The U.S. Attorneys Scandal Gets Dirty

[Bronco_Beerslug]

Wouldn't you know it, Republicans and their obsession with sex behind part of this........................beautiful!

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The U.S. attorneys scandal gets dirty
By Mark Follman

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As Congress prepares to grill Alberto Gonzales, Salon has uncovered another partisan issue connected to the mass firings: Pornography.

April 19, 2007 | Facing a torrent of criticism that the Department of Justice has been tainted by partisan politics, Alberto Gonzales is poised for the defense argument of his life. The attorney general must explain to Congress an accumulation of embarrassing partisan e-mails and inaccurate statements by top Bush officials, which have helped transform the quiet firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year into an explosive Washington scandal.





Gonzales will be grilled about alleged Republican meddling on issues from corruption to cronyism, widely documented in the four months since the purge. But a Salon investigation has uncovered another partisan issue dirtying the U.S. attorneys scandal: adult pornography.


Questions remain about the real reasons behind the firings and to what degree the nation's chief prosecutors were pressured to carry out the political agenda of the White House and its Republican allies. There is evidence that the politicization of the Justice Department has included recasting the Civil Rights Division and pushing election-fraud investigations in ways favorable to Republicans. Some U.S. attorneys were told they were being forced out of their posts so that up-and-coming Bush loyalists could have a chance to burnish their résumés for yet higher political appointments. Troubling allegations persist that some U.S. attorneys were fired to thwart corruption probes against Republican officials.


Although the prosecution of adult obscenity has long been a fixation for right-wing Republicans, since the Reagan era it has never been more than a negligible fraction of the Justice Department's work. Yet, the alleged failure of two U.S. attorneys to go after porn prosecutions became part of a dubious set of "performance-related" reasons given by top officials for the recent firings. Meanwhile, several of the small handful of porn cases done under Gonzales were conducted by high-ranking officials close to the attorney general. Those officials were also involved in the group firing of the U.S. attorneys, and two of them recently received promotions.


Two of the fired U.S. attorneys, Dan Bogden of Nevada and Paul Charlton of Arizona, were pressured by a top Justice Department official last fall to commit resources to adult obscenity cases, even though both of their offices faced serious shortages of manpower. Each of them warned top officials that pursuing the obscenity cases would force them to pull prosecutors away from other significant criminal investigations. In Nevada, ongoing cases included gang violence and racketeering, corporate healthcare fraud, and the prosecution of a Republican official on corruption charges. In Arizona, they included multiple investigations of child exploitation, including "traveler" cases in which pedophiles arrive from elsewhere to meet children they've targeted online.

The U.S. attorneys' doubts about prioritizing obscenity cases drew the ire of Brent Ward, the director of the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force in Washington, who went on to tell top Justice Department officials that the two were insubordinate over the issue. But the obscenity case that Ward pressured Bogden to pursue was "woefully deficient" according to a former senior law enforcement official who spoke to Salon last month. And Charlton's office was in fact on the leading edge of adult obscenity prosecutions, including a recent case aimed at stopping pornography distributed via SPAM e-mail.
According to Bogden, his office was short eight of its allotted 45 criminal prosecutors when Ward paid a visit last September to present the porn case he wanted handled in Nevada.


"I would have had to take someone else off another criminal case to put them on it," Bogden said in a recent phone interview. At the time, the Nevada U.S. attorney's office was maxed out with several high-profile prosecutions. A public corruption trial was just beginning against Lance Malone, a Republican county commissioner accused of accepting bribes and violating the RICO act. (Several of his fellow commissioners, all Democrats, had already plea-bargained or been convicted.) A major case was under way against corporate officials for Medicare fraud and kickbacks to doctors totaling $22 million. Less than two weeks after Ward's visit, multiple trials were set to begin involving more than 40 members of the Hell's Angels for a violent confrontation with a rival gang inside a Harrah's Casino, using firearms, knives, hammers and wrenches, that had resulted in three deaths.
After determining that Ward's obscenity case was thin and would require a lot of work, Bogden suggested that the case wait until January, when two new prosecutors were slated to join Bogden's staff. "Mr. Ward went along with that plan," Bogden said. "He said, OK fine, we'll wait till after the first of the year."
Bogden said he never heard anything else about the matter from Ward or anyone else in Washington -- though by then Ward had already e-mailed a superior in the deputy attorney general's office calling Bogden a "defiant U.S. attorney" who was offering "lame excuses."


