Once he was the nation’s Attorney General, appointed — and constantly protected and defended by — President George Bush. But he is considered by some to have been one of the worst Attorney Generals in recent history — and now Alberto Gonzales is having a hard time finding a job at a law firm.

Will he soon be applying for work at the temp agency Manpower?

Maybe not yet — but the New York Times reports that Gonzales is finding the response to his resume has not been enthusiastic:

Alberto R. Gonzales, like many others recently unemployed, has discovered how difficult it can be to find a new job. Mr. Gonzales, the former attorney general, who was forced to resign last year, has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster, Washington lawyers and his associates said in recent interviews.

He has, through friends, put out inquiries, they said, and has not found any takers. What makes Mr. Gonzales’s case extraordinary is that former attorneys general, the government’s chief lawyer, are typically highly sought.

A longtime loyalist to George W. Bush dating to their years together in Texas, Mr. Gonzales was once widely viewed as a strong candidate to be the first Hispanic-American nominated one day to the Supreme Court. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he carried an impressive personal story as the child of poor Mexican immigrants.

Despite those credentials, he left office last August with a frayed reputation over his role in the dismissal of several federal prosecutors and the truthfulness of his testimony about a secret eavesdropping program. He has had no full-time job since his resignation, and his principal income has come from giving a handful of talks at colleges and before private business groups.

“Frayed,” indeed. Any prospective employer from Mars who did not know who Gonzales is could do a Google search about his legacy and not be impressed by this, this, this, this, this, this or this.

But has there been a new development that won’t improve his legacy but will perhaps end even the remaining half-ounce of doubt about his role in “enhanced interrogation techniques” (the phrase used for “torture” by those defending the administration who apparently also like the phrase “pre-owned cars” instead of “used cars.”) and why he played the role.

Read the rest of this entry »

It has taken no time at all to understand that in his own way Attorney General Michael Mukasey is even worse than Alberto Gonzalez. That is because he is more clever than Gonzo in doing the White House’s bidding, which is to say suborning the law at every opportunity.

Law school prof Jonathan Turley has reached a not dissimilar conclusion in writing in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece that:

“The recent decisions of . . . Mukasey to block any prosecution of Bush administration officials for contempt and to block any criminal investigation of torture led to a chorus of criticism. Many view the decisions as raw examples of political manipulation of the legal process and overt cronyism. I must confess that I was one of those crying foul until I suddenly realized that there was something profound, even beautiful, in Mukasey’s action.

“In his twisting of legal principles, the attorney general has succeeded in creating a perfect paradox. Under Mukasey’s Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president — and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.”

It is worth noting for the umpteenth time that none of this mischief might have transpired had feckless Democratic leaders like Senator Charles Schumer drawn the line at Mukasey’s nomination hearing when he bobbed and weaved on what constituted torture and blew them off by saying that he’d get back to them after he was sworn in.

As Turley also notes, that is the ultimate paradox.

Meanwhile, there is the reason that Mukasey was nominated in the first place: Gonzalez couldn’t keep his stories straight about why nine U.S. attorneys had been sacked, eventually had to resign and is now lawyering up for coming legal fireworks.

Although the answer is something of an open secret, Congress wants to know where the orders to purge the attorneys came from.

This prompted contempt citations against, Joshua Bolten, President Bush’s chief of staff, and Harriet Miers, the prez’s former counsel and failed Supreme Court wannabe, after the White House claimed executive privilege and refused to let them testify. Mukasey has dutifully said he will not refer the contempt citations to a federal grand jury.

House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who like other Democratic bigs seems to show up for work with a spine on some days but not on others, has responded that she will give the House Judiciary Committee the authority to file a civil lawsuit against Bolten and Miers in federal court.

If the next president is a Democrat (and that is by no means a foregone conclusion) what if any investigations of Bush administration criminality and other misdeeds should be persued?

Or, should the Democratic president and Congress, in the spirit of a new era and an appeal to bipartisanship, wipe the slate clean?

The criminality and misdeeds include:

* The refusal of Alberto Gonzalez, Harriet Miers and other key adminstration officials to answer subpoenas in connection with the politically motivated firings of U.S. attorneys.

