Politics

by hilzoy

From the Financial Times:

“Paul Wolfowitz’s handling of a secondment deal for his girlfriend Shaha Riza broke the World Bank’s code of conduct, three staff rules and the terms of his contract as bank president, the final report by a panel investigating his role has concluded.

The report asks the bank’s board to consider, in the light of its findings, “whether Mr Wolfowitz will be able to provide the leadership needed to ensure that the bank continues to operate to the fullest extent possible in achieving its mandate”.

It suggested the board should take into account in making this judgment the “damage done to the reputation of the World Bank group and its president, the lack of confidence expressed by internal and external stakeholders in the present leadership, the erosion of operational effectiveness…and the important strategy and governance challenges the World Bank group is facing”.

Following the release of the panel’s report, 37 of the bank’s 39 country directors sent a letter to the board demanding it “practice what it preaches on governance and accountability.”

The letter, obtained by the Financial Times, stopped short of directly recommending that Mr Wolfowitz go. (…)

The report concluded that Mr Wolfowitz broke staff rule 3.01 on professional conduct, rule 5.02 on external service and 6.01 on pay.

It stated that the initial pay rise, 8 per cent a year, later rises and presumed additional promotion on Ms Riza’s return to the bank were excessive and never envisaged by the bank’s ethics committee.

It said Mr Wolfowitz’s attitude evidenced “questionable judgment and a preoccupation with self interest”.

The report also concluded that Mr Wolfowitz violated the terms of his contract, which require him to abide by the bank’s code of conduct.”

Actually, the report (pdf) also found that Wolfowitz’ contract “requires Mr. Wolfowitz to avoid any conflict of interest, real or apparent”, and that he violated that provision as well.

More below.

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by hilzoy

This tells you almost* all you need to know about this administration: when they learn that one of their programs is illegal, they don’t stop immediately and try to figure out how to learn what they need to know within the law. No: they go screeching off to the the hospital to try to pester John Ashcroft, who doesn’t actually have the power they need, into signing off on it, because they know that the person he has left in charge in his absence won’t sign off on a violation of law, and if pestering a seriously ill and possibly disoriented person who’s in intensive care is what they have to do to get their way, then the law and compassion be damned.

From ThinkProgress, James Comey’s testimony. [UPDATE: Via Marty Lederman, the full transcript (pdf).] He seems to be talking about the warrantless surveillance program:

“COMEY: We had concerns as to our ability to certify its legality, which was our obligation for the program to be renewed.

The attorney general was taken that very afternoon to George Washington Hospital, where he went into intensive care and remained there for over a week. And I became the acting attorney general.

And over the next week — particularly the following week, on Tuesday — we communicated to the relevant parties at the White House and elsewhere our decision that as acting attorney general I would not certify the program as to its legality and explained our reasoning in detail, which I will not go into here. Nor am I confirming it’s any particular program. That was Tuesday that we communicated that.

The next day was Wednesday, March the 10th, the night of the hospital incident. And I was headed home at about 8 o’clock that evening, my security detail was driving me. And I remember exactly where I was — on Constitution Avenue — and got a call from Attorney General Ashcroft’s chief of staff telling me that he had gotten a call… (…)
That he had gotten a call from Mrs. Ashcroft from the hospital. She had banned all visitors and all phone calls. So I hadn’t seen him or talked to him because he was very ill.

And Mrs. Ashcroft reported that a call had come through, and that as a result of that call Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales were on their way to the hospital to see Mr. Ashcroft. (…)

Told my security detail that I needed to get to George Washington Hospital immediately. They turned on the emergency equipment and drove very quickly to the hospital.

I got out of the car and ran up — literally ran up the stairs with my security detail.

SCHUMER: What was your concern? You were in obviously a huge hurry.

COMEY: I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to that.

SCHUMER: Right, OK.

COMEY: I was worried about him, frankly.

