Holder admits megabanks are ‘too big to jail’

Holder admits megabanks are ‘too big to jail’
DARRELL DELAMAIDE
March 7, 2013
Full article:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/holder-admits-mega-banks-are-too-big-to-jail-2013-03-07

Attorney General Eric Holder, the top U.S. law-enforcement official, finally admitted this week that bank executives truly are above the law and may commit crimes with virtual impunity.

Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Holder acknowledged under questioning by Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the ranking member, that the megabanks are too big to jail. “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them,” Holder said.

He continued: “When we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute — if you do bring a criminal charge — it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”

Holder went on to suggest that, until Congress does something about it, the size of these banks will preclude bringing them to justice.

“I think it has an inhibiting influence, impact, on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate,” Holder said. “I think that’s something that we — you all — need to consider.”

Fired US attorney calls upon White House

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3012.shtml

Fired US attorney calls upon White House to let Miers and Bolten to testify
By Jason Leopold
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Feb 29, 2008

David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was one of nine federal prosecutors fired two years ago for reasons that appear to be politically motivated, said a recent House vote to hold former White House counsel Harriet Miers and President Bush's chief of staff, Josh Bolten, in contempt for refusing to testify before Congress about the matter was encouraging. But he said questions related to his dismissal remain unanswered.

In an interview following the historic vote, the first time in 25 years a full chamber of Congress voted on contempt of Congress citation, Iglesias called upon the White House to "do the right thing."

"Congress is exercising its legitimate oversight role in this unfinished matter," said Iglesias, who has written a book on the ordeal, "In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration," that is due to be published in June. "I implore the White House to do the right thing and produce Ms. Miers and Mr. Bolten to the Congress."

The White House said it has no intention of producing documents to the House Judiciary Committee or allowing Bolten and Miers to testify on grounds that the information is covered by executive privilege. Attorney General Michael Mukasey testified before Congress two weeks ago that he has no plans to enforce the contempt citations.

But Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) said even if Mukasey refuses to act on the contempt citations, Congress will pursue civil litigation to enforce the subpoenas and Bolten and Miers' testimony.

"It's pretty clear to me that senior White House and U.S. Department of Justice officials deliberately fired U.S. attorneys who they felt were not acting in ways that were politically advantageous to the Bush administration and the Republican Party," Hinchey said. "Those subpoenas have been ignored for far too long, which is why . . . we finally passed resolutions of contempt against them to begin the legal process of forcing them to comply or, if they continue to refuse, imposing tough consequences."

John Conyers, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, agreed, and said he would vigorously pursue legal action to enforce the subpoenas to "vindicate Congress' authority."

“The Privilege Resolution introduced [February 13] follows the suggestion first made by former Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner last year and authorizes the House general counsel to file a civil suit to enforce the subpoenas," Conyers said. "That way, if the administration refuses to enforce the contempt finding, we can take action in the courts. . . . Although Mr. Sensenbrenner suggested a civil lawsuit as an alternative to contempt, the courts have made clear that statutory contempt must be tried first. In a lawsuit in the 1980s, when the Justice Department tried to get a civil court ruling after the House had found a former EPA administrator in contempt, the court ruled that it should 'defer to established statutory procedures' on contempt and that a civil lawsuit could be pursued only after statutory contempt remedies are exhausted. Here, a civil suit would be filed only after the administration refuses to allow statutory contempt to go forward."

Iglesias said the legal wrangling clearly indicates that the executive branch and Congress are headed for a showdown, but he added that documents in the case released thus far goes far beyond the realm of circumstantial evidence and shows culpability--and perhaps criminal behavior--on the part of several high-level former Justice Department and White House officials who were involved in his firing and sought to cover-up their involvement. Iglesias points to a transcript of an interview with career Justice Department official David Margolis conducted by congressional investigators in May 2007 in which Margolis said that he participated in a "brainstorming" session with other senior DOJ officials to come up with a reason to sell to the public and to lawmakers in the event that questions were raised about why Iglesias was ousted.

John McKay, the former US attorney for the Western District of Washington who was also fired in late 2006 for reasons that appear to have been motivated by partisan politics, wrote in a lengthy article in the January edition of the Seattle University Law Review that Iglesias's firing stands out among the other eight federal prosecutors because it demonstrates "the very real prospect of improper interference with an ongoing criminal investigation involving public corruption and the seeking of political advantage."

"Violations of the obstruction of justice statute may have occurred and should be investigated," McKay wrote. "Even as the role of the White House remains shrouded in its claims of executive privilege, 23 certain White House employees appear to have been heavily involved in the dismissal of U.S. Attorney Iglesias. In several e-mails it appears that these officials were reacting directly to the complaints of Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) and the ongoing investigation into public corruption in New Mexico. For example, Deputy White House Counsel Bill Kelley smugly e-mailed Gonzales’ Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson to report that Domenici’s office was 'happy as a clam' on learning of Iglesias’s ouster. Senior Counselor to the President Karl Rove bragged about Iglesias’s dismissal by proclaiming 'he’s gone' to the New Mexico Republican Party Chairman, who had previously complained to Rove about Iglesias."

McKay wrote that multiple investigations at the DOJ, which are said to be in the final stages, could result in "criminal charges" against former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other former DOJ officials involved in the dismissals "for impeding justice."

"The elements of a prima facie case of obstruction of justice are: (1) the existence of the judicial proceeding; (2) knowledge of or notice of the judicial proceeding; (3) acting 'corruptly' with intent to influence, obstruct or impede the proceeding in the due administration of justice; and (4) a nexus (although not necessarily one which is material) between the judicial proceeding sought to be corruptly influenced and the defendant's efforts," McKay wrote in the 32-page law review article. "The [federal] omnibus clause is a 'catchall' provision, which is broadly construed to include a wide variety of corrupt methods."

In testimony before Congress last year, Iglesias said that a few weeks before the 2006 midterm elections he received telephone calls from Domenici, and the state's Republican congresswoman, Heather Wilson, inquiring about the timing of an indictment against a popular Democratic official in the state who was the target of a corruption investigation. Iglesias told Domenici and Wilson he could not discuss indictments with them. Iglesias was added to a list of US attorneys to be fired on Election Day in November 2006. The official or officials responsible for drafting the list is still unknown.

Domenici is currently the subject of a Senate Ethics Committee probe for allegedly trying to pressure Iglesias into securing indictments prior to the November 2006 midterm election.

Last April, Iglesias filed a Hatch Act complaint with the White House Office of Special Counsel, alleging former White House political adviser Karl Rove and other Bush administration officials may have broken the law by orchestrating his firing. That investigation is still ongoing, but the obscure shop has hit some roadblocks. Special Counsel Scott Bloch, a Bush appointee, said he has been unable to obtain certain documents from the Justice Department (DOJ) to advance his probe into the firings.

The OSC sent a request to the DOJ late last year seeking a wide range of documents including email correspondence between DOJ and White House officials who had discussed which US attorneys should be selected for dismissal. The OSC set a deadline for turning over the documents. However, the deadline has since passed and the DOJ has not formally responded to the OSC's request, nor has the agency stated a reason it would not turn over documents. The OSC appears to have been particularly interested in obtaining documents from the DOJ surrounding the circumstances that led to Iglesias's firing, according to people knowledgeable about the probe.

The DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) and the Justice Department's inspector general have been investigating the issue, with particular attention being paid to Iglesias's dismissal. Recently, the OPR contacted Iglesias's former executive assistant, Rumaldo Armijo, to interview him about whether he was pressured by Pat Rogers, a Republican attorney in Albuquerque, and Mickey Barnett, a Republican lobbyist, to bring charges of voter fraud against Democrats in the state, Iglesias confirmed when asked about the matter during an interview.

Rogers was affiliated with the American Center for Voting Rights, a now defunct non-profit organization that sought to defend voter rights and increase public confidence in the fairness and outcome of elections. However, it has since emerged that the organization played a major role in suppressing the votes of people who intended to cast ballots for Democrats in various states. Rogers is also the former chief counsel to the New Mexico Republican Party, and was tapped by Domenici to replace Iglesias as US Attorney for New Mexico.

Rogers did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Armijo was also unavailable for comment. During his tenure in the US attorney's office he was in charge of issues related to voter fraud in New Mexico. Iglesias said in an interview that he launched an in-depth investigation into claims of voter fraud in New Mexico and found the allegations to be “non-provable in court.” He said he is certain that his firing was due, in part, to the fact that he would not file criminal charges of voter fraud in New Mexico. Iglesias added that, based on evidence that had surfaced thus far and "Karl Rove's obsession with voter fraud issues throughout the country," he now believes GOP operatives had wanted him to go after Democratic-funded organizations in an attempt to swing the 2006 midterm elections to Republicans.

Armijo spoke to the Senate Ethics Committee last year about numerous telephone calls and emails dating back to 2005 he received from Rogers related to voter fraud, and Iglesias's alleged failure to investigate the matter while Iglesias was US attorney, Iglesias confirmed.

Last May, House Democrats released a transcript of an interview congressional investigators had with one of Gonzales's senior Justice Department staffers, Matthew Friedrich, in which Friedrich recounted that over breakfast in November 2006, Rogers and Barnett told him they were frustrated about Iglesias's refusal to pursue cases of voter fraud and that they had spoken to Karl Rove and Domenici about having Iglesias fired.

"I remember them repeating basically what they had said before in terms of unhappiness with Dave Iglesias and the fact that this case hadn't gone anyplace," Friedrich said, according to a copy of the interview transcript. "It was clear to me that they did not want him to be the US attorney. And they mentioned that they had essentially . . . they were sort of working towards that."

According to media reports, Rogers said he does not recall speaking to Rove about Iglesias.

Additionally, Barnett and Rogers met with Monica Goodling, the Justice Department's White House liaison, in June 2006 to complain that Iglesias was ignoring voter fraud. Goodling's meeting with Rogers and Barnett took place at the urging of a colleague. Rogers also drafted a lengthy letter that he sent to Domenici detailing what he claimed were Iglesias's prosecutorial failures, Iglesias said he had been told.

Allen Weh, the New Mexico Republican Party chairman, told McClatchy Newspapers in March that he urged Rove to use his influence to have Iglesias fired because Weh was unhappy with Iglesias's alleged refusal to bring criminal charges against Democrats in a voter fraud investigation.

Weh told McClatchy Newspapers that he followed up with Rove personally in late 2006 during a visit to the White House.

"Is anything ever going to happen to that guy?" Weh said he asked Rove at a White House holiday event that month, according to McClatchy's report.

"He's gone," Rove said, according to Weh.

"I probably said something close to 'Hallelujah,'" said Weh.