* The refusal to hand over to congressional investigators certain testimony from Vice President Cheney and other key administration officials in connection with the Wilson-Plame leak scandal.

* The official embrace of torture in contravention of the Constitution, treaties and conventions and common decency.

* The Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

* Pre-9/11 CIA and other intelligence failures.

* The willful destruction of millions of White House emails sought by congressional investigators.

* Voter supression efforts directed by the Justice Department.

* A full accounting of the costs of the Iraq war.

* No-bid contracts given Halliburton and other firms working in Iraq and Afghanistan with close administration ties.

* The consequences of the multiple Bush signing statements.

* Government and government-funded scientific research and studies skewed for political reasons.

* Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s legal conflicts of interest.

And the list goes on.

The George Polk Award inevitably plays second fiddle to the Pulitzer Prize, but it commands just as much respect from journalists.

This makes the award of a Polk this morning to Josh Marshall and his staff at Talking Points Memo — the first time that a blog has been honored — so sweet and well deserved.

Josh started TPM back in 2000 as a bit of a lark, but it has grown into a full-time enterprise and a model for what blogs are capable of doing above and beyond the mainstream media.

TPM’s Polk is for its dogged coverage of the politically motivated dismissals of U.S. attorneys by the Bush administration, a story that the MSM at first pooh-poohed and then had to play catch-up on. Josh and co-bloggers Paul Kiel and Justin Rood did most of the muckraking, but were assisted by readers who helped them analyze important documents.

More than anything or anyone else, we have TPM to thank for the fact that Alberto Gonzales is back in Texas lawyering-up.

A hearty thanks is in order.

More here.

There’s certainly an argument that we get the government we deserve.  It’s just that I feel that I personally deserve better.

About the best we can say about Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s testimony Wednesday in the Senate is that he was no Alberto Gonzales, with the frequent memory lapses and possibly intentional misstatements.
But that is a very low bar.(New York Times) 

It certainly is.  Dahlia Lithwick snarks, "Mukasey is only willing to make and defend his decisions without explaining them. Still, he is very convincing in asserting that even though his decision is secret and its rationale is secret, and all future applications are secret, he is nevertheless confident that it’s the right decision."  (Slate)    Isn’t this the conduct we’ve come to expect and take for granted whenever a Bush administration official is asked to demonstrate accountability to the public?:

Yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, featuring day-long testimony from Attorney General Michael Mukasey, was extraordinary foronly one reason: for our country, what happened in the hearing is now completely ordinary….[Mukasey] is, ideologically,…as much of a loyal adherent to the Bush/Cheney extremist worldview as Gonzales ever was.

Mukasey explicitly embraces the most extreme theories of presidential omnipotence and lawlessness and displays as much Cheney-ite contempt for the notion of Congressional oversight as the Vice President himself. He repeatedly endorsed patently illegal behavior — including torture — and refused even to pretend that he cared what the Senate thought about any of it. He even told Republican Senators that they have no right to pass a whistleblower law allowing federal employees who learn of lawbreaking to inform Congress about it, because such a law would infringe on the President’s constitutional powers. In Mukasey’s worldview, the President has unlimited power and
Congress has none. (Salon: Greenwald; links in original)

An op-ed in The New York Times suggests that the American people "deserve better from their highest law-enforcement official."(New York Times)  I wonder if we do.  If so, we clearly haven’t done an effective job of conveying this to our elected representatives.
Read the rest of this entry »

Since late last year, a bitter war of words has broken out between the United States and Argentina’s former first lady and first female president, Cristina Kirchner, over whether Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez helped fund her election campaign. According to this op-ed article from Argentina’s La Nacion, whatever the truth of these charges leveled by U.S. prosecutors, allowing U.S.-Argentine relations to deteriorate over the issue is not a wise course of action.

“The anti-U.S. bias that Argentina has historically shown and which is confirmed by the polls, has led the Kirchners [Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, the previous and present Presidents] to dangerously escalate a conflict that has no precedent in our constitutional government.”