And so I raced to the hospital room, entered. And Mrs. Ashcroft was standing by the hospital bed, Mr. Ashcroft was lying down in the bed, the room was darkened. And I immediately began speaking to him, trying to orient him as to time and place, and try to see if he could focus on what was happening, and it wasn’t clear to me that he could. He seemed pretty bad off. (…)

I tried to see if I could help him get oriented. As I said, it wasn’t clear that I had succeeded.

I went out in the hallway. Spoke to Director Mueller by phone. He was on his way. I handed the phone to the head of the security detail and Director Mueller instructed the FBI agents present not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances. And I went back in the room. (…)

And it was only a matter of minutes that the door opened and in walked Mr. Gonzales, carrying an envelope, and Mr. Card. They came over and stood by the bed. They greeted the attorney general very briefly. And then Mr. Gonzales began to discuss why they were there — to seek his approval for a matter, and explained what the matter was — which I will not do.

And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me. He lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter, rich in both substance and fact, which stunned me — drawn from the hour-long meeting we’d had a week earlier — and in very strong terms expressed himself, and then laid his head back down on the pillow, seemed spent, and said to them, But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general.

SCHUMER: But he expressed his reluctance or he would not sign the statement that they — give the authorization that they had asked, is that right?

COMEY: Yes.

And as he laid back down, he said, But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not the attorney general. There is the attorney general, and he pointed to me, and I was just to his left.

The two men did not acknowledge me. They turned and walked from the room.”

Comey was prepared to resign over this:

“SCHUMER: OK.

Can you tell us what happened the next day?

COMEY: The program was reauthorized without us and without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality. And I prepared a letter of resignation, intending to resign the next day, Friday, March the 12th.

SCHUMER: OK.

And that was the day, as I understand it, of the Madrid train bombings. (…) Yet, even in light of that, you still felt so strongly that you drafted a letter of resignation.

COMEY: Yes.

SCHUMER: OK.

And why did you decide to resign? COMEY: I just believed…

SCHUMER: Or to offer your resignation, is a better way to put it?

COMEY: I believed that I couldn’t — I couldn’t stay, if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis. I just simply couldn’t stay.”

Apparently, Ashcroft, Ashcroft’s chief of staff, Comey’s chief of staff, FBI Director Mueller, and perhaps others were prepared to join him. Good for them.

“SCHUMER: OK.

So let me just (inaudible) — this is an amazing story, has an amazing pattern of fact that you recall. […] So in sum, it was your belief that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card were trying to take advantage of an ill and maybe disoriented man to try and get him to do something that many, at least in the Justice Department, thought was against the law? Was that a correct summation?

COMEY: I was concerned that this was an effort to do an end-run around the acting attorney general and to get a very sick man to approve something that the Department of Justice had already concluded — the department as a whole — was unable to be certified as to its legality. And that was my concern.”

One of the two men who appeared in Ashcroft’s room in the ICU to try to get him to approve the program was Alberto Gonzales. And that tells you everything you need to know about Alberto Gonzales’ character and his commitment to the rule of law.

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by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

“President Bush would veto the new Iraq spending bill being developed by House Democrats because it includes unacceptable language restricting funding, White House press secretary Tony Snow said Wednesday morning.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Snow said of the bill: “There are restrictions on funding and there are also some of the spending items that were mentioned in the first veto message that are still in the bill.””

The quick version of the bill (i.e., the one you’d get from the media) is: this bill funds the war for two months, after which the President has to submit a report on the Iraqis’ progress towards meeting various benchmarks. (He doesn’t have to actually certify that the Iraqis are making any actual progress; he just has to submit a report.) The President might not like either provision, but I honestly can’t see how either can be viewed as a good reason to veto the bill. If the President does veto it, I think he runs a very serious risk of being seen as the unreasonable one (as, in fact, he will be.)

The longer version of the bill is below the fold. But I can’t see how it helps his case either.

