Whatever will we tell the children?

Mommy, why is the lying man still in charge of the law?

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/syndicated_player/index.jhtml

It doesn’t matter; Bush will pardon Gonzo anyway

Of course Bush will pardon Gonzales if the latter is impeached in Congress. That’s what the Bush Crime Family does — they take care of their good loyal soldiers.

Doesn’t mean Congress shouldn’t make him do it.

Yesterday FBI Director Robert Mueller testified that the infamous 2004 confrontation WAS, in fact, about the NSA spying program:

The director, Robert S. Mueller III, told the House Judiciary Committee that the confrontation was about the National Security Agency’s counterterrorist eavesdropping program, describing it as “an N.S.A. program that has been much discussed.” His testimony was a serious blow to Mr. Gonzales, who insisted at a Senate hearing on Tuesday that there were no disagreements inside the Bush administration about the program at the time of those discussions or at any other time.

The director’s remarks were especially significant because Mr. Mueller is the Justice Department’s chief law enforcement official. He also played a crucial role in the 2004 dispute over the program, intervening with President Bush to help deal with the threat of mass resignations that grew out of a day of emergency meetings at the White House and at the hospital bedside of John Ashcroft, who was then attorney general.

In a separate development, Senate Democrats, who were unaware of Mr. Mueller’s comments, demanded the appointment of a special counsel to investigate whether Mr. Gonzales committed perjury in his testimony on Tuesday about the intelligence dispute. The Senate Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, issued a subpoena to Karl Rove, the White House senior political adviser, and another presidential aide, J. Scott Jennings, for testimony about the dismissal of federal prosecutors, another issue that has dogged Mr. Gonzales.

White House officials said the Democrats had engaged in political gamesmanship.

“What we are witnessing is an out-of-control Congress which spends time calling for special prosecutors, starting investigations, issuing subpoenas and generally just trying to settle scores,” said Scott M. Stanzel, a White House spokesman. “All the while they fail to pass appropriations bills and important issues like immigration reform, energy and other problems go unanswered.”

The conflict underscored how Mr. Gonzales’s troubles have expanded beyond accusations of improper political influence in the dismissal of United States attorneys to the handling of the eavesdropping program, in which Mr. Gonzales was significantly involved in his previous post as White House counsel.

“I had an understanding that the discussion was on a N.S.A. program,” Mr. Mueller said in answer to a question from Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, in a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

Asked whether he was referring to the Terrorist Surveillance Program, or T.S.P., he replied, “The discussion was on a national N.S.A. program that has been much discussed, yes.”

Which means that either Gonzales perjured himself, or else there is ANOTHER spying program even more secret, and presumably even worse, than the already-illegal NSA program.

So why was this man smirking during his testimony? In all likelihood, as Jon Ponder says, it’s because Gonzales knows that he will never spend a minute in jail — that all he needs to do is remain loyal to The Family, and he’ll be pardoned. Still, this should not dissuade Congress from doing the right thing. It’s highly unlikely that Bush will be impeached, and that even if impeachment articles are drawn up, and even if they are sent on to the Senate by the House, he won’t be convicted because Senate Republicans have put the American people on notice that to them, party loyalty trumps everything — even the rule of law, even the United States Constitution. The best we can hope for is to ensure that the history books put on record that the 43rd president was a criminal who pardoned all the men who fell on their swords for him.

Smirk II, Electric Bugaloo

Why is this man smirking?
(AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

That’s an easy one to answer — it’s because he knows that no one can touch him. He knows that his presdent, the self appointed First Dictator of the United States, will protect him to the ends of the earth. After all, isn’t that how organized crime works? Solozzo didn’t dare touch Tom Hagen, and Congress won’t dare impeach Alberto Gonzales, despite the latter’s obvious perjury yesterday:

ThinkProgress has the document showing clearly that Gonzales perjured himself about the March 2004 White House intelligence briefing.

The only way that Gonzales hasn’t committed perjury is if there is another, even more secret surveillance program to which NO ONE outside the Administration was privy. Would he care to elaborate on that one to avoid a perjury charge? I think not, especially when there is some question as to exactly whom is going to try him.