This chain of events troubles McKay who wrote in his law review article that former Attorney General Gonzales ultimately approved Iglesias's termination with the full knowledge that it was based on partisan politics.

Gonzales admitted "he took multiple phone calls from Domenici concerning [Iglesias], urging that he be replaced, and has admitted that [President Bush] spoke with him about the 'problems' with Iglesias," McKay wrote.

”Gonzales has even admitted that one of the reasons that Iglesias was fired was because Senator Domenici had "lost confidence" in Iglesias. “While these allegations are troubling under any analysis, a thorough and independent investigation is necessary to determine whether criminal laws have been violated,” McKay added. “Among the considerations facing the inspector general is whether the actions of former Attorney General Gonzales constituted obstruction of justice by removing Iglesias.”

Attorney general nominee's answer on torture

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/10/18/mukasey.hearing/

Attorney general nominee's answer on torture frustrates Democrats
Michael Mukasey refused to directly disavow harsh interrogation methods
Said he would resign before following an order he believed unconstitutional
Nominee expected to receive confirmation

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The refusal of attorney general-nominee Michael Mukasey to directly disavow waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques frustrated Senate Democrats Thursday.

Under tough questioning on torture policy on the second day of his confirmation hearings, the retired federal judge repeated his view that torture is unconstitutional, but he would not categorically declare any specific techniques to be prohibited.

"I don't think I can discuss techniques," Mukasey told the committee, as skeptical Democrats pressed on.

When asked by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, if waterboarding was constitutional, Mukasey responded "I don't know what's involved in the techniques. If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional."

Whitehouse continued, "'If it's torture.' That's a massive hedge, I mean it either is or it isn't. Do you have an opinion whether waterboarding -- which is the practice of putting someone in a reclining position, strapping them down, putting cloth over their faces and pouring water over the cloth to simulate the feeling of drowning -- is that constitutional?"

"If that amounts to torture, it is not constitutional," Mukasey said.

"I'm very disappointed in that answer," Whitehouse said.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, and Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Illinois, said they, too, were dissatisfied by the conditional answers.

Although waterboarding was specifically prohibited in a law passed by Congress, the Bush administration has declared that while it does not torture detainees it won't publicly reveal which harsh interrogation techniques may be used.

Mukasey attempted to explain his conditional responses.

"I know the way cross-examinations proceed. You start with an easy step and then you go down the road. I don't want to go down the road on interrogation techniques," he said. "Did the things that were presented to me seem over the line to me as I sit here? Of course they did."

But he added, "I think I need to be very careful about where I go on that subject."

Several Democratic senators also reacted coolly to Mukasey's views on presidential authority under the Constitution to order surveillance without a court-issued warrant.

During the previous day's testimony, Mukasey said he does not believe the president has legal authority to approve torture techniques for use on terror suspects, something former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales refused to say.

Mukasey disavowed a memo written by former Justice official Jay Bybee that justified certain harsh techniques. "The Bybee memo, to paraphrase a French diplomat, was worse than a sin. It was a mistake. It was unnecessary," he said.

Although senators gave no signal they would oppose the nomination, which appears solidly on track, Democrats made clear they were less pleased with Mukasey's answers than they had been the previous day.

"I don't know whether you received some criticism from anybody in the administration last night after your testimony, but I sense a difference and a number of people here -- Republican and Democratic alike -- have sensed a difference," Leahy told the nominee.

Mukasey assured Leahy he had not been so criticized and had spent Wednesday night with his family.

On the first day of Mukasey's confirmation hearing Mukasey made it clear to senators he would be independent from the White House and would make legal decisions based "on facts and law, not by interests and motives."

Mukasey also said he would resign from office if faced with a presidential order he believed was unconstitutional.

"I would try to talk him [the president] out of it -- or leave," he said. In his short opening statement, Mukasey said everyone in the Justice Department is "united by shared values and standards."

"I am here in the first instance to tell you, but also to tell the men and women of the Department of Justice, that those are the standards that guided the department when I was privileged to serve 35 years ago, and those are the standards I intend to help them uphold if I am confirmed," Mukasey said.

On Wednesday, Leahy predicted Mukasey, a retired federal judge appointed to the bench by President Reagan, would have no trouble winning Senate confirmation "because we know that we need somebody to clean up the Department of Justice."

Leahy said the hearing would conclude Thursday, after the panel hears from outside legal experts regarding Mukasey's views and legal opinions.

Embattled Gonzales quits at last

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0807/5522.html

Embattled Gonzales quits at last
By: Mike Allen
August 27, 2007

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned this morning, long after he had become a persistent embarrassment to President Bush.

The acting attorney general will be Solicitor General Paul Clement, who can stay in the job for months, administration officials said.

The president praised and defended Gonzales during brief remarks in Waco, Texas. "After months of unfair treatment, that has created a harmful distraction at the Justice Department, Judge Gonzales decided to resign his position and I accept his decision," Bush said. "It's sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeding from doing important work because his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons."

In a brief statement before cameras at the Justice Department, Gonzales said he had met with Bush on Sunday and informed him of his decision to resign, effective Sept. 17. He made no references to the controversies that hounded him from office.

“Let me say that it's been one of my greatest privileges to lead the Department of Justice,” Gonzales said. “I have great admiration and respect for the men and women who work here. I have made a point as attorney general to personally meet as many of them as possible, and today I want to again thank them for their service to our nation. ... I am profoundly grateful to President Bush for his friendship and for the many opportunities he has given me to serve the American people.”

Possible successors include Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Frances Fragos Townsend, the assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. One oft-discussed scenario would have Townsend succeeding Chertoff. But a Chertoff confirmation rehearing would mean an exploration of the administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina.

Several Republicans said Towsend might be a promising choice. She was a federal prosecutor in New York City, handling mob and white-collar cases. Towsend worked at the Justice Department under President Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno. She has become close to Bush and is one of the White House's most compeling personalities for television appearances.

Another possibility would be Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), former Judiciary Committee chairman. But it's not clear that he would want to give up his Senate seat for a job that will last for a little more than a year.

Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was prepared to call the chamber to order occasionally during August to prevent Bush from using his recess appointment powers to install officials while Congress is gone. But the White House agreed not to do that.

The administration is now planning for a nominee who will be confirmed by the Senate and serve until the end of the administration. An individual may serve in an acting capacity for 210 days. However, if there is a pending nominee, the 210-day "clock" is reset at Day One when the nominee is announced. The clock is reset again if the nomination is withdrawn or fails.

Clement was an editor of the Harvard Law Review before clerking for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court. He later served as chief counsel of the Senate subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights and was a partner in the Washington office of King & Spalding.

Gonzales had become the most visible and frequent administration target for the Democratic majority in Congress, which complained that his testimony about the quiet firing of several U.S. attorneys was misleading at best.

Bush stood by his longtime friend from Texas even as White House loyalists despaired about the damage he was doing to the image of the Justice Department.

Gonzales, the first Hispanic attorney general, was counsel to Bush in the Texas governor's office, was appointed by him to the Texas Supreme Court and was this president's first White House counsel.

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards issued a four-word reaction: "Better late than never.”

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on Fox: "Thank God."

The Gonzales decision was first reported on the website of The New York Times.

Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie: Gonzales' Top Six Fibs

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003920.php

Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie, Lie: Gonzales' Top Six Fibs
By Paul Kiel
August 17, 2007

The verdict is clear: Alberto Gonzales is the lying-est attorney general in recent history. "I don't trust you," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) told him last month. Ranking member Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) sounded him out for his "lack of credibility." "He tells the half truth, the partial truth and everything but the truth," said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that Gonzales. “He’s one sneaky, lying S.O.B., to put it bluntly" is Rep. David Obey's (D-WI) frank take.

But even though we've been cataloging the troubles, and Gonzales' dwindling credibility, at the Justice Department for the past several months, we hadn't yet done a rundown. So we've collected below what are, as far as we can tell, Gonzales' six most brazen public untruths.

To do this, we were forced to constrain the endeavor. Gonzales' amazingly faulty memory is clearly cause for strong suspicion -- but his countless "I don't recall"s have not yet been proven to be dishonest. And there have been a stream of dubious statements -- such as that he'd never fire a U.S. attorney for political reasons or his insistence that they were fired for "performance" reasons -- countered by weighty circumstantial evidence. But we've set a high bar. Certainly we expect our little list to lengthen in the future as more evidence is produced -- and as Gonzales continues to speak publicly.

We arrived at the six statements below. Some can be judiciously described as lies, i.e. apparently consciously false statements made with the intent to deceive. Some are better described as "wily" prevarications, or as literally true statements made with the intent to deceive or cover up. (I count #2-5 in the former category, #1 and #6 in the latter.)

Yesterday, Sen. Leahy requested that the Justice Department's inspector general investigate five public statements that Gonzales had made -- the same five statements that we chose as #1-5 in our tally. Certainly these statements will play a significant role in impeachment proceedings, should Democrats decide to go that route.

Enjoy:

1) “The disagreement that occurred, and the reason for the visit to the hospital, Senator, was about other intelligence activities. It was not about the terrorist surveillance program that the president announced to the American people.”
-- 7/24/07 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee

The parsing in this testimony was so awkward, so evidently legalistic, that Gonzales has stood by the testimony, apparently confident that the inherent dishonesty in the distinction did not rise to the level of perjury. He’s since explained that his language “may have created confusion,” but that the “terrorist surveillance program” only referred to a narrow and uncontroversial surveillance activity, and that the dispute which led to his infamous trip to John Ashcroft’s hospital bed was about other activities -- albeit activities that others, like FBI Director Robert Mueller, have consistently viewed as part of a single program. To Mueller apparently, Gonzales' parsing is needlessly misleading.

2) “The consensus in the room from the congressional leadership [the gang of eight] was that we should continue the activities, at least for now, despite the objections of Mr. Comey. There was also consensus that it would be very, very difficult to obtain legislation without compromising this program, but that we should look for a way ahead. It is for this reason that within a matter of hours Andy Card and I went to the hospital."

"I just wanted to put in context for this committee and the American people why Mr. Card and I went. It's because we had an emergency meeting in the White House Situation Room, where the congressional leadership had told us, "Continue going forward with this very important intelligence activity.”
-- 7/24/07 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee

There were a couple questionable (and contested) assertions in this one. Remember the situation: Deputy Attorney General James Comey was serving as attorney general, since Ashcroft had fallen ill. After Comey refused to reauthorize the administration's warrantless surveillance program, Gonzales and Andrew Card went to the hospital to try and convince Ashcroft to overrule him. FBI Director Robert Mueller's notes on the hospital showdown have since shown that he found Ashcroft to be "feeble, barely articulate, clearly stressed" after the encounter.