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by hilzoy

Via TPM: Murray Waas has a really important story in the National Journal. It’s worth reading in its entorety, since Waas reports that Alberto Gonzales first took complete control of all hiring and firing authority of DoJ political appointees who don’t need Senate confirmation — which is to say, large swaths of the upper levels of the DoJ — and then delegated that authority to Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling. Recall that both Sampson and Goodling are in their thirties, neither has much legal experience at all, and Goodling was the White House liaison.

What I think this means is that the political operation at the White House was taking over the upper levels of the Department of Justice in a way that goes far, far beyond the sorts of politicization that are usually regarded as scandalous. It’s scandalous if the DoJ decides to prosecute someone Just because that person is a political enemy, or not to prosecute someone because he or she is a political ally. It’s way, way past scandalous if the White House political operation tries to make the DoJ into its enforcement arm.

Excerpts:

“Attorney General Alberto Gonzales signed a highly confidential order in March 2006 delegating to two of his top aides — who have since resigned because of their central roles in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys — extraordinary authority over the hiring and firing of most non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department. A copy of the order and other Justice Department records related to the conception and implementation of the order were provided to National Journal.

In the order, Gonzales delegated to his then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, and his White House liaison “the authority, with the approval of the Attorney General, to take final action in matters pertaining to the appointment, employment, pay, separation, and general administration” of virtually all non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department, including all of the department’s political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation. Monica Goodling became White House liaison in April 2006, the month after Gonzales signed the order.

The existence of the order suggests that a broad effort was under way by the White House to place politically and ideologically loyal appointees throughout the Justice Department, not just at the U.S.-attorney level. Department records show that the personnel authority was delegated to the two aides at about the same time they were working with the White House in planning the firings of a dozen U.S. attorneys, eight of whom were, in fact, later dismissed.

A senior executive branch official familiar with the delegation of authority said in an interview that — as was the case with the firings of the U.S. attorneys and the selection of their replacements — the two aides intended to work closely with White House political aides and the White House counsel’s office in deciding which senior Justice Department officials to dismiss and whom to appoint to their posts. “It was an attempt to make the department more responsive to the political side of the White House and to do it in such a way that people would not know it was going on,” the official said.”

More excerpts and comments below the fold.

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by hilzoy

Excerpts from his column in tomorrow’s NYT, plus comments, below the fold.

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by hilzoy

Via Matt Yglesias, the NYT:

“A federal panel responsible for conducting election research played down the findings of experts who concluded last year that there was little voter fraud around the nation, according to a review of the original report obtained by The New York Times.

Instead, the panel, the Election Assistance Commission, issued a report that said the pervasiveness of fraud was open to debate.

The revised version echoes complaints made by Republican politicians, who have long suggested that voter fraud is widespread and justifies the voter identification laws that have been passed in at least two dozen states.

Democrats say the threat is overstated and have opposed voter identification laws, which they say disenfranchise the poor, members of minority groups and the elderly, who are less likely to have photo IDs and are more likely to be Democrats.

Though the original report said that among experts “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud,” the final version of the report released to the public concluded in its executive summary that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.” (…)

A number of election law experts, based on their own research, have concluded that the accusations regarding widespread fraud are unjustified. And in this case, one of the two experts hired to do the report was Job Serebrov, a Republican elections lawyers from Arkansas, who defended his research in an e-mail message obtained by The Times that was sent last October to Margaret Sims, a commission staff member.

“Tova and I worked hard to produce a correct, accurate and truthful report,” Mr. Serebrov wrote, referring to Tova Wang, a voting expert with liberal leanings from the Century Foundation and co-author of the report. “I could care less that the results are not what the more conservative members of my party wanted.”

He added: “Neither one of us was willing to conform results for political expediency.””

Note that that last email is not a comment in response to the Times’ questions; it’s an email sent to a staff member of the commission. I leave to your imaginations what earlier questions or remarks by the commission or its staffers might have prompted one of the study’s authors to write: “I could care less that the results are not what the more conservative members of my party wanted.”

