March 28
I came up with a name for the scandal that keeps on giving: Gonzogate. Yes, you can use it. Some credit might be nice. No, I haven't searched to see if someone else coined the word before me. If someone did, I don't want to know.
While we're coining terms, after my state's embarrassing congresswoman Michele Bachmann grabbed the acting president as he walked by after the State of the Union address and held on a long time, 35 seconds I heard (in this video, she's been holding 23 seconds when the clip ends), my wife and I started using the term "to go Michele Bachmann on someone". It means to grab on to someone and insist on their intention, presumably in a groupie sort of way.
For last night's DFL Links, I wrote up a summary of Gonzogate in bullet form which I thought would help discussion. It turned out to be 3½ pages in Word. I didn't include links to sources since it was print, though I might at some point. More likely I'll make an update since Gonzogate is just getting started. Anyway, here it is.
Tomorrow Kyle Sampson is supposed to testify before Congress, so the gift that keeps giving might give some more. Today though, there might be a new permutation. One of the fired attorneys, Carol Lam, convicted Rep. Duke Cunningham, and between her firing and actual departure she managed to indict a contractor who bribed Cunningham, Brent Wilkes, and a guilty plea from Wilkes' partner, Mitchell Wade. I suspect interest in Wade was renewed by Gonzogate, though David Corn said he was working on this months ago, and now the White House might be directly tied to the Cunningham scandal. To summarize, Wade's company, MZM, went its first eight years with no revenue. Two months after getting approved as a federal contractor, Wade got a contract to provide office equipment to the White House. It turns out now that the office equipment was a machine for scanning mail for anthrax. This part was kept secret. Also newly learned was that Wade was paid $140,000, the amount spent shortly thereafter to buy a yacht for Cunningham. Two months later, the company got a $250 million contract. Wade and Wilkes were bribing Cunningham while they were going after the White House contract. There's no evidence yet that contract was the reward of bribery, just suspicion that someone with no record gets the contract. Corn hasn't been able to get past White House restrictions on the contract. Maybe it's national security. Maybe we've learned not to believe anything the White House says anymore. Maybe we've learned evidence is often classified to protect the guilty. Like I've been saying, Gonzogate (yes, I do like that name, no matter what I said about putting "gate" onto scandal names) might be big well beyond the actual fired attorneys, because so much of what they worked on will be investigated, and those wondering about the non-fired attorneys will be following their new skepticism. Not being a journalist, doing this in my spare time, I will be encouraging my congressmen to impeach and remove Gonzales. I almost hope he doesn't resign, so he can see what getting fired is like, and because no amount of political humiliation is too much for the man who called the Geneva Conventions "quaint".
March 24
Despite feeling like I'm coming down with something and spending most of the day in bed, I have to point this out to whoever is reading this. Take notice of the timing on this story that DOJ (Department of Justice) released a memo showing Gonzales was in on discussions about firing the US Attorneys. Though the NPR reporters were careful to say this didn't definitely prove Gonzales lied under oath to Congress and to the press that his staff made the decision and he didn't know all that went into it, merely that he was at a meeting where it was discussed and it isn't apparent how detailed the discussion was, I wish to point out the timing of the release. It was released late Friday night. Why does that matter? Because it was too late to become part of that day's news and has to be shunted to the next day -- Saturday. Saturday has by far the lowest newspaper readership and the lowest TV news viewership. I'll even guess that's true for radio too, both public broadcasting and commercial talk radio. I don't know about web site traffic, but I'd be surprised if news sites aren't at their lowest visitation of the week. This is why the Saturday news has to be checked. Releasing on Friday is, you will discover, a common tactic for releasing what has to be released, but the releasers really don't want to, so they hide it. Not only is Saturday the day with the smallest audience, but on Sunday, the biggest day for newspapers, it's yesterday's news, and on Monday it's last week's news. So they hope you won't notice.
In this case, not only did DOJ bring this out late Friday night, but notice it wasn't part of the earlier document dumps. It also was from November 27, that period of 18½ days missing from the 3,000 document dump. They badly wanted to hide this one. Given that it doesn't prove with certainty that Gonzales lied, we have to wonder what they're still holding back. So write to your members of Congress. Tell them that when the Bush administration has been caught using secrecy to do things that are at least unethical if not illegal, more secrecy won't help. The public has the right to see the testimony of White House and DOJ staff. Secrecy will only feed the distrust.