First and foremost is Gonzales’ bizarre cover story that admits all of the facts but insists on another interpretation of them. Gonzales claims that he did not go to the hospital room to “take advantage of a very sick man,” as Comey put it in his testimony – no, he went to inform Ashcroft of the congressional leadership’s decision. Of course, he admitted in his testimony that he came to Ashcroft’s hospital room with the reauthorization form in his hand (as Comey had testified). There's no other interpretation than that the reason he went to the hospital room was to have Ashcroft reauthorize the program. So what’s the difference? It’s a matter of emphasis, you might say. According to Gonzales, he was just acting on the will of Congress.

Except he wasn’t. Three people present at the meeting told The Washington Post that the briefing was solely on operational details and not on the legal basis for the program. So when Gonzales says that they wanted to continue the program "despite the objections of Mr. Comey," he's being dishonest. The lawmakers didn't know about Comey's objections. Ex-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-ND) and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) have both said unequivocally that the meeting as Gonzales describes it never happened.

3) "I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on."
-- A March 13th press conference on the U.S. attorney firings.

After internal Justice Department emails and memos demonstrated that this was false, Gonzales explained in a March 27th interview: “What I meant was that I have not been involved, was not involved in the deliberations over whether or not United States attorneys should resign.” Kyle Sampson testified two days later to Congress that Gonzales had been periodically updated on the firing process over the course of two years.

4) "I haven't done -- I haven't talked to witnesses because of the fact that I haven't wanted to interfere with this investigation and department investigations."”
-- 4/19/07 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee

“….as I've indicated, I have not gone back and spoken directly with Mr. Sampson and others who are involved in this process, in order to protect the integrity of this investigation and the investigation of the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Office of Inspector General.”
-- 5/11/07 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee

As Monica Goodling testified, in a private conversation approximately a week after Congress requested to interview her about the firings, Gonzales recounted to her his memory of how the U.S. attorney firings had occurred. He then wanted to know if she had “any reaction” to his recollection. Gonzales later testified that the conversation was “not to shape her testimony” -- it was “in the context of trying to console and reassure an emotionally distraught woman that she had done something wrong.”

5) “The track record established over the past three years has demonstrated the effectiveness of the safeguards of civil liberties put in place when the act was passed. There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse.”
-- 4/27/05 testimony before the House intelligence committee

In fact, as reported by The Washington Post (http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003635.php), FBI reports to the attorney general had shown a number of instances of improper surveillance or searches. Gonzales later testified that his testimony had been truthful because these were not “intentional” abuses of the Patriot Act.

6) “…[L]et me publicly sort of preempt, perhaps, a question you're going to ask me, and that is, I am fully committed, as the administration's fully committed, to ensure that, with respect to every United States attorney position in this country, we will have a presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed United States attorney.”
-- 1/18/07 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee

What Gonzales didn’t tell Congress is that his chief of staff Kyle Sampson had been scheming for months to circumvent the Senate, via an obscure provision of the Patriot Act that allowed Gonzales to appoint interim U.S. attorneys indefinitely. Sampson wanted to use the authority to keep Karl Rove’s former aide Timothy Griffin in place as Little Rock’s U.S. attorneys, despite opposition from Arkansas’ Democratic senators. He continued to tout the idea until as late as December, even communicating the strategy to lawyers in the White House counsel’s office.

In subsequent testimony, Gonzales admitted to being aware of Sampson’s scheming, but said he’d “never liked” the idea and had never considered it. Sampson, however, testified that Gonzales had considered it, and had only rejected the idea as late as January, shortly before he made the remarks above, and after senators had started asking questions about the U.S. attorney firings. So Gonzales' statement may have been literally true at the time he said it, but his chief of staff had certainly been unaware of such a commitment earlier that same month.

Gonzales appears to have used the same line about being committed to having a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney a month earlier in a private conversation with Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR). Of course, back then, Sampson was still avidly pushing his scheme since Gonzales had not rejected it -- a revelation that led Pryor (one of the few Democrats to have supported Gonzales' confirmation as attorney general) to announce on the Senate floor that Gonzales had "lied" to him.

TOPICS: Alberto Gonzales

Bush Gets a Spying Blank Check

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/080507.html

Bush Gets a Spying Blank Check
By Robert Parry
August 5, 2007

Eager to leave for its August recess, Congress handed George W. Bush another blank check on executive power, letting him order up spying directives against a vast number of people, including Americans, if they are physically outside the United States.

The “Protect America Act of 2007” sets the standard for a surveillance order – which can last for up to one year – as simply that it be “directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.”

The bill’s advocates claim it is intended to intercept communications when at least one party is linked to a terrorist group or a terrorist affiliate and is outside the United States. But the bill’s language doesn’t limit the surveillance to “terrorists” or “enemy combatants” – indeed those words are not mentioned in the legislation.

Nor does the bill, which was drafted by the Bush administration’s national security team, specify what happens to a one-year surveillance order against a target if the person then enters – or returns – to the United States. The vaguely worded act gives broad discretion to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell.

Its key language states: “Notwithstanding any other law, the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General may for periods of up to one year authorize the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States.”

In the pre-recess rush to wrap up legislative business – and to avoid a messy confrontation with President Bush – Congress offered only cursory attention to what this provision means and what new abuses are now possible.

For instance, could a one-year surveillance order be issued against an American attorney who was representing a Guantanamo detainee and who traveled to Europe for a legal conference? Could the surveillance order follow that person back home? How about an outspoken peace activist who visited a friend in Canada?

The key limitation on the administration’s authority is the need to be seeking “foreign intelligence information.” Though the term does cover information about possible hostile acts by a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, including sabotage, terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, the phrase can be interpreted in a far looser way.

The term can be defined broadly as information about a foreign power that relates to U.S. national defense, national security or the conduct of foreign affairs. In today’s world, those categories could mean pretty much anything.

Not Reassuring

Other supposed safeguards in the bill might not be reassuring to its targets, either. While the targets obviously are kept in the dark about the surveillance, their communications providers – such as phone companies or e-mail services – can challenge the government’s order if they’re willing to absorb the expense and offend the Executive Branch, which often has giant contracts with the same providers.

Even then, the service providers, which aren't told the classified basis for the surveillance order, can only contest the surveillance on procedural grounds through the secret channels of the FISA court system, with appeals of adverse rulings allowed by either side up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But service providers are given a strong incentive not to challenge the government’s order. While a legal challenge on behalf of an unsuspecting client could be expensive – especially if the Bush administration were to retaliate by shifting government contracts to a competitor – the legislation grants immunity from liability to any service provider who complies.

“Notwithstanding any other law, no cause of action shall lie in any court against any person for providing any information, facilities, or assistance in accordance with a directive under this section,” the bill states.

In other words, if someone later discovers that their service provider gave the government access to their phone calls and e-mails, the person has no grounds to sue for damages, regardless of how unjustified the surveillance may have been.

Given the Bush administration’s proclivity for stretching the boundaries of its powers, the scope of the spying legislation alarmed civil libertarians and some Democrats who favored a more limited revision of FISA to address a supposed new obstacle related to spying on suspected al-Qaeda operatives.

Boehner’s Leak

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, divulged in a Fox News interview on July 31 that a FISA court had ruled in secret that warrantless intercepts of foreign communications routed through the United States were illegal.

“There's been a ruling, over the last four or five months, that prohibits the ability of our intelligence services and our counterintelligence people from listening in to two terrorists in other parts of the world where the communication could come through the United States," Boehner said.

President Bush then demanded that Democrats approve a revision to the FISA law before leaving for the August recess. Democrats thought they had reached a compromise that would address the kind of situation described by Boehner, but the White House and the Republicans demanded more sweeping changes.

The Senate caved in first, voting 60-28 to authorize Bush’s broader spying powers, with many centrist Democrats – such as California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Virginia Sen. Jim Webb – joining a solid phalanx of Republicans. (Presidential contenders – Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden – voted no.)

On Aug. 4, Bush turned up the heat on the House. He called the spying powers contained in the bill crucial weapons in the fight against terrorism and declared that “protecting America is our most solemn obligation.”

Many Americans would disagree, arguing that the most solemn obligation is to protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But the Democratic congressional leaders acted as if their highest priorities were getting away for the August recess and avoiding ugly attacks on their patriotism from Fox News and the right-wing media.

Instead of canceling the recess – and using the month of August to fight over both Bush’s extraordinary expansion of presidential powers and the Iraq War – House Democratic leaders brought the Senate-approved “Protect America Act of 2007” to the floor. It carried, 227-183, with 41 Democratic defections.

Trying to put the best spin on their defeat, Democratic leaders pointed to their one concession: a sunset provision that requires President Bush to seek renewal of his powers in six months.

However, not only it is it hard to envision the Democrats finding more backbone to stand up to the “soft on terror” charge in an election year, but passage of the bill complicates the argument that Bush broke the law with his prior warrantless wiretapping.

Bush’s defenders can now cite this broad legislative authority as giving, in effect, a retroactive congressional blessing to Bush’s apparent violations of FISA, which requires a secret court warrant for eavesdropping and other spying inside the United States.

Some rank-and-file Democrats also may wonder how valuable their party’s electoral victory in November 2006 has proved to be. Despite gaining control of Congress, the Democrats have failed to stop the Iraq War or to reinstate habeas corpus and other constitutional rights that were breached by the Military Commissions Act of 2006, passed before the election.

[For more on Bush’s assault on American liberties, see our new book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.]

Ducking a Fight

The Democratic leaders have failed to slow the growth of presidential power in large part because they keep avoiding a showdown with Bush.

Early on, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, took presidential impeachment “off the table.” Plus, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would always approve Bush’s requests for Iraq War funding even as Republicans use vetoes and filibusters to block Democratic war policy alternatives.

Democrats also remain fearful of right-wing media attacks on their patriotism. In a July meeting with former CIA officer Ray McGovern and some impeachment backers, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Michigan, lamented that the Republicans and Fox News would have a field day if a Democratic impeachment effort flopped. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “John Conyers Is No Martin Luther King.”]

Now, in August, the Democrats have shied away from another confrontation with Bush, leaving little doubt that last November’s election has done little to change the underlying political dynamic of Washington.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there.

Gonzales Digs a Deeper Hole

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1646714,00.html

Tuesday, Jul. 24, 2007
Gonzales Digs a Deeper Hole
By Jay Newton-Small/Washington

Just when it seemed that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' reputation on Capitol Hill couldn't possibly get much worse, he showed up Tuesday for yet another hearing. And as with so many of his recent appearances before Congress, his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee raised a lot more troubling questions than it answered — not just about his own conduct of and honesty about the U.S. Attorney firings, but also about the Administration's domestic intelligence gathering programs.

