Document Dump Gives "Misleading Rationale" to U.S. Attorney Firings

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002801.php

Salon: Document Dump Gives "Misleading Rationale" to U.S. Attorney Firings
By Paul Kiel - March 19, 2007, 3:21 PM
As I wrote before, every justification given for the Justice Department's firing of the U.S. attorneys is eventually proven not just to be bogus, but spectacularly bogus.

The cases of Nevada's Daniel Bogden and Arizona's Paul Charlton are no different. As Salon reports, among last week's trove of documents from the Justice Department was one email that showed officials fretting that Bogden and Chartlon were "unwilling to take good cases" presented to them by the obscenity task force.

Except, of course, not only were those cases not "good," but both Charlton and Bogden ended up taking them on, Salon's Mark Follman reports.

Nevertheless, the email appears to have been included in last week's release in order to "shore up explanation for the firings," as Salon puts it.

But as the piece makes clear, this email might in and of itself have been a conscious "shoring up" of the firing. Daniel Bogden and Paul Charlton, after all, didn't make an appearance on Kyle Sampson's hit list until September of 2006. Was it a coincidence that just one week after Sampson included Bogden and Charlton as among those "we should now consider pushing out" in a September 13th email, DoJ officials started complaining in writing about the two of them? Maybe, maybe not. But with this story, suspicion has become the rule.

[seemslikeadream]

1. Smearing the U.S. attorneys

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/19/charlton/

March 19, 2007 | Evidence continues to mount that Bush administration officials deliberately misled Congress and the public about the firing en masse of eight U.S. attorneys last year. New details obtained by Salon about communications released by the administration to Congress last week reveal more holes in the administration's explanations for the firings.

Bush officials have denied the firings were politically motivated, and have stuck to their core story that all but one of the U.S. attorneys were sacked due to poor performance or policy disputes. That story began to fall apart when six of the attorneys testified on Capitol Hill in early March, and it continues to crumble in light of e-mails and other documents detailing long-running plans for the purge.

Under threat of subpoena by congressional Democrats, the administration has appeared so far to cooperate in turning over documents. Many of the documents released have contained damning details about partisan evaluation of U.S. attorneys -- praising those who "exhibited loyalty" to President Bush -- and White House involvement in the firings, which was previously denied.

Less attention has been paid, however, to how the administration has used the release of the documents to shore up its explanation for the firings, further disparaging the reputations of the attorneys sent packing. While at least some key political details were carefully redacted -- including names of the candidates top officials wanted to install in the vacated posts -- e-mails criticizing some of the fired U.S. attorneys were publicized. But the disclosure of those criticisms distorts the truth about the attorneys' work and why they may have really been fired, according to several sources who spoke with Salon.

[Broadslidin]

2. Phssst..., Bush's brain sure Composed a Bunch of additional 'good uns'..

last night....!

[seemslikeadream]

3. Paralysis Sets In as DOJ Faces Crisis

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/blogs/news_blog/070319/paralysis_sets_in_as_doj_faces.htm

Paralysis Sets In as DOJ Faces Crisis
March 19, 2007 | 1:11 PM ET | Permanent Link
More from chief legal affairs correspondent Chitra Ragavan:

The Justice Department is expected to release more than 400 pages of E-mails and documents by close of business today to comply with a demand from Democrats in Congress over the growing crisis regarding the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year. The crisis has engulfed the department and threatens to cut short Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's tenure.

"You have no idea," said one Justice official, "how bad it is here."

The fear that virtually any piece of communication will have to be turned over has paralyzed department officials' ability to communicate effectively and respond in unison to the crisis, as has the fact that senior Justice officials themselves say they still don't know the entire story about what happened that led to the crisis. So they are afraid that anything they put down on paper could be viewed as lies or obfuscation, when in fact, the story is changing daily as new documents are found and as the Office of Legal Counsel conducts its own internal probe into the matter.

The paralysis will affect the calculations that Gonzales must make this week as to whether he should stay or go. If Gonzales doesn't resign, there's little doubt that he will get few of his initiatives through for the rest of his tenure and that his people will spend months churning out documents at the behest of angry Democrats who will be investigating virtually anything that moves. But this could also give Gonzales an exit strategy, officials say. He could say that while neither he nor his subordinates did anything wrong, he has decided to resign for the greater good of the department and for justice at large.

The Bush administration is making its own calibrated calculations. A stubbornly loyal individual, the president has had trouble cutting his ties to his embattled cabinet secretaries. However, if he chooses to keep Gonzales on, he is at risk of seriously eroding political capital at a time when his administration is being criticized even by party loyalists.

[Jackpine Radical]

4. Info Please--If Gonzo resigns, might that short-circuit the investigations?

Or do you expect the hunt to continue until they nail Rove (at least--maybe others) to the wall?