WASHINGTON - Internal Bush administration e-mails suggest that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales may have played a bigger role than he has acknowledged in the plan to fire several U.S. attorneys.
The e-mails, delivered to Congress Friday night, show that Gonzales attended an hourlong meeting on the firings on Nov. 27, 2006 - 10 days before seven U.S. attorneys were told to resign. The attorney general's participation in the session calls into question his assertion that he was essentially in the dark about the firings.
At a news conference last week, Gonzales said that he was aware that his aides were working on a plan to fire several U.S. attorneys but that he left the details to Kyle Sampson, his then-chief of staff, and other aides. Sampson agreed on Friday to testify about his role in the firings at a Senate hearing next week.
"We never had a discussion about where things stood," Gonzales said on March 13. "What I knew was that there was an ongoing effort that was led by Mr. Sampson ... to ascertain where we could make improvements in U.S. attorney performances around the country."
The Nov. 27 meeting in Gonzales' conference room came as Sampson was still trying to decide which federal prosecutors would be asked to step down. His final list targeted seven U.S. attorneys, who were told on Dec. 7 that they were being ousted. Another prosecutor had been asked to step down months earlier.
Alberto Gonzales lied. He was far more involved in the attorney purge than he has claimed to be. He attended an hour-long meeting regarding the firings ten days before they occurred? And he didn't know anything about it until that meeting? If that is so, then Gonzales is incompetent for not knowing what his chief of staff has been doing for that past year on the attorney firings--especially since Sampson was talking to the White House on those firings. What is more, this latest revelation of Gonzales knowing more about the attorney purge also suggests a greater involvement of the Bush White House in this scandal. According to McClatchy:
The latest documents also raise new questions about how involved White House political operatives were in the decision to fire the prosecutors.
In a Dec. 3, 2006, e-mail released Friday night, Scott Jennings, one of presidential adviser Karl Rove's aides, asked Sampson if he had a list of "all vacant, or about-to-be vacant, US Attorney slots." Jennings' request came on a Sunday, so Sampson offered to send it to him the next day.
Jennings, a political operative, had earlier passed along complaints from Republican Party activists about U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, who was fired from his job in New Mexico. Some Republicans were angry that Iglesias hadn't been more aggressive in investigating Democrats.
The e-mails also show that administration officials struggled to find a way to justify the firings and considered citing immigration enforcement simply because three of the fired prosecutors were stationed near the border with Mexico. While the e-mails don't provide evidence of partisan motives for the firings, they seem to undercut the administration's explanation that the prosecutors were dismissed for poor performance.
"The one common link here is that three of them are along the southern border so you could make the connection that DOJ is unhappy with the immigration prosecution numbers in those districts," Tasia Scolinos, a senior public affairs specialist at the Justice Department, told Catherine Martin, a White House communications adviser, in an e-mail.
"Which ones are they?" Martin replied.
Scolinos was clearly unprepared for the furor that resulted from the dismissals.
"I think most of them will resign quietly - they don't get anything out of making it public," she told Martin. "I don't see it as being a national story - especially if it phases in over a few months."
Their e-mail exchange on Nov. 17, 2006, offered little hint of the firestorm that's now fueling talk of Gonzales' resignation and threatens a legal showdown between Congress and the White House.
We have Scott Jennings, an aid to Karl Rove, talking to Kyle Sampson, chief of staff for Alberto Gonzales, where Jennings is asking Sampson to provide a list of all vacant U.S. attorney slots. Jennings requests this list on December 3, 2006--just four days before the seven attorneys were fired on December 7, 2006. There is something strange about this request. Why is a political aid to Karl Rove asking for a list of the vacant U.S. attorney slots? Why does Karl Rove want this list? And an even bigger question to ask here is exactly when did Rove's office know about these attorney firings, considering that they are asking for this list just four days before the actual firings? What concerns me here is that Karl Rove would start selecting Bush political loyalists to fill these attorney slots--just as Rove aid Timothy Griffin was selected as a U.S. attorney for Arkansas.
