Dahlia Lithwick links the U.S. attorney scandal to the recent FISA vote, calling out the Democrats for, in her words, “hypocritically berating the attorney general with fingers crossed behind their backs.”
‘Nuff said.
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How unseemly is this story?
On the night of March 10, 2004, as Attorney General John D. Ashcroft lay ill in an intensive-care unit, his deputy, James B. Comey, received an urgent call.
White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and President Bush‘s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., were on their way to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush’s domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department had just determined was illegal.
In vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Comey said he alerted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and raced, sirens blaring, to join Ashcroft in his hospital room, arriving minutes before Gonzales and Card. Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought. Gonzales and Card, who had never acknowledged Comey’s presence in the room, turned and left.
According to testimony yesterday by Comey, the Bush administration was so keen on creating a a paper trail that would make its illegal wiretapping program appear legal that it was willing to take advantage of a deathly ill member of its administration, hoping to catch him in his weakness.
The irony in all this, as Keith Olbermann pointed out last night, is that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft comes off looking like a paragon of virtue and a defender of civil liberties — a crazy notion given his record in office.
What does this say about Gonzales, the current occupant of the attorney general’s office, and the lengths to which this administration might go to protect its prerogatives and advance its notion of the unitary executive?
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Christie has a partisan background and there are rumors, which he denies, that he will be challenging Gov. Corzine in 2009 — or running for some other office. I won’t go so far as to call him a partisan hack, but the math on this does not add up.
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The Baltimore Sun yesterday made plain what so many of us already knew: Republicans have been engaging in a national effort to supress votes in Democratic districts. This should be added to the list of particulars against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — if he doesn’t resign, then he should be removed from office. This is unacceptable.
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An interesting piece from Harper’s (my favorite magazine) on the U.S. Attorney’s scandal that expands it beyond the firings to consider the actual prosecutions pursued by attorneys working for the Bush administration.
The piece looks at a study from two University of Minnesota professors — Donald Shields and John Cragan — that “undertook a study to ascertain whether the Bush Administration was engaged in criminal prosecutions that targeted Democrats because they are Democrats — in other words, political profiling. Their results are stunning and have not been effectively controverted.”
The results: Seven times as many Democratic officials have been investigated under the Bush administration as Republicans, “a number that exceeds even the racial profiling of African Americans in traffic stops.” And the “current Bush Republican Administration appears to be the first to have engaged in political profiling,” according to the piece.
If fully sustained, this will be an indictment not merely of the leadership of the Department. It will also raise fair questions about the professionalism, independence and integrity of federal prosecutors in the field around the country who allowed themselves to be the tools of this program.
The obvious question, which has been asked by Blue Jersey, is what about U.S. Attorney Chris Christie? U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, who was a target of the U.S. Attorney during his campaign, might have some thoughts.
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Hank Kalet 