Commentary below the fold.

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by hilzoy

I can’t imagine what we did to deserve the level of dishonesty this administration has been throwing at us:

“It has now been 57 days since I requested that Congress pass emergency funds for our troops. Instead of passing clean bills that fund our troops on the front lines, the House and Senate have spent this time debating bills that undercut the troops, by substituting the judgment of politicians in Washington for the judgment of our commanders on the ground, setting an arbitrary deadline for withdrawal from Iraq, and spending billions of dollars on pork barrel projects completely unrelated to the war. (…)

Democrat leaders in Congress seem more interested in fighting political battles in Washington than in providing our troops what they need to fight the battles in Iraq. If Democrat leaders in Congress are bent on making a political statement, then they need to send me this unacceptable bill as quickly as possible when they come back. I’ll veto it, and then Congress can get down to the business of funding our troops without strings and without delay.

If Congress fails to act in the next few weeks, it will have significant consequences for our men and women in the Armed Forces (…)

In a time of war, it’s irresponsible for the Democrat leadership — Democratic leadership in Congress to delay for months on end while our troops in combat are waiting for the funds. The bottom line is this: Congress’s failure to fund our troops on the front lines will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines. And others could see their loved ones headed back to the war sooner than they need to. That is unacceptable to me, and I believe it is unacceptable to the American people.

Members of Congress say they support the troops. Now they need to show that support in deed, as well as in word. Members of Congress are entitled to their views and should express them. Yet debating these differences should not come at the expense of funding our troops.

Congress’s most basic responsibility is to give our troops the equipment and training they need to fight our enemies and protect our nation. They’re now failing in that responsibility, and if they do not change course in the coming weeks, the price of that failure will be paid by our troops and their loved ones.”

Where to begin?

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by hilzoy

As everyone undoubtedly knows, Monica Goodling has decided to take the fifth rather than testify before Congress:

“Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s senior counselor yesterday refused to testify in the Senate about her involvement in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Monica M. Goodling, who has taken an indefinite leave of absence, said in a sworn affidavit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that she will “decline to answer any and all questions” about the firings because she faces “a perilous environment in which to testify.” (…)

Goodling contended in her affidavit yesterday that Leahy and other lawmakers, including Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Linda T. Sanchez (D-Calif.), had already “drawn conclusions” about the prosecutors’ firings.

Dowd said the “hostile and questionable environment in the present Congressional proceedings is at best ambiguous; more accurately, the environment can be described as legally perilous for Ms. Goodling.””

The full letter from Ms. Goodling’s lawyer, with her affidavit, is here (pdf). As lots of people have pointed out, the Fifth Amendment says that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”; and this means that while Goodling clearly has the right to take the fifth if she believes that her testimony might incriminate her, it does not mean that that she can decline to testify just because she thinks her questioners might be biassed or mean. I like Sandy Levinson’s way of making this point:

“What is the precise nature of the ostensible “constitutional right” that she is invoking on the advice of counsel? Can we now explain to the IRS that we are not sending in our tax return this year because, given Al Capone and other examples, we just don’t trust the IRS to play fair with people it views as public enemies (and, in the age of the Bush-Cheney Administration, that could be a very broad category indeed)? If not, why not? Or is there some special principal–call it the “non-oversight one”–that applies especially to Congress? And, by the way, does it apply only to officials of the Executive Branch, or can any private citizen invoke the “I really don’t like you people and therefore I’m taking the 5th” defense? It would, of course, be entirely different if she were forthrightly willing to say “I’m not sure that everything I did was really legal and therefore I’m going to be prudent and refuse to talk about any of it,” which is certainly an inference one can draw from most persons’ invocation of the Fifth Amendment. “

Dan Froomkin also makes a good point about Goodling’s lawyer’s letter:

“And he cites “numerous examples of witnesses who gave testimony before Congress and then faced criminal investigations and even indictments for perjury, false statements, or obstruction of congressional proceedings, including United States v. Poindexter, United States v. North, United States v. Safavian, and United States v. Weissman. . . .