And there is more. There is the emails showing how the Bush administration officials are struggling to find a way to justify these firings. Just look at what Scolinos tells Martin in the one email regarding using immigration as an excuse for the firings: "The one common link here is that three of them are along the southern border so you could make the connection that DOJ is unhappy with the immigration prosecution numbers in those districts...." The Bush administration didn't have any reason for these attorney firings, so they were trying to make up some reasons along the way. Three attorneys were on the southern border? Let's use immigration as an excuse. Now while McClatchy says that there were no partisan motives for these firings, you still have to ask the question of why did these firings take place when there was no justified reason to fire these attorneys in the first place? Five of these attorneys had positive performance reviews, so poor performance wasn't the reason. This latest email shows that immigration was being used as an excuse. What I find especially ironic here is how Scolinos thought that the attorney purge would no be such a big deal--Scolinos believes that the attorneys would resign quietly, and not complain about it. And since the fired attorneys would not complain publicly about it, then the firings wouldn't become a national story and phase over in a few months. The Bush administration blew it, big time here. This is hubris--pure and simple. The Bush administration thought that they could get away with this firing, and not have it come out as a huge scandal. They were wrong. The attorneys felt that they were wrongly fired, and took their story to the public. The liberal blogs, and the press, started investigating this story. And now we've got a huge scandal, with the Bush White House sitting right in the middle of this mess.
Now let's go to the second McClatchy story, titled New U.S. attorneys seem to have partisan records:
WASHINGTON - Under President Bush, the Justice Department has backed laws that narrow minority voting rights and pressed U.S. attorneys to investigate voter fraud - policies that critics say have been intended to suppress Democratic votes.
Bush, his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, and other Republican political advisers have highlighted voting rights issues and what Rove has called the "growing problem" of election fraud by Democrats since Bush took power in the tumultuous election of 2000, a race ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Since 2005, McClatchy Newspapers has found, Bush has appointed at least three U.S. attorneys who had worked in the Justice Department's civil rights division when it was rolling back longstanding voting-rights policies aimed at protecting predominantly poor, minority voters.
Another newly installed U.S. attorney, Tim Griffin in Little Rock, Ark., was accused of participating in efforts to suppress Democratic votes in Florida during the 2004 presidential election while he was a research director for the Republican National Committee. He's denied any wrongdoing.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the four U.S. attorneys weren't chosen only because of their backgrounds in election issues, but "we would expect any U.S. attorney to prosecute voting fraud."
Taken together, critics say, the replacement of the U.S. attorneys, the voter-fraud campaign and the changes in Justice Department voting rights policies suggest that the Bush administration may have been using its law enforcement powers for partisan political purposes.
I had to read this story about three times here. The Bush administration was hiring attorneys who could help roll back civil rights and voting registration policies that protected minorities, and poor people, from voting fraud. These minority, and poor, voters were more likely to vote for Democratic candidates. In other words, the Bush administration was using the Justice Department to disenfranchise potential Democratic voters in future elections, thus cementing a Republican lock in future elections. President Bush's top adviser, Karl Rove, was apparently obsessed with a "'growing problem' of election fraud by Democrats." Now I'm not sure how much election fraud is committed by the Democratic Party, as opposed to election fraud committed by the Republican Party. That is a topic for another posting. What is important to understand is that Rove was obsessed with this issue of election fraud. That is a motive for appointing political loyalists into U.S. attorney positions, who can then help benefit both the Bush administration and the Republican Party. And that is what we see here with the McClatchy story:
Last April, while the Justice Department and the White House were planning the firings, Rove gave a speech in Washington to the Republican National Lawyers Association. He ticked off 11 states that he said could be pivotal in the 2008 elections. Bush has appointed new U.S. attorneys in nine of them since 2005: Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico. U.S. attorneys in the latter four were among those fired.