That new wrinkle stemmed from Gonzales' testy exchange with Senator Arlen Specter, the panel's top Republican. Specter opened up with former Deputy Attorney General James Comey's testimony to the panel in May over Gonzales' actions while serving as White House Counsel. Comey had alleged that Gonzales tried to convince an ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in the hospital recovering from gallbladder surgery, to sign off on Bush's warrantless wiretapping program. "There are no rules saying he couldn't take back authority," Gonzales said, trying to explain that they had hoped Ashcroft might be able to sign off on an intelligence program due to expire the next day, a program that Comey as acting AG had refused to renew.

But what Specter really wanted to know was how that meeting squared with Gonzales' previous testimony that there had been no serious internal disagreements over the program. Gonzales seemed to believe he had a simple explanation. "The disagreement that occurred was about other intelligence activities, and the reason for the visit to the hospital was about other intelligence activities," the Attorney General said. "It was not about the terrorist surveillance program that the president announced to the American people."

Both Specter and later Senator Chuck Schumer latched onto Gonzales' puzzling comment. Schumer in particular brought up several examples where in sworn testimony Gonzales has named the Terrorist Surveillance Program as the one at issue during the hospital visit to Ashcroft's room. Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy then ordered a complete review of Gonzales' statements to the committee. "This is such a significant and major point," Leahy said. "There's a discrepancy here in sworn testimony and we're going to find out who's telling the truth."

Specter later circled back to Gonzales on the matter, warning him: "My suggestion to you is you review your testimony to find out if your credibility has been breached to the point of being actionable," Specter said. The maximum penalty for being caught lying to Congress is five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 per count. Specter wryly noted to reporters during a break that there is a jail in the Capitol complex.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, who was involved in the briefings at the time of the hospital visit, said the so-called Gang of Eight — the eight top bipartisan members of Congress on intelligence issues — were not briefed about any sunset the program was facing, as Gonzales claimed. He also emphatically refuted Gonzales' statements that there was more than one program under discussion at the time and that the Gang of Eight had agreed the program was so important that if it had been allowed to lapse they were considering emergency legislation.

"Once again he's making up something to protect himself and creating situations that never happened," Rockefeller said, adding that "based on what I know about it, I'd have to say" Gonzales has committed perjury.

Gonzales' woes actually began even before he was sworn in. He took his seat as a protestor held a pink banner reading "Impeach" behind him and to yells of "Impeach him!" from protesters in the room, who were quickly escorted out. Specter threatened the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into the firings of the eight U.S. Attorneys last year and a Senate "trial" to hold in contempt those Administration officials refusing to comply with Senate subpoenas. Then Leahy gaveled in the proceedings, saying "the Attorney General has lost the confidence of the Congress and the American people." ( When asked about Specter's threat of holding a Senate trial on contempt citations, Senator Trent Lott, the No. 2 Senator Republican, said he didn't "believe that's necessary," adding he intended to speak with Specter about the issue.)

In his opening statement, Gonzales underlined all the important work the department is still engaged in, highlighting its hunt for sexual predators and its role in the war on terror. But when asked by Senator Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat, if his presence is more detrimental than helpful Gonzales said: "Ultimately, I have to decide is it better for me to leave: I've decided to stay and fix the problem and that's what I'm doing," he said over guffaws from hearing attendees. "We're bringing in good experienced people. We've changed policies, we've been made aware with some of the problems with our policies."

Much of Gonzales' time was spent telling the committee he couldn't remember, wasn't up to date or wasn't at liberty to discuss the details on everything from the department's controversial settlement with the makers of Oxycotin, a drug believed responsible for dozens of deaths and his consideration of death penalty cases. to his involvement in drafting U.S. torture guidelines while working at the White House and why he apparently lied to a Senate panel over President George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping programs.

When Specter asked Gonzales whether the President has the right to prohibit the Department of Justice from pursuing Congressional charges of contempt against former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten — the House Judiciary Committee tomorrow is expected to issue two contempt citations for their refusal, citing executive privilege, to comply with subpoenas to testify — Gonzales had a short lawyerly response. "I am recused of speaking on that matter due to the ongoing investigation," he said.

Later, when Senator Diane Feinstein, a California Democrat, asked how many names were on the list of U.S. Attorneys to be fired that he approved, he said he couldn't recall. "After all this time and all of the investigations into this, I find it hard to believe you can't remember," Feinstein quipped. "I'll have to get back to you on that," Gonzales said.

He couldn't remember answers for even the rare friendly inquisitors. After Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, tried to prod him about how long Comey was in Ashcroft's room — hinting that maybe he hadn't really been present for much of the conversation — Gonzales replied, "I don't remember."

Beast of the Month - June 2007

Beast of the Month - June 2007
Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General

"I yam an anti-Christ... "
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"

"Senator, that I don't recall remembering."
Alberto Gonzales before the Senate Judiciary Committee

As June begins, the smell of justice is in the air. After all, the noteworthy celebrity villain Paris Hilton is finally going to jail for her crimes against humanity.

Okay, maybe Paris isn't the most deserving candidate to stick up for, but with all the late-night talk show monologue snickering, somebody has to. Granted, the idea of Ms. Hilton's simple life turning into a Chained Heat lesbian prison film (perhaps featuring Sybil Danning in a cameo) certainly has its appeal, at least as a "reality" show or "home" video. But isn't all this focus on bad little Paris just making her a convenient scapegoat while the more substantive crimes of the Bush Administration continue to go unpunished? For example, is Paris a worse scofflaw than Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General and The Konformist Beast of the Month?

To George W. Bush, a guy who loves giving out pet nicknames, Gonzales is referred to a Fredo, a fairly insulting reference to the incompetent member of The Godfather Corleone clan. Of course, considering Shrub's dismal record, he appears more suited for the Fredo name (although he must compete with his brother Neil for the title.) Others, most notably the Website Buzzflash.com, have given Gonzales the more deserving moniker of Consigliere, in honor of Robert Duvall's Tom Hagen in the Puzo-penned, Copolla-directed classic. He is, after all, Bush's little fixer of legal problems, a position he's held since 1996 when he got Bush off serving jury duty. (Shrub made a big show on how he was eager to serve on a jury like a "common man" - until he found out it was a drunk-driving case, which would require him to reveal his then covered-up history of driving smashed. In came Fredo, who argued that, as Governor, he may later be asked to pardon in the case, which would put him in conflict-of-interest if he sat on the jury.) Personally, we at The Konformist like to refer to Gonzales as "Sanjaya" since, whenever he opens his mouth, we wonder why he hasn't got his ass booted out of the DOJ already.

But unlike Sanjaya on American Idol, Gonzales is still the Attorney General because his miserable performance is precisely what Bush wants. For example, in April before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales, in the most embarrassing spectacle in front of the esteemed group since Clarence Thomas told Long Dong Silver jokes, used some version of "I don't recall" 71 times in testimony. At the time, Gonzales seemed dazed and confused, perhaps because conventional wisdom was he soon would be out of a job over the Attorney Firing Scandal (which prompted his testimony in the first place.) Even GOP Senators were publicly urging him to throw in the towel. Cut to May, and in front of the House Judiciary Committee, Gonzales, though still with a memory loss resembling Guy Pearce in Memento, seemed confident, relaxed, even a tad cocky with a smirk on his face. What caused the change? More than likely, Bush told him he wasn't going to dump him, perhaps because his unconvincing obfuscations have successfully hampered the Congressional investigations surrounding Bush.

Unsurprisingly, though the support of Fredo by Bush has apparently become even stronger, the evidence of corruption, malfeasance and abuse of power by Gonzales has become, incredibly, even greater since his April testimony. The biggest bombshell in May: testimony from former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey that Gonzales and then Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card attempted to secretly visit then Attorney General John Ashcroft while he laid ill, medicated and disoriented in a hospital, in order to reauthorize a secret wiretapping program that Comey, then acting AG, refused to sign off on as legal. Only by rushing to Ashcroft's hospital with FBI Director Robert Mueller was this end-around stopped. As Comey put it: "I was very upset. I was angry. I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man..."

This revelation is stunning on three counts. One, it shows that Ashcroft, for all his far-right political leanings, scary religious fundamentalism and point-man status for ramrodding the PATRIOT Act through Congress, was actually a stronger defender of civil liberties than Gonzales, which may have had something to do with his "resignation" in 2004. (Like Comey, Ashcroft was opposed to the warrantless wiretapping program.) Two, it shows that members of the Bush Team literally use gangster-type methods to get what they want. (No word if Gonzales and Card were going to leave a horse's head in Ashcroft's bed to clinch an offer he couldn't refuse.) And third, it hints at evidence that the NSA wiretapping program, already blatantly illegal with what is known about it, was at one point even more contemptuous of the law than what has been reported.

After the showdown, changes were made in the program that allowed Ashcroft to sign off on it. What were these changes? Both the New York Times and Washington Post have hinted at the likely answer, perhaps because, as has been the case over the Bush years, they have the evidence already but have decided to hide it from the public in collusion with the political establishment. To its usual credit, The World Socialist Web Site was explicit about the logical explanation in a May 18 article. The smoking gun appears to be Mueller's involvement in the dispute, who, like Ashcroft and Comey, considered resigning over the standoff. While Comey and even Ashcroft had every reason to take umbrage at the Bush Mob's defiance of their legal opinion, why would the FBI Director, no civil libertarian, give a rat's ass? The most plausible explanation: this was a turf battle, and while Mueller may not care about privacy rights, he DID care about protecting his FBI. More explicitly, the NSA historically has only been involved in international surveillance, while the FBI held domain in domestic spying. It seems Occam's Razor would suggest that, at least until the program was modified under protest by Ashcroft, Comey and Mueller, the warrantless NSA spying program involved communications completely within the United States. Of course, since Gonzales is now the man in the DOJ signing off on any programs, there is good reason to suspect that the secret spying program involves such communications again.