Adult obscenity prosecutions are notoriously difficult to win, since prosecutors must show that materials involving and used by consenting adults have violated local "community standards." In the post-9/11 era, law enforcement experts have questioned whether a focus on federal obscenity cases makes sense, given the massive resources diverted to counterterrorism and the demands of other criminal priorities like gun violence, identity theft and the proliferation via the Internet of sex crimes against children.


"With everything else going on, should they really have FBI agents and prosecutors devoted to sitting around watching dirty movies?" said a senior law enforcement official who attended a national conference on adult obscenity orchestrated by the Gonzales Justice Department in October 2006. "We're not the policymakers," he said. "But I guarantee you won't find any office in any major metropolitan area that would seriously consider this a priority."

But Gonzales apparently considered it one. After taking the helm of the Justice Department he declared the prosecution of adult obscenity a top priority, launching a new task force devoted to it in May 2005. His renewed war on porn, an agenda that had gathered dust ever since the publication of the obscenely large Meese Report in 1986, was seen by some political observers as a sop to right-wing Republicans who suspected Gonzales wasn't authentically conservative on social issues. His answer to those doubts was a task force that would pack the punch of four full-time attorneys, a postal inspector, an IRS agent and computer and forensics experts in the Justice Department, and would coordinate with a new Adult Obscenity Squad at the FBI, 10 agents strong.
Nonetheless, obscenity cases have remained a minuscule portion of the Justice Department's prosecutions since Gonzales launched the initiative -- fewer than 10 among the more than 20,000 criminal cases carried out each year, according to Justice Department statistics and research by Salon.


Four of the obscenity cases were conducted by three high-ranking officials close to Gonzales.
Ward, who zealously went after porn as a U.S. attorney himself in Utah in the 1980s, helped argue a 2006 case in Florida against the producer of the widely advertised and sold "Girls Gone Wild" videos. Although the videos pale by comparison with explicit sexual material available all over television and the Internet, Ward found an angle with which he could score a win: The producer had failed to properly document whether a number of the young women flashing some skin for his cameras were of legal age.


After pressing Bogden and Charlton last fall to devote resources to obscenity prosecutions in each of their states, Ward disparaged the two U.S. attorneys as "unwilling to take good cases" in an e-mail to Kyle Sampson, Gonzales' recently resigned chief of staff. Sampson was coordinating with White House lawyers on a hit list of U.S. attorneys to be replaced. "If you want to act on what I give you," Ward wrote to Sampson, "I will be glad to provide a little more context for each of the two situations."


Next page: A serious warning sent to Attorney General Gonzales in July 2006


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Mary Beth Buchanan, a U.S. attorney in western Pennsylvania who has also served in several executive roles in the Justice Department since 2001, has led two obscenity prosecutions under Gonzales. One was a reinstated case against online purveyors of hardcore videos, a case Buchanan had first pursued in 2003 but that had been thrown out by a federal judge as unconstitutional. She also prosecuted a 2006 case against a woman who published stories about child molestation -- which were fictional and contained no images -- on the Internet. "I cannot imagine material more offensive," Buchanan said about the fictional, text-only stories in the case.


Last year Buchanan reportedly consulted with Sampson as he worked on identifying U.S. attorneys to be fired. Just prior to the group firing in early December, Buchanan received another prestigious appointment, when President Bush tapped her to head the Justice Department's Office on Violence Against Women.


