Mukasey won't enforce Contempt Citations

Here is your Friday News Dump™. And boy howdy, is it the sort of thing a failed administration would really try to release after the east coast network news broadcasts.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Friday rejected referring the House's contempt citations against two of President Bush's top aides to a federal grand jury. Mukasey says they committed no crime.

Mukasey said White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former presidential counsel Harriet Miers were right in refusing to provide Congress White House documents or testify about the firings of federal prosecutors.

"The department will not bring the congressional contempt citations before a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute Mr. Bolten or Ms. Miers," Mukasey wrote House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The House voted two weeks ago to cite Bolten and Mukasey for contempt of Congress and seek a grand jury investigation. Most Republicans boycotted the vote.

Speaker Pelosi requested a grand jury investigation yesterday (Thursday) and gave Mukasey a week to reply. He wasted no time in responding, because he only had one crack at the news dump. Had he responded on Thursday of next week, it would have been THE STORY all day Friday and going into the weekend.

Pelosi is pissed, and apparently prepared to make good on her threat to file a federal civil suit if the attorney general dug in his heels and refused to act as the attorney the people of this country instead of the president.

Mukasey, taking a very Nixonian position, has maintained that Miers and Bolton were right to refuse to appear because Bush told them not to. And acting on the orders of the president means they committed no crime. Like I said - Nixonian, like when he said to David Frost "[W]hen the president does it that means that it is not illegal."

Folks, this is exactly why we need to ITMFA right now. Because if aWol is not impeached, he can pardon the whole lot of them, putting them out of reach of a future Justice Department. But a president under impeachment can't pardon a thanksgiving turkey.

UPDATE I - PALE RIDER

Say we're sitting here a year from now--and Attorney General John Edwards has just refused to investigate whether some Presidential aides to President Obama have to appear before Congress because some Republican Congressman thinks they might have something to say about why all of the deleted E-Mails suddenly appeared after a few very talented people were able to retrieve them from some tape backups that were found under Bradley Schlozman's cookie cabinet in his old office. How shrill do you think these hypocritical bastards are going to be? And how loud are we going to be laughing at them for being so shrill?