Who's Indicted? You Choose ...

[Punzie]

Who will be? Anyone in the Bush Administration who gets caught.

There has to be one Republican scapegoat.

Bush has to be able to say: "I pardoned the innocent, but you see, I'm fair, I did not pardon <fill in blank>."

Maybe the poll should ask:

"Who will be the scapegoat?"

[ManhattanKnight]

March 25, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist

When Will Fredo Get Whacked?

By FRANK RICH

PRESIDENT BUSH wants to keep everything that happens in his White House secret, but when it comes to his own emotions, he’s as transparent as a teenager on MySpace.

On Monday morning he observed the Iraq war’s fourth anniversary with a sullen stay-the-course peroration so perfunctory he seemed to sleepwalk through its smorgasbord of recycled half-truths (Iraqi leaders are “beginning to meet the benchmarks”) and boilerplate (“There will be good days, and there will be bad days”). But at a press conference the next day to defend his attorney general, the president was back in the saddle, guns blazing, Mr. Bring ’Em On reborn. He vowed to vanquish his Democratic antagonists much as he once, so very long ago, pledged to make short work of insurgents in Iraq.

The Jekyll-and-Hyde contrast between these two performances couldn’t be a more dramatic indicator of Mr. Bush’s priorities in his presidency’s endgame. His passion for protecting his power and his courtiers far exceeds his passion for protecting the troops he’s pouring into Iraq’s civil war. But why go to the mat for Alberto Gonzales? Even Bush loyalists have rarely shown respect for this crony whom the president saddled with the nickname Fredo; they revolted when Mr. Bush flirted with appointing him to the Supreme Court and shun him now. The attorney general’s alleged infraction — misrepresenting a Justice Department purge of eight United States attorneys, all political appointees, for political reasons — seems an easy-to-settle kerfuffle next to his infamous 2002 memo dismissing the Geneva Conventions’ strictures on torture as “quaint” and “obsolete.”

That’s why the president’s wild overreaction is revealing. So far his truculence has been largely attributed to his slavish loyalty to his White House supplicants, his ideological belief in unilateral executive-branch power and, as always, his need to shield the Machiavellian machinations of Karl Rove (who installed a prot&#233;g&#233; in place of one of the fired attorneys). But the fierceness of Mr. Bush’s response — to the ludicrous extreme of forbidding transcripts of Congressional questioning of White House personnel — indicates there is far more fire to go with all the Beltway smoke.

Mr. Gonzales may be a nonentity, but he’s a nonentity like Zelig. He’s been present at every dubious legal crossroads in Mr. Bush’s career. That conjoined history began in 1996, when Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, was summoned for jury duty in Austin. To popular acclaim, he announced he was glad to lend his “average guy” perspective to a drunken driving trial. But there was one hitch. On the juror questionnaire, he left blank a required section asking, “Have you ever been accused, or a complainant, or a witness in a criminal case?”

A likely explanation for that omission, unknown to the public at the time, was that Mr. Bush had been charged with disorderly conduct in 1968 and drunken driving in 1976. Enter Mr. Gonzales. As the story is told in “The President’s Counselor,” a nonpartisan biography by the Texas journalist Bill Minutaglio, Mr. Gonzales met with the judge presiding over the trial in his chambers (a meeting Mr. Gonzales would years later claim to have “no recollection” of requesting) and saved his client from jury duty. Mr. Minutaglio likens the scene to “The Godfather” — casting Mr. Gonzales not as the feckless Fredo, however, but as the “discreet ‘fixer’ attorney,” Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen.

Mr. Gonzales’s career has been laced with such narrow escapes for both him and Mr. Bush. As a partner at the Houston law firm of Vinson & Elkins, Mr. Gonzales had worked for Enron until 1994. After Enron imploded in 2001, reporters wanted to know whether Ken Lay’s pals in the Bush hierarchy had received a heads up about the company’s pending demise before its unfortunate shareholders were left holding the bag. The White House said that Mr. Gonzales had been out of the Enron loop “to the best of his recollection.” This month Murray Waas of The National Journal uncovered a more recent close shave: Just as Justice Department investigators were about to examine “documents that might have shed light on Gonzales’s role” in the administration’s extralegal domestic wiretapping program last year, Mr. Bush shut down the investigation.

It was Mr. Gonzales as well who threw up roadblocks when the 9/11 Commission sought documents and testimony from the White House about the fateful summer of 2001. Less widely known is Mr. Gonzales’s curious behavior in the C.I.A. leak case while he was still White House counsel. When the Justice Department officially notified him on the evening of Sept. 29, 2003, that it was opening an investigation into the outing of Valerie Wilson, he immediately informed Andrew Card, Mr. Bush’s chief of staff. But Mr. Gonzales waited another 12 hours to officially notify the president and inform White House employees to preserve all materials relevant to the investigation. As Chuck Schumer said after this maneuver became known, “Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence.”

Now that 12-hour delay has been matched by the 18-day gap in the Justice Department e-mails turned over to Congress in the dispute over the attorney purge. And we’re being told by Tony Snow that Mr. Bush has “no recollection” of hearing anything about the firings. But even these literal echoes of Watergate cannot obliterate the contours of the story this White House wants to hide.

Do not be distracted by the apples and oranges among the fired attorneys. Perhaps a couple of their forced resignations were routine. But in other instances, incriminating evidence coalesces around a familiar administration motive: its desperate desire to cover up the corruption that soiled what was supposed to be this White House’s greatest asset, its protection of the nation’s security. This was the motive that drove the White House to vilify Joseph Wilson when he challenged fraudulent prewar intelligence about Saddam’s W.M.D. The e-mails in the attorney flap released so far suggest that this same motive may have driven the Justice Department to try mounting a similar strike at Patrick Fitzgerald, the United States attorney charged with investigating the Wilson leak.

In March 2005, while preparing for the firings, Mr. Gonzales’s now-jettisoned chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, produced a chart rating all 93 United States attorneys nationwide. Mr. Fitzgerald, widely admired as one of the nation’s best prosecutors (most famously of terrorists), was somehow slapped with the designation “not distinguished.” Two others given that same rating were fired. You have to wonder if Mr. Fitzgerald was spared because someone in a high place belatedly calculated the political firestorm that would engulf the White House had this prosecutor been part of a Saturday night massacre in the middle of the Wilson inquiry.

Another canned attorney to track because of her scrutiny of Bush administration national security scandals is Carol Lam. She was fired from her post in San Diego after her successful prosecution of Representative Duke Cunningham, the California Republican who took $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors. Mr. Rove has publicly suggested that Ms. Lam got the ax because “she would not commit resources to prosecute immigration offenses.” That’s false. Last August an assistant attorney general praised her for doubling her immigration prosecutions; last week USA Today crunched the statistics and found that she ranked seventh among her 93 peers in successful prosecutions for 2006, with immigration violations accounting for the largest single crime category prosecuted during her tenure.