William Mercer, the U.S. attorney for Montana, continued his own multiyear campaign against obscenity in 2005, prosecuting two men for conspiring to transport obscene materials. Like Buchanan, Mercer has served simultaneously in an executive role at Justice; he was first tapped by Gonzales in 2005 to be principal associate deputy attorney general. His absence for duties in Washington prompted a chief federal judge to call Mercer's Montana office "a mess" from lack of leadership and to demand that Gonzales replace him, though Mercer still allotted time back home to convict the two men for shipping hardcore videotapes. That followed a 2004 prosecution he conducted against a purveyor of such video titles as "Ride'um Cowgirl" and "Dogs and Horses and Pigs and Chickens," a case Mercer hailed as Montana's first ever win on obscenity.


In September 2006, Mercer got a second promotion at Main Justice, when Bush appointed him to be associate attorney general. Now Gonzales' third in command, Mercer was involved in various communications concerning the group firing of U.S. attorneys, including telling Bogden and Charlton that they were being forced out so that other Bush appointees could have their posts.


Bogden maintained in the recent phone interview that he was never told by superiors of any concerns they may have had with him about policy or performance, including on obscenity.

Charlton gave similar testimony to Congress in early March, as did several of Bogden and Charlton's colleagues who were fired. In Charlton's case, top officials offered contradictory reasons for his dismissal. He also drew criticism over drug enforcement, though a senior Justice Department official defended Charlton at length on that issue in an e-mail exchange made public last month by congressional investigators.



Meanwhile, in testimony in March, Associate Deputy Attorney General William Moschella gave an entirely different set of reasons, telling lawmakers that Charlton was fired for his views on the death penalty and recording the confessions of suspects interviewed by law enforcement officials.
But Ward's criticism of Charlton on obscenity, which later appeared on a chart of alleged performance problems circulated to top Justice Department and White House officials, is an especially curious twist. The Arizona U.S. attorney's office in fact worked on two obscenity cases under Gonzales -- as many as any other U.S. attorney's office in the nation. Its case targeting the distribution of porn via SPAM was the first of its kind and had the potential to benefit the public much more broadly than any prior obscenity prosecution. The other case, on which Charlton's staff was assisting one of Ward's task force prosecutors from Washington, targeted a hardcore porn distributor called Five Star Video.


The Five Star Video case was already months under way when Ward visited in September 2006, but Ward was requesting that Charlton commit additional resources, according to an attorney knowledgeable about the staffing and caseload of the Arizona U.S. attorney's office. Ward wanted a local prosecutor to help take the case through trial because he was concerned about getting a conviction per local community standards with only a Washington lawyer sitting at the table.


At the time, the Arizona office was 20 percent understaffed with prosecutors, according to the attorney, and had already been forced to cut back on its criminal caseload. The office would've had to take a prosecutor off another case to go to trial with Ward's case. "You're literally robbing Peter to pay Paul," the attorney said. That concern was raised with Ward, particularly regarding cases on child exploitation. "There were enough of those cases for the Arizona office to be doing them 24/7," the attorney said. "Nobody debates that if resources are limited, those cases should be a priority over cases involving material with consenting adults."


The staffing shortages that forced such choices were raised with Gonzales at least as early as July 2006. That month, the attorney general received a letter from senior House Democrats Henry Waxman of California and John Conyers of Michigan detailing an investigation into budget cuts at the Justice Department. "U.S. attorneys offices across the nation are severely understaffed," the letter warned. "Due to hiring freezes, experienced prosecutors who leave for the private sector are not being replaced. In several key offices, 20% or more of prosecutor positions remain unfilled." The letter noted "eight to ten vacancies" in the Arizona office.


Between the strain on resources and an array of demands on criminal divisions around the country, Gonzales' obscenity conference in October 2006 raised some eyebrows. "It was meant to rally the troops and get them excited, and they presented it as another priority that needed to be done," said the senior law enforcement official who attended. "But people were wondering why we were having a national conference on this. For starters, what's obscene in Dubuque won't even bat an eye in Las Vegas. And we've got a lot of more serious problems out there."

