There's your answer. White House personnel appear to have been systematically avoiding using their government emails on the job because they knew they might some day be subpoenaed. But as we noted earlier with Karl Rove, this may have been too clever by half. If the president's aides were using RNC emails or emails from other Republican political committees, they can't have even the vaguest claim to shielding those communications behind executive privilege. -- Josh Marshall
more on emails -- E-mail Controversy Prompts Many Aides To Stop Usage March 27, 2007 | 5:18 PM ET | Permanent Link The growing controversy over the firing of federal prosecutors and what administration officials knew about it is renewing concerns among Bush aides over the less-than-secret aspect of E-emails. Those concerns were elevated this week when a House chairman asked that all aides retain their E-mails. But just a week after E-mails in the U.S. attorneys case became a main focus of congressional Democrats probing the firings, several aides said that they stopped using the White House system except for purely professional correspondence. "We just got a bit lazy," said one aide. "We knew E-mails could be subpoenaed. We saw that with the Clintons but I don't think anybody saw that we were doing anything wrong." But the release of White House emails to the Democrats and the expanded request for more from Rep. Henry Waxman has iced the system. At least two aides said that they have subsequently bought their own private E-mail system through a cellular phone or Blackberry server. When asked how he communicated, one aide pulled out a new personal cellphone and said, "texting." http://www.usnews.com/usnews/blogs/..._controversy_prompts_many.htm?s_cid=rss:site1
Translation: "We never thought the Dems would win Congress and we knew the Repubs in Congress would never hold us accountable."
I think this is a matter of GW Bush not asking for or accepting Gonzales' resignation. GW Bush figures at this point he has nothing to lose in regard to his poll ratings and at this point its best to show loyalty to those most loyal even if it cost him political points.
The nail in the coffin. From the editors of the National Review -- Time to Go By The Editors The story of the eight fired U.S. attorneys has been relentlessly overhyped. We do not know that any of them was fired because the administration put its political interests ahead of his or her prosecutorial judgment. Sen. Dick Durbin’s recent insinuation that the attorneys who were not fired had kept their jobs by compromising their prosecutions was outrageous. If congressional Democrats are wrong to bluster, however, they are within their rights to investigate. They may yet turn up enough evidence to prove that some of the firings were improper violations of political norms. We do not need more evidence, however, to reach a conclusion about the suitability of Alberto Gonzales for the leadership of the Department of Justice. While we defended him from some of the outlandish charges made during his confirmation hearings, we have never seen evidence that he has a fine legal mind, good judgment, or managerial ability. Nor has his conduct at any stage of this controversy gained our confidence. His claim not to have been involved in the firings suggests that he was either deceptive or inexcusably detached from the operations of his own department. His deputy, Paul McNulty, insulted the fired prosecutors by claiming that they had been asked to resign for “performance-related issues.” But many of them received good reviews, and none of them said he was told about any disappointment with his performance. If Justice wanted to clear them out to make way for new blood, or to find attorneys who shared their prosecutorial priorities, that would have been perfectly legitimate. By saying what he did, McNulty guaranteed that the fired attorneys would lash out in the press. Gonzales’s latest tactic has been to concede that improper motives may have played a role in the firings, but to blame his underlings for any misconduct and to pledge to get to the bottom of it. What little credibility Gonzales had is gone. All that now keeps him in office, save the friendship of the president, is the conviction of many Republicans that removing him would embolden the Democrats. It is an overblown fear. The Democrats will pursue scandals, real or invented, whether or not Gonzales stays. But they have an especially inviting target in Gonzales. He cannot defend the administration and its policies even when they deserve defense. Alberto Gonzales should resign. The Justice Department needs a fresh start. http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTNjY2U3Yjk0NTRmNTcyNjg1M2EwM2FlNTA0OTYyMzU=
When the National Neocon Review says a Bush Cabinet member should resign, that person is as good as gone.
This adminstration is so deep in garbage and corruption - it's just unbelievable. How does 30% of this country still support it? That's amazing to me. Nothing can shock me at this point. If we found out that Bush was selling bullets to the insurgency in order to fund increase military spending in iraq - I would just shrug my shoulders. Amazing.
I'm listening to the Kyle Sampson hearings and I have to say that Arlen Specter is becoming one of my most respected politicians.
There is a large gulf between what Specter says and what he does. Specter has never failed to carry the Admin's water, though he tends to b**** about it.