To see what Mr. Rove might be trying to cover up, look instead at what Ms. Lam was up to in May, just as the Justice Department e-mails indicate she was being earmarked for removal. Building on the Cunningham case, she was closing in on Dusty Foggo, the C.I.A.’s No. 3 official and the director of its daily operations. Mr. Foggo had been installed in this high intelligence position by Mr. Bush’s handpicked successor to George Tenet as C.I.A. director, Porter Goss.

Ms. Lam’s pursuit sped Mr. Foggo’s abrupt resignation; Mr. Goss was out too after serving less than two years. Nine months later — just as Ms. Lam stepped down from her job in February — Mr. Foggo and a defense contractor who raised more than $100,000 for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign were indicted by a grand jury on 11 counts of conspiracy and money laundering in what The Washington Post called “one of the first criminal cases to reach into the C.I.A.’s clandestine operations in Europe and the Middle East.” Because the allegations include the compromising of classified information that remains classified, we don’t know the full extent of the damage to an agency and a nation at war.

Not yet anyway. “I’m not going to resign,” Mr. Gonzales asserted last week as he played the minority card, rounding up Hispanic supporters to cheer his protestations of innocence. “I’m going to stay focused on protecting our kids.” Actually, he’s going to stay focused on protecting the president. Once he can no longer be useful in that role, it’s a sure thing that like Scooter before him, Fredo will be tossed overboard.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[Jasonik]

The Washington Back Channel

By MAX FRANKEL
Published: March 25, 2007

I. So there I sat, watching the United States government in all its majesty dragging into court the American press (in all its piety), forcing reporters to betray confidences, rifling their files and notebooks, making them swear to their confused memories and motives and burdening their bosses with hefty legal fees — all for the high-sounding purpose, yet again, of protecting our nation’s secrets. Top-secret secrets! In wartime!

To be sure, the defendant this time was not a journalist but a high-ranking official, I. Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff and national security adviser to Vice President Cheney and also a former assistant to President Bush — a pooh-bah courtier who knew virtually all government secrets worth knowing. Libby sat indicted, however, not as a critic of government who blew a whistle to correct an injustice but as an agent of government who lied and obstructed justice to protect the misuse of secrets. He was no Daniel Ellsberg, who gave the top-secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times to expose the nation’s devious drift into war in Vietnam. Libby peddled secrets with comparable fervor, but to defend misjudgments and misrepresentations on the path to war in Iraq.

The crosscurrents of this trial were particularly confusing. No one stood accused of spilling a secret; this was at best a proxy trial, with perjury substituting for an unreachable, perhaps even nonexistent crime. The issue was merely, Who knew what when and said what to whom and testified about it how? Then again, in many eyes, the Libby case, like the Pentagon Papers, amounted to a tortured trial of a current war, America’s quaintly bitter way of assigning blame for a costly catastrophe.

And either way, reporters became central to the case. Their messy relations with officialdom were uncomfortably on display. We heard about celebrated correspondents routinely granting anonymity — better called irresponsibility — to government sources just to hear whispered propaganda and other self-serving falsehoods. We learned how our patriotic guardians of wartime secrets wantonly leak them to manipulate public opinion, protect their backsides or smear an adversary. And we learned again how clumsy are the criminal laws with which high-minded prosecutors try to discipline the politics of Washington.

Should we really be expending so much emotion crying over one spilled secret? Did Libby’s lies really warrant the law’s intrusion into reporters’ dealings with government informants?

Sitting in court, I kept thinking back to 1971 and my effort to unwrap the mysteries of the capital’s information traffic. I was The New York Times’s chief Washington correspondent when the Nixon administration asked the courts to halt our publication of the Pentagon Papers. Sensing then that even our own lawyers, like most judges, felt an urge to bow before the incantations of “national security,” I wrote a memo that shared with them the ultimate secret about secrets in Washington: that “practically everything that our government does, plans, thinks, hears and contemplates in the realms of foreign policy is stamped and treated as secret — and then unraveled by that same government, by the Congress and by the press in one continuing round of professional and social contacts and cooperative and competitive exchanges of information.”

My memorandum, duly attested, became an official affidavit and sailed with the case clear up to the Supreme Court. It continued:

The governmental, political and personal interests of the participants are inseparable in this process. Presidents make “secret” decisions only to reveal them for the purposes of frightening an adversary nation, wooing a friendly electorate, protecting their reputations. ... High officials of the government reveal secrets in the search for support of their policies, or to help sabotage the plans and policies of rival departments. ... Though not the only vehicle for this traffic in secrets — the Congress is always eager to provide a forum — the press is probably the most important.

Libby’s leaks fit this pattern, serving to protect his and Cheney’s personal reputations as well as their interests of state. And Libby’s lies were a ham-handed effort to evade responsibility for a possibly illegal betrayal, by his leaking, of a secret agent’s identity. But since that offense was never established, was it wise for government to intrude so crudely into Washington’s normal flow of secret information?

Libby’s reasonable expectation that reporters would keep his confidences — and protect his perjury — was foiled by some weird mishaps and finally by the shrewd maneuvers of a passionate and politically independent prosecutor. The resulting trial produced a fascinating display of how information is harvested in Washington and how secrets are dripped out by officialdom. But I kept thinking that the compelled testimony about reporters and their sources would end up doing more damage than even the reckless violation of a C.I.A. agent’s cover. For given the cult of secrecy that enveloped our government during the cold war and the hoarding of information that always attends the lust for power, a free, unregulated and unpunished flow of leaks remains essential to the sophisticated reporting of diplomatic and military affairs, a safeguard of our democracy.

II. Known for most of his 56 years as “Scooter,” Libby is a man of slight build, warm disposition and prodigious intellect. For a quarter-century, he has been affiliated in and out of government with Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, forming the nucleus of a neoconservative fraternity that wanted to project unchallengeable American power across the globe. The group aspired, even before its return to power with the second President Bush, to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein and turn it into a democratic bastion that might stabilize the Middle East and safeguard oil supplies and routes. When Cheney became vice president in 2001, he drew Libby to his side to coordinate policies with like-minded officials planted throughout the executive branch. The attacks of 9/11 gave the group its strategic opportunity to promote the invasion of Iraq on the ground that this would keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

That misfired adventure, and the buyer’s remorse of a press and public that accepted the war’s pretext, lay at the root of Libby’s perjury. For it was Cheney, with Libby’s active help, who had sounded the loudest alarms about Hussein’s “reconstituted” nuclear program, about his stores of chemical and biological weapons and supposed ties to Al Qaeda. When, mere weeks into the war in 2003, no such weapons could be found, it was Cheney and Libby whose reputations and influence were imperiled as much as the president’s.