“[T]he potential for legal jeopardy for Ms. Goodling from even her most truthful and accurate testimony under these circumstances is very real. One need look no further than the recent circumstances and proceedings involving Scooter Libby.”

But here’s one thing all those people had in common: They lied.”

Christy at Firedoglake has some interesting background on Goodling’s lawyer, which leads her to conclude that “Ms. Goodling either has a nice cash stash, that someone else is footing her legal bills, or that Mr. Dowd is an old family friend, because a man with this background does not come cheaply to the negotiation table”. Here’s a decent profile of Ms. Goodling, and here’s an article about the law school she has her degree from. (It was founded by Pat Robertson.)

So what, I asked myself, can I bring to the table, now that everyone else has said such illuminating and insightful things? Well: I thought of one admittedly tiny thing.

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by hilzoy

Josh Marshall has another very interesting story up tonight. It concerns Mitchell Wade, a defense contractor who pled guilty to bribing Duke Cunningham about a year ago. To set the scene, recall this timeline:

1993: Mitchell Wade incorporates MZM Inc.

1993-2001: MZM reports no revenue from any government contract, or, for that matter, from anywhere else.

November 2001: MZM begins buying things for Duke Cunningham:

“In November 2001, a company check for $12,000 paid for three nightstands, a leaded-glass cabinet, an antique washstand and four armoires.

In December 2001, a $50,000 company check was sent to a mortgage banker, who in turn made out a check to Cunningham for the same amount. In January 2002, the company’s American Express card was used to purchase a leather sofa and a sleigh bed for Cunningham.

In all, more than $100,000 in cash and furnishings were given to Cunningham even before MZM had posted its first revenue.”

May 2002: “Although MZM had no experience with government contracts, the General Services Administration in May 2002 placed the company on a list of approved information technology service providers, a key step for the company to get business from federal agencies.”

Summer, 2002: According to Cunningham’s sentencing recommendation:

“In the summer of 2002, through an intermediary, Cunningham approached the seller of a 42 foot Carver yacht then named the ‘Buoy Toy’ (…) and eventually negotiated a price.”

August 2002: “The first contract, worth $140,000, came from the White House — to provide office furniture and computers for Vice President Dick Cheney.”

August 30, 2002, just two weeks later: “Wade purchased a yacht, later christened “Duke-Stir,” for $140,000, according to court documents. Cunningham used the yacht, docked at the Capital Yacht Club, as his home in Washington — and the scene of parties for lobbyists and others.”

Isn’t that interesting? A company that has never had a government contract before, but that has been paying off a powerful Congressman, suddenly lands a contract from the Vice President’s office, and two weeks later the head of that company turns around and buys a yacht for the use of that same Congressman, a yacht that the Congressman had previously negotiated to a price for. And, by an astonishing coincidence, that price was the exact same amount that the contractor’s contract was for. I mean, what are the odds of that?

I’ve always wondered what, exactly, that contract with Cheney’s office was for. Not being an investigative reporter, however, I wasn’t able to find out. Luckily for all of us, the investigative reporter who broke the original Cunningham story did, and apparently he’s written about it in a forthcoming book. Josh Marshall reports what he found:

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by hilzoy

Via Dan Froomkin, here’s an article from the National Journal:

“White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove may have forfeited potential claims of executive privilege over the dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys — if he communicated about the matter outside the White House e-mail system, using his Republican National Committee e-mail account or RNC equipment. Or at least that’s a legal possibility posed by rapidly advancing electronic technology and the evolving work habits of busy White House officials.”

