Tuesday, March 20, 2007

All Right, I'll Call it Purgegate

Glenn Greenwald points out Republicans and U.S. attorneys -- then and now. See it's routine to to replace the US Attorneys when you come to office, and when Bush did in 2001 Democrats didn't make an issue of it, even though Republicans did when Clinton did it in 1993. "What none of those administrations did -- until now -- was cherry-pick a list of prosecutors to be fired in the middle of the administration for clearly political purposes and then lie to Congress (and the country) about what happened."

TPM has a review of the latest document dump. Plenty of hints of partisan reasons though no smoking gun yet. Kevin Drum sums it up as "that the five firings with the weakest official explanations are the same five prosecutors who have been suspected of being either too tough on Republican corruption cases or too weak on Democratic ones. You can't very well put that on your summary sheet, though, which probably explains why the DOJies had trouble coming up with good reasons for firing them. The dots are practically begging to be connected here."

In a vote today the Senate overturned the clause in the Patriot Act allowing the AG appoint US Attorney's without Senate confirmation. I assume Bush has to sign it but the vote was 94-2 so it's veto proof, and also bi-partisan.

Bush spoke this afternoon at 5:45, which seems an odd time. Maybe hoping people were commuting? A transcript is up. Basically he said we've already given 3,000 pages of internal documents and my staff will testify, but only in a non-public meeting, not under oath and without any transcript taken. I interpret that as meaning he doesn't want anyone to watch or any record of them lying to Congress. Unless they're Quakers, they can take an oath to tell the truth. Think Progess reports that There Is No Precedent Barring White House Aides From Testifying To Congress. "Under President Clinton, 31 of his top aides testified on 47 different occasions." Bush "refused three invitations from Congress for his aides to testify, a first since President Richard Nixon in 1972."

Oh and Bush didn't mention the gap in the documents "from mid-November to early December in e-mails and other memos, which was a critical period as the White House and Justice Department reviewed, then approved, which U.S. attorneys would be fired while also developing a political and communications strategy for countering any fallout from the firings."

The Democrats have already rejected these conditions. Bush said that if they did they would be playing partisan politics instead of getting to the truth, but I think that 94-2 vote proves it isn't that. Expect subpoenas to be issued shortly. Bush said today he will fight them by taking this to court. Daily Kos points out that this is merely the first battle between Bush and the Democratic Congress. Bush is fighting now to defend himself to keep "leverage in investigating NSA spying, the DeLay/Abramoff-financed Texas redistricting, Cheney's Energy Task Force, the political manipulation of science, the Plame outing... everything."

Attorneyga...um...Purgegate is far from over.

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