The Cheney office came to grief, however, not from any sober investigation of intelligence failures and misrepresentations. The crazy charm of the case of United States v. I. Lewis Libby was that misperceptions inside government about a retired American diplomat and his undercover wife became the inspiration of idle gossip and ugly smears that joined to produce an explosive chain reaction.

Thus, much as I regretted to see the press snagged again in the clutches of the law — and embarrassed by our susceptibility to government disinformation — I found myself deeply engrossed in this spectacle. A once-disciplined Bush administration was being forced to devour one of its most valued operatives. A nation’s anger over an imperial debacle was being heaped upon a mainly symbolic defendant. A policy confounded by sectarian violence in Iraq was exposing fierce tribal warfare among the Potomac bureaucracies.

Paradox tumbled from paradox: Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a fastidious U.S. attorney with Democratic, Republican and Qaeda scalps on his wall, had to rely on the testimony of reporters he had bullied into his service, actually jailing Judith Miller, then of The Times, for 85 days. Conversely, Theodore V. Wells Jr., the expansive principal defense counsel, chose a strategy that required him to savage the character and skills of some of Libby’s associates in government and also of his client’s once-favored, “very responsible” media outlets — Miller and Tim Russert of NBC.

The final allure of the Libby trial was the hope that Fitzgerald had fully solved the underlying mystery that plagued the capital for four years: Who outed Valerie Plame? Also known as Valerie Wilson, she was a covert (and, as befits a spy story, comely) agent of the Central Intelligence Agency so covert, in fact, that she had traveled in the guise of an energy consultant while recruiting spies abroad to track the traffic in weapons of mass destruction. Fatefully, she also became the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a debonair diplomat who bravely shielded hundreds of Americans from Saddam Hussein when they were trapped in Baghdad during the first gulf war and who later developed broad contacts throughout Africa. Doctrinally, his approach to Iraq stood with the moderate center of both political parties, in favor of disarming Hussein with threats and diplomacy rather than militarily deposing him.

Except in the comics, of course, truth and justice do not often occupy the same realm. The Libby jury was never told the details about Valerie Plame’s job and status; these were issues “beyond the scope” of the indictment and also judged too secret to air in public. Nor was the jury told about Libby’s lawyerly knowledge that he could talk about Plame to reporters and still avoid violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by claiming to have learned about her from reporters. And of course the jury never heard a word about the deeper deception that had been the drumbeat for war.

The Bush administration’s evidence of a revived nuclear weapons program in Iraq rested almost entirely on claims that Hussein had contracted to buy large amounts of yellowcake, a uranium concentrate, from Niger and shopped the world for aluminum tubes with which to enrich uranium for weapons fuel. Expert opinion at the United Nations and also inside the U.S. government insisted that the sought tubes were usable only in rockets, not nuclear weapons. And the supposed purchases of uranium were swiftly debunked by three investigations. Yet the intelligence about a uranium purchase, based on suspect and even forged information, acquired nine lives in Washington.

When in early 2002, Cheney and Libby came upon a fresh report about uranium sales, they insistently asked an already dubious C.I.A. to check into it further. So with the assistance of Valerie Wilson, two of her colleagues in the agency’s counterproliferation division invited Joseph Wilson, her husband, to seek out friends in Niger, where he quickly gathered proof that no such deal had been or could be made without being discovered.

Wilson’s oral report to that effect and other findings persuaded the C.I.A.’s director, George Tenet, to remove any mention of uranium sales from a presidential speech in October 2002, but the Niger scare resurfaced three months later. Propelled by the winds of wishful thinking, it sailed clear into the president’s prewar State of the Union address, becoming a notorious 16 Words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” It was only one sentence among the pretexts for war, but because others were even less credible, it proved to be radioactive.

In April 2003, after the capture of Baghdad, with no nuclear or other mass weapon facilities in sight, Joe Wilson began to believe that the fishy Niger story, which he assumed his report had slain, had been the main prop under the president’s rationale for war; and if so, he wondered, what other intelligence had been willfully misrepresented? With or without the benefit of some pillow talk with Valerie, Wilson grew particularly suspicious of Cheney and Libby, supposing that their request for a C.I.A. inquiry into the Niger matter must have brought them knowledge of his negative finding. How then could the White House and State Department continue to defend the use of such discredited information?

Wilson aired his suspicions and Niger experience at a panel discussion on Iraq and agreed there to let Nicholas Kristof report them in his Times column on May 6, 2003, attributed only to a “former ambassador.” That’s how it’s done by critics who want to appear modest or discreet and by writers who want a good story, whatever the terms.

Stung by that column’s assertion that the vice president’s office had inspired the diplomat’s mission and knew of its result, Cheney and Libby asked the State Department to identify the ambassador. A search of the files at State brought up Wilson’s name, but it also revealed the C.I.A. as sponsor of his trip. Gratuitously, mistakenly and with a slight leer, the department reported back that “Wilson’s wife, a C.I.A. W.M.D. managerial type,” had “convened” the meeting that sent him to Niger.

Now the pot began to bubble.

Libby’s first reaction, as shown in trial testimony, was to badger the C.I.A. to quickly absolve the vice president of any knowledge of the Wilson mission. The agency complied, but the press wolves kept howling about the missing W.M.D.’s and lusting to learn who wrote the already refuted 16 Words into the president’s text. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, pleaded ignorance, even scoffing that the negative Niger report must be languishing “in the bowels of” the C.I.A. That put-down brought forth a second column by Kristof, on June 13, still not naming Wilson. But it used provocative shorthand to say that the ambassador had gone to Niger “at the behest” of the vice president’s office and added with provocative certainty that the office must have known that the Niger reports were forgeries.

III. Here came the first freakish turn of events, not fully revealed until the trial testimony of Bob Woodward, The Washington Post’s hero of Watergate, protector of Deep Throat and supreme collector of capital leaks.

While chatting confidentially with Woodward on June 13, the day of Kristof’s second column, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage could not resist a huge dose of schadenfreude. Himself a skeptic about the war, Armitage had read his department’s answer to Libby about the Wilson trip with a practiced bureaucratic eye. There was no way the State Department was going to take the blame for those 16 Words. And since he knew that Woodward was gathering information for a book rather than the next day’s paper, he chortled crudely about the affair.

See how an official’s boast of innocence fed a reporter’s hunger for guilty knowledge, a combination that produced the very first leak concerning Wilson’s wife. The audiotape played for the jury began with Armitage insisting that the saboteurs of the president’s speech resided elsewhere:

Armitage: We’ve got our documents on it. We’re clean as a [expletive] whistle. And George [Tenet] personally got it out of the Cincinnati speech of the president.

