Gonzo is still under the gun

Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine announced today that his office is investigating outgoing disgraced attorney general Alberto Gonzales to determine if he should face charges of perjury for lying in his testimony before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

In a letter today to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), Fine said his office "has ongoing investigations" related to Gonzales's testimony on several key issues, including the prosecutor firings and allegations of improper hiring; the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program; the FBI's use of national security letters; and allegations that Gonzales sought to improperly influence a witness who was under investigation by Congress and the Justice Department.

Gonzales's often contradictory remarks and his repeated assertions that he could not recall key events drew fire from lawmakers of both parties and contributed to his dwindling support on Capitol Hill.

Prior to todays acknowledgment, Fine would only confirm that he was looking into allegations that the Attorney General sought to influence the testimony of Monica Goodling before she appeared before Congress.

Earlier this month Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy had requested Fine expand the scope of his investigation to include Gonzales contradictory testimony. Today, Fine indicated that he was already on it, and so was the Office of Professional Responsibility. The two offices are jointly conducting an investigation into the illegal politicization of Justice.

Leahy issues a statement that he was "pleased" that Gonzales was being investigated, but indicated that the Congress would continue investigating Gonzales as well. "The current Attorney General is leaving, but these questions remain," Leahy said. "It is appropriate that the Inspector General will examine whether the Attorney General was honest with this and other Congressional committees about these crucial issues."

Specter Strikes a Tough Pose

The Hill is reporting that Arlen Specter left a White House briefing late Monday, having given the Bush administration 18 hours to resolve the contradictions in Alberto Gonzales’s testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. His aides released a statement late in the day that indicated something big is in the offing for Tuesday.

“Given the difficulty of discussing classified matters in public, I think it is preferable to have a letter addressing that question [of Gonzales’ veracity] from the administration … by noon tomorrow, which will be made available to the news media,” Specter wrote in the statement. “The administration has committed to producing such a letter.”

Specter expects the letter clarifying the attorney general’s testimony to be addressed to himself and Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who declined to comment on the matter.

Specter was equally cagey, telling reporters to wait until Tuesday for any further comment from him.

When asked whether Gonzales should be forced to resign, Specter said any such speculation would be "premature to consider." He said other senators were present for the administration briefing, which was given by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and others, but declined to identify them.

In last week’s testimony, Gonzalez appeared to perjure himself last week when he disputed the testimony of James Comey, Deputy Attorney General under John Ashcroft. Gonzales insisted that the legality of the Bush administrations propensity for and policy of spying on American citizens had never been at issue in the Justice Department.

The bald-faced lying led many Democrats to call for a Special Prosecutor to investigate illegality inside the Justice Department and the chief law enforcement officer in the land for perjury. The clamoring of Democrats prompted Specter to request the classified briefing on Monday.

Remember, it was only last Thursday that Specter openly flouted the president on Air Force One, first by mingling with the press corps, and then by dissing the president. Pretty bold. There are only two rules for politicians traveling with the president – don’t mingle with the press corps and don’t trash-talk the pres or his team. Specter broke both “rules.” Before take-off.

So what does Specter have planned for tomorrow? And does it involve Karl and Harriet?

[Cross-posted from Watching Those We Chose]

It’s beginning to look a lot like perjury

Senate Democrats hit the ground running this morning and immediately fired off a letter to Solicitor General Paul Clement demanding the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the Attorney General. "It has become apparent that the attorney general has provided at a minimum half-truths and misleading statements," four members of the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote.

They asked Clement to immediately appoint an indepedent counsel from outside the Justice Department to determine whether Gonzales "may have misled Congress or perjured himself in testimony before Congress."

"We do not make this request lightly," wrote Sens. Charles E. Schumer of New York, Dianne Feinstein of California, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

A draft copy of the letter was obtained by The Associated Press shortly before a news conference planned by the senators.

Neither Gonzales nor the Justice Department had immediate comment about the letter. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he supports the request.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont, in a separate letter Thursday to Gonzales, said he would give the attorney general eight days to correct, clarify or otherwise change his testimony "so that, consistent with your oath, they are the whole truth."

The four senators said that Gonzales' testimony last year that there had been no internal dissent over the president's warrantless wiretapping program conflicted with testimony by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey and with Gonzales' own statements this week before the Judiciary Committee.

They also said Gonzales falsely told the panel that he had not talked about the firings with other Justice Department officials. His former White House liaison, Monica Goodling, told the House Judiciary Committee under a grant of immunity that she had an "uncomfortable" conversation with Gonzales in which he outlined his recollection of what happened and asked her for her reaction.

"The attorney general should be held to the highest ethical standards," the senators wrote.

Yes, the chief law enforcement officer in the land should absolutely be held to the highest of ethical standards. Unfortunately, when we are talking about the Bush Organized Crime Syndicate; that ideal just doesn’t mean the same thing as it does to you and me (presuming you view the Rule of Law and the Social Contract as more than mere technicalities.)

