Sam. I’ll take that at face value. Thanks for replying.
McClatchy (the chain formerly known as Knight Ridder) has been doing some more great reporting:
Interesting to see how this story is developing. Now Chuck Schumer has called for AG Gonzales’s resignation; Arlen Specter has offered only tepid support, at best. His DoJ days may be numbered.
Here’s the deal on Gonzales: there’s never been any evidence that he has the least bit of independence from the White House. Whatever he’s done here, you can bet the orders came from up the ladder. So focusing on Gonzales would be a mistake. His departure would be useful in that it might be hard for the Bush White House to find someone equally pliant who can survive an AG confirmation hearing. (They’ve used up Harriet Miers, I’m afraid.)
But even in the post-Katrina political landscape, the ‘liberal’ media tends to shut down on a story once a single head rolls. (For instance, after Katrina itself, once Heckuva Job Brownie was fired, his boss Chertoff got a free pass.) So it’s essential to aim higher - to find out who gave Gonzales his marching orders (Rove, probably) and take him down.
How?
Unlikely. This White House has mastered deniability and political insulation; there’s a huge procedural gulf, documentation-wise, between the decision-makers and the water-carriers. The best the opposition can hope for in the short and medium term is to keep the pressure on said water-carriers, encouraging the administration to bounce them out of a basic need for survival, to sacrifice them on the altar of political expediency, each time one of these scandals breaks (and with the Dems in power, it seems like they’re coming fast and furious, doesn’t it?).
By so doing, it should become more and more difficult, over time, for the administration to enact its policies, mostly because they’ll have a harder and harder time convincing competent and qualified people to sign up to be fall guys, people to be tossed overboard to protect the higher-ups from accusations of malfeasance. That isn’t to say there’ll be a shortage of people for these positions; there’ll always be sharks and merceneries aplenty in DC. What there will be a shortage of, however, is competence, of people with actual experience and skill, which means that the sacrificial apparatchiks will be increasingly green and clumsy, ergo they’ll be less and less able to carry out their missions quietly and efficiently, which in turn means that their nefarious deeds will be caught by the spotlight more and more quickly, which means mounting frustration, turnover, and distraction, which, finally, means that the administration’s unsavory agenda will be more and more paralyzed.
It’ll be slow, but unless one of the higher-ups gets caught on video or audio saying or doing something so spectacularly corrupt that even Joe Public can grasp the malfeasance based on a seven-second clip, none of this stuff is going to stick to anybody above the deputy level. So, slow it may be, but that’s the way it’s probably going to work.
Sorry Sam, I don’t buy your story. I believe when you wrote these words, you were interested in needling and dismissing this issue, just as John Mace and Bricker tried to do, by trying to obscure the actual issue: that’s it’s highly odd for a President to em masse fire his OWN people midway into his second term, and that on inspection of this odd event, it then turned out to be rife with some pretty awful ethical problems with it (i.e. punishing attorneys for not bowing to direct political threats and pressure).
The issue has virtually NOTHING to do with the fact that every President traditionally puts his own people in place upon taking office. Virtually every story on this issue has noted this, and it’s noted several times in the thread. My OP makes an offhand mention of it by noting that it happened mid-term (And note that the OP does not, in fact, fret about the fact that they were fired: all anyone found it at first was an odd move and worthy of more digging)
So, at the very very best, your comment is an example of you posting a nasty driveby jibe without you even bothering to figure out what the issue under discussion was. There are worse interpretations.
Put people under oath in Congressional committee hearings. Start with the small fry, and work your way up, just like prosecutors do. At this point, you’d want to start with the people who report to Gonzales, and also with the people who are known to have called in to the White House or DoJ and complained.
Do all of that, conclusively prove Rove was in the loop and gave the orders, and you still have to prove he committed a crime by doing so – see the problem?
Crime, schmime - he could be impeached, AFAICT:
Now it may be that ‘civil officer’ is a legal term of art that includes political appointees in Cabinet agencies, but excludes White House employees. But that seems to be a longshot.
That’s certainly sleazy and unethical, but we already knew that about Creepy Unca Karl.
What we really want to know is, was he the one who forwarded names to Gonzales, with the implication that they shouldn’t be U.S. attorneys much longer?
The shedding of light on this stinker of a story is exactly why people should be grateful that the Congress switched hands last November. This story would be dead and buried otherwise.
White House Said to Prompt Firing of Prosecutors
Firings Had Genesis in White House
Does anyone know whether Gonzales was under oath January 18th, when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee “I would never, ever make a change in the United States attorney position for political reasons”?
If only we had some sort of resident expert on legal matters, someone who could offer an opinion on this whole affair…
From the Washington Post, via Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly.
Sampson is the chief of staff to Gonzales who just resigned. Here he was, writing to the White House that Harriet and Karl wanted to get Rove’s former aide installed as a US Attorney.
All of this is increasingly linked to manipulating votes and gaming the system. I just wonder how much this will help to reduce the cognitive barriers that have existed for many in terms of believing that Republicans have been trying to carry out large scale manipulations of voting practices for a long time now (see, e.g. the RNC’s links to the phone jamming scandal in N.H.).
Lying to Congress is a criminal offense, even if he wasn’t under oath. But it would be nice to nail the fucker on perjury, wouldn’t it?
My vague recollection is that this was asked, and answered in the affirmative, somewhere in the lefty blogs recently. And mcjoan of dKos, one of the front-pagers there, referred to Gonzales’ “sworn testimony” on January 18 in a post last week.
I’d like better confirmation, but that’s what I’ve got.
So, any chance that ol’ Alberto will get subjected to any of that stuff that totally, definitely ain’t torture? You know, if it’s suspected that he isn’t revealing enough?
-Joe
hahaha. This is all just too delish. Senator Leahy is “astonished” that someone practically everyone knows is a freaking lying weasel is, well, a freaking lying weasel, and has been since day one.
I’m smelling me some Gonzales meat on a spit …and is that a whiff Rove meat wafting through as well? Yummm.