Woodward: Oh, he did?

A.: Oh, yeah. ...

W.: How come it wasn’t taken out of the State of the Union then?

A.: Because I think it was overruled by the types down at the White House. Condi doesn’t like being in the hot spot. But she —

W.: But it was Joe Wilson who was sent by the agency. I mean that’s just —

A.: His wife works in the agency.

W.: Why doesn’t that come out? Why does ... that have to be a big secret? ...

A.: Yeah. And I know [expletive] Joe Wilson’s been calling everybody. He’s [expletive] off because he was designated as a low-level guy, went out [to Niger] to look at it. ...

W.: But why would they send him?

A.: Because his wife’s a [expletive] analyst at the agency.

W.: It’s still weird.

A.: It — it’s perfect. This is what she does, she is a W.M.D. analyst out there.

W.: Oh, she is?

A.: Yeah. ...

W.: She’s the chief W.M.D.?

A.: No, she isn’t the chief, no.

W.: But high enough up that she can say, “Oh, yeah, hubby will go”?

A.: Yeah, “He knows Africa —” ...

W.: Was she out there with him?

A.: No.

W.: When he was ambassador?

A.: Not to my knowledge. I don’t know. I don’t know if she was out there or not. But his wife is in the agency and is a W.M.D. analyst. How about that [expletive]!

That’s how it’s done, in barroom style: an official playing bureaucratic tennis, protecting his boss, Secretary of State Colin Powell; a reporter preying on the knowingness of his source. Woodward held the anecdote for possible follow-up questions and mentioned it to his Post colleague Walter Pincus, who did nothing with it.

It all sounded so familiar: Government officials spreading secrets to shape a story and to advance their interests, large and small. Listening to Woodward, I found myself recalling the day Lyndon Johnson summoned me to his Texas ranch during a recess of his 1967 summit meeting with Aleksei Kosygin, the Soviet premier, in Glassboro, N.J. I was covering the conference for The Times, and the president, standing beside me waist-deep in his swimming pool, wanted me to know how well he was jousting with his guest and enjoying the discomfort of Kosygin’s Kremlin colleagues. When I wondered casually how Kosygin was being second-guessed so readily, the president proudly revealed that, thanks to a global network of sophisticated intercepts, he could hear everything being said among the Soviet leaders then dispersed in different parts of the world. Like the reporters who appeared at the Libby trial, I received such information on my source’s terms; I could use Johnson’s observations to analyze the summit discussion without naming him, but I could not refer to his techniques of eavesdropping. Those were the rules of the game.

I knew the rules from the other side as well, from my experience as an Army private with newspaper connections. In early 1955, I was sent out from my desk in the Pentagon to Yucca Flat, Nev., to squat in trenches with several hundred soldiers during three nuclear tests. As the mushrooms rose, we marched 1,000 yards to ground zero, pawns to prove that the infantry could safely fire atomic artillery shells.

Other government agencies at the tests were eager to prove the opposite — the great danger of these explosions. So to end the competing press briefings, the Atomic Energy Commission declared all the tests “top secret.” Undaunted, the Army had me don civilian clothes and drive to Las Vegas to brief reporters I knew from The Times and The Associated Press about the maneuvers. Anonymous in the casinos, I told them atomic secrets.

IV. Libby’s interpretation of the Wilson challenge was much more sinister, and fateful, than anything implied in Armitage’s gossip: someone at the C.I.A. was trying to discredit the office of the vice president. Libby mentioned the Wilsons while complaining to the C.I.A. that some of its analysts had been griping to reporters about being pressured into distorting intelligence during his and Cheney’s frequent prewar visits to the agency. By the July 4 weekend, the suspicions in the vice president’s office about a C.I.A. vendetta — and the suspicions of its critics — hardened into angry resentment.

Provoked by Rice’s dismissive claim that his Niger findings were languishing in obscurity, Wilson stormed into public view with a clarion J’Accuse! On July 6, he appeared simultaneously in The Times (“What I Didn’t Find in Africa”), in a flattering Washington Post profile and as a last-minute guest on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He minced no words (only a punctuation mark) by opening The Times’s Op-Ed article with a question: “Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?” He knew from experience, he added, that at least some of its information about nuclear weapons “was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

I could easily imagine the calculations in Cheney’s office. With just a touch of the paranoia produced by the war on terror, Cheney and Libby must have concluded that this relentless critic — connected by marriage to a resentful corner of the C.I.A. — was leading a coordinated assault by analysts whose judgments they had either ignored or inflated to make the case against Hussein. I could almost sympathize, knowing (as the jury probably did not) that several analysts had indeed complained about excessive pressure to the C.I.A.’s ombudsman and that the news of their unhappiness had been leaked to The Times and The Washington Post. A similar restiveness had become evident at the Pentagon, where Cheney allies had pushed forward unproved claims of collaboration between Hussein and Al Qaeda over the objections of other intelligence analysts.

I also knew from experience how the highest officials, while publicly scorning the press, parsed its daily offerings with obsessive concern. Here was Cheney urgently underlining Kristof and scribbling a question to Libby atop Wilson’s Times Op-Ed: “Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? — Or did his wife send him on a junket?” A telltale word, that “junket”; it would soon flow from official lips that Libby swore he never tutored.

In fact, Libby told the F.B.I. and the grand jury that he learned about Wilson’s wife — as if for the first time — from Tim Russert on July 10 or 11. He insisted that he had totally forgotten discussing her during the preceding month with Cheney and with officials from State and the C.I.A. Libby’s recollection of how he was “taken aback” by Russert’s revelation stood at the heart of his indictment, and his meandering re-enactment of his talk with Russert would clinch the case for the jury.

The other, subsidiary counts charged that Libby lied by denying knowledge of Wilson’s wife before the Russert conversation. And the sharpest contradiction was delivered by Ari Fleischer, the president’s former press secretary. Fleischer began his last week on the job on July 7, one day after Joe Wilson’s public attack, and lunched for the first time with Libby. You could hear a score being settled when Fleischer testified that Libby had rarely provided useful information for the press. But at this lunch they were chummy, discussing Fleischer’s plans for private life, their bond as Miami Dolphins fans and that morning’s White House press briefing, at which Fleischer assured the world that Cheney did not send Wilson to Niger. And that’s when Libby told a man in touch with reporters all day long — “hush-hush, this is on the Q.T.” — that Wilson was sent by his wife and that she worked at the C.I.A., and, Fleischer added, “I think he told me her name.”