By U.S. Correspondent Rosendo Fraga

Translated By Barbara Howe

January 13, 2008

Argentina - La Nacion - Home Page (Spanish)

Historian Eric Hobsbawm recalls that since 1865, the United States has had seven presidents that never finished their terms either due to death or other unforeseen events, and that such circumstances have brought significant changes to the direction of the country. But he also contends that the rails upon which power rests are so stable that no matter who drives the train, there is little risk of derailment.

It is from this premise that the Argentine government should discuss the conflict with the United States, following the trial that has begun in Miami in regard to the suitcase of Antonini Wilson. The effects of this crisis have the potential to wreak substantial changes, no matter who wins the U.S. elections in November.

History shows that the relationship between Argentina and the United States has never been easy, but Presidents Roca, Yrigoyen and Peron avoided direct confrontation with Washington. Presidents Justo and Frondizi sought closer ties, while maintaining a certain autonomy. And relations were difficult during the last military government, when Argentina broke the embargo on grain imposed on the Soviet Union for its intervention in Afghanistan, and strained again during the Malvinas War.

[Editor’s Note: The Malvinas Islands are called the Falkland Islands by the British. The author refers to the war that broke out between Britain and Argentina over possession of the islands in 1982 ].

With the restoration of democracy, bilateral relations were good, as happened under President Menem and Dela Rua, or slightly less good under Presidents Afonsin and Duhalde.

[President] Kirchner’s speech in front of President Bush at the Summit of the America’s at de Mar del Plata two years ago marked a turning point that President Christina Kirchner has now deepened.

READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US

While India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was telling his partymen and allies that he felt let down by the country’s climbdown on the nuclear deal with the US, his daughter — the New York-based Amrit Singh — was embarrassing the Bush administration about its human rights record.

The Times of India reports: “An attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Amrit Singh is the co-author of a just-released report Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond. It is a scalding indictment of American human rights abuses based on the administration’s own records.

(Amrit, the yongest among Indian P.M.’s three daughters, was also recognised for her work in the Ali vs Rumsfeld case, which was filed against US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld on behalf of Iraqi and Afghan detainees who were tortured in American custody….More here…)

Amrit (which in Hindi means nectar), 38, is married to an American but has kept a low profile, and hardly any Indian-American paper has written about her or her relationship to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. “I tease her father that he has a diversified portfolio,” Prof Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University once said. “He gets along with President Bush, while his daughter criticises him!”

“Amrit’s ACLU expose is an apt answer to those who accuse the PM of being an American stooge. Like her father, who taught for a while in the West and served as an international civil servant, Amrit is a product of liberal western academia. An alumnus of Cambridge, Oxford and Yale, from where she received her BA in economics, MPhil and her law degree respectively, Amrit was a lecturer at Oxford - her father’s alma mater - and later at Yale, where she was a visiting Fellow.

“From 1996-98, she worked at the IMF and then clerked with a Judge of the US District Court in New York. Such a resume may have earned her a damning label as a western careerist in the eyes of India’s paranoid Left and ultranationalist Right. But in 2002, Amrit joined the ACLU, scourge of American conservatives and red rag to the Bushies. In the 1988 presidential election, Dubya’s father, George H W Bush, famously pilloried his Democratic rival Michael Dukakis as a ‘card-carrying member of the ACLU,’ a ‘slur’ that ACLU has since used successfully in its recruitment drives.
Read the rest of this entry »

A year ago today, back when a surge was something that you didn’t want to fry your computer, extraordinary rendition was a stirring playing of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, people thought FISA was the federal agency that protected their bank deposits and a Huckabee was a . . . something or other, I posed a couple of questions:

Can we survive two more years of a Bush presidency?

Have we become a nation of sheep?

Looking back over the previous 12 months and ahead to a watershed 2008 election, the answer to both questions is an equivocal “yes.”

The ability of the most amoral presidency since forever to shock but not surprise ripened like cow pie in a pasture on a hot summer day during 2007:

* George Bush’s Forever War morphed into a business deal that merely forestalls the eventual collapse of Iraq: Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki gets coup insurance in the form of a long-term U.S. troop presence and the U.S. gets first dibs at Iraq’s vast untapped oil riches.