I'd respect Specter a lot more if he reveled who from his staff inserted the clause in the Patriot Act that started the whole kurfuffle.
Ex-Aide: Gonzales Played Role in Firings By LAURIE KELLMAN The Associated Press Thursday, March 29, 2007; 12:17 PM http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/29/AR2007032900352_pf.html WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wrongly stated he was not involved in discussions about the firings of federal prosecutors, his former chief of staff told the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday. "I don't think the attorney general's statement that he was not involved in any discussions of U.S. attorney removals was accurate," testified Kyle Sampson, who quit this month as Gonzales' top aide. "I remember discussing with him this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign." Sampson said Gonzales attended a crucial meeting on the firings Nov. 27, 10 days before they were carried out. Under questioning by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., Sampson said Gonzales also was wrong when he said other senior Justice Department aides gave Congress inaccurate information because they hadn't been fully briefed about the firings. "I shared information with anyone who wanted it," Sampson said. Asked by Schumer if Gonzales' statement was false, Sampson replied, "I don't think it's accurate if the statement implies that I intended to mislead the Congress." In earlier testimony Sampson said the prosecutors were fired last year because they did not sufficiently support President Bush's priorities, defending a standard that Democrats called "highly improper." "The distinction between 'political' and 'performance-related' reasons for removing a United States attorney is, in my view, largely artificial," Sampson said. "Some were asked to resign because they were not carrying out the president's and the attorney general's priorities," he said. "In some sense that may be described as political by some people." He denied that any prosecutor was fired for pursuing corruption cases that might hurt the administration. "To my knowledge, nothing of the sort occurred here," Sampson told the committee. Gonzales planned to meet with U.S. attorneys from the mid-Atlantic region at Justice Department headquarters Thursday. It's part of a nationwide series of meetings to discuss the issue. The Judiciary Committee's senior Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, scolded Sampson for causing an uproar that has distracted the Justice Department and jeopardized Gonzales' job. "It is generally acknowledged that the Department of Justice is in a state of disrepair, perhaps even dysfunction, because of what has happened," Specter said. The remaining U.S. attorneys are skittish, he said, "not knowing when the other shoe may drop." Democrats rejected the concept of mixing politics with federal law enforcement. They accused the Bush administration of cronyism and trying to circumvent the Senate confirmation process by installing favored GOP allies in plum jobs as U.S. attorneys. "We have a situation that's highly improper. It corrodes the public's trust in our system of Justice," said Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy. "It's wrong." Sampson, who quit earlier this month amid the furor, disputed Democratic charges that the firings were a purge by intimidation and a warning to the remaining prosecutors to fall in line. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, offered Sampson some support, saying he had seen no evidence that the dismissals were "designed to impede or actually did impede a criminal investigation or prosecution." Sampson testified that federal prosecutors serve at the president's pleasure and are judged in large part on whether they pursue or resist administration policy. "I came here today because this episode has been personally devastating to me and my family," Sampson told the panel, saying he wanted to share what he knew with Congress and put the issue behind him. The Justice Department admitted Wednesday that it gave senators inaccurate information about the firings and presidential political adviser Karl Rove's role in trying to secure a U.S. attorney's post in Arkansas for one of his former aides, Tim Griffin. Justice officials acknowledged that a Feb. 23 letter to four Democratic senators erred in asserting that the department was not aware of any role Rove played in the decision to appoint Griffin to replace U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins in Little Rock, Ark. Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard Hertling said that certain statements in last month's letter to Democratic lawmakers appeared to be "contradicted by department documents included in our production." That admission, only hours before Sampson's testimony, took some of the sting out of Democrats' key pieces of evidence that the administration had misled Congress. Still, Sampson provided plenty of fodder. He acknowledged planning the firings as much as two years ago with the considered, collective judgment of a number of senior Justice Department officials. The Feb. 23 letter, which was written by Sampson but signed by Hertling, emphatically stated that "the department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin." It also said that "the Department of Justice is not aware of anyone lobbying, either inside or outside of the administration, for Mr. Griffin's appointment." Those assertions are contradicted by e-mails from Sampson to a White House aide, saying that getting Griffin appointed "was important to Harriet, Karl, etc." Former White House Counsel Harriet Miers was among the first people to suggest Griffin as a replacement for Cummins.