Did Libby mean simply to instruct Fleischer further about the affair? Or was he planting a seed that he hoped would germinate? He and Cheney knew that calling it a spousal perk would discredit Wilson’s mission. Yet they surely also recognized the legal risk in exposing Valerie Plame’s covert status — that the Intelligence Identities Protection Act prohibits anyone with authorized access to knowledge of a covert agent to intentionally disclose the agent’s identity to persons not so authorized. Never forewarned that such a risk was involved in the Wilson case, Fleischer eventually spread the talk of a “boondoggle” to three reporters and would demand immunity from prosecution as the price of his testimony against Libby.

In the evening of July 7, Fleischer flew off with the president and other high officials to visit five African countries, but they worried that the Washington clamor about the 16 Words would drown out the journey’s goodwill message. So Powell and Rice dictated a mealy surrender from Air Force One: Yes, the Niger tale was based on a forgery, and the remaining evidence for the 16 Words “did not rise to the level of inclusion in a presidential speech.”

Instead of appeasing the press, however, that retraction provoked an even greater commotion: Who pushed those false words into the president’s mouth?

Libby persisted in building defenses for the vice president’s office, not at all preoccupied, as his lawyers would argue, by the onslaught of foreign crises. On Tuesday, July 8, in what his normally detailed calendar listed only as a “private meeting,” Libby spent two hours at breakfast with Judith Miller to enlist her help in countering Wilson’s attack. He told the grand jury that he admired her reporting, on Al Qaeda and chemical and biological weapons, and presumably also her prewar articles lending credence to the administration’s wild alarms about Iraqi W.M.D.’s — credulous articles that The Times eventually disowned.

Miller testified that Libby brought her selected excerpts from a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate (N.I.E.) to buttress his claim that long after Wilson’s mission, the C.I.A. still endorsed reports that Saddam Hussein had “vigorously” pursued uranium in Africa. This brought back memories of my own similar encounters — of President Kennedy allowing me to copy a secret transcript to prove how the Russians lied to him about missiles in Cuba; of Secretary of State Dean Rusk confiding that the Southeast Asia Treaty, later invoked in support of war in Vietnam, was “not worth the paper it’s written on”; of Henry Kissinger casually bemoaning the anti-Semitism he experienced “in the highest places.” The established Washington routine meant that such revelations could be reported, provided that they were attributed only to “senior administration officials.” But on the subject of Joe Wilson and his wife, Miller’s notes showed, Libby took the added precaution of asking to be identified as “a former Hill staffer.” Though technically true, this was a devious dodge even by Washington’s tortuous rules of engagement, and it should have led Miller to realize that the remedy for bad leaks is more leaks.

Miller said that she had gone to breakfast eager to learn why the intelligence reports she had swallowed had been so wrong but that she found Libby too much concerned with the 16 Words, with “who said what to whom, what I call inside baseball in Washington.” The editor in me cringed at this justification for her not writing anything out of this interview. She could have been the first to recognize that the White House’s denigration of the Wilsons betrayed a bitter feud during which Cheney was angrily pressuring Tenet to take sole responsibility for the bungled intelligence. By following the trail of Libby’s leak back to C.I.A. informants, she could have produced a pretty good yarn.

Miller’s role in the case served no one very well. On cross-examination, she was rattled into multiple confessions of uncertainty, poor memory and wobbly note-taking. She had suffered nearly three months in jail to serve the principle that reporters had a duty to keep their promises of confidentiality to sources — but finally accepted Libby’s longstanding offer to waive his protection as well as Fitzgerald’s agreement to avoid asking her about other sources. The prosecutor, in turn, had to make do with Miller’s tattered notes and testimony, for which he had fought a two-year battle clear up to the Supreme Court. As for Libby, his lawyers were so rough on Miller that the jury felt sympathy for her and her evidence.

The prosecutor did succeed in revealing the shameless ease with which top-secret information is bartered in Washington for political advantage. For example, Cheney and Libby claimed to have the president’s authority for leaking self-serving quotes from the National Intelligence Estimate even while other high officials were still begging Tenet to agree to declassification. And we learned that not even the administration’s best friends were spared the humiliation of falling for its ruses. To stimulate a supportive editorial in The Wall Street Journal, Libby enlisted Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, whose relay of sensitive information was celebrated by the paper as especially credible because “it does not come from the White House.”

Most reporters do not just lazily regurgitate such leaks; they use them as wedges to pry out other secrets. I remember once being shown the draft of a U.S. government “white paper” documenting the perfidies of the North Vietnam regime; a few more interviews found the news not in those accusations but in the fact that they were being assembled to justify the start of intensive bombing of that country. A few more questions following Libby’s leak from the N.I.E. would have exposed it as a deeply flawed analysis, a cut-and-paste collection of stale reports. It had been thrown together in three weeks in September 2002 because Senate Democrats refused to authorize the Iraq war without evidence of W.M.D. activity. By mid-2003, intelligence experts were available to denounce the document as wrong on every important count, the worst N.I.E. ever produced and one obviously tailored to support a policy decision already made.

No wonder, then, that the White House tried to shift the blame for its embrace of such sour intelligence and to discredit Wilson for standing in its way. The claim that Wilson’s mission to Niger had been an irrelevant junket arranged by his wife was duly conveyed, probably by Cheney, to Karl Rove, the president’s top political aide and most practiced spinmeister. And he promptly mobilized White House aides on July 8, observing that they were already late to the battle, “a day behind” in the pursuit of Wilson.

Reporters covering the president in Africa and some in Washington suddenly found themselves receiving broad hints to inquire about who had arranged the Wilson mission. And Robert Novak, a Rove favorite among conservative columnists, was the first to get an answer. After years of trying, he had obtained an interview with Armitage for July 8, at the end of which Armitage told him about Wilson’s wife, Valerie, and her job at the C.I.A. It was a chatty, offhand comment, according to Armitage; it was a calculated leak that he was urged to print, Novak said. He did print it on July 14, causing the C.I.A. to demand the criminal investigation of who illegally disclosed an agent’s identity, and it resulted two years later in Libby’s indictment.

When he finally described his role under oath, Novak said he had his own motives for asking Armitage about Wilson. Two days earlier, he overheard the ambassador making “obnoxious” comments about Bush in the green room before their separate appearances on “Meet the Press” and wondered why such a critic had been sent on an important mission. Novak said he used Rove — “a very good source, and I talked to him two or three times a week” — only to confirm the Armitage tip.

First Woodward, now Novak: Why did Armitage dump on Wilson a second time? I suspect that he was half annoyed and half amused by the fuss an upstart diplomat had created — for other departments. But he may also have known of Rove’s interest in spreading the junket tale. Whatever his motive, Armitage confessed his role to the F.B.I. at the start of the criminal probe two months later and was spared prosecution, probably because he claimed ignorance of Valerie Wilson’s covert status.

