Schlozman may face Grand Jury probe

Disgraced former U.S. attorney Bradley Schlozman blew into my town in the spring of 2006 to take over as U.S. Attorney after Todd Graves was forced out for being insufficiently political in the way he did his job.

Now, two years later Schlozman may finally face a Grand Jury probe into his work in election manipulation.

The move amounts to a first step from an internal inquiry toward possible criminal charges in the scandal that helped force the resignation of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

At issue is whether Bradley Schlozman intentionally misled senators during a June 2007 hearing when he gave conflicting statements about his role in an election-eve filing of a voter fraud lawsuit in Missouri while serving, a year earlier, as a U.S. attorney based in Kansas City, Mo.

He also angered Democrats at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing when he admitted to boasting about hiring conservative loyalists over better-qualified lawyers in 2005 when he served as acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's civil rights division.

The department's inspector general has been investigating Schlozman's statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee in an internal inquiry over the last year.

On Monday, an official said the Justice Department has issued a grand jury referral — an internal first step toward asking a grand jury to take up the case.

It is not clear whether the matter is already in front of a grand jury, but here's hoping...

Both Schlozman and his attorney declined to comment on Monday, as did the justice department.

Schlozman has defended his decision to bring a specious voter-fraud case just days before the 2006 election, even though DoJ guidelines advise against filing charges that could influence elections, and lets face it - the ACORN charges were weak tea indeed.

Todd Graves, Schlozman's predecessor and the ninth U.S. Attorney forced out in the scandal, testified before Congress that he was asked to resign his position after standing firm for the rule of law and playing by the established rules and refusing to file politically motivated cases.

At the same hearing, Schlozman initially told lawmakers that he filed the ACORN charges at the behest of senior officials in the Gonzales Department of Just-Us, then later "took full responsibility for the specious filing. At the time, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., angrily accused Schlozman of reversing his testimony.

Schlozman also admitted at that same hearing that he had bragged it up to other officials how many republican operatives he had managed to get hired at the DoJ while he was serving as the head of the civil rights division of the DoJ. He also said he told some job applicants to take their political background off resumes before applying for positions. He then, audaciously, denied taking political affiliation into account in hiring.

This bastard fucked with elections that I voted in. The ACORN indictment was just the first one, and the one that most people have heard of. He also screwed with the mayors race in Kansas City last spring by bringing a fraudulent indictment against former Jackson County Executive Katherine Shields for mortgage fraud.

The jury all but laughed out loud and declared her "not guilty" right there in the jury box before recessing for deliberations, but the damage was done. Her career was undermined and our election was influenced and now we have Mayor Funkhouser - who I supported - but I didn't want him to win it cheaply, and a year on I am realizing there is a reason why we don't generally elect non-politicians to political office. His term has been fraught with missteps that Shields or Brooks would have avoided easily because they know how the game called politics is played.

Here's hoping for an indictment, trial, guilty verdict and legal fees that wipe his feckless ass out. It is going to take a decade to undo the damage that he has done, and some things will never be put right - like the Kansas City Mayors race in 2007.

It's finally happened....my irony-meter is broken

The books that tell the dirty little secrets about the Bush administration and the John Stuart Mill/ Utilitarian Machiavellian, win-at-any-cost, depraved and debased nature of the modern incarnation of the GOP.

Funny enough - they are the only books about the GOP that are selling - Karl Rove made the rounds trying to sell a book idea with a high-powered rep and got no takers. Ann-thrax Coulter-geist went to the well one too many times, and her latest book has totally tanked. Total sales have not even risen to the level that they could be called anemic. Even the choir has told the preacher to shut the hell up already.

The one that I already ordered an advance copy of that doesn't even publish until next month is How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, which tells the story of the 2002 New Hampshire Senate Race. The book is a tell-all by the operative who committed the election tampering. He believes that the decision to tamper with the dead-heat election reaches high up in the national party, and that when it unraveled they conspired to hang it all on him.

I don't have a copy yet - but McClatchy got hold of one:

The 2002 New Hampshire Senate race, in which GOP Rep. John Sununu edged Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen by 19,000 votes, was among several targeted by Republicans seeking to win control of the U.S. Senate.

Raymond said those who've tried to make him the fall guy for the New Hampshire scheme failed to recognize that e-mails, phone records and other evidence documented the complicity of a top state GOP official and the Republican National Committee's northeast regional director.

Both men were later convicted of charges related to the phone harassment, along with Raymond and an Idaho phone bank operator. Defense lawyers have since won a retrial for James Tobin, the former regional director for both the RNC and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

A lawyer for Tobin didn't respond to phone messages.