* In a fairy tale ending, the president commuted the prison sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff. Libby, of course, had been thrown overboard by his bosses as they lost control of the Wilson-Plame affair, which grew out of one of the administration’s bigger whoppers justifying the war.

* U.S. attorneys were sacked because they resisted becoming handmaidens for a Justice Department that had become a branch of the Republican Party with subpoena power.

* The shroud of secrecy was torn off the administration’s enthusiastic embrace of Nazi-like torture techniques, which so troubled the head of the CIA’s clandestine service — although not for the right reasons — that he ordered the destruction of terrorist interrogation videotapes despite being explicitly told not to do so.

* The administration’s bellicose Iran policy crashed upon the shoals of a report by the nation’s spymasters that Tehran apparently had shuttered its nuclear weapons program four years earlier, an inconvenient disclosure that did not dissuade the president and vice president from continuing to rattle their sabers.

* Two key administration players – presidential mentor Karl Rove and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – resigned after working tirelessly to suborn the rule of law while stonewalling a feckless Democratic congressional majority in its feeble attempts to call them out. Both men, and most especially Gonzales, face a perilous New Year because of their probable criminal culpability.

* Meanwhile, the U.S. economy increasingly looked like a house of cards as the gap between Wall Street and Main Street grew, the war became a half-trillion dollar albatross and the dollar tanked against major foreign currencies. A home mortgage meltdown long in the making was exacerbated by an administration that shamelessly continued to reward the rich and give the finger to a middle class in crisis through, among other acts, vetoing an expansion of the life-saving S-CHIP program.

Can we expect more of the same in 2008? Absolutely. But that does not diminish the importance of digging deeper into the rotten core of the Bush presidency.

This means bringing Gonzales and other perps to justice, demanding increased transparency in what the administration and Congress does, working to restore civil liberties lost in the unprecedented Bush-Cheney power grab, and insisting that the Republican presidential field either climb out of Bush’s bed or explain why voters can expect more of the same any of them become president.

Will the republic survive another year? Yes, just as the hundreds of terrorism suspects have survived another year without due process in Guantánamo Bay and other way stations in the Rumsfeld Gulag, but there remains the specter of a citizenry even more disenchanted with its president and other so-called leaders and the institutions they profess to represent then at the end of the Clinton presidency.

Read the rest of this entry »

Following the news and many opinions concerning Judge Mukasey and water-boarding, I came to the following conclusions:

1) We need an Attorney General
2) Judge Mukasey is likely to be a competent (if not an excellent) Attorney General
3) GWB will not put forth a “better” nominee than Judge Mukasey
4) The Senate should confirm Judge Mukasey so that he can clean-up the Justice Department after the mess made by Alberto Gonzales.

So I am pleased that Senators Schumer and Feinstein have declared their support so that Mukasey’s nomination will probably be approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee and later the full Senate. Senators Schumer and Feinstein are currently taking a good bit of abuse on the Internet but I am proud of them and remember JFK’s book “Profiles in Courage.”

Now that the month of decision about Iraq has come and gone in a Petraeus-MoveOn cloud of dust, the United States government has started October in a worse stupor than ever.

Democrats who took over Congress in a fever to stop the old war and expose Bush-Cheney lawlessness have just opened the door to a new war and, after months of bloviating about Administration scandals, have only the sorry scalp of Alberto Gonzales to show for their efforts.

The Presidential front runners are still wagging fingers at George Bush without promising to be out of Iraq by 2013 while the frontmost runner of all, the new, improved Hillary Clinton of 2007, casts a vote for Kyl/Lieberman aggression against Iran that looks very much like the one for invading Iraq in 2002.

Only a party elder and a Senate newcomer are awake enough to sound an alarm. As Mario Cuomo reminds Congress of its Constitutional power and responsibility, freshman Senator Jim Webb speaks up about last week’s move against Iran:

“This proposal is Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream. It’s not a prescription for success. At best, it’s a deliberate attempt to divert attention from a failed diplomatic policy. At worst, it could be read as a back door method of gaining Congressional validation for action without one hearing or without serious debate.”

Whatever Bush and Cheney have put into the Washington water supply, it has most Democrats pushing the snooze button on their 2008 alarm clocks. They may wake up with the worst political hangover ever.