Knowing of Armitage’s role, why didn’t Fitzgerald fold his tent and return at once to his “day job” as U.S. attorney in Chicago? Because Libby’s already evident lies to the F.B.I. and Fleischer’s multiple leaks in far-off Uganda convinced him that there had been more than a single careless source. He smelled an illegal White House smear campaign and thought Libby could help him crack the case. And if Libby persisted in his story before the grand jury, he would at least have a perjury case — if, against all precedent, he could force reporters to testify.

He overcame the press resistance with a clever strategy: shaming the reporters’ known sources into waiving all claims of confidentiality, then persuading judges to jail reporters who still refused to talk. Miller held out because she doubted that Libby’s waiver was truly voluntary, but the experience of prison and Libby’s phone call eventually eased her conscience. Matthew Cooper, then of Time magazine, almost joined her in jail, but his bosses mooted resistance by turning over his notes. Cooper testified that he first learned about Wilson’s wife from Rove, who mentioned her carefully as the subject of the imminent Novak column.

V. As Fitzgerald’s focus changed from leaking to lying, Tim Russert emerged as his key witness.

Russert hobbled into court with a crutch and a broken ankle to swear to what he had never said. Tight-lipped and ready for battle, he showed none of the cheerful ebullience with which he grills guests on “Meet the Press.” His confrontation with the impassive Libby, just 30 feet away, was especially striking because the vice president had so often used Russert’s program to proclaim Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; it was “our best format,” Cathie Martin, Cheney’s communications chief, testified, providing control of “our message.” Symbiotically, the vice president was one of Russert’s best, attention-winning guests.

But now Russert sat unyielding, denying and denying Libby’s most important defense: that it was Russert who told him about Wilson’s wife on Thursday or Friday of that fateful July week. Listening to eight hours of Libby’s recorded grand-jury testimony, the petit jury heard a sometimes ingratiating, sometimes recoiling witness advancing this critical alibi:

“And then he said ... Did you know that Ambassador Wilson’s wife works at the C.I.A.? And I was a little taken aback by that. I remember being taken aback by it. And I said — he may have said a little more but that was — he said that. And I said, No, I don’t know that. And I said, No I don’t know that intentionally because I didn’t want him to take anything I was saying as in any way confirming what he said, because at that point in time I did not recall that I had ever known, and I thought this is something that he was telling me that I was first learning. And so I said, No, I don’t know that because I want to be very careful not to confirm it for him, so that he didn’t take my statement as confirmation for him.

‘Now, I had said earlier in the conversation, which I omitted to tell you, that this — you know, as always, Tim, our discussion is off the record, if that’s O.K. with you, and he said that’s fine.

“So then ... Mr. Russert said to me, Did you know that Ambassador Wilson’s wife, or his wife, works at the C.I.A.? And I said, No, I don’t know that. And then he said, Yeah — yes, all the reporters know it. And I said, again, I don’t know that. I just wanted to be clear that I wasn’t confirming anything for him on this. And you know, I was struck by what he was saying in that he thought it was an important fact, but I didn’t ask him any more about it because I didn’t want to be digging in on him. ... ”

Never happened, Russert insisted — couldn’t have happened, because he and NBC News never heard of Valerie Plame until Novak’s column appeared the following Monday. He said Libby had called him in his role as NBC’s Washington bureau chief to register a cussing complaint about Chris Matthews’s attacks on Cheney and Libby. Russert said he referred Libby to Matthews’s superiors and no other subject came up. The jury believed him, concluding that even if the wife had been brought up by Russert, Libby’s claim of being “struck” and “taken aback” was simply incredible.

The defense’s counterattack on this vital witness could aim only at Russert’s character. It forced an embarrassed admission that Russert, a lawyer, had impulsively answered the F.B.I.’s questions without legal advice and without pleading the confidentiality he later invoked to contest a grand-jury summons. Russert also struggled to deny any animus toward the defendant, despite his giddy, celebratory comments on the “Today” and Don Imus shows on the morning of Libby’s indictment. But he held firm, no doubt resolving to beware when next he wanders into unprepared forums.

VI. Libby’s main defense for misstatements was a bad memory. And the nine witnesses who disputed his accounts were treated by his lawyers as similarly impaired. Judge Reggie B. Walton insisted, however, that a “memory defense” required Libby to take the stand. Since neither Cheney nor Libby dared to submit to cross-examination, the defense used one of Libby’s successors, John Hannah, to argue that burdensome crises weighed heavily on Libby in the summer of 2003. The jurors, judging by their written questions, were especially intrigued by Hannah’s depiction of Libby as a simultaneously brilliant yet abysmally forgetful colleague.

Besides Novak, the defense presented five other reporters to whom Libby did not speak about Wilson’s wife that July week. The most important was Walter Pincus of The Post, an early skeptic about W.M.D. claims, who revealed that he learned about Wilson’s “boondoggle” and helpful wife “off the record” from Ari Fleischer, two days before the Novak column.

All the reporters told the jury that they could do their jobs only by subscribing to the convoluted code of conduct governing Washington interviews. “Off the record” information could not be published, but could guide research and perhaps be confirmed elsewhere; “deep background” material could be printed only if not attributed to anyone; “background” called for a circumlocution, like “senior administration official.” Where no rules were explicit, the reporters protectively assumed some degree of confidentiality.

The system is sloppy and breeds confusion. Libby’s press aide, Cathie Martin, said that he often spoke “off the record” when he really meant “deep background.” Cheney by contrast was shown to have attached different degrees of anonymity to different parts of a single conversation — so much off the record, other items in various stages of “background.” Novak explained that he and Rove “had a modus operandi, you might say, where I knew without him getting into a long dissertation, I knew when he was confirming something or rejecting something, or at least I felt that way. ... When he said, ‘Oh, you know that, too,’ I took that as confirmation.”

These rituals have been observed at least since World War II. As I put it in my 1971 affidavit, secrets are the coins of Washington reporting and of official briefings in the national security orbit:

Learning always to trust each other to some extent, and never to trust each other fully — for their purposes are often contradictory or downright antagonistic — the reporter and the official trespass regularly, customarily, easily and un-self-consciously (even unconsciously) through what they both know to be official “secrets.” The reporter knows always to protect his sources and is expected to protect military secrets about troop movements and the like. He also learns to cross-check his information and to nurse it until an insight or story has turned ripe. The official knows, if he wishes to preserve this valuable channel and outlet, to protect his credibility and the deeper purpose that he is trying to serve.

And Woodward gave voice to the universal understanding that while many sources speak confidentially “for very noble reasons,” some do so “for less noble reasons.”