Various GOP organizations have paid high-powered Washington lawyers in excess of $6 million to defend Tobin, and to fight a civil law suit brought against the GOP by the Democratic Party as a result of the election tampering. The cash outlay alone gives the impression that it might go higher. "Any tactic that didn't pass the smell test would never see the light of day without, — at the very least, the approval of an RNC attorney," he wrote.

A lawyer representing the Democratic party said that phone records show that Tobin called Rove's political shop in the White House a total of 22 times in the 24 hours before and after the jamming. When asked about the calls under oath, Tobin exercised his fifth amendment right against self incrimination.

Raymond said it was Tobin who first phoned him 2 1/2 weeks before the election and asked if he could jam Democrats' phone lines, connecting him with Charles McGee, the executive director of the New Hampshire GOP.

However, he said, when he phoned Tobin after Sununu's 19,000-vote election victory to tell him that a Manchester, N.H., police officer was looking into the scheme, Tobin responded, "I don't know what you're talking about."

Raymond said he was seething with anger in the ensuing weeks as he read news reports of McGee denying knowledge of the scheme.

In early 2003, Raymond recalled, the state GOP wrote to demand its money back.

"They were going to throw me under the bus," Raymond wrote, "but first they wanted to check my pockets to see if there was any cash there."

Raymond and McGee pleaded guilty to harassment charges. Their cooperation with investigators led to Tobin's conviction.

Raymond predicted that political dirty tricks "will only get tougher, nastier, more brutal" in coming elections.

As for his three months in a Pennsylvania prison, he wrote: "After 10 full years inside the GOP, 90 days among honest criminals wasn't really any great ordeal."

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And this is what broke my irony-meter...

You might recall that a while back I was quite obsessed with the Department of Justice scandal, and specifically Bradley Schlozman, who blew into my town and started tampering with elections that I participated in. Yeah. I kinda took it personal...

Well! File this one under the heading "It all Depends on Whose Ox is Getting Gored"!!!

While in Kansas City the U.S. Attorney promptly got down to business and made with the filing of specious suits on flimsy evidence; in New Hampshire, the DoJ delayed prosecuting Tobin until after the 2004 election, so they could protect top GOP operatives from the scandal until the votes were cast and counted! Federal prosecutor Todd Hinnen was hindered from bringing charges against the New Hampshire Republican Party by officials at main Justice. Not only that, but weeks before the election he was told to ask a judge to halt action temporarily in a Democratic Party civil suit against the GOP so that it wouldn't hurt the investigation, even though Hinnen had expressed no concerns that it would.

Tobin's lawyer, a former Pentagon general counsel named Terry O'Donnell was in contact with senior DoJ officials even prior to Tobin's indictment.

The House Judiciary Committee started investigating the role of partisan politics in the investigation and indictment in October.

An official with detailed knowledge of the investigation into the 2002 Election-Day scheme said the inquiry sputtered for months after a prosecutor sought approval to indict James Tobin, the northeast regional coordinator for the Republican National Committee.

The phone-jamming operation was aimed at preventing New Hampshire Democrats from rounding up voters in the close U.S. Senate race between Republican Rep. John Sununu and Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen. Sununu's 19,000-vote victory helped the GOP regain control of the Senate.

While there were guilty pleas in the New Hampshire investigation prior to the 2004 presidential election, involvement of the national GOP wasn't confirmed. A Manchester, N.H., policeman quickly traced the jamming to Republican political operatives in 2003 and forwarded the evidence to the Justice Department for what ordinarily would be a straightforward case.

However, the official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, told McClatchy that senior Justice Department officials slowed the inquiry. The official didn't know whether top department officials ordered the delays or what motivated those decisions.

Is anyone else just simply non-fucking-plussed by this point? Holy chocolate-covered Christ, how god-damned far does it all go? Is there a single aspect of public life that these fiends haven't tainted?

Yeah, I can't think of one either...But our Democratic "leaders" still won't put impeachment back on the table?

What? The? Fuck.?

Schlozman out at Department of "Just Us"

Bradley Schlozman has resigned, sneaking out last week, his exit unannounced. An exit like that is truly an embarrassment for such a high-profile Loyal Bushie. That is called leaving not with a bang, but with the proverbial whimper. Schlozman skulks away a pariah in the legal community, an abject failure, having seen his grand voter suppression schemes blow up in his face, revealing to the entire world that he is nothing more than a gormless cheat. (Rather like the much ballyhooed and terribly overestimated Karl Rove.)

