Monday, March 19, 2007

White House emails show a possible connection between attorney purge and Cunningham corruption probe

This is a big story here. We're going to start with The Washington Post here:

The U.S. attorney in San Diego notified the Justice Department of search warrants in a Republican bribery scandal last May 10, one day before the attorney general's chief of staff warned the White House of a "real problem" with her, a Democratic senator said yesterday.

The prosecutor, Carol S. Lam, was dismissed seven months later as part of an effort by the Justice Department and the White House to fire eight U.S. attorneys.

A Justice spokesman said there was no connection between Lam's firing and her public corruption investigations, and pointed to criticisms of Lam for her record on prosecuting immigration cases.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a television appearance yesterday that Lam "sent a notice to the Justice Department saying that there would be two search warrants" in a criminal investigation of defense contractor Brent R. Wilkes and Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who had just quit as the CIA's top administrator amid questions about his ties to disgraced former GOP congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

The next day, May 11, D. Kyle Sampson, then chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, sent an e-mail message to William Kelley in the White House counsel's office saying that Lam should be removed as quickly as possible, according to documents turned over to Congress last week.

"Please call me at your convenience to discuss the following," Sampson wrote, referring to "[t]he real problem we have right now with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires."

The FBI raided Foggo's home and former CIA office on May 12. He was indicted along with Wilkes on fraud and money-laundering charges on Feb. 13 -- two days before Lam left as U.S. attorney.

I don't know about you, but the timing here seems really suspicious. Now McClatchy has a little more information on this story:

Feinstein said Lam notified the Justice Department on May 10, 2006, that she planned to serve search warrants on Kyle Dustin "Dusty" Foggo, who'd resigned two days earlier as the No. 3 official at the CIA.

On May 11, 2006, Kyle Sampson, then Gonzales' chief of staff, sent an e-mail to deputy White House counsel William Kelley, asking Kelley to call to discuss "the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires."

The e-mail did not spell out what the "real problem" was, and it was unclear whether Kelley and Sampson talked later.

[....]

Lam oversaw the investigation that led to the corruption conviction of then-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., who pleaded guilty in late 2005 to accepting $2.4 million in bribes. He was sentenced in March 2006 to eight years and four months in prison.

On the same day last year as the Sampson e-mail, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Cunningham probe was being expanded to look at the actions of another California Republican, then-House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis.

Feinstein did not say how she learned that Lam had notified the Justice Department about her plans to serve search warrants on Foggo, who on May 8 had resigned as the executive director of the CIA. FBI agents seized records from Foggo's CIA offices and his suburban Vienna, Va., home on May 12.

Who Lam notified about her plans was unknown. Ordinarily, information about search warrants in high-profile cases would be passed to the U.S. attorney executive office in Washington. At the time, that office was headed by Michael Battle. Battle, who notified the dismissed U.S. attorneys they were being replaced in December, resigned March 5.

So Lam sent an email to the Justice Department saying that she would be issuing search warrants against Foggo on May 10, 2006. McClatchy says that the email would have been sent to the U.S. attorney executive office, which was headed up by Michael Battle. Now according to a March 5, 2007 CNN story, Battle not only personally informed the eight U.S. attorneys of their dismissal, but also announced that he would resign from his post on March 16. According to TPM Muckraker, Battle resigned his post, just two weeks ago, in order to pursue opportunities in the private sector. There is a lot of coincidental timing here that really doesn't pass the smell test. Lam sends her email regarding the search warrants, supposedly to Battle, on May 10th. Sampson sends his email regarding the "problem" with Carol Lam to William Kelly on May 11th. And now as this whole attorney scandal starts to break open in public, we've got Battle resigning his post to pursue opportunities in the private sector? Did Michael Battle forward Lam's email to Kyle Sampson? Did Battle resign his position as the head of the U.S. attorney executive office in Washington as a CYA to stay out of the attorney scandal? Even more, we've got a Los Angeles Times article that was published on May 11th, reporting that the U.S. attorney's office was looking into the connection between the Cunningham probe and GOP Representative Jerry Lewis, who was the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Sampson would have known that Lam was heading up the Duke Cunningham corruption probe--did he learn of Lam's email regarding the search warrants before the LA Times story was published? Was the "real problem" that Sampson refers to in his email to Kelly about Lam's expanding corruption investigation to include Lewis?

There is a lot more to this scandal.

One final little detail from the McClatchy story:

On Sunday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said he intends to force President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, to testify and will insist that the testimony be under oath. Leahy, who appeared on ABC's "This Week," said he is "sick and tired" of the administration's changing rationale for the firings.

It appears that Leahy is going to issue subpoenas to force Karl Rove to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his own involvement in this attorney scandal. The Bush White House will refuse to allow Rove to testify, claiming executive privilege. The end result here is that we're going to have a constitutional crisis in the next couple of weeks, where a Democratic Congress wants to investigate a Republican White House's political involvement in this attorney purge. We may just see this scandal end up in the Supreme Court.

More to come.

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