Fighting Republican Memory Loss

There is a new thing on the market if you keep forgetting things like crimes committed while in the Bush Administration. Do you have some of the problems below? Democratic Committee Chairs might have an answer for you.

Gonzales Lied Again: He Fired Nine Attorneys

We have been so focused on finding out the whole truth about the eight fired U.S. Attorneys that no one considered there could be more. It turns out that Western Missouri prosecutor Todd Graves was told to resign several months before the rest were forced out. He left quietly back in March of 2006. So why has he come out now and spoke up about the dismissal? It seems Graves has a few things in common with the others.

From The Washington Post:

The former prosecutor's disclosure, in an interview on the eve of a second appearance today by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales before lawmakers investigating the firings, means that the administration began moving to replace U.S. attorneys five months earlier than was previously known. It also means that at least nine prosecutors were asked to resign last year, a deviation from repeated suggestions by Gonzales and other senior Justice officials in congressional testimony and other public statements that the firings did not extend beyond the eight prosecutors already known to have been forced out.

(snip)

The characterization -- that Graves was being moved out simply to give someone else a turn -- is practically identical to the explanation that Bud Cummins, the former U.S. attorney in Little Rock, has said he was given last June, when he, too, was asked to leave. He was replaced by a former aide to President Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove. The seven other U.S. attorneys were dismissed on a single day in December.

Graves said his conversation with Battle "made clear to me the fact I was getting a push."

"I felt like I was no longer welcome in the department," he said. "It wasn't like I was trying to hang on."

Well that was the main story about the others when we heard about this whole mess in the first place. Then the tale got more twisted as Gonzales lied with abandon and leaks started springing bits of truth. All eight initial attorneys had been investigating issues of voter fraud that could have been bad news for the Bush Administration. So was Graves onto the same thing?

The same month he was asked to step down, Graves's name was included in a Jan. 9, 2006, list assembled by Gonzales's then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, of seven U.S. attorneys the administration was considering forcing from their jobs. That April, Sampson sent another e-mail noting that two of the prosecutors on that list had already left. Three names, including Graves's, were redacted when Justice officials released the January list.

Graves said yesterday that he never knew he was on the list and was not given a specific reason he was asked to leave.

During the spring of 2005, an aide to Bond urged the White House to replace Graves, because the prosecutor's wife and brother-in-law recently had been given state patronage contracts to run private offices for driver's licenses and other motor vehicle services. A spokeswoman for Bond confirmed that interaction but said Justice officials later told the senator's staff that the contracts issue was not why the administration wanted him to leave.

Graves acknowledged that he had twice during the past few years clashed with Justice's civil rights division over cases, including a federal lawsuit involving Missouri's voter rolls that Graves said a Washington Justice official signed off on after he refused to do so. That official, Bradley J. Schlozman, was appointed as interim U.S. attorney to succeed Graves, remaining for a year until the Senate this spring confirmed John Wood for the job. Wood was a counselor to the deputy attorney general and is a son of Bond's first cousin, although the senator's spokeswoman, Shana Marchio, said Bond did not recommend him for the job.

So was it purely a political patronage thing or voter rolls...or maybe even both. Either way, Graves was kicked to the street while another attorney was picked for the job. Who is that new guy by the way? None other than Bradley Schlozman, the guy that rushed after A.C.O.R.N. activists right before the November election. Those Bushies sure do know how to pick the winners, don't they?

After Sampson Talks, Gonzales Does A "D'Oh"

The Washington Post aptly described Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' reply to yesterday's testimony by Kyle Sampson as the "Homer Simpson " defense. Sampson's answers to the Senate inquiry were damning to Gonzales and directly contradicted Alberto's earlier statements. Now that the AG is caught lying he will have to make up new lies to cover the ones he has already uttered. He is trying to scam the Senate and the American people into believing that he didn't do anything seriously wrong. Yet, once a liar is caught, it is hard to be seen as believable anymore.