I take personal the truncation of the Department of Justice. The feckless Schlozman was the U.S. Attorney in my city, installed without a Senate confirmation after Todd Graves was wrongly fired. From that position, Schlozman abused his power to derail the political career of Katherine Shields, a prominent Kansas City Democrat. He replaced the ninth fired U.S. Attorney, Todd Graves, who was very much John Ashcroft’s man, and had a sense of right and wrong, and refused to tamper with elections. Schlozman had no such qualms of conscience. He came to us from the Voting Rights Division, where his purpose was to suppress the rights of groups that were likely to vote for Democrats. One of the most revolting schemes he cooked up was the caging strategy that was used to deny African American members of the armed services their Constitutional right to vote. He and fellow political operative Hans Von Spakovsky schemed to politicize the hiring process for career Justice Department officials and eviscerate the Voting Rights Division. They were successful in doing so, but at steep cost. Throughout the Justice Department, positions remain unfilled. People simply do not want to work for the Department in this politicized environment, feeling that any connection with the Gonzalez Department of Just Us would be a kiss of death to a career they want to see continue past January 2009.

Schlozman is merely the latest perjuring rat to desert the sinking ship that is the Gonzalez Just Us Department. He is the latest hack to leave, joining Goodling, Sampson, Taylor, McNulty, Elston, and Mercer…just off the top of my head.

Like the others, he will not be missed. This is just more good riddance to bad rubbish.

We aren't letting go because we think Justice should be just and voters should be franchised

I realize that the right wing wishes we would just shut up about the Department of Justice scandals – "move along" they say, "there is nothing to see here – Hey! Look over there! A puppy!"

But the fact is, there seems to be a whole hell of a lot of there there. My background is clinical – and I can tell you that the deadliest cancers are often myriad little tumors, and that same pathology seems to be at work here. There is simply an overwhelming incidence of abject politicization of the very area of government that can least withstand that egregious offense.

Legal voters were disenfranchised. Black military personnel were targeted for disenfranchisement via a caging scheme. This much has been admitted to. How the defenders can continue to defend this Constitutional offense is beyond me. The actions of the Gonzales DoJ is an affront to decency.

The civil rights division was gutted under Schlozman before he came to Kansas City, where he pursued charges contrary to department policy with the intent to sway elections. In the second case, it might have worked. My candidate won the Mayors race, but I will always wonder – did that thin soup of a charge affected the outcome of the primary?

And now McClatchy tells us that it looks like the Federalist Society might have had a hand in selecting the attorneys who were fired and the candidates to replaced them.

WASHINGTON - A leader of an influential conservative legal group recommended a replacement candidate for the U.S. attorney in San Diego just days after the sitting prosecutor's name was secretly placed on a Justice Department firing list, according to a document released Wednesday.

The recommendation by the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo, came before anyone outside of a tight group in the White House and Justice Department knew about a nascent strategy that ultimately led to the firings of nine U.S. attorneys.

It could not be determined whether a short e-mail, sent on March 7, 2005, making the recommendation meant that Leo knew of the plan to fire Carol Lam or whether his message was unsolicited and coincidental.

The subject line of Leo's e-mail to Mary Beth Buchanan, then-director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, says, "USA San Diego," indicating the top prosecutor job for the Southern District of California. Lam was on the job at the time and had no plans to step down. (emphasis added)

The text of the note reads, "You guys need a good candidate?" Leo goes on to say he would "strongly recommend" the Air Force's general counsel, Mary Walker.

Walker led a Pentagon working group in 2003, which critics said helped provide the administration with a rationale to circumvent the international Geneva Conventions banning torture in the interrogations of terrorism suspects. (emphasis added)

Leo, the Justice Department and Walker could not be reached for comment late Wednesday. Lam declined comment.

The Justice Department turned over the e-mail to Congress as part of a probe into last year's firings of U.S. attorneys.

While the Justice Department has given no direct reason for Lam's firing, officials criticized her handling of immigration and gun cases. Nonetheless, Lam drew positive job evaluations and has testified that she was given no notice of any concerns.

Democrats have questioned whether her firing was connected to her office's high-profile corruption prosecutions implicating Republicans.

Lam's name first appeared on what is believed to have been the Justice Department's earliest target list of prosecutors in late February 2005.

I am sorry, but this is just too much. Now it appears that the Federalist Society had a say in replacing the supremely competent and accomplished Carol Lam (of course, Carol Lam was also the one who shot down Duke Cunningham) and hand-picking a Dominatrix with a J.D. to replace her before she could take down any more corrupt republicans.