Bush's long history of tilting Justice The administration began skewing federal law enforcement before the current U.S. attorney scandal, says a former Department of Justice lawyer. By Joseph D. Rich JOSEPH D. RICH was chief of the voting section in the Justice Department's civil right division from 1999 to 2005. He now works for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. March 29, 2007 http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rich29mar29,0,3371050.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail THE SCANDAL unfolding around the firing of eight U.S. attorneys compels the conclusion that the Bush administration has rewarded loyalty over all else. A destructive pattern of partisan political actions at the Justice Department started long before this incident, however, as those of us who worked in its civil rights division can attest. I spent more than 35 years in the department enforcing federal civil rights laws — particularly voting rights. Before leaving in 2005, I worked for attorneys general with dramatically different political philosophies — from John Mitchell to Ed Meese to Janet Reno. Regardless of the administration, the political appointees had respect for the experience and judgment of longtime civil servants. Under the Bush administration, however, all that changed. Over the last six years, this Justice Department has ignored the advice of its staff and skewed aspects of law enforcement in ways that clearly were intended to influence the outcome of elections. It has notably shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights. From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities. At least two of the recently fired U.S. attorneys, John McKay in Seattle and David C. Iglesias in New Mexico, were targeted largely because they refused to prosecute voting fraud cases that implicated Democrats or voters likely to vote for Democrats. This pattern also extended to hiring. In March 2006, Bradley Schlozman was appointed interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo. Two weeks earlier, the administration was granted the authority to make such indefinite appointments without Senate confirmation. That was too bad: A Senate hearing might have uncovered Schlozman's central role in politicizing the civil rights division during his three-year tenure. Schlozman, for instance, was part of the team of political appointees that approved then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's plan to redraw congressional districts in Texas, which in 2004 increased the number of Republicans elected to the House. Similarly, Schlozman was acting assistant attorney general in charge of the division when the Justice Department OKd a Georgia law requiring voters to show photo IDs at the polls. These decisions went against the recommendations of career staff, who asserted that such rulings discriminated against minority voters. The warnings were prescient: Both proposals were struck down by federal courts. Schlozman continued to influence elections as an interim U.S. attorney. Missouri had one of the closest Senate races in the country last November, and a week before the election, Schlozman brought four voter fraud indictments against members of an organization representing poor and minority people. This blatantly contradicted the department's long-standing policy to wait until after an election to bring such indictments because a federal criminal investigation might affect the outcome of the vote. The timing of the Missouri indictments could not have made the administration's aims more transparent. This administration is also politicizing the career staff of the Justice Department. Outright hostility to career employees who disagreed with the political appointees was evident early on. Seven career managers were removed in the civil rights division. I personally was ordered to change performance evaluations of several attorneys under my supervision. I was told to include critical comments about those whose recommendations ran counter to the political will of the administration and to improve evaluations of those who were politically favored. Morale plummeted, resulting in an alarming exodus of career attorneys. In the last two years, 55% to 60% of attorneys in the voting section have transferred to other departments or left the Justice Department entirely. At the same time, career staff were nearly cut out of the process of hiring lawyers. Control of hiring went to political appointees, so an applicant's fidelity to GOP interests replaced civil rights experience as the most important factor in hiring decisions. For decades prior to this administration, the Justice Department had successfully kept politics out of its law enforcement decisions. Hopefully, the spotlight on this misconduct will begin the process of restoring dignity and nonpartisanship to federal law enforcement. As the 2008 elections approach, it is critical to have a Justice Department that approaches its responsibility to all eligible voters without favor.
Interesting, I wasn't aware that Sen. Specter was the one responsible for that clause considering he's very protective of Senate power and has been a skeptic of he Patriot Act.