Where I come from, they call lying to a senate committee “Perjury”

Two years ago, when AG Abu G went before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on behalf of not letting the Partiot Apostasy Act sunset, he looked the Senators in the eye and lied. Blatantly and flat-out, he chose to not tell the truth to the Senators impaneled before him. He assured the lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzo insisted.

Except – that was a lie, and he knew it when he told it. Less than a week before (even his notoriously feeble memory should go back six days) the FBI had sent a copy of a report to Gonzalez, and that report confirmed that agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to possess. That report was one of at least a half dozen that detailed abuses of the Patriot Act that had been received in the three months before Gonzalez appeared before the panel to lie his ass off. The reports he conveniently ignored detailed instances of “unauthorized surveillance, an illegal property search and a case in which an Internet firm improperly turned over a compact disc with data that the FBI was not entitled to collect, the documents show. Gonzales was copied on each report that said administrative rules or laws protecting civil liberties and privacy had been violated.”

Additionally, the reports detailed the abuse and over-use of the specious anti-terror tool, the national security letter (NSL). This was well before the Justice Department's inspector general brought widespread abuse of the letters in 2004 and 2005 to light in a scathing report this past March.

You might recall, this was all happening about the time they were touting him as a possible successor to the Supreme Court – which given what we know now and they knew then is especially sickening. Jolly Roberts and Scalito are bad enough – can you imagine a Supreme Court with Bush’s Chihuahua enjoying a lifetime appointment? I’m reaching for a valium at the mere thought…

So – have you had enough yet? It is time to bring these feckless traitors to heel.

To that end…

It's time to

ITMFA!!!

Fred Fielding Goes Long

Okay, buckle up and grab the dashboard. The route of Republican logic (snort at that oxymoron) we are about to traverse is as twisted a path as any Missouri two-lane blacktop.

White House Counsel Fred Fielding has sent along a letter ‘splainin’ why the White House is refusing to let Sara Taylor and Harriet Meyers testify if there is any record of the exchange.

Writes F²

"Obviously, there has been a lot of discussion back and forth in that regard. The position that the president took and conveyed to the committees and the offer of compromise did not include transcripts. The accommodation was designed to provide information, not to appear to be having testimony without having testimony. One of the concomitants of testimony, of course, is transcripts.

"As far as the debate goes, often cited is that a transcript is not wanted because otherwise there would be a perjury trap. And, candidly, as everyone has discussed, misleading Congress is misleading Congress, whether it's under oath or not. And so a transcript may be convenient, but there's no intention to try to avoid telling the truth." (emphasis added)

Perjury trap? Are they planning to lie?

I guess if you are a part of this freakshow, it’s better to be assumed a liar than to open your mouth to prove it.

Sara Taylor was overheard explaining to a friend at lunch that “orange makes me look sallow.”

Welcome to America, 2.0

[Crossposted from WTWC]

“I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me,” Taguba said. “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.”

Sometimes you have to hang back. You become aware of something, and you go charging hell-bent-for-leather into the topic. And by god – you are preachin’ the gospel. That is what I was doing when I first read the Seymour Hersch article on Saturday evening.

And then it hit me. The reason I was so fucking mad is because what I was writing about is the invalidation of my entire life, spent in service to the Constitution of this nation.

That is the net effect of what is revealed in Seymour Hersch’s article in The New Yorker. Everything my life has stood for up to now is null and void. I’ve suspected for quite some time, but now I know for sure. I feel stateless. You might as well revoke my god-damned citizenship, because I am a woman without a country.

The perfidy of the Bush administration, well documented and so vast as to be overwhelming, has undermined the Honor Code and the confidence of – and in – the officer corps.

At this point, I don’t have to rehash the article. Everyone has read it who is going to. But I am going to excerpt the passage that made me livid and enraged me:

When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?”

(Let me answer that for you, General. You stand the fuck up for the ideals that your uniform represent, and you stand up for what is right because you are a god damned General, and by definition a leader of men, and when you act like a punk you are a disgrace. You stand the fuck up and you aren’t too chickenshit to even look at some god-damned photographs.)

Here is how I see it. We have destroyed the military and trashed the Honor Code, and as far as I can tell, the chain of command is as quaint as the Geneva Conventions, the Great Writ, and the Constitutional guarantee of Due Process (rooted in the Great Writ “Set forth in the Meadow Runnyemead” – all of which have been sacrificed on the altar of the “Global War On Terror™”

Rumsfeld lied to Congress – under oath. He needs to face the consequences of that action. Plausible deniability my ass. Common sense needs to trump weasel-words in this instance.

If these bastards get away with this – then the American experiment is over. It is that simple, and that much is at stake.