Cross-posted from my blog.

Federal Prosecutor Arrested In Child Sex Sting

DETROIT — A U.S. Justice Department official has been arrested on suspicion of traveling to Detroit over the weekend to have sex with a minor.

John David R. Atchison, 53, an assistant U.S. attorney from the northern district of Florida, was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Detroit Monday afternoon.

An undercover officer posed as a mother offering her child to Atchison for sex, according to police.

Prosecutors said Atchison flew from Pensacola, Fla., to Detroit on Sunday intending to have sex with the 5-year-old girl.

He was arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

He is charged with enticement of a minor to engage in sexual activity.

Alberto Gonzales has learned the hard way. Like many rag-to-riches people learn. When the gilded carriage stops for you, and the door creaks open, and you have never seen such heaven on earth… if only you will just ascend the steps….well, it’s best to pass it by.

Entering the gilded carriage is a bargain with the dark man, an elite game where the bettor never wins.

The now older but wiser Mr. Gonzales who danced so very hard to many other people’s music, perhaps wishes late at night … that he’d never left his once-sane life, and just said no thanks when the gilded carriage glided up to him on that lonely road…if only he’d just kept walking under his own power instead of agreeing to be carried like a pampered and protected jewel on a velvet cushion.

Yet, time out of mind, stepping into The Gilded Carriage and not realizing the driver of the carriage is Death, is the undoing of heroes and heroines in tales, as well as high aspiring, but unconscious, politicians, viziers, wizards, and would-be consigliore to kings in reality.

As I’ve studied the leitmotif of the “Carriage of Death,’ in mythos and tales over these years, the conveyance that ‘tricks’ the humble traveler into becoming too proud, appears as a sumptuous one… the gilded carriage promises in some way to give ease to the weary and dusty traveler who feels so lucky to hitch a ride.

But the other occupant inside the carriage, or driving the carriage, though often bedecked in fine linens and jewels of authority, is none other than Death come to quickly, or else slowly, destroy the foolish rider who took Death’s invitation without foresight.

To enter the gilded carriage unaware, means the latest riders will not be taken to glory, but down to their graves if they dont find a way to disembark.

The Gilded Carriage figures prominently in my exegesis on the old tale, “The Red Shoes” in Women Who Run With the Wolves. “The Red Shoes” unfolds as a story of… a person’s curiosity at first, which quickly turns into an obsession and finally into a reaching for power that then spins completely out of control.

Putting on ‘the red shoes’ makes the person in the tale go mad. Though Mr. Gonzales may have started his tenure in black wing tips, somewhere along the way, he seems to have entered the gilded carriage, and by the end, the shoes he was wearing were red, red, red… red as the sun. And he, like the child in the tale, could not stop dancing. Until others stopped him.

In the old story of, “The Red Shoes,” an impoverished and ragged little child has made handmade shoes for herself. The shoes are humble, creative, serviceable, beautiful in their own way. And the child treks in her handmade shoes through the forest from home to market, and back again.

One day, a gilded carriage draws up beside her and stops. The carved golden door opens of its own accord. Inside is an old woman dressed in finery. The crone offers the child a ride…

This is the part, that were it a film for children who knew the story, the children in the theatre would cry out, “Don’t get in! Don’t get in!”

But, the child, dazzled by the wealth and accommodation inside the carriage, and the offer of friendship from on high, Read the rest of this entry »

Alberto Gonzales, a legal lightweight and dull-witted apparatchik whose name was once floated as a possible Supreme Court justice, leaves in shambles a Justice Department that he willingly helped the White House to transform into a branch of the Republican Party.

President Bush repeatedly stood by Gonzales even as he faced increasing scrutiny for his abysmal leadership of the department and bipartisan calls for his resignation, his role in the dismissals of nine U.S. attorneys and whether he testified truthfully in numerous appearances before Congress. To do otherwise would have been to acknowledge that this longtime colleague and helpmate was not up to the job, and that was not about to happen in an administration where politics trumps policy and loyalty, not honesty, is the greatest virtue.

Gonzalez, as it turned out, had sworn allegiance to the president and not the Constitution.