Of course, the NSA spying program is merely one of many outrages involving the Bush Team where Gonzales is a pivotal person. Among his most notorious hits:

* ATTORNEY FIRING SCANDAL: Eight US Attorneys were dumped from the DOJ last December. (One of the eight, David Iglesias, was the inspiration for the Tom Cruise character in the film A Few Good Men, who egged on Jack Nicholson's classic line, "You can't handle the truth!") At least 26 attorneys have been considered for firing since 2005, with three others receiving pink slips. Though it's customary for mass replacements in attorneys to occur at the start of a new administration, widespread mid-term firings are unprecedented, with only two in the previous quarter century for misconduct. While attorneys are appointments that can be hired and fired at will, in this case, it appears the vast majority were fired for blatantly partisan purposes. Specifically, four of the eleven fired were involved in key target areas for so-called "voter fraud" claims, under Karl Rove's cynical plan to use bogus election fraud investigations to suppress minority voters. The four were unwilling to press charges in the cases, and lost favor in the Bush Team for this. Meanwhile, five were involved in high-profile investigations of GOP figures, most notably Carol Lam, who nailed Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham for bribery. An email by Gonazales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson revealed that "loyal Bushies" were to replace the ousted prosecutors. All told, the scandal reveals a grotesque attempt to politicize the DOJ, with strong evidence of both voter fraud and obstruction of justice by the Bush gang. Further obstruction was done by Gonzales himself, who in a March 13 press conference declared about the scandal: "I never saw documents. We never had a discussion about where things stood." Ten days later, it was revealed he attended an hour-long meeting on November 27 where he approved a detailed plan for the mass firings. Meanwhile, in his testimony before the Senate, he claimed he left the decisions on firings to his staff, but internal emails later revealed he personally urged the ousting of Ms. Lam. Faced with evidence of perjury, even Gonzales has admitted: "incomplete information was communicated or may have been communicated to Congress."

* TORTURE & GENEVA CONVENTION VIOLATIONS: Gonzales authored a January 2002 memo that argued against the Geneva Convention applying to alleged Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters held in detention, declaring "a new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitation on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders some of its provisions quaint." This memo led directly to the torture and abuse that followed in places such as Camp X-Ray and Abu Ghraib.

* REJECTION OF HABEAS CORPUS RIGHTS: In January, Gonzales, showing flawless logic, stated before the Senate Judiciary Committee: "There is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution. There is a prohibition against taking it away." This drew a stunned response from GOP Senator Arlen Specter: "Wait a minute. The Constitution says you can’t take it away, except in the case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus, unless there is an invasion or rebellion?" Gonzales didn't budge on his opinion. With the shameful passage of the Military Commissions Act last year, which allows those labeled "unlawful enemy combatants" to be stripped of habeas corpus, his translation of Constitutional rights is more than a mere philosophical disagreement.

* GOVERNMENT SECRECY: Gonzales drafted Executive Order 13233 (issued by Bush on November 1, 2001, soon after 9/11) placed limits on Freedom of Information Act access to records of former presidents. He also fought to keep Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force documents secret. In other words, while he's been rapidly invading the privacy of the American public, Gonzales has been pushing more secrecy for the Bush Mob.


Based on the above, there's no reason he should still be the Attorney General, but it appears, contrary to recent conventional wisdom, he's not going anywhere. After all, Bush is standing by him, and since Fredo is, above all, a "loyal Bushie" hack, that likely won't change any time soon. The only other way Gonzales can lose his job is if Congress impeaches him, but the Democrats, showing no sign of gonads, aren't up for such a fight (much less impeaching Cheney or Bush.) They have threatened a resolution of no-confidence, believing that would shame him and Bush into his resignation. Apparently they haven't been paying attention the last six and a half years.

Perhaps the only good thing to come out of Gonzales' term as AG: the American public has been saved the prospect of Fredo as a Supreme Court justice. His name had been floated as a Bush nominee, and since he was viewed as a "moderate" Republican, he seemed like a candidate who could sail through confirmation without much Democratic opposition. Thanks to his miserable record as AG, a future Justice Gonzales plan seems doomed. Still, that Gonzales could be a leading candidate for a powerful lifetime appointment by the Bush Team shouldn't leave Americans feeling to confident about the future of justice in the USA.

In any case, we salute Aberto Gonzales as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Al!!!

Sources:

Cohn, Marjorie. "The Quaint Mr. Gonzales." Truthout 13 November 2004 <http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111304A.shtml>.

Collins, Michael. "Did Bush Commit Election Fraud?" Scoop 23 April 2007 <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0704/S00350.htm>.

Crawford Greenburg, Jan and de Vogue, Ariane. "Gonzales Contradicts His Own Testimony." ABC News 16 April 2007 <http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=3046651&page=1>.

Egelko, Bob. "Gonzales Says the Constitution Doesn't Guarantee Habeas Corpus." San Francisco Chronicle 24 January 2007 <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/24/MNGDONO11O1.DTL>.

Eggen,Dan and Goldstein, Amy. "Voter-Fraud Complaints by GOP Drove Dismissals." Washington Post 14 May 2007.

Eggen,Dan and Kane, Paul. "Karl Rove Knew About Firings, E-Mails Show." Washington Post 16 March 2007.

Isikoff, Michael. "Gonzales: Did He Help Bush Keep His DUI Quiet?" Newsweek 31 January 2005.

Kay, Joe. "Former Justice Department Official Describes Illegal Actions by Bush Administration in Defense of Domestic Spying." World Socialist Web Site 17 May 2007 <http://wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/come-m17.shtml>.

Kay, Joe. "Former Justice Department Official's Testimony Raises Question: How Extensive Is Police State Spying in the US?" World Socialist Web Site 18 May 2007 <http://wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/come-m18.shtml>.

Kellman, Laurie. "White House Pressed Ashcroft on Wiretaps." Associated Press 15 May 2007 <http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070515/ap_on_go_co/eavesdropping>.

"Married to the Mob, the Story of Alberto G." BuzzFlash 17 May 2007 <http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorials/135>.

Palast, Greg. "Fired Prosecuters: Rove's 'Obstruction of Justice?'" GregPalast.com 14 May 2007 <http://www.gregpalast.com/investigative-journalist-greg-palast-reports-on-the-firing-of-new-mexico-attorney-david-iglesias>.

Rich, Frank. "When Will Fredo Get Whacked?" New York Times 25 March 2007.

Scelfo, Julie. "Quite Unprecedented." Newsweek 15 March 2007 <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17627519/site/newsweek/page/0/>.

Bush aides may have illegally lost e-mail, Dems say

http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN1839309320070618?feedType=RSS&rpc=22

Bush aides may have illegally lost e-mail, Dems say
Mon Jun 18, 2007
By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Karl Rove and dozens of other White House staffers appear to have illegally routed official e-mails through a Republican group that subsequently deleted them, a congressional report said on Monday.

By using Republican National Committee e-mail accounts for official business, senior White House aides may have broken a law requiring them to preserve presidential records, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said in an interim report.

"This should be a matter of grave concern for anyone who values open government and the preservation of an accurate historical record," said committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat.

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 requires White House officials to save official correspondence. While the White House automatically archives its e-mail the RNC typically deletes messages on its server older than 30 days, the report said.

The White House and the RNC said Waxman's committee was jumping to conclusions.

"We have seen a number of times right now where people have been putting together investigations to see what sticks. They have had very little success so far," White House spokesman Tony Snow said.

White House officials have for years used RNC e-mail accounts to comply with the Hatch Act, which forbids public servants from using government property to conduct political business.

At least 88 White House staffers had RNC accounts and there are signs that many of them used those accounts extensively for nonpolitical matters, the committee said.

Rove, a top political adviser to President George W. Bush, sent more than 100 e-mail messages and received more than 200 each day through his RNC account in 2007, the report said.

More than half of the 140,000 Rove messages saved by the RNC was correspondence with other government officials, the committee said. Most of his correspondence from Bush's first term has not been preserved, it said.

Rove thought his messages were being archived, his former assistant Susan Ralston told the committee. His lawyer has said he never intentionally deleted e-mail from any accounts.

The RNC said it is still searching for the missing e-mails.

"There is no basis for an assumption that any e-mail not already found would be of an official nature," RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt said by e-mail.

The report also points a finger at Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, currently facing pressure to resign over U.S. attorney firings that Democrats say were political in nature.

As White House counsel, Gonzales may have known that Rove and others were using RNC accounts but did nothing to stop it, the report says.

A Justice Department official referred questions to the White House.

The committee said it will investigate Gonzales' role further and search federal agencies for copies of the missing e-mails. It also said it plans to subpoena Bush's 2004 re-election campaign for additional e-mails because the campaign has not cooperated.

How extensive is police state spying in the US?

http://wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/come-m18.shtml

World Socialist Web Site

Former Justice Department official’s testimony raises question:
How extensive is police state spying in the US?
By Joe Kay
18 May 2007

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey’s testimony before a Senate panel May 15 raises a number of important questions about the extent of domestic spying in the United States. Comey’s testimony gives further credence to reports that the monitoring programs set up by the American government to spy on telephone calls and e-mails are far more expansive than anything that has been officially acknowledged.

In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey provided details of a confrontation in March 2004 between himself and top White House officials over a warrantless wiretapping program operated by the National Security Agency (NSA). Even in the form later acknowledged by the President, the program violates the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Comey, backed by then Attorney General John Ashcroft and then FBI director Robert Mueller, refused to give Justice Department approval for the program’s reauthorization. He grounded his position on a finding by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that the program had no legal justification. Comey’s stance provoked a sharp conflict with the White House, particularly with then White House counsel and current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and then White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, backed by Vice President Cheney. (See “Former Justice Department official describes illegal actions by Bush administration in defense of domestic spying”)

According to Comey, certain changes were made in the program after he and others objected, and these changes were sufficient to allow the Justice Department to ratify the program’s legality. The unanswered questions, however, remain: what precisely were these changes, and what was it that Comey and others opposed? How expansive was the spying program authorized after the September 11 attacks? These are not simply historical questions. There can be little doubt that all these domestic spying operations continue today, even if in a different guise.

Editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post on Thursday touched on these matters. The Times wrote, “The really big question ... is what exactly the national Security Agency was doing before that night [when Comey refused to reauthorize the program], under Mr. Bush’s personal orders. Did Mr. Bush start by authorizing the agency to intercept domestic e-mails and telephone calls without first getting a warrant?”

In December 2005, after an article appeared in the Times describing aspects of the NSA program, Bush acknowledged the existence of an operation he insisted only involved communications that either came from or were sent to someone residing outside the United States. The Times is suggesting that prior to the confrontation with Comey, the program may have included warrantless spying on communications entirely within the United States—an even more flagrant violation of FISA.

The nature of the dispute with Comey is illuminated by Congressional testimony given by Gonzales in February 2006, after he had assumed the post of attorney general. In that testimony, which the Bush administration insisted not be conducted under oath, Gonzales said that there had been no “serious disagreement” from Comey or other administration officials “about the program that the president has confirmed.” He said, however, that there had been “disagreements about other matters regarding operations, which I cannot get into.”