VII. Clearly, from the perspective of the public interest, there are and always have been both good and bad leaks, true and illuminating betrayals of secrets as well as false and conniving ones. On the path to war in Iraq, high officials of the Bush administration leaked classified but far from reliable information about W.M.D.’s, then pointed to its publication as “evidence” of its truth. When no W.M.D.’s were found, they used the same flawed secrets to justify their misrepresentations. But reporters could not expose this skullduggery until they obtained contradictory leaks from disheartened intelligence officials.

And while some leaks were destroying Valerie Wilson’s career and endangering her associates around the world, the leaks of other secrets allowed reporters to uncover the inhuman treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Guantánamo, the illegal eavesdropping on Americans and the “rendition” of captives to distant dungeons. The “moral ambiguities” of all this contrapuntal leaking were fairly observed by Joseph Wilson in his memoir, “The Politics of Truth” (Carroll & Graf):

I wondered: When is a leaker a true whistle-blower, risking his personal security to inform the citizenry and preserve the public’s interest? When is a leaker a mendacious opportunist, out to advance the narrow interests of himself or his boss? When does a leaker become so appalled at the self-serving actions of his colleagues that he crosses the line to shine a light on them? Is there a reliable way to distinguish among the many varieties of that genus peculiarly indigenous to Washington, the leaker?

The answer, of course, is that there are no neat lines of distinction. Ambiguity can inhabit even a single leak, serving a selfish and public interest in one breath. Officials who leak secrets to ward off blame for policy failures may be disloyal and insubordinate, but they may also inspire constructive corrective action. Leaks that describe poor training and equipment for troops in Iraq may severely damage morale both at home and at the front, but they may also expose incompetence and save lives. The leaks in California about baseball players using steroids betrayed grand-jury secrecy and circulated unproved charges against players, but they also forced the baseball industry to confront its coverups of drug abuse and unfair competition.

An even greater cloud of ambiguity hovered over the Libby case after it failed to produce firm evidence of any crime. Valerie Wilson’s exposure will be punished, if at all, only through the suit that she and her husband are bringing against Cheney, Libby, Armitage and Rove. Indeed, Libby’s jurors expressed some regret that he alone faced their judgment, even as they pronounced him guilty on four of five counts.

VIII. So was Libby’s prosecution worth a four-year judicial and journalistic circus? Was it worth turning the White House into a defensive fortress? Was it worth invading newsroom files and alerting other sources that their chance of exposure has been significantly increased? Was tracking down one leak worth the risk that greater wrongdoing will go unreported in the future?

The damage to newsgathering, I believe, has been significant. Celebrity journalists like Bob Woodward and Tim Russert may not lose access to sources, but more vulnerable reporters and less-wealthy media outlets will surrender to the subpoenas and jail threats now descending on them in unprecedented numbers. Some will betray confidences; some will suppress articles whose defense would be costly. Others may avoid risky reporting altogether. Sensing danger, many investigative reporters have become highly circumspect, using what one judge sympathetically called the methods of drug dealers to protect themselves: resorting to disposable cellphones, meeting sources outdoors and avoiding e-mail and other computer communication.

Fitzgerald’s strategy of prodding sources to waive confidentiality was a clever ploy that threatens other delicate relationships. In his separate capacity as U.S. attorney in Chicago, he has opened another route to uncovering sources without the media’s cooperation: he won a battle to force telephone companies to reveal the call records of two Times reporters whose newsgathering may have forecast a government raid on an Islamic charity. Moreover, the Libby case has lost the media political support, on both the left and right flanks. Liberals were so eager to see Cheney and Libby exposed that they lost patience for reporters’ claims of privilege. Conservatives, meanwhile, hoped that compelling reporters to reveal their sources was merely the start of legal actions to punish “unpatriotic” disclosures; they applaud the attorney general’s threat to use the Espionage Act to punish both the receipt and publication of national-security secrets.

Government obviously needs to guard some secrets, especially those describing military tactics and intelligence sources and methods. That is why presidents struggle to impose discipline on their bureaucracies. President Johnson used to cancel promotions and other promised actions if his authority was undermined with premature leaks. President Nixon pursued leaks with lie detectors and “plumbers” who broke into adversaries’ files, culminating in their hapless adventure at the Watergate. And Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, withheld information from other government departments and tapped the phones of his aides as well as reporters. Yet these same leaders leaked freely to promote their personal and political agendas, no doubt unable, like Cheney and Libby, to distinguish between the two.

The Libby case, however, did not serve to enhance government discipline. If President Bush had truly wanted to find and fire the people who outed Valerie Wilson, as he vowed, he could have extracted confessions from the White House staffs in a single stern meeting. And the case did little to promote honesty among high officials; Libby, like the Iran-contra liars in the Reagan-Bush administration, will almost surely be pardoned and praised for taking a hit for the team.

Much as I enjoyed the human drama and revelations of the Libby case, I wound up regretting the rough ride of the law through the marketplace of information.

Fitzgerald may be forgiven his passionate defense of the integrity of grand-jury proceedings and F.B.I. investigations. But attorneys general should resist the temptation to interfere with newsgathering or to delegate such a decision to a single-minded special counsel. When a White House leak is suspected, it is hard to avoid an independent prosecutor, but it’s a pressure worth resisting. Nothing in the last four decades has altered my preference for the chaotic condition I described when I asked the courts not to fret over the lost secrets of the Pentagon Papers:

For the vast majority of “secrets,” there has developed between the government and the press (and Congress) a rather simple rule of thumb: The government hides what it can, pleading necessity as long as it can, and the press pries out what it can, pleading a need and right to know. Each side in this “game” regularly “wins” and “loses” a round or two. Each fights with the weapons at its command. When the government loses a secret or two, it simply adjusts to a new reality. When the press loses a quest or two, it simply reports (or misreports) as best it can. Or so it has been, until this moment.

It may sound cynical to conclude that tolerating abusive leaks by government is the price that society has to pay for the benefit of receiving essential leaks about government. But that awkward condition has long served to protect the most vital secrets while dislodging the many the public deserves to know.

As Justice Potter Stewart wrote after studying the unending contest between the government and the press during the cold war:

So far as the Constitution goes ... the press is free to do battle against secrecy and deception in government. But the press cannot expect from the Constitution any guarantee that it will succeed. ... The Constitution itself is neither a Freedom of Information Act nor an Official Secrets Act. The Constitution, in other words, establishes the contest, not its resolution. ... For the rest, we must rely, as so often in our system we must, on the tug and pull of the political forces in American society.

In loose translation: Prosecutors of the realm, let this back-alley market flourish. Attorneys general and others armed with subpoena power, please leave well enough alone. Back off. Butt out.


Max Frankel, a former executive editor of The New York Times, is the author of “The Times of My Life and My Life With The Times.”

[ZippyTheChimp]

March 25, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist

When Will Fredo Get Whacked?

Ha.

Frank Rich classic.