Rove thanked the audience for "all that you are doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the integrity of the ballot is protected." He added, "A lot in American politics is up for grabs."
The department's civil rights division, for example, supported a Georgia voter identification law that a court later said discriminated against poor, minority voters. It also declined to oppose an unusual Texas redistricting plan that helped expand the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. That plan was partially reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Frank DiMarino, a former federal prosecutor who served six U.S. attorneys in Florida and Georgia during an 18-year Justice Department career, said that too much emphasis on voter fraud investigations "smacks of trying to use prosecutorial power to investigate and potentially indict political enemies."
Several former voting rights lawyers, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of antagonizing the administration, said the division's political appointees reversed the recommendations of career lawyers in key cases and transferred or drove out most of the unit's veteran attorneys.
Bradley Schlozman, who was the civil rights division's deputy chief, agreed in 2005 to reverse the career staff's recommendations to challenge a Georgia law that would have required voters to pay $20 for photo IDs and in some cases travel as far as 30 miles to obtain the ID card.
A federal judge threw out the Georgia law, calling it an unconstitutional, Jim Crow-era poll tax.
In an interview, Schlozman, who was named interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City in November 2005, said he merely affirmed a subordinate's decision to overturn the career staff's recommendations.
He said it was "absolutely not true" that he drove out career lawyers. "What I tried to do was to depoliticize the hiring process," Schlozman said. "We hired people across the political spectrum."
Former voting rights section chief Joseph Rich, however, said longtime career lawyers whose views differed from those of political appointees were routinely "reassigned or stripped of major responsibilities."
In testimony to a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing this week, Rich said that 20 of the 35 attorneys in the voting rights section have been transferred to other jobs or have left their jobs since April 2005 and a staff of 26 civil rights analysts who reviewed state laws for discrimination has been slashed to 10.
He said he has yet to see evidence of voter fraud on a scale that warrants voter ID laws, which he said are "without exception ... supported and pushed by Republicans and objected to by Democrats. I believe it is clear that this kind of law tends to suppress the vote of lower-income and minority voters."
Other former voting-rights section lawyers said that during the tenure of Alex Acosta, who served as the division chief from the fall of 2003 until he was named interim U.S. attorney in Miami in the summer of 2005, the department didn't file a single suit alleging that local or state laws or election rules diluted the votes of African-Americans. In a similar time period, the Clinton administration filed six such cases.
Those kinds of cases, Rich said, are "the guts of the Voting Rights Act."
There has been a lot of questions regarding the motive of why the Bush administration fired these eight U.S. attorneys. And there have been a number of reasons brought up on this issue--to stifle U.S. attorney Carol Lam's investigation into the Duke Cunningham corruption case, to punish David Iglesias' for not indicting a Democratic legislator before the 2006 elections, or even to appoint Rove aid Griffin into Bud Cummins' position, in Arkansas, in order to dig up dirt on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's past for the 2008 elections. But what is important for this Bush administration is power--the ability to take control of power, to use such power for its own political purposes, and to maintain their power over the long term. If there ever is a prime Bush White House motive for the firing of these eight U.S. attorneys, this is it. Appoint Bush loyalists in the top U.S. attorney positions, who can then use the Justice Department to maintain GOP political power and dominance through stifling Democratic votes in future elections. If President Bush and Karl Rove were able to push this attorney purge through quietly, I seriously wonder how the 2008 presidential elections would have turned out--especially if the replacement attorneys also started concentrating their attention in supposed voter fraud cases that helped benefit the Republican Party?
2 comments:
excellent albeit scary article. This is the seedy underbelly of the Republican dirty tricks dept.
Thank you for your comment. You're right--it is a seedy underbelly of the Republican dirty tricks department. What is even more scary here is that the Bush administration was planning on "legalizing" the GOP dirty tricks department by appointing Bushie loyalists into the Justice Department, who could then take their marching orders from the administration. It is a disturbing thought of how this administration can think of nothing but its own absolute political power.
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