When asked about the storm clouds surrounding Gonzales, the president’s typical answer has been: “Why would I hold somebody accountable who’s done nothing wrong?”

Whining to the end that he has been treated unfairly and (isn’t this rich) was being hounded out of office by partisan politics, Gonzalez leaves an extraordinary legacy:

A disdain for the rule of law — whether it had to do with torture, civil rights or fair elections — that bordered on the obsessive.

Obdurate to the end, Gonzalez denied through his press spokesman that he was leaving through this morning although he had told Bush of his decision on Friday. Sources say the president initially rebuffed Gonzalez’ decision but relented after a face-to-face meeting in Crawford, Texas, yesterday.

Gonzalez would not explain why he was turning in his badge at a brief press conference this morning and refused to answer questions, although in a reference to being the first Hispanic AG, he said “I have lived the American dream. Even my worst days as attorney general were better than my father’s best days.”

I would say it was more like screwing up the American dream.

The president later praised Gonzalez as “a man of integrity, decency and principle.”

Michael Chertoff is said to be the leading choice as a successor. What better way to honor his service as the sycophantic Homeland Security czar on the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina? And if Chertoff is the prez’s pick, doesn’t it just speak volumes that there seem to be so few people who qualify as Cabinet-level department heads under the president’s special standards that he seems to keep picking the same people from the same small pool?

(Solicitor General Paul Clement will be interim AG after Gonzalez steps down on September 17. The safest bet for the White House would be to stick with Clement, who has not been dragged into the U.S. attorney scandal.)

In any event, do not expect wholesale changes at main Justice, and the successor will spend the next 15 months doing damage control and dealing with the various investigations that he inherits.

Gonzales’ greatest achievement?

He made John Ashcroft and even Janet Reno look good.

While the departure is welcome and long overdue, it’s not like Bush and Dick Cheney are packing their bags anytime soon, so the sound you hear is one hand clapping.

It also removes some of the urgency from the various Democrat-led investigations into Gonzales’ mischief. For another, it sets up the specter of another distracting and time consuming knock-down drag-out over confirming a successor.

A final thought: Josh Marshall, who singlehandedly broke the U.S. attorney scandal at Talking Points Memo and rode it hard until the MSM finally took notice, deserves a victory lap.

The blogosphere is very much and always will be a work in progress, but Josh showed the Big Boys a thing or three about doggedly staying on a story in the face of world-class stonewalling, as well as using his readers as citizen journalists to help in his investigation.

MSNBC Breaking News: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign

Apparently Gonzales resigned on Friday.

New York Times: Gonzales Resigns as Attorney General

What Rumor? THIS Rumor: Chertoff for AG

If Democrats hadn’t taken control of Congress this year, we might be living in a third-world country under self-reinforcing Republican rule. Ultimately we have George Bush’s stupidity and stubbornness over Iraq to thank for saving us.

As Karl Rove prepares for his final bows tomorrow on Sunday morning talk shows, the House Oversight Committee leaks the latest news in his dismantling of the Hatch Act, which has barred federal employees from engaging in partisan politics since 1939.

The McClatchy newspapers report: “Top Commerce and Treasury Departments officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy.”

This comes after revelations that the State Department, American ambassadors, the General Services Administration (which oversees government contracts) and, most infamously, U.S. Attorneys were dragooned into using their time and taxpayer money to benefit Republican office holders.

Despite all this electoral manipulation, intense and widespread public anger over Iraq and the personal corruption of Congressional Republicans gave both houses to the Democrats last November. It’s sobering to imagine how a little less hubris would have kept Bush and Rove’s lackeys in power.

As Democrats congratulate themselves for uncovering the chicanery and relish their prospects in next year’s voting, they may want to take a sober look at how much their efforts to sweep out the Augean Stables are distracting them from pressing public needs.

Nobody, especially in Washington, is immune from arrogance.

Cross-posted from blog

Mike Lane, Cagle Cartoons

AP via Washington Post: Democrats Urge Perjury Probe of Gonzales

WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats called for a perjury investigation against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Thursday and subpoenaed top presidential aide Karl Rove in a deepening political and legal clash with the Bush administration.