Nice.

[Crossposted from WTWC]

The U.S. Attorney Scandal Hits Close to Home

Someone asked on a political discussion board that I frequent recently that now that they know about the eight U.S. attorneys who were fired for not being Loyal Bushies, the questions on that persons mind were the 85 who weren’t fired. Was it because they did play ball that they were spared?

Good question. I would like an answer to that myself.

I live in a city where the investigations into the U.S. Attorney scandal should be shining a light but hasn’t yet – although an op-ed by Joseph D. Rich, a 35 year career civil rights lawyer in the civil rights division of the DoJ in the March 30 L.A. Times was a start. He mentioned the U.S. Attorney for Western Missouri in his column yesterday.

The official website makes him sound like the great white savior and the natural-born Heir to the Movement. It is, shall we say, spun. And about as substantive as cotton candy. Mr. Rich sets us straight on Mr. Scholzman’s bona fides.

This pattern also extended to hiring. In March 2006, Bradley Schlozman was appointed interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo. Two weeks earlier, the administration was granted the authority to make such indefinite appointments without Senate confirmation. That was too bad: A Senate hearing might have uncovered Schlozman's central role in politicizing the civil rights division during his three-year tenure.

Schlozman, for instance, was part of the team of political appointees that approved then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's plan to redraw congressional districts in Texas, which in 2004 increased the number of Republicans elected to the House. Similarly, Schlozman was acting assistant attorney general in charge of the division when the Justice Department OKd a Georgia law requiring voters to show photo IDs at the polls. These decisions went against the recommendations of career staff, who asserted that such rulings discriminated against minority voters. The warnings were prescient: Both proposals were struck down by federal courts.

Schlozman continued to influence elections as an interim U.S. attorney. Missouri had one of the closest Senate races in the country last November, and a week before the election, Schlozman brought four voter fraud indictments against members of an organization representing poor and minority people. This blatantly contradicted the department's long-standing policy to wait until after an election to bring such indictments because a federal criminal investigation might affect the outcome of the vote. The timing of the Missouri indictments could not have made the administration's aims more transparent.

I live here. I vote here. There are two “Blue” areas in this state, and I live in one of them. In fact, State Senate 10, which I call home, is the most liberal area in the most liberal U.S. House district in the entire state.

When a new U.S. Attorney showed up last March, and didn’t do his star turn in front of the Senate, some of us sniffed the air, and we did smell something - but it was new and different and we didn't recognize it as dangerous.

The trial balloon floated away, unmolested.

When we pointed out the discrepancy in the way the new U.S. attorney was rushing to publicize investigations (we had read the Rove playbook, after all, and specious investigations into politicians his candidates faced, and their supporters, is a long-time favorite of his – a veritable fallback position) we were told we were being partisan and hypocritical.

And while we were still questioning the rushed ACORN indictments, he shamelessly did it again, off the national radar, just weeks later!

He filed a mortgage fraud charge against former County Executive Katherine Shields as she was running in the mayoral primary last winter. Shields was never my candidate, but I sure as hell didn’t want her eliminated by a specious indictment that has suddenly gone nowhere since she was eliminated from the field.

There is plenty of reason to believe that the United States Attorney for Western Missouri has acted in ways intended to influence the outcome of elections, and his actions have consistently favored the Republican party in statewide election contests.

Shields was considered a strong candidate for the Mayors office, and a potential Democratic contender on a statewide ballot in the future. She had already been elected county-wide to the County Executive position – twice – and without that indictment, it would most likely have been a very different primary. It is not inconceivable that we would have sent her to Jefferson City or Washington D.C. in the not-too-distant future, had her political career not hit the shoals with that indictment.

The entire dynamic of the primary changed with just one headline. Her entire career was undermined, if not destroyed, with one suspiciously-timed headline.

I don't presume to speak for anyone but myself, but I get really, really pissed off when my rights as a citizen to participate in free and fair elections is abrogated by political hacks who would subvert the entire United States Department of Justice to favor one party.

If Mr. Schlozman was put in that position – with no Senate oversight – to influence elections in the bluest parts of a red state - MY red state - and that is what it looks like from here – then our Missouri elected officials - Claire, Reverend Cleaver, I’m talking to you here – and you too, Robin Carnahan, you are the Secretary of State and the official in charge of elections in this state – owe it to us, the citizens, to open investigations into the goings on in the office of the U.S. Attorney for Western Missouri.

[Cross posted from Watching Those We Chose]