and wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times "Why I Was Fired"

The Bush Administration and it's apologist have supplied a steady stream of various excuses regarding the ouster of the attorneys.

First the Administration claimed the attorneys preformed poorly. Then it was within it's right to purge the attorneys, however suspicious and politically motivated the circumstances appeared. Then they pointed fingers at each other "Harriet did it" or "Rove did it" and "Gonzales did it". Finally they pledged accountability, right before they said they had nothing to be accountable for.

So, one would reasonably assume that if the Bush Administration was not participating in lecherous partisanship and trying to steer investigations when it purged the attorneys then it should not have any objections to going under oath and explaining themselves, should they? If the Bush Administration did nothing wrong then they should have nothing to hide and going under oath should not be a problem, right?

Wrong. Someone is hiding something.

The Politico is reporting that “In DOJ documents that were publicly posted by the House Judiciary Committee, there is a gap from mid-November to early December in e-mails and other memos, which was a critical period as the White House and Justice Department reviewed, then approved, which U.S. attorneys would be fired while also developing a political and communications strategy for countering any fallout from the firings.”

That's pretty damning, it reminds me of the 18 1/2-minute gap in the Nixon audio tapes about the Watergate break-in.

Not only that, now the President is refusing to allow implicated members of his Administration to go under oath.

The audacity of this President never ceases to amaze me, he could have cookie crumbs on his lips and he would still try to make a convincing case that he really wasn't eating cookies from the cookie jar.

The President now claims that the Democrats are just being "partisan" because they want answers regarding the attorney purge. Does he really think we are all that ignorant than we buy that nonsense? If he does, then I guess we can see who the ignorant one is.

It was the Bush administration that chose to purge attorneys for what clearly appears to be political reasons, and this is what the President seems to be choosing to ignore when he claims the Democrats want partisanship and impasse rather than truth and justice.

President Bush has a warning for those nefarious Democrats...

“We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants. The initial response by Democrats unfortunately shows some appear more interested in scoring political points than in learning the facts. It will be regrettable if they choose to head down the partisan road of issuing subpoenas and demanding show trials. And I have agreed to make key White House officials and documents available. I proposed a reasonable way to avoid an impasse, and I hope they don’t choose confrontation. I will oppose any attempts to subpoena White House officials.”

"A partisan fishing expedition"?!? Ooh, I get it, like the "partisan fishing expedition" the Bush Administration went on when it purged the eight attorneys?

"Honorable public servants"?!? The President is talking about the same Alberto Gonzales that said the US constitution prohibited taking away habeas corpus but that doesn't necessarily mean you have a right to habeas corpus? I'm sure Gonzales is an honorable servant, but he is not a servant to the public, obviously.

Democrats "scoring political points"? That may be so, but that is only because they are doing the right thing, what the public would want them to do, which is investigate. I am referring to the same public that Gonzales is an alleged "honorable servant" of, lest there be any confusion.

It will be "regrettable if they [Democrats] choose to head down the partisan road of issuing subpoenas"?!? Someone needs to tell Bush that it is normal procedure, if one refuses to cooperate and refuses to talk that the next step is a subpoena.

"I hope they [Democrats] don't choose confrontation." But essentially it is Bush who chose confrontation when he decided to refuse to allow members of his Administration go under oath and on record to explain the events surrounding the attorney purge.