Bud Cummins, who was the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas from 2001 until he was forced out last year, says that adult obscenity was discussed several times in his district after Gonzales declared it a priority, but no agency ever brought his office a case. "I wouldn't have refused, but we would have studied any case presented for any of the legitimate issues that make such prosecutions difficult," Cummins said by phone recently. "That is what we were getting paid for. I would have certainly been cautious about pursuing obscenity cases, even here in the heart of the Bible Belt." He said that the apparent heat on Bogden for exercising caution and discretion over obscenity prosecutions in a place like Las Vegas is "pretty ridiculous." As with every other issue raised about the fired U.S. attorneys' performance, he added, "nobody told Dan he wasn't doing what they wanted on obscenity. At best, that is lousy management. At worst, it is a pretext for something else they don't want to discuss."
In an Op-Ed in last Sunday's Washington Post, Gonzales gave a preview of his congressional testimony to come. He apologized for his poor handling of the U.S. attorney firings, while maintaining that none of them had been carried out for "an improper reason."


He ended on an upbeat note, emphasizing that he looked forward to furthering "the great goals of our department" in the coming weeks and months. "During the past two years," Gonzales wrote, "we have made great strides in securing our country from terrorism, protecting our neighborhoods from gangs and drugs, shielding our children from predators and pedophiles, and protecting the public trust by prosecuting public corruption."

Adult obscenity did not make his list.

Additional research for this story was contributed by Salon editorial fellow Jonathan Vanian.

[alkemical]

I wonder if all of this is somehow tied to the abramoff scandel?

[Bronco_Beerslug]

Another liar in the Bush cartel....

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Gonzales's Candor, Judgment Questioned by Senators (Update4)

By James Rowley and Robert Schmidt

April 19 (Bloomberg) -- Senators of both parties challenged U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's candor about the firing of eight U.S. attorneys and questioned his fitness to remain in office.

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee subjected Gonzales to a rapid-fire barrage of questions that demanded detailed explanations of the firings and his role in them. The controversy has triggered calls from lawmakers in both parties for his removal. President George W. Bush has stood by Gonzales, saying he has confidence in him.

``We have to evaluate whether you are really being forthright,'' said Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, the panel's top Republican. ``Your characterization of your participation is significantly, if not totally, at variance with the facts.''

Gonzales said he couldn't remember when he approved the firings and conceded that he relied almost solely on the advice of top Justice Department officials who reviewed the performance of U.S. attorneys. Nor could he recall a Nov. 27 meeting where other Justice Department officials say the plan was approved, the attorney general said.

``How can you be sure you made the decision?'' said Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the panel.

Political Reasons

House and Senate panels are investigating whether the U.S. attorneys were dismissed for improper political reasons. Today, the attorney general stood by his decisions. Still, Gonzales conceded that ``those eight attorneys deserved better'' treatment from him and the Justice Department.

Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn, facing Gonzales across the hearing room, demanded his resignation. ``The best way to put this behind us is your resignation,'' he said. The firings were handled incompetently, and ``there has to be consequences to accepting responsibility'' for those mistakes, he told Gonzales.

CONT.

[bendog]

That made my day, thanks. adult porn

[Garcia Bronco]

I swear...these guys are like a monkey effing a football

"Gonzales said he couldn't remember when he approved the firings "

[bendog]

Originally Posted by Garcia Bronco

I swear...these guys are like a monkey effing a football

"Gonzales said he couldn't remember when he approved the firings "

It's painful to see. I was sitting in the docs waiting room earlier reading a Time Mag. A story on Wolfowitz giving his girlfriend the raise. I said something like "The architect of the Iraq invasion, showing the same good judgment leading to the war, gave the bimbo the raise."

[Traveler]

After reading Gonzales' testimony, he should hand his resignation to Prez effective immediately.

How in the world can you fire someone and not provide compelling evidence as to why? Not to speak ill of the dead, but I guess he suddenly got a case of "convienient amnesia" like Reagan.

[Rohirrim]

I think the Bush cabal whould hold a contest to decide who was the biggest, most incompetent buffoon of the whole administration. I'll bet it would go down to the wire.

