Purgegate – it’s the lies st00pid

Uriasposten er kommet efter den, lidt sent. Men bedre sent end aldrig … etc.

Forventeligt, derfor:

Clinton did it too-forsvaret:

Manipulation med retssystemet er ikke noget, man skal spøge med, men det virker alt andet lige lidt mistænkeligt, at hverken DR eller Politiken gider se på Bush´ forgænger, der fyrede ikke otte, men samtlige treoghalvfems af USA´s statsadvokater:

Ja. Clinton fyrede 89 ud af 93 USAs i sine første 2 år i stolen:

In a March 4 memo titled “Draft Talking Points,” Justice Department spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos asked, “The [White House] is under the impression that we did not remove all the Clinton [U.S. attorneys] in 2001 like he did when he took office. Is that true?”

That is mostly true, replied D. Kyle Sampson, then chief of staff to Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales. “Clinton fired all Bush [U.S. attorneys] in one fell swoop. We fired all Clinton [U.S. attorneys] but staggered it out more and permitted some to stay on a few months,” he said.

A few minutes later, Deputy Atty. Gen. Paul J. McNulty replied to the same memo.

“On the issue of Clinton [U.S. attorneys], we called each one and had them give us a timeframe. Most were gone by late April. In contrast, Clinton [Justice Department] told all but a dozen in early March to be gone immediately,” McNulty said.

The difference appears minor. Both McNulty and Sampson acknowledged that the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration, brought in a new slate of U.S. attorneys within a few months of taking office.

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.

Nonetheless, the idea that Clinton and Reno broke with precedent and fired all U.S. attorneys upon taking office has played a key role in the public debate in recent weeks. In conservative media and on talk radio, Reno’s abrupt firing of all the U.S. attorneys had been described as extreme and unprecedented.

Saint Ronnie gjorde det. Og Bush, ja ham, miserable failure, gjorde det også. Han fyrede så godt som alle US Attourneys da han satte sig i præsidentembedet. Fordi – tadaaaa! – USAs er politisk udnævnte.

Ditch one.

De var nogle demokratiske operatører, der ikke ville efterforske demokratisk valgsvindel-forsvaret:

Det slutter imidlertid ikke der. Flere af de statsadvokater som demokraterne vil have undersøgt fyringerne af fik nemlig silkesnoren efter at have vist alt andet end professionel ildhu i efterforskningen af demokratisk valgsvindel:

Oooooh ja. Klart. Dels fordi det ligger lige til højrebenet, at demokraterne er nogle værre valgsvindlere, mens republikanerne er de evigt uskyldigt forfulgte (Florida 2000, anyone … dér kunne man vist godt have brugt en overemsig offentlig anklager til at rede trådene ud, men det fik man ikke lov til; det sørgede en Højesteretsbeslutning i SCOTUS som bekendt for.) Og dels fordi det faktisk er sådan, at der i forvejen bliver efterforsket MASSIVT mange flere demokratiske politikere end republikanske:

Paul Krugman’s column today is about a study by two retired professors, Donald Shields and John Cragan, who have taken a look at the partisan breakdown of corruption investigations by the Department of Justice under George Bush. Their preliminary results, published in 2004, showed that DOJ initiated far more investigations of Democrats than Republicans, and their followup study shows that the pattern continued through 2006. However, the really interesting part came in the breakdown between local cases and national cases.

In statewide and federal cases they found a total of 66 investigations. Here’s the breakdown:

• Democrats: 36
• Republicans: 30

This is roughly what you’d expect. Democrats are slightly overrepresented compared to their actual numbers, but only by a bit. There’s nothing fishy. But the numbers for local cases paint a very different story. They found 309 investigations, broken down as follows:

• Democrats: 262
• Republicans: 37
• Independents: 10

Now isn’t that odd? At the local level, even though both parties make up about half of all elected officials, Democrats get hammered and Republicans are left alone. Shields and Cragan offer up the following hypothesis:

We believe that this tremendous disparity is politically motivated and it occurs because the local (non-statewide and non-Congressional) investigations occur under the radar of a diligent national press. Each instance is treated by a local beat reporter as an isolated case that is only of local interest….[Conversely] because the investigations of state-wide and federal elected officials and candidates occurred within the radar of the national press, there was little room for nefarious, out-of-line investigations for political purposes on the part of the Bush Justice Department.