It its editorial Thursday, the Times noted that Gonzales must have been referring in this testimony to the program that included the modifications after an agreement had been reached with Comey. This is the same program whose existence has been acknowledged by Bush.

The Post raised the same point in its editorial on Thursday, asking, “What was the administration doing, and what was it willing to continue to do, that its lawyers concluded was without a legal basis?”

The very fact that both these newspapers of the political establishment raise these questions is a good indication that they have information that the spying programs are in fact much more expansive than has been acknowledged.

Vast databases of information gathered

There are a number of possible elements of the program that might have been the source of opposition within the Justice Department. One relates to the power claimed by the administration to justify the program even though it violates FISA.

The rationale favored by Gonzales, Cheney and top Justice Department aids in power following the attacks of September 11—figures such as John Yoo and Jay Bybee—was that the President has virtually unlimited powers as commander in chief to carry out the “war on terror.”

In 2003, a new group of officials came into the Justice Department, including Comey and Jack Goldsmith, the new assistant attorney general. According to a number of media reports (including a February 6, 2006 article in Newsweek, “Domestic Spying: Bush Appointees Revolt”), these officials resisted the blanket executive power argument, which gave the President essentially dictatorial powers to override the law. They favored basing the rationale for the spying program on the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), passed by Congress following the September 11 attacks.

To use AUMF as a rationale for warrantless spying, however, was not only a groundless application of that resolution (which says nothing about spying), but it would also constrain the targets of the actions to “those nations, organizations, or persons [the President] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorists attacks” of September 11.

This would imply that prior to March 2004, the program involved spying on broad sections of the American population, without even the pretense of restricting targets to associates of Al Qaeda. The new program as acknowledged by the President would have to be at least nominally more restrictive, though the additional powers could be shifted to other programs that have not been acknowledged.

Another possibility is that suggested by the Times, namely that the communications monitored included those entirely within the US. One reason to suppose that purely domestic spying was involved was the close involvement of Mueller, the head of the FBI, in the dispute between Comey and the White House. The FBI is involved primarily in domestic spying, while the NSA and CIA spy internationally. According to Comey, Bush met personally with Mueller to help work out a compromise. The NSA was apparently not involved at all in these discussions. Why was Mueller involved? Was he upset about the encroachment of the NSA into the FBI’s traditional field of operations?

Most likely, the basis of the disputes was a combination of these factors—the program was so expansive and unconstrained that it encompassed virtually anyone. It is worth recalling the description given by the Times in its original December 2005 article revealing the program’s existence. Citing “senior government officials,” the newspaper reported that: “when the special operation first began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the NSA. The agency can choose its eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from Justice Department or other Bush administration officials.”

The newspaper wrote at the time that these unnamed officials were “apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation.”

Moreover, the press itself has reported the existence of programs extending far beyond what has been officially acknowledged. The Times reported on December 24, 2005, that “The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged ... It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries.”

In 2006, a former technician at AT&T, Mark Klein, produced documents showing that the telecommunications giant was routing large amounts of internet communications directly to the NSA “Based on my understanding of the connections and equipment at issue,” Klein said at the time, “it appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the Internet—whether that be people’s e-mail, Web surfing or other data.”

In the spring of 2006, USA Today reported that three telecommunications companies—AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth—had handed over to the NSA the calling records of hundreds of millions of telephone customers, including 80 percent of the landline and 50 percent of the wireless users in the US.

Framework of a police state

These programs constitute the framework of a police state in the United States. They provide the government with information that can be used to intimidate, undermine or blackmail any individual or group it chooses, including political opponents.

The expansion of spying powers is part of a much broader attack on the most fundamental democratic rights of the population in the US and internationally. The “war on terror” has been used to justify torture, the denial of habeas corpus, the creation of drumhead military commissions and the imprisonment of “enemy combatants”—including US citizens—indefinitely and without charge.

All of this has been justified as a response to September 11, an event that has never been seriously investigated. These attacks, for which there is substantial evidence of some level of government involvement, have become the pretext not only for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also for a frontal attack on the constitutional order in the United States.

The spying programs continue to this day. Whatever changes may have been made when Comey raised objections, they most likely involved shifting certain operations from one program to another. Russel Tice, a former NSA employee, has said that the agency has been authorized to engage in much broader spying than the government has admitted as part of a top-secret “special access program.”

As for those officials who raised objections, most have been pushed out of the Justice Department in one way or another. Gonzales meanwhile has become the attorney general.

The methods of criminality and gangsterism—including the revelation that Gonzales and Card went to the hospital bed of the ailing Ashcroft in order to pressure him to override Comey and endorse the program—reflect the nature of the regime and the aims it is pursuing. The firing of the US attorneys is part of this. The principal aim of these firings was to push an attack on voting rights in order to manipulate the 2006 elections.

Five years after the spying programs were initiated, and a year and a half after hints of their existence were revealed in the American media, the public still has no knowledge of what information the government is collecting and what it is being used for. The Bush administration has refused to provide any details, citing “national security.”

What is perhaps most striking is the way in which all of this has produced no serious opposition from the Democratic Party or mass media. Aside from a few revelations, the media has not pursued the issue. It is worth recalling that the Times sat on the initial story on the NSA program for over a year at the request of the White House, helping to ensure that it did not come up as an issue in the 2004 elections. The Times editorial on Thursday ends merely with the hope that Congress will conduct a “vigorous investigation.”

The Democratic Party has also made very little of the spying programs and has not pursued the issue since gaining control of Congress in January. No leading Democrat has called for an end to the programs, and there has yet been no call for the impeachment and prosecution of those who have clearly violated the law on an unprecedented scale.

The reaction of the Democrats to this massive assault on the constitution has been characterized by both cowardice and complicity. They are unwilling to explain to the population what is really taking place and why these domestic spying programs have been implemented. The entire political establishment accepts the lie of the “war on terror,” and, to the extent that there are criticisms, they proceed from the premise that the Bush administration has “overreached” in prosecuting this war.

In fact, these measures have nothing to do with combating terrorism. Laws such as FISA were put in place following revelations of spying on political opponents of government police. These laws are now being repudiated, and an even more expansive database of information is being collected, primarily for use in countering the inevitable explosion of social tensions and mass political opposition in the United States.

The main threat perceived by the political establishment, including both the Democrats and the Republicans, is not Al Qaeda, but the broad mass of American working people, which is coming increasingly into conflict with the right-wing and militarist policies of the American ruling elite.

Justice official describes illegal actions by Bush

http://wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/come-m17.shtml

World Socialist Web Site

Former Justice Department official describes illegal actions by Bush administration in defense of domestic spying
By Joe Kay
17 May 2007

In congressional testimony on Tuesday, a former top Justice Department official described how White House officials resorted to extraordinary actions to defend the administration’s illegal warrantless domestic wiretapping program. The testimony provides a portrait of an administration that operates outside of the law in the prosecution of a historically unprecedented attack on democratic rights.

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee, answering questions from New York Democrat Charles Schumer. Comey gave details of a dispute between the White House and high-ranking officials in the Justice Department, including then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, over the National Security Agency (NSA) warrentless electronic surveillance operation initiated by executive order shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks. The dispute was first reported in the press in early 2006, but only in its broad outlines.

The wiretapping program involves spying on international phone calls and emails by people in the United States without the benefit of a court-issued warrant, in violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). It was so blatantly illegal that it provoked sharp opposition within the Justice Department, with Bush-appointee Ashcroft and Comey refusing to certify the program’s legality when it was up for reauthorization in 2004.

Comey was at the time (early March 2004) the acting attorney general, because Ashcroft was incapacitated following surgery for pancreatitis. Comey described how White House officials, angered by his refusal to certify the program’s legality, sought to pressure Ashcroft behind Comey’s back to give his approval. Those most directly involved were then-White House Counsel and current Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, backed by Vice President Dick Cheney.

“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—it was unable to certify as to its legality,” Comey testified.

Comey did not give details on the nature of the Justice Department’s objections, nor what was eventually done to mollify its concerns. He refused even to explicitly confirm that he was speaking about the NSA program, citing its classified nature.

The dispute between the Justice Department and the White House emerged after a review by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel found that there was no legal foundation for the spying program.

In line with previous discussions with Ashcroft and the recommendations of the department, Comey refused to give his approval. The details of what happened next provide a picture of the type of methods employed by the White House, even against opponents within the administration itself.

Ashcroft’s wife, who had banned visitors to Ashcroft while he was recovering from surgery, called Ashcroft’s assistant on March 10, 2004 to inform him that she had received a call, and that Card and Gonzales would be visiting the disabled attorney general. Asked who made this call to Ashcroft’s wife, Comey testified, “I have some recollection that the call was from the president himself, but I don’t know that for sure. It came from the White House.”

Comey, informed by Ashcroft’s assistant of the pending visit, moved quickly to intervene. Jumping into his car, he “told my security detail that I needed to get to George Washington Hospital immediately. They turned on the emergency equipment and drove [with emergency lights flashing and siren blaring] very quickly to the hospital.” Arriving at the hospital he “literally ran up the stairs with my security detail.”

Comey was clearly concerned that Card and Gonzales would pressure a half-conscious Ashcroft to sign onto the spying program without fully realizing what he was doing. Comey, however, arrived at Ashcroft’s hospital bed first. “I immediately began speaking to him,” Comey testified, “trying to orient him as to time and place, and trying 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.”

Comey was so concerned that the White House officials would resort to thuggish behavior he called then-FBI Director Robert Mueller and had Mueller instruct the FBI agents present in Ashcroft’s room “not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances.”

After a few minutes, Gonzales and Card arrived, and Gonzales began speaking with Ashcroft, asking him to reauthorize the program. Ashcroft refused, on the basis of the discussion with Comey and previous discussions in the Justice Department. According to Comey, “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 ... The two men did not acknowledge me. They turned and walked from the room.”

Shortly after this interview, Card called Comey and demanded that he attend a meeting in the White House that evening. Again evidently convinced that the White House would resort to thuggish or underhanded methods, he insisted that he would not meet at the White House without a witness, choosing Theodore Olson, the solicitor general.

Unable to secure Comey’s support, the White House decided to go ahead with the program anyway. “The program was reauthorized without us and without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality,” Comey said.

This is an extraordinary revelation. The Bush administration, in violation of the legal opinion of its own Justice Department—presumably responsible for upholding the law—went ahead with a program that involves unprecedented attacks on the democratic rights of the American people.

In response to this move, Comey says that he, Ashcroft and Mueller prepared to resign from the administration. This evidently prompted the White House to engage in some damage control to prevent an open rupture. Bush held a personal meeting with both Comey and Mueller, and some sort of arrangement was worked out to allow the spying program to continue, with the Justice Department officials giving their formal approval a few weeks later.