Actually, while I am not a lawyer, I don’t think this is a particularly good argument: surely what matters for executive privilege claims is whether or not someone is advising the President, not what email system he’s using. [UPDATE: In comments, the clear consensus is that I am wrong.*] The more interesting part comes later:

“According to one former White House official familiar with Rove’s work habits, the president’s top political adviser does “about 95 percent” of his e-mailing using his RNC-based account. Many White House officials, including aides in the Political Affairs Office, use the RNC account as an alternative to their official government e-mail addresses to help keep their official and political duties separate. Although some White House officials use dual sets of electronic devices for that purpose, Rove prefers to use his RNC-provided BlackBerry for convenience, the former official said.

No original e-mails or documents created by Rove have emerged among the more than 3,000 pages of communications offered to Congress in its probe of the attorney firings, although several e-mails from other White House and Justice Department officials containing references to him were among the documents provided. (…)

President Bush pledged this week to “release all White House documents and e-mails involving direct communications with the Justice Department or any other outside person, including members of Congress and their staff, related to this issue.” The president, echoed by White House Counsel Fred Fielding in a March 20 letter to lawmakers, said that any congressional interviews with White House officials or voluntary surrender of e-mails and materials by the president will not disclose communications between or among White House officials. That would eliminate voluntary disclosure of possible e-mail discussions between Rove and Miers, and between Rove and Jennings or other White House aides who frequently use BlackBerry devices and may have conducted official White House business using their RNC e-mail accounts. Bush said on Tuesday that he would go to court, if necessary, to “oppose any attempts to subpoena White House officials.”

If Rove or other White House officials used RNC e-mail to discuss the prosecutor firings or the subsequent controversy — and if their discussions went to e-mail recipients who use the White House servers — their communications are captured and would be considered presidential records owned by the American people for purposes of eventual public disclosure under the Presidential Records Act, by virtue of both subject matter and official position, according to the archives expert.

White House and RNC spokespeople did not respond to National Journal questions about Rove’s use of the RNC e-mail system and the preservation of communications he created on its equipment. The former White House official, speaking on background, said that although the RNC had a policy to purge e-mails after a short period of time, Rove’s e-mails on its system and those of a few other White House aides in sensitive positions were preserved by the RNC “to protect Karl.” Even with a policy of deleting e-mails from servers, information-technology experts say, organizations rarely erase data entirely.”

The law governing presidential records is here. Presidential records include documents “relating to the political activities of the President or members of his staff” that “relate to or have a direct effect upon the carrying out of constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President” (US Code 44:22:2201:2A). The Presidential Records Act requires that they be preserved. The White House has a system for doing that:

“(T)o fulfill its statutory obligations under the PRA, the White House email system automatically copies all messages created by staff and sends them to the White House Office of Records Management for archiving. It appears that the White House deliberately bypassed the automatic archiving function of its own email system that was designed to ensure compliance with the PRA.”

The law does not, as far as I can tell, set out any penalties for not preserving presidential records, presumably because, well, Presidents are supposed to take care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and all that. It is not legal for Rove to use a server whose contents are periodically purged; and speaking as an academic, it’s horrible to think that all that history is being put in jeopardy.

Moreover, as this dKos diary points out, it could also be a serious security risk. Do you think that the US Government has installed all the things it uses to keep White House communications secure on the RNC servers? Would that even be legal? (I hope not: I don’t really want my hard-earned tax dollars going to beef up security on the RNC’s computer network — or the Democrats’ either. That’s not what we pay taxes for.) If the RNC’s communications aren’t secured, however, then Karl Rove has found one more way to compromise national security.

Honestly: I have had more than enough of people in this administration acting as though the rules just don’t apply to them.

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by hilzoy

A couple of days ago, I advanced the following explanation for part of the US Attorney purge:

(a) The provision allowing Bush to appoint US Attorneys without Senate confirmation was slipped into the PATRIOT Act to benefit Tim Griffin, who replaced Bud Commins as US Attorney in the Eastern district of Arkansas.

(b) Griffin is normally described as a protégé of Karl Rove, which he is. But his specific area of expertise is opposition research: digging up dirt on one’s political opponents. He was the head of opposition research for the Bush 2004 campaign.