[Odysseus]

Originally Posted by claviculasolomonis

I wonder if all of this is somehow tied to the abramoff scandel?

I wonder if everything Jack was really involved in will ever come out?

[bendog]

I remember when Rummy was about to get the axe. There was media speculation that he was drawing a lot of attention from other incompetent players. In retrospect, Gore's charge that despite how good a cabinet JR could get, ultimately the potus had to choose which advice to take. Powell was competent, and perhaps ONeill may have been. It wasn't the tax cut per se that will sink us in a few years, it was the spending. Plus the tax cut was not weighted to the middle class, and there were no incentives to increase the savings rate.

[alkemical]

Originally Posted by quiettiger

I wonder if everything Jack was really involved in will ever come out?

I've read some stuff about him setting up sex parties for Politicians, etc - it has some eriee similarities to the boystown scandle in the '80s - So i don't think the extent how "bad" it is will ever come out.

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The Bush cartel of liars and players who orchestrated the firings of Republican U.S. attorneys...

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Legal Affairs
Administration Officials Eyed in Attorney Probe

NPR.org, April 19, 2007 · As Attorney General Alberto Gonzales goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, lawmakers want to know what role other members of the Bush administration played. Here, a look at some of the officials involved:


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Michael Battle: Battle ran the office in Washington, D.C., that oversaw all U.S. attorneys. He was directed to call the seven dismissed prosecutors to inform them that they were to be removed on Dec. 7, 2006.

Battle has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee behind closed doors. According to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), Battle told the committee that he was not aware of any performance problems with several of the fired prosecutors until just before he was asked to call them. The Justice Department has said that the prosecutors were fired for performance-related reasons.

Battle also told the committee that Gonzales was at a Nov. 27, 2006, meeting where a memo listing the U.S. attorneys to be fired was distributed, Schumer said. Gonzales has denied seeing that memo. Battle resigned as the scandal emerged, though the Justice Department maintains his departure was long-planned.





AP Photo Michael Elston: Chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. Elston was part of a senior group at the Department of Justice that was consulted about the U.S. attorney firings. He exchanged e-mails with Kyle Sampson prior to the firings, receiving updates on White House approvals. After the eight attorneys were fired, Elston coordinated when they would leave their jobs.

On Feb. 1, 2007, Elston sent an e-mail that was copied to Sampson, Monica Goodling, William Moschella and Paul McNulty, among others. In that e-mail, Elston says that H. E. "Bud" Cummins, who had been dismissed from his post as a U.S. attorney in Little Rock, Ark., in June 2006, had been asked to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Elston wrote, "He declined, but wanted to know if we wanted him to testify — would tell the truth about his circumstances." Sampson replied to all, saying, "I don't think he should. How would he answer: Did you resign voluntarily? Who told you? When did they tell you? What did they say?"

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Regent University

Monica Goodling: Until April 7, Goodling served as senior counsel to Gonzales and as liaison to the White House. She was in a key position to know what role the White House played in developing the plan to dismiss the U.S. attorneys, and her name is all over the Justice Department e-mails that have been released about the firings.

Goodling declined to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, pleading her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. In an affidavit sent to the committee, she cited the fact that "a senior Justice Department official" had blamed her for his false testimony. Shortly thereafter, she quit her job at the Justice Department.

But Congress still wants to hear from Goodling: The House Judiciary Committee is considering granting her immunity and forcing her to testify.

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William Kelley: Kelley was deputy to Harriet Miers while she was White House counsel. E-mails suggest Kelley was involved in discussions surrounding the firing of Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney for San Diego, who successfully prosecuted former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA) for corruption.

Kelley was with Miers when John McKay, the U.S. attorney for Seattle, was interviewed for a federal judgeship in the summer of 2006. During that interview, McKay later testified, he was asked to explain "criticism that I mishandled" the closely contested 2004 governor's race in Washington state, which was eventually won by a Democrat.