Comey would not give any details about what the nature of this agreement was, but it did not involve any fundamental changes to the program, which has continued to be used to spy on Americans without warrants. Indeed, the very existence of the program was not revealed until December of 2005.

This testimony speaks volumes about the modus operandi of the Bush administration. Comey was a top official in the administration. He was intimately familiar with the types of methods used by the White House, and his response in the dispute with Gonzales and Card was no doubt based on his prior experiences.

The Washington Post, in an editorial on Wednesday, spoke of a “lawlessness so shocking that it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source.” This is indeed the basic character of the Bush administration—in its handling of domestic spying, the war in Iraq, and every other aspect of its policy.

The incident also underscores the illegality of the program itself. Ashcroft, one of the principal architects of the Patriot Act and similar legislation, is not known for his defense of democratic rights. That he, Mueller and Comey felt they had to oppose the White House is an indication of how unprecedented the new spying measures of the Bush administration were.

A year-and-a-half after the NSA spying program was first revealed to the public, its breadth and depth still remain unknown. What is clear, however, is that the Bush administration has begun compiling vast databases of phone calls, phone records, emails and other communications in violation of the FISA Act.

In 2006, a US Federal court ruled the NSA program unconstitutional and illegal, a decision that is currently under appeal. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is seeking Congressional approval for changes in the FISA Act that would expand government powers. The White House continues to insist, however, that whatever the law, the president has the constitutional authority as commander-in-chief to spy on the American people.

There are ample grounds for impeaching everyone involved in implementing these policies, including the president and vice president. Arlen Specter, the lone Republican senator to attend the hearing on Tuesday, noted that the story “has some characteristics of the Saturday Night Massacre.” He was referring to Nixon’s dismissal of the special prosecutor into the Watergate scandal Archibald Cox, and the subsequent resignations of the attorney general and the deputy attorney general.

The Saturday Night Massacre led eventually to the initiation of impeachment proceedings and the subsequent resignation of Nixon. In fact, the lawlessness of the Bush administration makes the actions of Nixon in Watergate look like petty theft.

In spite of this, very little has been made by the Democratic Party of the illegal spying program and the broader attacks on democratic rights, and there have been no serious calls for impeachment. On the contrary, Democratic congressional leaders such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have insisted repeatedly that there will be no move to impeach Bush, and this stance has been publicly defended by a number of so-called “anti-war” Democrats in Congress.

In fact, the Democrats do not have any principled disagreements with the Bush administration’s attack on the democratic rights of the American people.

It should be recalled that Senate Democrats helped give NSA chief Michael Hayden, who oversaw the illegal domestic spying program, a 78-15 confirmation vote to head the Central Intelligence Agency in May 2006, and they refused to filibuster Gonzales’ nomination to head the Justice Department in February 2005. Among those voting for Hayden was Charles Schumer.

Since they took control of Congress in January, the Democrats have said next to nothing about the NSA spying program and other unconstitutional domestic surveillance operations. Comey himself was called to testify in connection with the scandal surrounding the firing of US attorneys, not NSA warrantless wiretapping.

Rove’s “Obstruction of Justice?”

http://www.gregpalast.com/investigative-journalist-greg-palast-reports-on-the-firing-of-new-mexico-attorney-david-iglesias

- Greg Palast - http://www.gregpalast.com -

Fired Prosecuters:
Rove’s “Obstruction of Justice?”
RFK says “They Ought to be in Jail”
Posted By Greg Palast On May 14, 2007

Democracy Now!
Monday, May 14th, 2007
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On a single day, December 7, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales demanded the resignations of 8 United States Attorneys. What was really the purpose of the firings - and who was behind it? Investigative journalist Greg Palast reports.
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AMY GOODMAN: Perhaps the most well known of these US attorneys is ousted New Mexico prosecutor David Iglesias. His case has been at the center of the political firestorm. Investigative journalist Greg Palast has been closely following this story. He files this report.

TOM CRUISE: Your honor, I’d like to ask for a recess. I’d like an answer to the question, Judge.

J.A. PRESTON: The court will wait for an answer.

GREG PALAST: This past December 7 was not the first time United States prosecutor David Iglesias had been brutally cut loose. In the 1992 film A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise plays David Iglesias, the true story of the young military defense lawyer fighting to uncover the truth.

TOM CRUISE: I want the truth!

JACK NICHOLSON: You can’t handle the truth!

GREG PALAST: Greg Palast.

DAVID IGLESIAS: Greg, hi. David Iglesias.

GREG PALAST: Hey, how are you, Captain?

DAVID IGLESIAS: Hey, I’m doing just fine. Thank you.

GREG PALAST: So can you handle the truth or not?

DAVID IGLESIAS: Absolutely.

GREG PALAST: Captain Iglesias, the US prosecutor, knew something was very wrong when, just a week before the 2006 midterm elections, he received a strange and threatening call to his home. It was his state’s senior senator, the powerful Republican leader Pete Domenici on the line, pushing Iglesias to file criminal charges against a Democrat before the election.

DAVID IGLESIAS: I’m sitting in my bedroom, and here’s the killer point, Greg. He says, “Are these going to get filed before November?” And I said I didn’t think so. And the line goes dead. In other words, our senior senator hung up on me. A terribly inappropriate call.

GREG PALAST: Inappropriate, certainly. Obstruction of justice, possibly.

DAVID IGLESIAS: He basically wanted to know: are you going to file these cases that can help Heather out? That was the subtext. I felt terrible after that phone call.

GREG PALAST: By “helping Heather,” he meant Congresswoman Heather Wilson, then candidate Heather Wilson. The race was a dead heat. Domenici wanted him to bust a Democrat to help Wilson. Still, Iglesias tried to be the loyal party man, even covering up the threatening call.

Did you report this phone call to anyone at the time?

DAVID IGLESIAS: I did not, and I should have. There is a requirement under the US attorney’s manual for us to report that kind of contact from a member of Congress. I didn’t do that.

GREG PALAST: But that act of loyalty wasn’t good enough for Karl Rove, the President’s political advisor. Rove flew to New Mexico just before the election and got an earful of complaints about Iglesias from state party chiefs. Rove reported to President Bush, who personally put the heat on Attorney General Gonzales. Iglesias was stunned.

DAVID IGLESIAS: I had no idea that a few local yokels in New Mexico would have enough stroke to get the President to complain.

GREG PALAST: There was more than failing to help the Wilson campaign. In the 2004 presidential election, Republican operatives blocked a quarter-million new voters nationwide from voting on grounds they brought the wrong IDs to the poles. To justify this massive blockade, Republican officials wanted Iglesias to arrest some voters to create a high publicity show trial. Iglesias went along with the game. Just before the 2004 election, he held a press conference announcing the creation of a vote fraud task force. But the prosecutor drew the line at arresting innocent voters.

DAVID IGLESIAS: They were telling Rove that I wasn’t doing their bidding. I wasn’t filing these voter fraud cases.

GREG PALAST: The evidence fellow Republicans gave him was junk. He refused to bring a single prosecution.

DAVID IGLESIAS: It was the old throwing pasta at the wall trick, that he’s throwing up pasta. Something’s got to stick, and it didn’t.

GREG PALAST: For failing to bring the voting cases, Iglesias paid with his job.

DAVID IGLESIAS: They wanted a political operative who happened to be a US attorney, and when they got somebody who actually took his oath to the Constitution seriously, they were appalled and they wanted me out of there. The two strikes against me was, I was not political, I didn’t help them out on their bogus voter fraud prosecutions.

GREG PALAST: Rove personally ordered his removal. As a prosecutor, Iglesias says that if missing emails prove the firing was punishment for failure to bring bogus charges, Mr. Rove himself is in legal trouble.

DAVID IGLESIAS: If his intent was, look what happened with Iglesias, if that was his intent, he’s in big trouble. That is obstruction of justice, one classic example.

GREG PALAST: Iglesias believes the real reasons for the firings are in what are called the missing emails, emails sent by the Rove team using Republican Party campaign computers, which Rove claims can’t be retrieved. But not all the missing emails are missing. We have 500 of them. Apparently the Rove team misaddressed their emails, and late one night they all ended up in our inboxes in our offices in New York City.

And as Iglesias predicted, they reveal a story the party would rather keep buried. Voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., reviewed the evidence in our cache of emails and concluded:

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: They ought to be in jail for doing this, because they knew it was illegal, and they did it anyway.

GREG PALAST: What is it that was so obviously illegal that law professor Kennedy thought they deserved prison time? The evidence that shook him was attached to fifty of the secret emails, something that GOP party chiefs called caging lists, thousands of names of voters. Notably, the majority were African American. Kennedy explained how caging worked.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Caging is an illegal way of getting rid of black votes. You get a list of all the black voters. Then you send a letter to their homes. And if the person doesn’t sign it at the homes, the letter then is returned to the Republican National Committee. They then direct the state attorney general, who is friendly to them, who’s Republican, to remove that voter from the list on the alleged basis that that voter does not live in the address that they designated as their address on the voting application form.

GREG PALAST: In all, the Republican Party challenged nearly three million voters, a mass attack on minority voting rights virtually unreported in the US press.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: So they disenfranchised millions of black voters who don’t even know that they’ve been disenfranchised.

GREG PALAST: Page after page of voters with this address, Naval Air Station, Jacksonville, hundreds, thousands of soldiers and sailors targeted to lose their vote. Go to Baghdad, lose your vote.

And what does this have to do with the prosecutor firings? Take a look at the name at the top of the secret missing email: Tim Griffin. This is the man in charge of the allegedly illegal caging operation. He is research director for the Republican National Committee, special assistant to Karl Rove, and as of December 7 Karl Rove’s personal pick for US attorney for the state of Arkansas. Is this a case of the perpetrator becomes the prosecutor? For Democracy Now! this is Greg Palast.

JACK NICHOLSON: We use words like honor, code, loyalty.

GREG PALAST: Is Tom Cruise going to play you in this follow-up?

DAVID IGLESIAS: He’s more handsome, but I’m quite a bit taller, so I’ve got that on him.

AMY GOODMAN: And that was the excerpt of A Few Good Men from Greg Palast’s piece. Greg Palast, investigative journalist, his latest book just out on paperback called Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans, Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Greg Palast joins us in the studio now.

Greg, I just want to start where you left off and started this film: A Few Good Men. I don’t think most people understand this about David Iglesias.

GREG PALAST: Yes, well, Iglesias was the guy played by Tom Cruise in the film A Few Good Men, which is a real story about how a young military attorney stood up to military brass to uncover the truth. And somehow they thought that this — you know, this Tom –

AMY GOODMAN: This was the hazing of a young man, a soldier, who was killed.