(c) The reason the administration wanted to make Tim Griffin a US Attorney in Arkansas was to send their chief opposition researcher to the state where Hillary Clinton, then the presumptive frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, had spent most of her adult life; and to send him not as a campaign employee but as a US Attorney with subpoena power.

Is this explanation true? I don’t have any evidence of it. I suspect that if it were true, there would not be any evidence. But it makes sense, both because the administration has in fact appointed its chief oppo researcher to the US Attorney’ job in Eastern Arkansas, and because it fits Rove’s modus operandi. (See below.) And if it is, it’s very, very bad.

According to the US Attorneys’ Manual, US Attorneys have all sorts of powers. You can read about the ones related to criminal law here. One of them is, of course, the power to indict and prosecute people. That’s a risky power to abuse, however: when you actually have to present your case, it’s a lot easier for people to see that you don’t have one. The power to investigate doesn’t suffer from these limitations: it’s easy to say that despite your earlier suspicions, you didn’t happen to find enough to prove your case. In the interim, however, your opponent will be under a cloud: s/he’s the object of a Federal Investigation, people will say; where there’s smoke, there’s fire. By the time they discover that the “investigation” didn’t actually go anywhere, the election might be over, and the person whose honor you have dragged through the mud might have lost.

Just think what fun an opposition researcher with subpoena power could have in Arkansas. There are crowds of people who know the Clintons in Arkansas, and any of them could profitably be investigated for fraud or insider trading or — heck, why not? — child molestation or serial murder. It would take a certain amount of ingenuity to come up with just the right investigations — investigations that managed to remind people of Whitewater and Monica and all that without being, well, obvious about it; but that, no doubt, is where the artistic side of an opposition researcher comes into play. And while this sort of thing requires more of a certain kind of deviant brilliance than normal US Attorney work, it’s a lot easier in other respects, since there’s no need for even the slightest bit of evidence that the person you propose to investigate and smear is actually guilty of anything.

I can’t tell you how angry the thought of someone doing this makes me. It was wrong when Hoover kept files on his opponents. It was wrong when Nixon launched IRS audits of people he decided were his “enemies”. Any time the law enforcement powers of the state are used for political purposes, it’s wrong, wrong, wrong.

Naturally, this wrong thing turns out to be one of Karl Rove’s favored tactics…

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by hilzoy

Kevin Drum reminds us that the eight US Attorneys who were fired are, in fact, eight separate cases, and that the reasons behind their firings might be quite different. This is clearly right, and it’s important to think of them individually. With that in mind, one of the things I want to know is: why was the provision that the Attorney General could replace US Attorneys without Senate confirmation slipped into the Patriot Act? Was this just a power grab for its own sake, or was there some particular person whom the administration wanted to appoint, and whom they did not want to have to seek Senate confirmation for?

If there was a particular person they had in mind, the obvious candidate is Tim Griffin, the protege of Karl Rove who replaced the US Attorney in the Eastern District of Arkansas. For the most part, the list of US Attorneys to be fired seems to have been in flux throughout the summer and fall of 2006: there are people who were fired who only appear late in the game, and there are people on various lists whose names were redacted, presumably because they were not fired. A few — e.g., Carol Lam — are on the list throughout.

But the US Attorney in the Eastern district of Arkansas is unique. The various people who wrote the DoJ emails and memos just assumed that Bud Cummins, the USAttorney who held that job in early 2006, would be asked to resign. This was never in question. More importantly, this is the only case in which they seem to have known from the outset who would replace him: Tim Griffin. (Griffin seems to have regarded this as a done deal before Cummins announced his retirement.) It was Griffin of whom Kyle Sampson wrote: “getting him appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, etc.” Moreover:

“On February 6, [Deputy Attorney General Paul] McNulty acknowledged during contentious testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Cummins had been fired because the administration wanted to name Timothy Griffin, a former aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove, who had also worked for the Republican National Committee. But McNulty said the firings of the other prosecutors were related to their poor performance.