Republicans alleged voter misconduct in that race. Democrats contend that McKay was dismissed because he refused to investigate the charges — a claim administration officials deny.

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AFP/Getty Images

Paul McNulty: The deputy attorney general, McNulty was copied on e-mails from Sampson to Miers about the possible political fallout from dismissing the prosecutors.

Two months after the firings, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he would never endorse changing U.S. attorneys for political reasons, or making any changes that would jeopardize ongoing investigations.

McNulty has since acknowledged that some of his testimony before Congress was inaccurate and has blamed Goodling for failing to brief him properly on the firings.

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Harriet Miers: While she was White House Counsel, Miers discussed replacing all 93 U.S. attorneys. She worked with Kyle Sampson to whittle down the list of prosecutors to be dismissed. Their e-mail correspondence contradicts earlier Bush administration assertions that the White House played a minor role in the firings.

In September 2006, Miers e-mailed Sampson, asking about "any current thinking on holdover U.S. attorneys." Sampson replied with a list of vacancies, and of U.S. attorneys who might be leaving or "nominated for other things," those who were "in the process of being pushed out" and those "we now should be considering pushing out." Six of the eight fired attorneys were on this list.

Sampson has described Miers as one of the "principals" who made the final decisions about the dismissals. The other principal was the attorney general.

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William Moschella: Principal associate deputy attorney general. Moschella appears to have played a key role in inserting a provision into the reauthorized Patriot Act that let the attorney general appoint interim U.S. attorneys without Senate approval.

In an e-mail dated Nov. 11, 2005, sent to other administration officials, Moschella wrote: "We support eliminating the court's role" in appointing interim U.S. attorneys, "and believe the AG should have that authority alone."

In March, Moschella told Congress that most of the U.S. attorney firings had been performance-related. He said none of the fired prosecutors had been improperly pressured or removed to make room for Republican political allies. But several of the fired prosecutors testified before Congress about specific instances in which they felt political pressure from Republicans on corruption probes.

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Karl Rove: The chief political adviser to the White House, Rove has been tied to the firings most strongly by Kyle Sampson's testimony. Sampson said that political complaints about attorneys from Republican members of Congress were registered with Rove and with officials in the Justice Department. Sampson also said that he repeatedly discussed the firing plan with White House personnel who report to Rove.

White House e-mails show that, contrary to initial White House claims, Rove knew about the firing plan as early as January 2005, and had asked "how we planned to proceed." An e-mail from Sampson suggests Rove backed the dismissals. It read, in part: "If Karl thinks there will be political will to do it, then so do I."

Democrats now want Rove to turn over any e-mails on the firings that he sent from accounts with the Republican National Committee. They say Rove may have used these accounts to circumvent record-keeping requirements and deleted many of the relevant e-mails himself.

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Kyle Sampson: As chief of staff to Attorney General Gonzales, Sampson headed the plan to fire U.S. attorneys. He discussed various possible dismissal scenarios with then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers, as well as with other White House officials. Sampson resigned as chief of staff to the attorney general after Justice Department officials said he did not fully inform them of his communications with the White House regarding the firing of U.S. attorneys.

But on March 29, 2007, Sampson told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he did, in fact, keep Gonzales and other officials apprised of the plan "at every step of the way."

Sampson also told the panel that the "decision-makers in this case" were Gonzales and Harriet Miers. "I and others made staff recommendations, but they were approved and signed off on by principals," he said.

[Blueflame]

Rove's fingerprints and the Gonzales Fiasco

"n the pitiful performance by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in an attempt to save his job, the undercurrent of Karl Rove's role is obvious.

Rove has been behind about every act of political chicanery in President Bush's tenure and while Bush was governor of Texas.

How else can you explainRove's missing E-mails that you can bet were incriminating to his part in the firings of eight federal prosecutors? Rove's fingerprints are all over this sorry episode.

He has orchestrated attacks on Democrats opposed to the war in Iraq. His message seems to be: Don't say they are unpatriotic but give strong hints of it. He has made no secret of his master plan tokeep the GOP majority in placewith whatever it takes.
That scheme took a nose dive last November, and this war could shatter Rove's dream for a long time.