How much longer do we have to abide this joker?

Of course we know why AGAG is still on the job...Anyone Bush found acceptable would not get past the confirmation process, and anyone the Democratically controlled congress would confirm...would burn the Bush maladministration to the ground.

It sure looks to me like the Attorney General of the United States should face perjury charges for lying to the House Judiciary Committee last week when he told the committee that the firing of U.S. Attorneys for political purposes was limited to the eight attorneys in the original inquiry.

The Washington Post reports this morning that he was lyin’ like a rug when he told that (tall) tale. It turns out that fully 25% of the U.S Attorneys were considered for dismissal.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales testified last week that the effort was limited to eight U.S. attorneys fired since last June, and other administration officials have said that only a few others were suggested for removal.

In fact, D. Kyle Sampson, then Gonzales's chief of staff, considered more than two dozen U.S. attorneys for termination, according to lists compiled by him and his colleagues, the sources said.

They amounted to more than a quarter of the nation's 93 U.S. attorneys. Thirteen of those known to have been targeted are still in their posts.

I can’t see Representative Conyers having much of a sense of humor about it all. Senator Schumer does not appear to be mollified. "When you start firing people for invalid reasons, just about anyone can end up on a list," he said. "It looks like the process was out of control, and if it hadn't been discovered, more would have been fired."

At least one of the targeted attorneys is not going to be placated by platitudes. Christopher J. Christie, U.S. Attorney for New Jersey and a major GOP fundraiser, is steamed about his name appearing on Mr. Sampson’s hit list.

He has a stellar record and is not accepting apologies. "I was completely shocked. No one had ever told me that my performance had been anything but good," Christie said. "I specifically asked him why he put my name on the list. He said he couldn't give me an explanation." (Because there was no legal one to offer, perhaps?)

Have we seen enough of this guy yet? Good lord – just this week we have learned about more than enough stuff to meet the burden of proof to initiate impeachment proceedings of the Attorney General.

The removal of Gonzales from his post is mandatory if we are to restore the concept of justice to Justice.

[Cross-posted from the blog you should be reading, Watching Those We Chose]

Rove MUST Testify Under Oath

When the law is on your side, you argue the law. When the facts are on your side you argue the facts. When neither the law nor the facts are on your side, you pound on the table, jump up and down, and scream like hell.

There is only one reason you pitch a fit and threaten to refuse to honor congressional subpoenas and fight like hell to avoid testifying under oath - with no record of the “interview” no less!!!

No, you take that tack when you got nothing else, and you are in a hell of a lot of trouble if the truth comes out, and you face perjury charges when they catch you lying under oath or Obstruction of Congress charges when the transcript reviews show inconsistencies and point towards other possible obstructions.

Karl Rove is a feckless, mendacious, untrustworthy, honorless lout who fancies himself above the law. He is not deserving of any benefit of the doubt; indeed, all prior actions and behaviors indicate that just exactly the opposite is the case.

Joe Conason at Salon thinks so too.

Rove is a proven liar who cannot be trusted to tell the truth even when he is under oath, unless and until he is directly threatened with the prospect of prison time. Or has everyone suddenly forgotten his exceedingly narrow escape from criminal indictment for perjury and false statements in the Valerie Plame Wilson investigation? Only after four visits to the grand jury convened by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, and a stark warning from Fitzgerald to defense counsel of a possible indictment, did Rove suddenly remember his role in the exposure of Plame as a CIA agent.

Not only did Rove lie, but he happily let others lie on his behalf, beginning in September 2003, when Scott McClellan, then the White House press secretary, publicly exonerated him of any blame in the outing of Plame. From that autumn until his fifth and final appearance before the grand jury in April 2006, the president's "boy genius" concealed the facts about his leak of Plame's CIA identity to Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper.

There is no reason to believe that Rove would ever have told the truth if Fitzgerald had not forced Cooper to testify before the grand jury and surrender his incriminating notes, with a contempt citation and the threat of a long sojourn in jail. Indeed, there is no reason to think that even knowing Cooper had testified would have made Rove testify accurately. He failed to do so from July 2005 until April 2006, after all. But in December 2005, Fitzgerald impaneled a new grand jury and started to present evidence against him.

Remember all those trips back to the Grand Jury he made. We have absolutely no reasons to trust this man, and multiple reasons not to trust him.

And for crying out loud, haven’t these congress people raised any kids? If they have raised a kid or two, they should recognize this tactic. Every responsible parent knows this behavior pattern and knows how to deal with it. It is when you now the little bastards are at least as guilty as you know they are and probably more so by a factor of at least three, so get busy and search their room. This is where responsible parents dig in their heels and start punishing.

This lot doesn’t know how to act because they obviously got no raisin’ when they were comin’ up, and nobody ever held them accountable or told them no. But better late than never…