Category Archive

House investigators have learned that the Bush administration’s use of Republican National Committee email accounts is far greater than previously disclosed — 140,216 emails sent or received by Karl Rove alone — and that the RNC has overseen “extensive destruction” of many of the emails, including all email records for 51 White House officials. The Presidential Records Act requires the … Read More

Not only was a knee-deep in the whole attorney firing issue, but now it looks like he may have obstructed justice in the attorney firing investigation: The Justice Department is investigating whether Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales sought to influence the testimony of a departing senior aide during a March meeting in Gonzales’s office, according to correspondence released today. In … Read More

Yesterday saw even more documents from the White House in the attorney purge scandal, and this one, while small, provides far more proof that the White House was heavily involved in the DOJ’s hiring and firing decisions of federal prosecutors.  Carpetbagger sums it up. UPDATE:  The lastest doc dump has sparked two significant subpoenae — one to Harriet Miers, and … Read More

N.Y. Times editorial: The Justice Department is no ordinary agency. Its 93 United States attorney offices, scattered across the country, prosecute federal crimes ranging from public corruption to terrorism. These prosecutors have enormous power: they can wiretap people’s homes, seize property and put people in jail for life. They can destroy businesses, and affect the outcomes of elections. It has … Read More

Nice summary by Marty Lederman: 1. There is little, if any, reliable evidence of any serious problem of voter fraud in the United States. 2. After the 2000 election, if not before, Karl Rove and other Republican operatives decided that Republican political prospects would be immeasurably improved if they would only repeat, as often as possible, the unsupported claim that … Read More

Murray Waas has a new story out: "The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove’s, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas." TPM has the analysis — the emails … Read More

This scandal is getting out of control. hard to keep up: (1) Monica Goodling is now facing a Justice Department investigation for her role in screening career attorneys for party affiliation. The Justice Department has launched an internal investigation into whether Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s former White House liaison illegally took party affiliation into account in hiring career federal … Read More

Murray Waas has a fascinating article in the National Review describing a secret order by Alberto Gonzales that delegated unprecedented control over the hiring and firing of senior Justice Department officials–including those who oversee the DOJ criminal division–to Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling. This order bypassed the traditional authority given to the deputy attorney general, the associate attorney general, and … Read More

Now that she won’t go to jail, will the graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University come to Jesus and, you know, tell the truth? By 21-10, the House oversight committee voted to issue a subpoena to Rice to compel her story on the Bush administration’s claim, now discredited, that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. Moments earlier in the committee … Read More

I have little to say about this.  By all accounts, he tanked yesterday.  His story was a concoction of "mea culpa" combined with "I’m not responsible" combined with "I don’t recall".  Bottom line is that Gonzales is either lying about his role in the U.S. Attorney firings, or he is incompetent in that he was "out of the loop" about … Read More