Note to Congress: If you can’t find the stones to impeach Bush or Cheney, how about this guy?

Perhaps you need something akin to training wheels or wine coolers or those inflatable plastic wings people put on their children when teaching them to swim — someone you can impeach who isn’t Big and Scary like the Towel-Snapper-in Chief and Lord Voldemort.

Like this guy:

As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. “There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse,” Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.

Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Two Justice Department officials say that Gonzo was kept very well informed of FBI civil liberties violations:

The two officials spoke in a telephone call arranged by press officials at the Justice Department after The Washington Post disclosed yesterday that the FBI sent reports to Gonzales of legal and procedural violations shortly before he told senators in April 2005: “There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse” after 2001.

“I have discussed and informed attorneys general, including this one, about mistakes the FBI has made or problems or violations or compliance incidents, however you want to refer to them,” said James A. Baker, a career official who heads the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review.

“I’ve discussed a number of times oversight concerns and, underlying those oversight concerns, the potential for violations. And I’m sure we’ve discussed violations that have occurred in the past,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security Kenneth L. Wainstein.

So HOW many times has Gonzo lied to Congress now? Why are they putting up with this crap?

Jerrold Nadler calls for a special counsel:

“Providing false, misleading or inaccurate statements to Congress is a serious crime, and the man who may have committed those acts cannot be trusted to investigate himself.”

Patrick Leahy is “deeply disturbed” over revelations that Gonzales lied to Congress back in April:

uote>”…it is only through dogged oversight or Freedom of Information Act lawsuits — such as the one that revealed these inconsistent statements — that Congress and the American people learn the truth about this administration’s activities,”

There’s an awful lot of gum-flapping and righteous indignation in Congress every time Alberto Gonzales goes up to Capitol Hill and lies through his teeth — and yet they do nothing except continue to show up on talk shows and express their shock that a Government Official Could Lie Exclamation Point.

Time to put your money where your mouths are, guys.

Utterly Shameless

This bunch in the executive branch really does see itself as above the law.

It looks like the spineless Democrats are going to allow Gonzo to dodge a proverbial bullet and keep his job, so what’s his reaction to investigations into his politicizing the Justice Department?

To politicize the Justice Department even further:

Gonzales described what he delicately calls “a more vigorous and a little bit more formal process” for annually evaluating prosecutors. What that means, as he explained it, is hauling in every U.S. attorney for a meeting to hear, among other things, politicians’ beefs against the prosecutor.

If that should happen, expect the fair-mindedness and independence Americans still count on from their Justice Department to slip.

In testimony to Congress and comments at the National Press Club, Gonzales framed the meetings as a way of improving communications. But it also looks a lot like a way to remind recalcitrant U.S. attorneys what the home team expects.

On Friday, a spokesman for Gonzales insisted in a written statement that the attorney general has no intention of holding one-on-ones with every U.S. attorney.

“The view of the overwhelming majority of U.S. attorneys is that they do not want a new, formalized review process — including one that might involve annual one-on-one meetings between each U.S. attorney and the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General. We have listened and agree with these views,” the spokesman said.

But later Friday a senior Justice Department official said one-on-one meetings are still on the table. “We haven’t ruled that out,” the official said.

Here’s what Gonzales told the House Judiciary Committee last month about what he would do to avoid another uproar in the event he wants to fire more prosecutors:

“At least once a year every United States attorney is going to sit down with either myself or the deputy attorney general, and we’re going to have a very candid conversation about issues and problems in their districts,” Gonzales said. “If I’ve heard of complaints from a member of Congress, it gives me an opportunity or the deputy attorney general an opportunity to tell the U.S. attorney what we’re hearing.”

For an idea of the effect that “what we’re hearing” can have, consider the case of former U.S. Atty. David Iglesias of New Mexico. Iglesias was fired after Republican Sen. Pete Domenici — his one-time sponsor — complained repeatedly to Gonzales and the White House that Iglesias was reluctant to prosecute vote fraud cases, a sensitive topic in a state George W. Bush lost by 366 votes in 2000.