From The Washington Post:

You just cannot make this stuff up. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, spends much of his Thursday deflating his former boss' story about the eight fired U.S. Attorneys and how does the Attorney General respond? By issuing a written statement late in the day that essentially says this: Yes, Sampson may have been keeping me in the loop on the firings after all but I wasn't really paying attention ("never focused" was the exact phrase) to what he was saying. It's the Homer Simpson defense to the Kyle Sampson story and if this were a Little League game they would have invoked the 10-run rule by now and sent Gonzales go home to Texas to once again become a lucrative private attorney.

But, alas, the Attorney General is still with us, at least for today, his credibility and reputation tattered and the wolves-- not just Democrats, mind you, but increasingly creeped-out Republicans-- howling at the door. Even if Gonzales is now telling the truth about his role in Firegate, even if somehow his story can be synched up with Sampson's, we all deserve so much more from our Attorney General that the next 18 days or so-- leading up to Gonzales' testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee-- will be excruiating. How badly does an Attorney General have to behave, how badly does he have to lead, how much prestige and trust does he have to lose, before he is forced, by his own conscience if nothing else, to make way for someone else? You tell me.

The only one doing the howling is going to be Gonzales. He'll be begging for mercy soon enough, but for now he will continuing lying his ass off until he is firmly pressed into the corner with nowhere to go. Until then he'll blame anyone, do anything and say whatever it takes to shield himself from the responsibility of his actions. Just like everyone else in the Bush Administration.

Sing Louder Mr. Sampson

The former Chief of Staff to Alberto Gonzales spent a grueling day in the Senate today. Here's a clip of him admitting to Senator Specter that he abused the U.S. Attorney's office procedures concerning the termination of the eight prosecutors and the means of replacing them. Check out the grilling:

Now Firing U.S. Attorneys For Political Reasons Is Okay

After vehemently denying that eight U.S. Attorneys were canned for political reasons, Kyle Sampson, the former Chief of Staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is saying that it is perfectly fine. Obviously the 'job-performance issues' approach didn't work so well, now they are going down a different and what looks like to me a more dangerous road. Kyle Sampson will go in front of Congress to testify voluntarily to say that it was a political decisions, but, um, not what you think constitutes a political decision, or something like that.

More on the confusion from Rawstory:

"The distinction between 'political' and 'performance-related' reasons for removing a United States Attorney is, in my view, largely artificial," Sampson said in his prepared remarks, which were posted by the McClatchy-Tribune News Service and are now available at this link.

Critics have defined some of the firings as "political" since, based on many of the documents released, they appear to be based partially on objections by Republican lawmakers. But Sampson, who resigned from his post earlier this month and agreed to testify voluntarily without being subpoenaed, will argue that a U.S. Attorney not being able to "work constructively" with governmental constituencies cannot be "successful" in his or her position.

"A U.S. Attorney who is unsuccessful from a political perspective, either because he or she has alienated the leadership of the Department in Washington or cannot work constructively with law enforcement or other governmental constituencies in the district important to effective leadership of the office, is unsuccessful," Sampson will say.

He added, "If he or she...is resistant to the President's or the Attorney General's constitutional authority...then that U.S. Attorney is not performing at a high level."

So what Sampson really means is that if the U.S. Attorney does not perform his political obligations to the President and the welfare of the Republican party, then they are clearly not doing their job. Prosecuting criminals is not enough, they have to be criminals that the President approves of. So Carol Lam, Duke Cunningham was not a criminal, he was just a victim. So David Iglesias, you should have gone after that obscure Democrat down in New Mexico. Who cares if the American people want the Justice Department to work outside of partisan lenses?

The Department of Justice is part of the Adminstration and those that work there serve at the pleasure of the President. It isn't about blind justice, it is about serving the President. The question is, who exactly is the President serving? It certainly isn't the American people. It is time for Gonzales and the President, to be forced out of office, for this and so many other reasons.