March 22
In case you forget the electoral fraud in Ohio in 2004, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman of The Free Press summarized what's been happening in uncovering the fraud and removing if not punishing those involved. The new state secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner, is trying to replace the whole Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. The board chairman is also chairman of the state Republican Party. What, you thought they had a concept of "conflict of interest"? You've not been paying attention the last few years. Most notable is that two board employees have been sentenced to prison for rigging the recount. I won't repeat the whole article, but to elaborate on what that last bit is about, the recount was supposed to be random. Some precincts would be recounted by hand to see if the recount matched the total. A complete manual recount would occur if there were discrepancies, otherwise the ballots were just run through the machines again. It was reported at the time, but ignored by those in power, that the precincts were preselected instead of randomly chosen at the time for the counting. They were selected for matching the machine count, thereby defeating the whole purpose. Maybe election board workers merely thought the fraud was impossible and didn't want to go through the recount, so rigged it to avoid something they thought unnecessary. Doesn't matter. Whether they though there was no fraud or tried to cover it up, this was still a crime.
No, the 2004 election won't be recounted or undone. However, it's still possible to set straight the historical record, and show that statistically it was likely if not proven that Kerry won in Ohio. He lost in a way too, since his quick concession is why he had no support for another presidential run, but that's a side note. The big thing is that things are changing in Ohio, and fraud will get tougher there and everywhere. If we keep pounding on the issue, refuse to accept illegitimate elections, keep pushing for election reform, we can clean up our elections. The GOP will have an awful winning elections for a while if the vote counts are honest, but I can live with that. But don't get complaisant yet. It appears even last year, concerns the Democratic candidates would have to win by a big margin to be declared winner by a small margin had some validation. Touchscreens in several counties missed a bunch of votes in the gubernatorial election. Sounds like Sarasota, FL. Probably it was a technical glitch, but that's bad anyway and feeds suspicion because, as always, the glitches help the Republicans. On the other hand, The Free Press reported in November that it looks like the same sorts of fraud committed in 2004 were tried again in 2006, with a statistically improbable shift to the Republicans relative to the last pre-election polls. Considering the big win Democrats had anyway, with Kenneth Blackwell getting trounced, it might have been the voters' intention that it be bigger.
March 21
Did I not say this US Attorneys scandal is the gift that keeps on giving? Well, I did. Now there's the 18½ minute day gap in the White House tapes DOJ e-mails. Sorry, am I laying it on too thick with the Watergate analogy? This does however remind me of Watergate, but also Iran-Contra. The scandals looked minor or like rumors when they broke, but then there was another development and another, and indications it might go all the way to the president (we had elected presidents back then: no, really) which turned into Nixon and Reagan getting caught being directly involved. This feels similar the way it looked like nothing to most public, politicians, and media, but got followed up by someone who smelled a rat. I don't recall exactly who followed up a report in Beirut newspaper to figure out that the report of arms sales to Iran amounted to something, but we all recall Woodward and Bernstein (or at least we recall Redford and Hoffman in the movie), and this time the liberal blogosphere gets credit. Once again there have been hints of presidential involvement, and if prior administrations were no lesson in the need for skepticism, the acting president's corruption has taught us no level of cynicism is too much. At this point, we don't know that Bush was actively involved or had prior knowledge of the firings or the real reasons for the firings, only that he received some complaints about USAs (the acronym for US attorneys used in the released e-mails) and brought them up with Gonzales, even though Bush says there was nothing specific. Right. He mentioned there were complaints, didn't say just what, and Torture Boy didn't ask. And Rush Limbaugh is moving his show to Air America.
Anyway, about that gap, Tony Snow was asked about it today and refused to answer. The 3,000 e-mail dump didn't include e-mails from mid-November to December 4. The USAs were told on Dec 7. Maybe DOJ just had a wacky way of marking the anniversary of another sneak attack. To make this plain to the Bushies (a small development of this scandal: we now know they use this word for themselves), it is unlikely to be a coincidence that the e-mails from the time when the decision was made and implemented just happen to be the ones that are missing. May I predict a big fight over those, maybe more than putting White House staff under oath.