Domenici also phoned Iglesias last fall and asked him if a certain high-profile Democrat was going to be indicted before the election, an inquiry Iglesias told lawmakers made him feel “leaned on.”

Gonzales said he fired Iglesias based on “what I understood to be the consensus recommendation of the senior leadership in the department,” but he offered no specifics — except Domenici’s complaints.

What, exactly, would a sit-down with the attorney general have been expected to yield in Iglesias’ case?

Whatever Gonzales does to review prosecutors’ performances will, by design, be murky, in the interests of maximizing executive power, the attorney general has indicated.

In case you had any doubts about how the Bush Family operates

The most serious threat facing America today

Copyright infringement.

Or so the Gonzales Justice Department would have you believe:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including “attempts” to commit piracy.

“To meet the global challenges of IP crime, our criminal laws must be kept updated,” Gonzales said during a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on Monday.

The Bush administration is throwing its support behind a proposal called the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007, which is likely to receive the enthusiastic support of the movie and music industries and would represent the most dramatic rewrite of copyright law since a 2005 measure dealing with pre-release piracy.

Here’s our podcast on the topic.

The IPPA would, for instance:

* Criminalize “attempting” to infringe copyright. Federal law currently punishes not-for-profit copyright infringement with between 1 and 10 years in prison, but there has to be actual infringement that takes place. The IPPA would eliminate that requirement. (The Justice Department’s summary of the legislation says: “It is a general tenet of the criminal law that those who attempt to commit a crime but do not complete it are as morally culpable as those who succeed in doing so.”)

* Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software. Anyone using counterfeit products who “recklessly causes or attempts to cause death” can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it.

* Permit more wiretaps for piracy investigations. Wiretaps would be authorized for investigations of Americans who are “attempting” to infringe copyrights.

* Allow computers to be seized more readily. Specifically, property such as a PC “intended to be used in any manner” to commit a copyright crime would be subject to forfeiture, including civil asset forfeiture. Civil asset forfeiture has become popular among police agencies in drug cases as a way to gain additional revenue, and is problematic and controversial.

* Increase penalties for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention regulations. Currently criminal violations are currently punished by jail times of up to 10 years and fines of up to $1 million. The IPPA would add forfeiture penalties too.

* Add penalties for “intended” copyright crimes. Currently certain copyright crimes require someone to commit the “distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies” valued at over $2,500. The IPPA would insert a new prohibition: actions that were “intended to consist of” distribution.

* Require Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Association of America. That would happen when compact discs with “unauthorized fixations of the sounds or sounds and images of a live musical performance” are attempted to be imported. Neither the Motion Picture Association of America nor the Business Software Alliance (nor any other copyright holder such as photographers, playwrights, or news organizations, for that matter) would qualify for this kind of special treatment.

A representative of the Motion Picture Association of America told us: “We appreciate the department’s commitment to intellectual property protection and look forward to working with both the department and Congress as the process moves ahead.”

What’s still unclear is the kind of reception this legislation might encounter on Capitol Hill. Gonzales may not be terribly popular, but Democrats do tend to be more closely aligned with Hollywood and the recording industry than the GOP. (A few years ago, Republicans even savaged fellow conservatives for allying themselves too closely with copyright holders.)

A spokeswoman for Rep. Howard Berman, the California Democrat who heads the House Judiciary subcommittee that focuses on intellectual property, said the congressman is reviewing proposals from the attorney general and from others. The aide said the Hollywood politician plans to introduce his own intellectual property enforcement bill later this year but said his office is not prepared to discuss any details yet.

Sounds like there’s going to be a general, bipartisan corporatist attempt to “protect” copyright holders and with addressing those pesky bloggers who say mean things about them at the same time.

Watch your Democratic Party very carefully on this, folks, because it’ll tell you who owns them.

Note also that the last time the Justice Department was obsessed with a relatively petty crime (last time it was prostitution), they ignored the terrorist attack that was on the verge of occurring.

Since when does "the adults are now in charge" mean passing the buck?

One of the traits of effective managers is to hire good people, communicate their responsibilities, trust them to do their work, and leave them alone, then check in periodically on their progress. But when push comes to shove, and the department’s performance is evaluated by the higher-ups, it’s the manager who is accountable.

