Remember the offer the White House gave the Congress? Rove, Miers and a few others would appear before the committees but only if it was in closed session, with few members present, not under oath, and no transcripts. Jon Stewart of the Daily Show mocks the "generous offer" made by the White House. Raw Story has the video here.
And there have been reams of paper emails released but there are 18 days missing. Conveniently like the 18 minutes lost from the Nixon tapes. But TPM Muckraker reports that:
3000 Pages and Counting
By Paul Kiel - March 23, 2007, 2:21 PM
We hear there's likely to be another document release from the Justice Department sometime today.
And here's Tony Snow's Flip Flop on this from Think Progress:
White House Press Secretary Tony Snow appeared on the morning talk shows on all the major networks and repeated his talking point that Congress “has no oversight responsibility over the White House.” A sampling of his statements:
There’s another principle, which is Congress doesn’t have the legislative — I mean oversight authority over the White House. [CNN, 3/22/07]
First, the White House is under no compulsion to do anything. The legislative branch doesn’t have oversight. [MSNBC, 3/22/07]
Congress doesn’t have any legitimate oversight and responsibilities to the White House. [Fox, 3/22/07]
But back when he was asked whether the conservative-led 109th Congress should be investigating members of the Executive Branch, he was singing a different tune:
QUESTION: What is the president’s opinion of a request by Republican leaders in the House to launch an investigation of Sandy Berger’s involvement in the removal of classified documents from the National Archives?
SNOW: There were questions last week, about investigations involving Republican members. Members of Congress have their own oversight obligations. They may proceed as they wish. They’re a separate and co-equal branch of government and I’m not going to tell them what they can and can’t do. [Briefing, 10/16/06]
Of course one of the Right's talking points on this issue is "Clinton did it"! Here's what really happened from the LA Times:
Three weeks ago, Justice Department officials settled on a "talking point" to rebut the chorus of Democratic accusations that the Bush administration had wrongly injected politics into law enforcement when it dismissed eight U.S. attorneys.
Why not focus on the Clinton administration's having "fired all 93 U.S. attorneys" when Janet Reno became attorney general in March 1993? The idea was introduced in a memo from a Justice Department spokeswoman.
The message has been effective. What's followed has been a surge of complaints on blogs and talk radio that it was the Clinton administration that first politicized the Justice Department.
The facts, it turns out, are more complicated.
But historical data compiled by the Senate show the pattern going back to President Reagan.
Reagan replaced 89 of the 93 U.S. attorneys in his first two years in office. President Clinton had 89 new U.S. attorneys in his first two years, and President Bush had 88 new U.S. attorneys in his first two years.
In a similar vein, the Justice Department recently supplied Congress with a district-by-district listing of U.S. attorneys who served prior to the Bush administration.
The list shows that in 1981, Reagan's first year in office, 71 of 93 districts had new U.S. attorneys. In 1993, Clinton's first year, 80 of 93 districts had new U.S. attorneys.
Here's another Video Link from Raw Story of the interview of Sen. Patrick Leahy by Keith Olbermann:
Thursday night on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee hinted that he might have more "whistleblowers" set to testify on the ongoing US Attorneys scandal, which some have dubbed "Attorneygate."
In the interview with Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Olbermann referred to comments made previously on the show by Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) about "really angry career employees," then asked if the Committee had any "rabbits in hats."
"He said that he hoped that the White House would let Mr. Rove and the others testify on the record," Olbermann related to Leahy. "If they did not, there really were enough really angry career employees, prosecutors in the Justice Department who would ensure that this information, the actual facts of the case would get out anyway."
Bridge, at the Sam Seder Show blog, posted this from the Vanity Fair's Wolcott blog as a reminder: (H/T to bridge)
James Wolcott:
"When Dick Cheney famously told Pat Leahy to go fuck himself, he and the rest of the administration clearly never anticipated the day when Leahy would return to powerful chairmanship; I think they internalized Karl Rove's visionary scheme of a permanent Republican majority and thought the future was in the bag. Now they're holding the bag and it's leaking all over their laps."
And it seems the Kyle Sampson, Gonzales' former Chief of Staff, will testify next Thursday. No subpoena necessary. This from TPM Muckraker:
Sampson: It's A Date!
By Paul Kiel - March 23, 2007, 4:27 PM
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee extended an invitation for Alberto Gonzales' former chief of staff Kyle Sampson to testify. If he didn't want to come voluntarily, the committee said, he'd be subpoenaed.
Today, via a letter from his lawyer to the committee, he accepted -- no subpoena necessary.
"Mr. Sampson looks forward to answering the Committee's questions," the letter reads. "We trust that his decision to do so will satisfy the need of the Congress to obtain information from him concerning the requested resignations of the United States Attorneys."
The hearing will take place at 10 AM next Thursday.
And the last for now but definatly not the least from McClatchy Newspapers
New U.S. attorneys seem to have partisan records
By Greg Gordon, Margaret Talev and Marisa Taylor
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Under President Bush, the Justice Department has backed laws that narrow minority voting rights and pressed U.S. attorneys to investigate voter fraud - policies that critics say have been intended to suppress Democratic votes.
Bush, his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, and other Republican political advisers have highlighted voting rights issues and what Rove has called the "growing problem" of election fraud by Democrats since Bush took power in the tumultuous election of 2000, a race ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Since 2005, McClatchy Newspapers has found, Bush has appointed at least three U.S. attorneys who had worked in the Justice Department's civil rights division when it was rolling back longstanding voting-rights policies aimed at protecting predominantly poor, minority voters.
Another newly installed U.S. attorney, Tim Griffin in Little Rock, Ark., was accused of participating in efforts to suppress Democratic votes in Florida during the 2004 presidential election while he was a research director for the Republican National Committee. He's denied any wrongdoing.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the four U.S. attorneys weren't chosen only because of their backgrounds in election issues, but "we would expect any U.S. attorney to prosecute voting fraud."
Taken together, critics say, the replacement of the U.S. attorneys, the voter-fraud campaign and the changes in Justice Department voting rights policies suggest that the Bush administration may have been using its law enforcement powers for partisan political purposes.
The Bush administration's emphasis on voter fraud is drawing scrutiny from the Democratic Congress, which has begun investigating the firings of eight U.S. attorneys - two of whom say that their ousters may have been prompted by the Bush administration's dissatisfaction with their investigations of alleged Democratic voter fraud.
Bush has said he's heard complaints from Republicans about some U.S. attorneys' "lack of vigorous prosecution of election fraud cases," and administration e-mails have shown that Rove and other White House officials were involved in the dismissals and in selecting a Rove aide to replace one of the U.S. attorneys. Nonetheless, Bush has refused to permit congressional investigators to question Rove and others under oath.
Seems to me Bush and the White House has much to hide. Happy reading!!
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