Which leads to another gift: Bush has taken a definite position on letting his staff testify. The Democrats so far are showing the backbone they are so often accused of lacking. I used to say that too, particularly in regards to the Patriot Act, the authorization to attack Iraq, and tolerating electoral fraud. I thought I detected a change when the counting of the electoral votes was accompanied by not just House Democrats challenging Ohio's votes, but Sen. Barbara Boxer too. I thought I saw the spinal growth when the grassroots got Howard Dean elected DNC chair over the objections of those who had been so cautious for so many years. I thought I felt a stiffening in 2005-6, but that could have been deceptive since Bush was collapsing so handily. Now it seems that at least in terms of oversight hearings, the Democrats have stopped taking crap. If you watched the Plame Leak hearing to the end, you saw Rep. Henry Waxman tell Victoria Toensing she was full of it and her not-believed assertions would be checked. Today, when Al Gore testified before the Senate Energy Committee, the former chairman and global warming denier, James Inhofe, tried right at the start to bully Gore and Boxer, and if you listen to the hearing, Boxer had none of it. At the risk of looking foolish later, I'll say I'm feeling confident the Democrats won't back down on Attorneygate (lousy gate-appended name I know, but I don't what to call it).
On a side note, wasn't it weird how Inhofe kept calling Gore "Senator"? He was a senator, but it seems off not to use the later title. The tone of voice made it feel like a dig, like the tone when the nastier Republicans say "the Democrat Party".
One more gift I'll mention. The Republicans who pressured the attorneys might be called to account for it. TPM Muckraker asked readers to pick some documents from the DOJ 3,000 document dump and post anything interesting they found. One person found this passage: "In particular, Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is yelling at Carol Lam a lot about a report saying something like only 6% of aliens and alien smugglers caught by the border patrol actually going to prosecution." Sen Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson are already in trouble for pressuring David Iglesias, the attorney in New Mexico. Did Issa do the same thing with Lam, the attorney in San Diego? That's just a reference in an e-mail not between Issa or Lam, so don't draw a conclusion yet. But do ask what it means.
This might be bigger were there not so much else going. One fired USA, Paul Charlton in Arizona, wanted to experiment with recording interrogations so it would be easier to convince juries that confessions were valid. The response from federal law enforcement agencies was that this would be a dreadful idea, because juries might not understand the "legal" but harsh methods used to extract confessions. There was a decided preference for no recordings to contradict interrogator notes and testimony. Someone writing a handwritten comment on a hardcopy said, "So we want to hide the truth? Don't want jury to reach its own judgment?" Want to bet a bunch of scandals will go almost unnoticed because there are so many, and the focus has to be on the biggest?
March 18
Yesterday I dissected a column that included falsehoods about Valerie and Joseph Wilson. While researching May's claims, just to avoid making mistakes myself while accusing someone of not doing research, I came upon something humorous. Frontpagemap, a conservative web site, confidently asserted on July 22, 2005, "Despite Rove’s demonstrable non-leak of Valerie Plame’s non-secret identity,..." Demonstrable? How demonstrable was it when it's been proven false, both Rove's role and her covert status? Maybe the writer, Ben Johnson, retracted in a subsequent column. However, looking at his titles, I have my doubts. I would have no problem if he had just said this was his opinion, or said it seemed likely, or hadn't been proven otherwise. He did write it over a year and a half ago and even though all reasonable people already knew she was covert, I'd let it go. But he said "demonstrable" about something undemonstrated. Like May's column in Friday's Star Tribune, the right is utterly delusional. Just don't let assertions opposing the facts mislead you into thinking there's doubt. the right wing's most common tactic is to keep asserting falsehoods and claiming doubt when there is none. They're doing it still to defame the Wilsons and defend Libby, and we see it in other issues too. It's a mindset. if in doubt, look it up. When you don't know who or what to believe, look it up. Sometimes the truth isn't somewhere in the middle.
March 17
I wish I could call it a technical glitch, but I think it's a user error. I appear to have wiped out my archive from the second half of last month. If someone has any of it cached, and can send it to me, that would be great. I'm expecting is anyone is seeing this that they no longer have the old version in their cache, but maybe it's cached elsewhere by someone who knows what "cached" means.
Getting back to serious stuff, last night I saw part of Valerie Wilson's testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. At about the same time I read this column by Clifford. D. May in which he either betrays enormous ignorance of the whole scandal, or he's delusional, or he's lying. I'm not sure which. He clearly does no research prior to spouting opinions. My guess if he had waited until after Wilson's testimony he would have said the same things, but maybe with a pang of conscience. Or maybe he would have said she lied about everything. He would have to, because she contracted so much of what he said, so either he's wrong or she lied under oath and the Republicans didn't call her on it.