Not in the Bush administration, however, where responsibility and accountability, not just tasks, are delegated downward. We know that George Bush wants to remove himself from accountability for the Iraq war by hiring a “war czar” — a position no one, understandably, seems to want. But it seems that Alberto Gonzales has run the Justice Department in the same way.

Murray Waas:

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

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

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

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

Instead of being an effective management technique, delegation in the Bush Administration and its associated agencies is all about covering the ass of upper management. One wonders, then, why Gonzales’ underlings were so willing to be a part of this scheme designed so obviously to give cover to the Attorney General. And also why so many people in this Administration have been willing, time and time again, to play the fall guy for this bunch. (Arianna has more on why those who know they’re just being set up to be fall guys don’t just resign.)

(h/t: Cernig)

Gonzo isn’t even a GOOD liar

Don’t you just love how the mainstream press simply cannot bring itself to use the words “lie”, “liar”, “lied” or “lying sack of shit” when describing Bush Administration officials?

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales met with senior aides on Nov. 27 to review a plan to fire a group of U.S. attorneys, according to documents released last night, a disclosure that contradicts Gonzales’s previous statement that he was not involved in “any discussions” about the dismissals.

Justice Department officials also announced last night that the department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility have launched a joint investigation into the firings, including an examination of whether any of the removals were improper and whether any Justice officials misled Congress about them.

The hour-long November meeting in the attorney general’s conference room included Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and four other senior Justice officials, including the Gonzales aide who coordinated the firings, then-Chief of Staff D. Kyle Sampson, records show.

Documents detailing the previously undisclosed meeting appear to conflict with remarks by Gonzales at a March 13 news conference in which he portrayed himself as a CEO who had delegated to Sampson responsibility for the particulars of firing eight U.S. attorneys.

“I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on,” Gonzales said.

Spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said last night that there is no “inconsistency” between the Nov. 27 meeting and Gonzales’s remarks. She argued that Gonzales was simply emphasizing at the news conference that he was not involved in the details of Sampson’s plans.

It all depends what the defininition of “plans” is.

“Contradicts.” “Appears to conflict.” If he says was not involved, but there is evidence that he was involved, then he is LYING. Why is this notion so difficult for the editors at WaPo to get their heads around?

No surprise here

The orders for the Prosecutor Massacre came right from the White House:

The White House was deeply involved in the decision late last year to dismiss federal prosecutors, including some who had been criticized by Republican lawmakers, administration officials said Monday.

Last October, President Bush spoke with Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to pass along concerns by Republicans that some prosecutors were not aggressively addressing voter fraud, the White House said Monday. Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, was among the politicians who complained directly to the president, according to an administration official.

The president did not call for the removal of any specific United States attorneys, said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman. She said she had “no indication” that the president had been personally aware that a process was already under way to identify prosecutors who would be fired.

Uh-huh. Right. And I am Marie of Rumania.

The White House continued to defend its handling of the dismissals.

“We continue to believe that the decision to remove and replace U.S. attorneys who serve at the pleasure of the president was perfectly appropriate and within our discretion,” Ms. Perino said.

“We stand by the Department of Justice assertion that they identified the seven U.S. attorneys who were removed, as they have said, based on performance and managerial reasons.”

Of course, this is the same Department of Justice that’s led by a guy who claims there is no express right to habeas corpus in the United States Constitution, despite that document’s explicitness about it: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it”, who set up the Administration’s policy of detainee torture, and who already has a history of lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

That this bunch of criminals is still claiming that these firings were about competence or were performance-related would be mind-boggling for its chutzpah if they hadn’t been able to get away with making preposterous claims for the last five years and getting away with it. Chuck Schumer is making all the right noises about compelling White House officials, including Karl Rove, to testify, but whether he’ll actually hold their feet to the fire and do anything about it when they lie under oath — as they will — remains to be seen. Color me skeptical. The biggest question now is whether the Bush/Cheney cabal is up to throwing both Gonzales AND Rove under the bus in an effort to save themselves.