Specter Detector U.S. attorney scandal update: Who's to blame for those alarming Patriot Act revisions? By Dahlia Lithwick Posted Monday, March 5, 2007, at 6:58 PM ET The U.S. attorneys purge scandal is heating up. The House and Senate have convened hearings for Tuesday, promising an orgy of named names and pointed fingers. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., now admits what he once denied: that he may have had a hand in the removal of New Mexico's U.S. attorney. And the senior Justice Department official who personally canned the U.S. attorneys has just announced the date of his resignation. But as the political scandal spreads, the question at its heart gets less and less public attention: Who changed the Patriot Act to make it easier to replace U.S. attorneys without oversight, and how did it happen with nobody looking? U.S. attorneys are well aware that they serve at the president's pleasure, but new wording in the Patriot Act made it worth the president's while to fire a big, fat lot of them and hire a group of new ones. And while certainly half the scandal is that the Justice Department did that—let eight U.S. attorneys go, seemingly for no reason—we seem to have forgotten that even without the mass firings, this law had been changed in the sneakiest way imaginable. The background: When Congress reauthorized the Patriot Act last year, it included little-noticed language that changed the way U.S. attorneys would be appointed if their predecessors were removed in the middle of their term. Under the old regime, interim U.S. attorneys needed to be confirmed by the Senate after 120 days. If they weren't, federal district judges could select their replacement. The new language removed both judicial and congressional oversight of the interim U.S. attorneys, letting DOJ anoint them indefinitely. This served three important goals: consolidating presidential power, diminishing oversight, and ensuring that "interim" prosecutors had permanent jobs. On Feb. 6, when the Senate held hearings on the issue of prosecutorial independence, former judiciary committee Chairman Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., proudly claimed to have been as clueless as the rest of us. Denying New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer's claim that he or his staff had "slipped the new provision into the Patriot Act in the dead of night," Specter asserted, "The first I found out about the change in the Patriot Act occurred a few weeks ago when Sen. [Dianne] Feinstein approached me on the floor." Specter added that he only looked into how the provision was altered after Feinstein told him about it. As he explained, "I then contacted my very able chief counsel, Michael O'Neill, to find out exactly what had happened. And Mr. O'Neill advised me that the requested change had come from the Department of Justice, that it had been handled by Brett Tolman, who is now the U.S. attorney for Utah, and that the change had been requested by the Department of Justice because there had been difficulty with the replacement of a U.S. attorney in South Dakota." Thus, at least according to Specter, O'Neill had merely been following orders from the Department of Justice when he snuck new language into the Patriot Act that would consolidate executive branch authority. Huge relief there. Now, it's not necessarily outrageous that Sen. Specter didn't know what his subordinate slipped into the legislation. The Patriot Reauthorization was a long and hotly debated bill. While one might hope that the committee chairman would have read the legislation, you can understand that he might skip a clause or two in the melee. But this was not some minor technical amendment. It was a substantial enhancement of executive power. So, Specter now finds himself in an exceedingly strange position: His staff either lied to him or misled him about what he acknowledges to be a significant legal change. He himself observed at that same hearing: "I did not slip it in and I do not slip things in. That is not my practice. If there is some item which I have any idea is controversial I tell everybody about it." So, Specter concedes that the item is controversial. He denies knowing about it. That implies it was O'Neill who slipped the new language in, and misled Specter and the Senate. And yet, at least as far as I can tell, nobody in power has said a word about O'Neill's conduct, and not one iota of blame has been laid at his doorstep. Joe Conason noted in Salon last month that 1) O'Neill is a former Clarence Thomas clerk, and 2) he joined Specter's staff at the same time Specter was fighting accusations of being wobbly in his fealty to the White House. The Justice Department has been quite clear that this change was needed to do away with judicial incursions into an executive function: They felt it improper that judges were effectively making executive-branch appointments. And it now seems that either the DOJ snookered O'Neill, O'Neill snookered Specter, or Specter snookered his colleagues. But any way you slice it, the executive seems to have encroached on congressional turf in order to expand executive turf. Whether Specter actually knew that O'Neill was carrying water for Karl Rove and turned a blind eye, or whether he was duped by O'Neill may never be known. But either way, it seems to me that Specter's office has done terrible damage to the very notion of independent and co-equal branches of government in this affair, and has yet to be called to account for it. Given that respect and esteem for co-equal independent branches of government is one of the senator's sacred cows, it's doubly ironic that no one has questioned him on this. It's a good thing that the ousted U.S. attorneys will testify before the House and the Senate. It will clear up a good deal of confusion about the Justice Department's claim that there was something wrong with their job performance. But it seems to me that that's precisely 50 percent of the scandal here. And there are some other folks deserving of subpoenas as well. Mr. O'Neill and Mr. Tolman spring to mind. The outrage isn't merely that the Justice Department abused its power to hire and fire. The real scandal is that it rewrote federal laws to do so, yet nobody seems to know who did it or why. Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor. http://www.slate.com/id/2161260/pagenum/2/