Let's start early in the column. May says, "Valerie Plame's name was first leaked to columnist Robert Novak by Richard Armitage, a State Department official who was not seeking to harm Plame or her husband, Joseph Wilson. (This is obvious to anyone who knows anything about Armitage; had it been otherwise, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald would, without doubt, have brought charges against him.)" Other journalists (does Novak in any way deserve that title?) were told before Novak, but that's a nit. Novak is the one who wrote about it and Armitage told him. I offer no opinion on whether Armitage would seek to harm anyone. I merely point out that the parenthetical statement is preposterous. Fitzgerald wouldn't decline to charge Armitage because Armitage was a nice guy. He would however decline if he didn't feel sure he would get a conviction. It wasn't enough for Armitage to leak her name. He had to know she was covert, and no matter how much it defies common sense that he might not guess a CIA employee was covert, it has to be proven to a criminal standard of evidence. Even if you don't know the particulars about Armitage, think a moment: prosecutors are supposed to charge only when they think they'll get a conviction. If they don't charge, they weren't sure they could do that. It has nothing to do with whether the target is a nice guy.
May then says this: "The bad news: The CIA actually did send Wilson -- a retired ambassador with no investigative skills and a blatant bias against the Bush administration -- to conduct a highly sensitive investigation." He maybe didn't know the CIA had sent Wilson on other missions. I didn't know either until Mrs. Wilson mentioned it in response to a question. Even at that, how May would know Wilson had no investigative skills is unknown. What May is insinuating with a half-truth is that Wilson had no qualifications. He actually had been ambassador to Iraq and to countries in West Africa. That's where Niger is, for the geographically challenged among you. In other words, he was picked because of his qualifications, not despite the lack of them. Oh, and about part about "blatant bias against the Bush administration", the evidence for this is...? I went looking around the right wing blogosphere and media, and all I can find are charges Wilson lied about voting for Bush in 2000. I can't confirm that he did in fact vote for Bush, but that could be an instance of lying bout someone by accusing them of lying when they said something they didn't actually say. I couldn't verify that Wilson gave money to the Gore campaign, just it's frequent repetition. It appears his activism started with Bush's insistence on using debunked information of which Wilson was a debunker. Mrs. Wilson has done nothing more than admit in answering a direct question that she's a Democrat. She also said Amb. Wilson was raised Republican. In an interview earlier this week broadcast today on Ring of Fire, Wilson said his one political appointment was ambassador to Iraq under Bush Sr. It appears the scant evidence of political bias leans the other way.
May repeated accusation that Mrs. Wilson sent her husband: "Key to that decision was Plame's recommendation. Despite Wilson's insistence that his wife played no role, a memo from Plame on behalf of Wilson was sent to the CIA's Directorate of Operations. That memo was retrieved and revealed by Senate investigators." If you watch the hearing, you discover if you didn't already know that the Senate investigation was part of the Republican smear campaign (for example, the report included statements that she sent her husband, even though there were never any facts to back that up). Mrs. Wilson at one point mentions the distress of a coworker whose words were twisted in the Senate report. I don't know what memo May refers to, but it has been established repeatedly that Mrs. Wilson was covert. Not just stated by her under oath yesterday, but her classified status was why the CIA requested the investigation in the first place. Her former coworkers have said she was covert. It was stated in the Libby indictment. Even if you lived looney right la-la-land before, in yesterday's hearing, the current head of the CIA was quoted saying she was covert, and Rep. Waxman's opening statement that she was covert had to be cleared by the CIA. I did note that Rep. Tom Davis asked if she was covert under the law that was violated when she was exposed, trying to find some legal loophole to keep saying she wasn't covert.
May then uses a favorite tactic of Fox Opinion (to use David Bender's term) where an accusation is stated in the form of a question so they can deny the accusation is made. "Among the national security questions this raises: Did CIA officials have no qualified agents they could assign? Or did they regard the inquiry into whether Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase uranium in Africa as not worthy of serious attention?" He's accusing the CIA of not taking seriously the suspicion the Iraq bought uranium from Niger. Guess what both Mrs. Wilson was working on? Think ironically and you'll get it: Iraqi WMD programs. Unless she lied under oath, this got a lot of CIA attention, and when the office of the vice president asked to have the story checked out, they jumped to it. Could May just be using a question to make an accusation he knows is false? Could that be called "lying"? See how easy it is? In a declarative statement, May is either lying or grossly ignorant of his subject.