During the hearings, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York posed the following question to McNulty: “First, Bud Cummins has said that he was told he had done nothing wrong and he was simply being asked to resign to let someone else have the job. Does he have it right?”

McNulty: “I’ll accept that as being accurate, as best I know the facts.””

It’s pretty clear that Cummins’ firing is unique in that it was motivated by a desire to give someone else a job, and that that someone was Tim Griffin. That means, I think, that if the provision allowing the AG to name replacements for US Attorneys was slipped into the Patriot Act because the administration wanted to appoint someone in particular to be a US Attorney, that someone was probably Tim Griffin. But why would it be so important to get him that job? And why might they have wanted to avoid Senate confirmation?

I suspect that the answer to the latter question is not: because he might not have been confirmed. (Not entirely, anyways.) The provision allowing the AG to bypass Senate confirmation was slipped into the Patriot Act in December of 2005. At that time, I don’t recall anyone thinking that the Republicans were going to lose control of the Senate — the fact that they did turned on such later events as George Allen’s macaca moment. I think it was the entire confirmation process that they wanted to avoid: the public questioning, the spotlight, possibly the need to give sworn testimony.

And why would the administration have wanted to avoid that? Well, consider who Tim Griffin is:

“A quick perusal of Griffin’s resume shows that his more-or-less exclusive vocation has been doing opposition research on Democrats on behalf of the Republican Party. Until recently, he was head of oppo research at the White House, working directly for Karl Rove. In 1999 and 2000, he was deputy research director for the Republican National Committee. In 2002 he returned as research director for the national GOP and stayed on for the next three years.

Before getting involved formally in oppo research he worked in what you might call de facto oppo research positions. In 1995 and 1996 he was associate independent counsel in the Henry Cisneros investigation. And after that he headed up to the Hill to work for Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) investigating political contributions from Asian-Americans to Bill Clinton.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, according to Time, back in 2000, when he was in charge of digging up dirt on Al Gore, he apparently had a poster hanging on the wall behind his desk which read: “On my command — unleash hell on Al.””

Opposition research is not a pleasant business, and might involve all sorts of things one would rather not discuss in public, under oath. For instance, this delightful episode:

“The Griffin scheme was sickly brilliant. We learned that the RNC sent first-class letters to new voters in minority precincts marked, “Do not forward.” Several sheets contained nothing but soldiers, other sheets, homeless shelters. Targets included the Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida and that city’s State Street Rescue Mission. Another target, Edward Waters College, a school for African-Americans.

If these voters were not currently at their home voting address, they were tagged as “suspect” and their registration wiped out or their ballot challenged and not counted. Of course, these ‘cages’ captured thousands of students, the homeless and those in the military though they are legitimate voters.

We telephoned those on the hit list, including one Randall Prausa. His wife admitted he wasn’t living at his voting address: Randall was a soldier shipped overseas.

Randall and other soldiers like him who sent in absentee ballots, when challenged, would lose their vote. And they wouldn’t even know it.”

(More on this here and here — apparently, Sen. Pryor of Arkansas was concerned about the ‘caging’ issue.)

More generally, though, I find it useful to think about the administration’s appointment of Griffin this way. It’s not surprising, at the beginning of a Presidential campaign season, for the Republican party to send its chief opposition researcher — the guy responsible for digging up dirt on political opponents — to the very state where Hillary Clinton, one of the frontrunners for the Democratic nomination, spent most of her adult life. But it’s completely out of line for them to send their chief opposition researcher to Arkansas as a US Attorney with subpoena power. Before I voted to confirm him, under the circumstances, I would want to be very sure that he had given up on opposition research, and on partisan political activity generally, and had decided to devote himself to prosecuting bad guys without fear or favor. If I was in any doubt, I would not vote to confirm. The line between political opposition research and federal prosecution ought to remain absolute.

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Kevin also points us to this article in the LA Times:

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