Politics ain't beanbag, as one wag put it long ago. Some Democratic consultants can play hardball too. But Rove likes to go beyond the rough stuff.

Go back to Rove's early days in judgeship races in Alabama. One opponent said Rovewasn't just satisfied with your defeat. He wanted to destroy you in the process.

In the book Bush's Brain, two Texas journalists documented Rove's methods. Not a pretty picture.

When Bush defeated Democratic Gov. Ann Richards in Texas, the whispering around the state was that Richards was a lesbian. She wasn't, but the smear probably worked. Rove denied any part in it.

In the presidential campaign of 2000, the primary race of John McCain was derailed in South Carolina afterRepublicans smeared him and his wife. (It is still difficult to understand how McCain can ever speak to Bush again.)

Where was Rove in all this? I have my suspicions.

Sen. John Kerry's war record was maligned by the Swift Boat ads run against him by wealthy Texans. This attack on Kerry's heroism in combat in Vietnam was disgusting. Again, I have my hunch that Rove knew about it all along.

Throughout Bush's tenure in Washington, Rove has been at the periphery with his brand of political magic.The president has been behind him all the way.

Karl Rove will likely keep his job until Bush leaves office in January 2009. Rove is likely to have moved on before then to ply his trade with another Republican hopeful.

If any Republican wants a consultant and strategist without a conscience, I've got your man.
Posted at 04:35 PM by John W. Mashek"

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion...nd_the_gon.htm

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Fired US Attorneys Doing OK

A year later, most have landed on their feet, in law partnerships or private-sector jobs where their compensation dwarfs government pay. Some carry scars from the experience. Six of the attorneys marked the anniversary of their firings at a private dinner in San Diego 10 days ago, where they
toasted one another for persevering.

"The great irony of this is, it has hardly tarnished any of our reputations," said Paul Charlton,the former U.S. attorney in Phoenix, who hosted the reunion.

Charlton, now a partner in a Phoenix law firm, says that as a group, the attorneys have fared much better than the department officials who orchestrated their demise.

Continued: http://www.latimes.com/services/site...ered.intercept

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Lawmakers vote to hold Bush aides in contempt

By Thomas Ferraro 2 hours, 1 minute ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate Judiciary Committee voted on Thursday to hold two men who have been top aides to President George W. Bush in contempt for refusing to comply with subpoenas in its probe of the firing of federal prosecutors.

On a largely party-line vote, the Democratic-led panel sent contempt of Congress citations against White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove to the full Senate for consideration.

"This is not a step I have wanted to take," said Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. He accused the White House of "stonewalling" and refusing to reach an acceptable compromise on providing documents and testimony.

In a battle dating back to shortly after Democrats took control of Congress in January, Bush has claimed executive privilege to protect aides from complying with subpoenas demanding documents and testimony in a congressional probe into the firing last year of nine federal prosecutors.

Setting the stage for a possible lengthy court fight, the committee rejected the privilege claim as unfounded.

At the White House, press secretary Dana Perino said, "The Democrats should know the futility of trying to press ahead with a criminal case."

In July, the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee also approved along party lines contempt citations against Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers.

It was unclear when the full House or Senate would vote on the citations. If approved, they would be sent to the U.S. Justice Department for prosecution.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey said during his confirmation hearing he did not believe the department could prosecute since it had deemed Bush's privilege claim as valid.

If the case does end up in the courts, it could takes years to conclude, long after Bush's term ends in January 2009.

Bush nominated Mukasey as attorney general after Alberto Gonzales, Bush's former White House counsel, resigned under pressure from lawmakers who questioned his competency and honesty.

Critics charged Gonzales had politicized the Justice Department and fired prosecutors because they were not seen as sufficiently loyal to the administration.

The White House has contended the dismissals were improperly handled, but did not involve any wrongdoing.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071213/...ss_contempt_dc