GREG PALAST: Yeah, who was killed. And it was covered up. And, you know, he just wanted to get to the truth. That was David Iglesias. Now, here he is again, you know, standing up to the brass. I mean, one of the things we have to be very careful of is — you know, I’m not going to say he’s a man for all season — he went along just before the 2004 election and held a big splashy press conference, saying, “Yes, I’m going to go and look for voter fraud,” that there are — you know, it looks like there may be thousands of fraudulent voters.

Understand what this is about. This is to create a hysteria so they could pass legislation which would require voters to show up with ID. A quarter-million voters were turned away for having the wrong ID, but no one was arrested. So Karl Rove and his assistant Tim Griffin are in a panic. You’re turning away thousands of voters, you’re not arresting any. So he’s asking Iglesias, demanding Iglesias — and now we know a half dozen others, almost everyone that was fired — they demand that they just grab people. That’s where Iglesias drew the line in the sand. He said a press conference is one thing, which he probably shouldn’t have done, but literally handcuffing innocent voters for show trials — and then, of course, then you drop the case later — that is one thing he absolutely was not going to do. He was going to give up his job.

He also made the mistake — when he got calls from Senator Pete Domenici asking for inside information, pushing him to arrest Democrats a week before the midterm election of 2006, that was another attempt at what could be obstruction of justice. The US code for US attorneys requires that he turn in Senator Domenici, which he admits he didn’t do. And now he regrets that, but he said, “You know, I want the evidence out there anyway, even if it shows that I failed to act.”

AMY GOODMAN: And Healther Wilson, of course, also called, and Heather Wilson at the time in an extremely close race for her political life as a congress member from New Mexico.

GREG PALAST: Well, in fact, from my investigation, she didn’t win. There was voter fraud, and that the majority of the votes went to the Democrats.

Another thing is that Iglesias did not, unfortunately, investigate the other side of the coin, which is this massive denial of votes, systematic by Republican operatives. Now, what we have and what we showed in the film is that when I was investigating for BBC and for Democracy Now! back in 2004, we got 500 of the so-called missing emails of Karl Rove. They were, you know — Karl Rove, people think he’s an evil genius, but that’s only about half right. I mean, he’s not necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he and his guys were mistyping their email addresses, sent them to georgewbush.org, instead of dotcom, which is an email domain owned by friends of ours, who shot them right to us.

We went through the 500, and what we found were this massive plan to deny the right to vote — I mean, extraordinarily targeting African American soldiers sent overseas. They’d send them a letter to their home address. The letter would come back. They say, “Gee, they don’t live there. They shouldn’t be allowed to vote.” Their absentee ballot would come in from overseas, and it would be challenged. They would lose their vote. They wouldn’t even know it. Now, when we showed this to several voting rights attorneys, including, as you heard, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — now, he was really shaken up. That’s when he said these guys should be in jail. So this is the other side of this whole issue involving the prosecutors.

And who did this? Who was in charge of this? It wasn’t Rove personally. He had put Tim Griffin in charge. Griffin is the guy who, with Rove, picked out the US attorneys to be fired and then had himself named by Rove — had himself named by Rove to the spot as US attorney for Arkansas. So what we may have here is a case of the perpetrator of voter fraud becoming the prosecutor. I mean, it is — and what this is all about — in fact, I have an internal Tim Griffin email — what this is all about is, he says it’s all about the votes. This is about the 2008 election, a panic to get their people in place for 2008 to create hysteria about voter ID, knock out minority voters, especially Hispanic, and to put in their people who are experienced in knocking out voters.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go more into this after break. We’re talking to Greg Palast. His book just came out on paperback. It’s called Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Greg Palast, investigative journalist, author of Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans. Investigative journalist Murray Waas reported last week the Bush administration has withheld emails showing senior White House and Justice Department officials collaborated to conceal the role of White House strategist Karl Rove in installing his former deputy, Timothy Griffin as US attorney in Arkansas. The emails show that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, worked with White House officials on two letters that misled Congress on the appointment and also Rove’s role in that. Greg?

GREG PALAST: Well, yeah. They were covering up the fact that Tim Griffin was Rove’s right-hand man. And you have to understand, Rove, as the political director at the White House, was deeply involved in targeting and taking out the US attorneys who were recalcitrant and wouldn’t start handcuffing Hispanic voters on false voter charges. They also know that it’s a slippery slope, because they know that I have 500 of the so-called missing emails.

In fact, that’s one of the points that — in one of their internal emails, which was actually subpoenaed by the committee, they’re complaining about that guy, the British reporter — that’s Greg Palast. As you realize, Amy, I’m American. But, of course, my reports are exiled to BBC Britain, and then they come back here through Democracy Now!, bless you. But they’re saying that these reports about Griffin’s role have not been picked up in the US media, in the US national media. And they’re kind of right. I mean, this material has not come through the US media.

They don’t want Griffin’s role opened up, because once they have the role of Griffin in the firings opened up, they’ll ask why that happened. They will find and discover these emails, and, in fact, now that they’re public, will turn them over to the Conyers committee, and then they’ll find out that Griffin was deeply involved in the removal of legal voters. And now you’re getting into potential felony area. That’s a very serious business. So they want to stop the slippery slope of bringing in Griffin and revealing the entire chain of emails, not just his involvement in the firings, but what led up to it, and that brings us to the emails that you just saw on our report.

AMY GOODMAN: In this whole scandal, we keep hearing about voter fraud, voter fraud. But can you explain what is being talked about here with this aggressive effort to restrict, particularly people of color, voting in battleground states?

GREG PALAST: What happened is that the Republican Party was running a massive campaign directed by Karl Rove and, we know, Tim Griffin, from the written emails, to block voters’ votes or to challenge their votes. One way to challenge voters was to say that they were stealing someone else’s identity. Someone is voting for Amy Goodman. Well, they say, the solution is to create ID cards. The problem is we can’t find anyone anywhere who has committed this crime of stealing Amy Goodman’s name to vote. People are not willing to go to jail to vote in some school board election or even for the presidency.

What Griffin, Rove’s assistant, wanted Iglesias to do — they gave them 110 names. They wanted them, for example, to arrest some guy named, say, roughly, if I remember, like Juan Gonzalez, and say he voted twice, stealing someone’s ID. Well, in New Mexico there may be two guys named Juan Gonzalez. So Iglesias just thought this was absolute junk, absolute junk stuff, and he wouldn’t do it. So it’s all about trying to create a hysteria about fraudulent voting.

There are 120 million people that voted, and I can’t find an actual case out of 120 of a prosecution that — a real prosecution of any single voter for voter identity theft. There is like five cases in the country involving some minor offices. That’s it. So it’s a complete false prosecution set-up, kind of like the Soviet Union: just grab people, put them on show trials, maybe let them go later, maybe they languish in jail.

On the other side, they’re covering up their own program, programmatic challenge of voters, which is not covered in the US press. Three million people were challenged. By the way, this isn’t, you know, from the Democracy Now! black helicopter. This is from the raw data of the United States Election Assistance Commission: three million challenges. These votes were basically lost. Over a million votes were lost. Half a million absentee ballots were thrown out, and many, many of those were votes of African American and Hispanic soldiers that went to Iraq, got their ballots challenged under this Karl Rove-Tim Griffin scheme, and they lost their vote. And they didn’t even know that they lost their vote. So all of this is being covered up.

And so, they cannot now — they don’t want to open up the whole story of Tim Griffin, how he became US attorney, what his role was, because it goes all the way back. And what David Iglesias was saying, US attorney, now captain — by the way, he’s back in the military — Captain Iglesias was saying, if you can show this chain of intent, that it’s all about the voting and he’s being punished for not bringing these false prosecutions, he says, that’s an obstruction of justice charge that can be brought against Karl Rove.

And, by the way, one little sidelight on that is that Captain Iglesias, one of the excuses that they try to give for firing him, Amy, was that he was absent for too many days from office. They didn’t mention that he was absent because he was on active duty in the US Naval Reserve. He is now, by the way, bringing the very first claim ever. You cannot fire someone for doing their duty in the US Naval Reserve. He’s now filing a charge against the commander-in-chief, George Bush, for attempting to fire him for simply showing up for active duty.

AMY GOODMAN: The Arkansas Leader reported enterprising reporters examining Griffin’s fanciful resume discovered his blistering record as a prosecutor was nothing more than paper shuffling in short stints in the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps and federal prosecutor offices. He had never taken a single case to trial. His career had consisted almost altogether of political hatchet work.

GREG PALAST: Well, you have to look at what’s going on here. You’ve replaced Iglesias, who is, you know, the Tom Cruise lawyer who has real experience as a prosecutor, as a trial lawyer from the military. They remove him, and they put in a paper shuffler — worse, someone who is actually shuffling voters’ papers that he shouldn’t be shuffling. You saw the kind of emotional reaction of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., voting rights attorney. He was the most emotional, because you have to imagine — remember that his father, his late father, was the predecessor to Alberto Gonzales. Imagine, we’ve gone from Robert F, Kennedy, Sr., to Roberto Gonzales.

AMY GOODMAN: Alberto.

GREG PALAST: Yeah. And you can, you know — from Kennedy’s, this was very an emotional issue. To see the office that his father used to protect civil rights being used deliberately to attack civil rights is a very serious business. But, again, here he is saying, and Iglesias is suggesting now with this evidence, that it rises now to obstruction of justice.

AMY GOODMAN: And, interestingly, McClatchy Newspapers reporting, as part of the strategy, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has sought to roll back policies to protect minority voting rights. On virtually every significant decision affecting election balloting since 2001, the division’s voting rights section has come down on the side of Republicans.

GREG PALAST: Well, even worse, what’s not covered there is that they covered up the active attack on legal voters. I mean, you’re talking — the caging lists that we have, in the 500 sheets, the 500 emails, we have 70,000 names. That’s one state. This was a multimillion-dollar, gold-plated attack operation on the right of minority voters to vote. And, obviously, Griffin knew it, because he was in charge of it. So you actually have the guys who are supposed to be protecting voters are either actively covering up or even actively participating in knocking out legal voters. I mean, it’s like the mob has grabbed the police department. That’s the problem, by the way, with voter fraud — with real voter fraud, not the phony stuff of grabbing the Juan Gonzalezes of New Mexico — if you win, you’ve now grabbed the apparatus of protection and enforcement. It’s the perfect crime.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it there. I want to thank you very much, Greg Palast, for joining us. Greg, an investigative journalist, latest book just out in paperbook called Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans, Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild.

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