Here's a subtle misleading statement ending with a question: "Wilson responded with his New York Times op-ed: "What I Didn't Find in Africa," which in turn led Bob Novak and other reporters to try to figure out who Wilson was and why the CIA had chosen him as their man in Niger. Yes, some administration officials attempted to provide truthful answers to the reporters' questions. To see a scandal in that, one has to be a fool or a hyperpartisan. (Washington lacks for neither.)" I find it unbelievable that May doesn't know that the scandal wasn't the attempt to find out who Amb. Wilson was, but the revelation of who his wife was. Moreover, we know from the Libby trial, which was before this column, that Bush administration officials were seeking out journalists to tell them who Mrs. Wilson was. This was not reporters hunting around. I can't believe even Novak would have cared who Wilson's wife was. By the way Fox viewers, why does Novak get to be an analyst on this story he's so wrapped up in? A real news channel wouldn't do that.
March 16
This US attorneys scandal is the gift that keeps on giving. There are new revelations daily, and journalists are finding more scandals growing from it. Today, NPR found that Kyle Sampson, the Justice chief of staff who resigned and appears to have been central to the scheme, has really just been transferred. Murray Waas at National Journal has found that Torture Boy learned he was going to be a target of the Office of Professional Responsibility's investigation into the warrantless wiretapping, so he had Bush do something without precedent, and deny investigators the needed clearance, though Bush did give clearance to those investigating the leak of the program. If Gonzales didn't tell Bush that Gonzales himself was a target, he badly deceived Bush, failed to show the only qualification that counts in the White House -- loyalty -- and would presumably be fired. Alternatively, Bush knew he was stopping an investigation. This is called a "cover-up".
But we're not done. Greg Palast discovered that Timothy Griffin, the new US Attorney in Little Rock, ran an election fraud scheme in Florida in 2004. This was a scheme other Republicans carried out in Ohio and Washington state that year. Griffin sent letters marked "do not forward" to Blacks and Hispanics in Democratic precincts. Many addresses were of soldiers deployed overseas and homeless shelters. When the letter came back, they were removed from the voter registration roles. Support the troops! By the way, this is a felony. How would Griffin do in a confirmation hearing? That's why that little unknown provision was sneaked into the Patriot Act renewal.
Reporters looking at the emails from the Justice department's "document dump", Dan Froomkin's term, saw that J. Scott Jennings, deputy to Karl Rove, was using a RNC domain called gwb43.com for what looks like official business, which is supposed to go through the White House system where all of it is archived. RNC e-mail, maybe, maybe not. It looks like a good way to hide when your job entails illegality. Also Steve Bell, chief of staff to Sen. Pete Domenici, might need to copy his boss and hire a lawyer, because he was sending mail to "kr@georgewbush.com". If you put that domain in a browser, it redirects to gop.com. If the email in these domains is archived, how much illegality might be revealed? Want to bet that some urgent deleting is going on over at the GOP IT department? CREW has asked the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to investigate.
So with the acting president admitting he brought up complaints about US attorneys with Gonzales, we have Bush being directly connected to a scandal. Two, if it turns out he denied investigators with the OFP the needed clearance to ask Gonzales about the warrantless wiretapping. His involvement is tangential so far, but does anyone believe he brought up complaints, but then didn't say what the complaints were or who they were against? "Hey Alberto, I got some complaints from GOP officials about some US attorneys. Now that I've exhausted that subject...". When I told a friend tonight that I thought impeachment just got possible, he said that was extremely optimistic. I said it is, but it had just been fantasyland a few days before, so that's an improvement.
Even if Bush's refusal to use e-mail leaves too little paper trail or electronic trail to prove anything, maybe Karl Rove will finally be called to account. The development in this morning's news was that Rove and Gonzales were involved at the beginning, like anyone believed Harriet Miers could come up with this. Gonzales was still White House Counsel, so the notion he wasn't in on the details looks questionable at best. Unfortunately, he testified under oath, so he could be up on charges of lying to Congress. Might be good to have Rove testify too. Otherwise, almost guaranteed, the truth won't come out, or he technically won't have committed a crime, and he's not in a job where he can be impeached, so as usual nothing will happen.
How big is this scandal? I don't have time even for Valerie Wilson's testimony today. For now, I'll just say that if you think the Republicans have any credibility at all on this, turn on C-SPAN and watch the hearing.