“It has become apparent that the attorney general has provided at a minimum half-truths and misleading statements,” four Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote in a letter to Solicitor General Paul Clement.

They dispatched the letter shortly before Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., announced the subpoena of Rove, the president’s top political strategist, in remarks on the Senate floor. The White House has claimed executive privilege to block congressional demands for documents or testimony by some current and former presidential aides. President Bush, meanwhile, has continued to support Gonzales.

Does the Bush administration’s astonishing assertion that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges rise to the level of a constitutional crisis?

The answer, I believe, is that this is just the latest chapter in an ongoing constitutional crisis involving a rogue president who continues to insist that when he invokes executive privilege, inks a signing statement, unilaterally suspends a bedrock principle of the American legal system or violates an international treaty, he is accountable to no one. Ever.

Once again the Bush administration is changing what has been the conventional wisdom.

You must have thought that if Congress brings contempt charges against Bush administration officials for refusing to testify (or show up) because President George Bush invoked executive privilege that under our system of government the Justice Department had to prosecute.

Not so, says the Bush administration which now effectively argues that the President’s word is The Law and Justice will do what he wants it to do.

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

The position presents serious legal and political obstacles for congressional Democrats, who have begun laying the groundwork for contempt proceedings against current and former White House officials in order to pry loose information about the dismissals.

Note that the Washington Post piece reports that this is a “NEW” assertion. Once again the executive branch is seizing new powers — this time to make not just executive privilege in essence a shield to be used whenever the Congress seeks to do oversight, but also to in effect tell Congress that it has no power to prosecute anyone because the President’s word is final…not just on who appears, but on who the Justice Department can prosecute.

Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, “whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action.”

But administration officials argued yesterday that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges in cases, such as the prosecutor firings, in which the president has declared that testimony or documents are protected from release by executive privilege. Officials pointed to a Justice Department legal opinion during the Reagan administration, which made the same argument in a case that was never resolved by the courts.

“A U.S. attorney would not be permitted to bring contempt charges or convene a grand jury in an executive privilege case,” said a senior official, who said his remarks reflect a consensus within the administration. “And a U.S. attorney wouldn’t be permitted to argue against the reasoned legal opinion that the Justice Department provided. No one should expect that to happen.”

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, added: “It has long been understood that, in circumstances like these, the constitutional prerogatives of the president would make it a futile and purely political act for Congress to refer contempt citations to U.S. attorneys.”

Really?

NOT QUITE, according to an expert quoted by the Post:

Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration’s stance “astonishing.”

“That’s a breathtakingly broad view of the president’s role in this system of separation of powers,” Rozell said. “What this statement is saying is the president’s claim of executive privilege trumps all.”

The key question again is when conservatives, who have so cherished the way the American system of government with its checks and balances was set up, will speak out against (yet another) a major seizure of power by the executive branch.

The other question: what is Congress’ remedy? Increasingly, Bush administration actions appear to be actually provocative aimed at throwing the matter into court. Could it be because George Bush now has more friends on the Supreme Court who believe in a stronger executive and will back him in the end? If they back him, the United States traditional definition of checks and balances may have to be heavily revised.

Former White House political director Sara Taylor’s testimony yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee committee on the firings of the U.S. attorneys proved to be anything but… testimony:

(1) President George Bush cited executive privilege and basically squelched her from answering the panel’s most significant and probing questions.
(2) She either set a record for or tied Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for the record for “I can’t recall” (and also some thinking, throaty noises).

CLICK HERE to see Think Progress’ montage of her “I can’t recall” moments. It is amazing.

P.S. When you view this there are three possible conclusions:

–She is not answering because it would incriminate higher ups such as the President.

–She really can’t recall.

–If she and Gonzales can’t recall then voters and Congress need to find out how an administration could possibly hire so many people with hideous memories. If they really can’t really can’t recall, then it’s a damning indictment of the quality of people in the administration. And if they really can’t recall, how can they be entrusted to bring together the strands of past policies, present challenges and choices for future action? Shouldn’t they be let go because they can’t remember anything?

UPDATE: Taylor took an oath and took it “seriously.” And who did she say she took it to? See the YOU TUBE VIA MATTHEW YGLESIAS.