And who does these investigations? Why, U.S. Attorneys, the very group that Alberto Gonzales has been busily trying to make even more partisan. Apparently a 262-37 breakdown isn’t good enough for him.

Og endnu flere af de nu fyrede anklagere havde den frækhed at efterforske uregelmæssigheder begået af republikanere.

Yesterday I wrote a post suggesting that some of the fired U.S. Attorneys really did have performance problems while others didn’t. How can you tell the difference? Well, the two who did have performance problems were given reviews that contained actual hard evidence of poor office management. The five who didn’t were given vague reviews that didn’t seem to add up to much. As it happens, these five were the same ones who had been suspected of being either too tough on Republican corruption cases or too weak on Democratic ones, which has led suspicious folks like me to suspect that this was the real reason they were fired.

Ditch two.

Men det er dybest set ligemeget alt sammen … it’s not the actions, it’s the lies – st00pid.

Bush-administrationen kunne have valgt at gå åbent frem og sige, at man fyrede disse anklagere af politiske årsager … taget i betragtning af, at det er anklagere, man selv har bragt ind i stillingerne, så er den lidt søgt, men herregud. Nogen var blevet lidt småmoppsede, men som sagt – herregud.

I stedet valgte.man.at.lyve. Først den ene løgn, så den anden løgn. Så den tredje løgn, den fjerde løgn og yderligere et par løgne mere. Undervejs er det givetvis endda lykkedes Gonzales at lyve for Kongressen, hvilket i sig selv er formelt strafbart (og ikke bare en politisk no-go-zone), uanset Gonzales ikke vidnede under edsansvar.

Man har padlet sig vej gennem hundredevis af forhutlede løgnhistorier, og når spurgt direkte: “Hvorfor fyrede I disse anklagere?”, så klapper man i. Med den tilføjelse, at det er “Uansvarligt og hæmningsløst” at stille dette spørgsmål. Inden længe er det vel også kommet dertil, at det er objektivt “pro-terroristisk” at forsøge at drage Bush-regeringen til ansvar for noget som helst (fejl … det ER objektivt pro-terroristisk; Bush er jo præsident i krigstid, og i krigstid SKAL man bakke blindt op om sine ledere, ikk’).

Hvis den her sag er så clear cut, som Henrik så gerne vil gøre den til, så – for lige at skamride Kevin Drum igen – synes jeg, at Henrik bør svare på følgende spørgsmål:

1. 1. Prior to the purge, DOJ lawyers quietly inserted a clause in the Patriot Act that allowed them to appoint new U.S. Attorneys without Senate approval. Why did they do this when their own emails show that the existing system hadn’t caused them any problems?
   2. They fired eight USAs at once. This is wildly unprecedented in the middle of an administration. Why did they feel the need for such an extensive sweep?
   3. None of the eight were given a reason for being fired.
   4. DOJ initially lied when asked why they were fired, chalking it up to “performance reasons” even though five of the eight had previously received reviews placing them in the top third of all USAs. Why lie if there’s an innocent explanation?
   5. Five of the eight were either aggressively prosecuting Republicans or else failing to prosecute Democrats to the satisfaction of local politicians. Coincidence?
   6. David Iglesias reported that he received case-related calls from from Heather Wilson and Pete Domenici shortly before the midterms. He believes the calls were intended to pressure him into indicting some local Democrats before election day. He didn’t, and a few weeks later he was fired.On a similar note, the day after Carol Lam notified DOJ that she was planning to expand the Duke Cunningham investigation, Kyle Sampson emailed the White House and told William Kelley to call him so he could explain the “real problem” he had with Lam. What was the real problem that he didn’t feel comfortable putting in email?
   7. When DOJ released thousands of pages of emails last week, there was a mysterious 18-day gap from a period shortly before the firings were announced. There are virtually no emails from within this period even though it seems like precisely the time when there would have been the greatest amount of email traffic. Where are the emails?
   8. The email dump contained virtually nothing from before the firings discussing the reasons for targeting the eight USAs who were eventually fired. Surely there must have been such a discussion?
   9. DOJ has now had weeks to come up with a plausible story for the firings and they still haven’t. This is truly remarkable. Why not just tell the truth? That doesn’t take weeks to concoct.

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