[Punzie]

The New York Times
May 3, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor

He’s Impeachable, You Know

By FRANK BOWMAN
Columbia, Mo.

IF Alberto Gonzales will not resign, Congress should impeach him. Article II of the Constitution grants Congress the power to impeach “the president, the vice president and all civil officers of the United States.” The phrase “civil officers” includes the members of the cabinet (one of whom, Secretary of War William Belknap, was impeached in 1876).

Impeachment is in bad odor in these post-Clinton days. It needn’t be. Though provoked by individual misconduct, the power to impeach is at bottom a tool granted Congress to defend the constitutional order. Mr. Gonzales’s behavior in the United States attorney affair is of a piece with his role as facilitator of this administration’s claims of unreviewable executive power.

A cabinet officer, like a judge or a president, may be impeached only for commission of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” But as the Nixon and Clinton impeachment debates reminded us, that constitutional phrase embraces not only indictable crimes but “conduct ... grossly incompatible with the office held and subversive of that office and of our constitutional system of government.”

United States attorneys, though subject to confirmation by the Senate, serve at the pleasure of the president. As a constitutional matter, the president is at perfect liberty to fire all or some of them whenever it suits him. He can fire them for mismanagement, for failing to pursue administration priorities with sufficient vigor, or even because he would prefer to replace an incumbent with a political crony. Indeed, a president could, without exceeding his constitutional authority and (probably) without violating any statute, fire a United States attorney for pursuing officeholders of the president’s party too aggressively or for failing to prosecute officeholders of the other party aggressively enough.

That the president has the constitutional power to do these things does not mean he has the right to do them without explanation. Congress has the right to demand explanations for the president’s managerial choices, both to exercise its own oversight function and to inform the voters its members represent.

The right of Congress to demand explanations imposes on the president, and on inferior executive officers who speak for him, the obligation to be truthful. An attorney general called before Congress to discuss the workings of the Justice Department can claim the protection of “executive privilege” and, if challenged, can defend the (doubtful) legitimacy of such a claim in the courts. But having elected to testify, he has no right to lie, either by affirmatively misrepresenting facts or by falsely claiming not to remember events. Lying to Congress is a felony — actually three felonies: perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice.

A false claim not to remember is just as much a lie as a conscious misrepresentation of a fact one remembers well. Instances of phony forgetfulness seem to abound throughout Mr. Gonzales’s testimony, but his claim to have no memory of the November Justice department meeting at which he authorized the attorney firings left even Republican stalwarts like Jeff Sessions of Alabama gaping in incredulity. The truth is almost surely that Mr. Gonzales’s forgetfulness is feigned — a calculated ploy to block legitimate Congressional inquiry into questionable decisions made by the Department of Justice, White House officials and, quite possibly, the president himself.

Even if perjury were not a felony, lying to Congress has always been understood to be an impeachable offense. As James Iredell, later a Supreme Court justice, said in 1788 during the debate over the impeachment clause, “The president must certainly be punishable for giving false information to the Senate.” The same is true of the president’s appointees.

The president may yet yield and send Mr. Gonzales packing. If not, Democrats may decide that to impeach Alberto Gonzales would be politically unwise. But before dismissing the possibility of impeachment, Congress should recognize that the issue here goes deeper than the misbehavior of one man. The real question is whether Republicans and Democrats are prepared to defend the constitutional authority of Congress against the implicit claim of an administration that it can do what it pleases and, when called to account, send an attorney general of the United States to Capitol Hill to commit amnesia on its behalf.

Frank Bowman is a law professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/03/opinion/03bowman.html

[Ninjahedge]

Irony being, who would be the presiding judge on this?

[Punzie]

The New York Times
May 15, 2007

Gonzales’s Deputy Quits Justice Department


Doug Mills/The New York Times
Paul J. McNulty, deputy attorney general, testified in February.

By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, May 14 — Paul J. McNulty, the deputy attorney general whose Congressional testimony in February provided a spark that turned a smoldering issue over the firings of federal prosecutors into a raging inferno, announced his resignation on Monday.

Mr. McNulty, the fourth and highest-ranking Justice Department official to resign since the uproar began in Congress over the dismissals of the United States attorneys, had told friends for weeks that he was planning to step aside.

In a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Mr. McNulty said he would remain at the Justice Department until late summer, adding “The financial realities of college-age children and two decades of public service lead me to a long overdue transition in my career.”

The departure of another senior aide at the Justice Department appeared to leave the attorney general in a somewhat more isolated position. But with President Bush’s support, Mr. Gonzales has so far fended off demands by Democrats and some Republicans who have called on him to resign.

Mr. McNulty, 49, will leave after spending more than two decades in a variety of positions at the Justice Department and on Capitol Hill. He was a United States attorney in Virginia before taking the deputy’s job in November 2005.

Mr. Gonzales said in a statement that the Justice Department “will be losing a thoughtful and dynamic leader,” citing Mr. McNulty’s efforts on corporate and procurement fraud issues and in creating a new legal system in Iraq.

In a brief interview, Mr. McNulty said that his years working at the Justice Department and as a Congressional staff member had been “extraordinarily rewarding” and that he would soon begin looking for a legal job outside the government.

But friends said that Mr. McNulty had long chafed in his role as second in command under Mr. Gonzales and had realized that the furor over the prosecutors had probably ended his hope to be named to a seat on a federal appeals court.

Mr. McNulty, whose affable presence was said by friends to conceal an aggressively conservative approach to legal issues, had been shaken by the intensity of the storm over the removals and the sometimes sharp personal criticism directed at him from the White House and former Republican allies.

At times, Mr. McNulty found himself pushed aside by D. Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Mr. Gonzales, who granted Mr. Sampson wide-ranging authority, especially in personnel matters.

Mr. McNulty blamed himself for failing to resist the dismissal plan when Mr. Sampson brought it to him in October 2006, according to associates. He took one prosecutor off the removal list but acquiesced to the removal of seven others, according to Congressional aides’ accounts of his private testimony to Congress on April 27.

Friends of Mr. Sampson and his former deputy, Monica Goodling, were angry at Mr. McNulty’s testimony on Feb. 6 when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that most of the United States attorneys had been removed for performance reasons.

In testimony that even angered Mr. Gonzales, according to a Justice Department e-mail message, Mr. McNulty said that one prosecutor, H. E. Cummins III of Arkansas, had been dismissed solely to make room for J. Timothy Griffin, who had been named as the temporary successor with the backing of Karl Rove, the senior White House political adviser.

Friends of Mr. McNulty said he had tried to be candid about what he knew of the removals. In his private Congressional testimony, Mr. McNulty said he did not realize until later the extensive White House involvement in Mr. Griffin’s appointment or Mr. Sampson’s nearly year-long effort to compile a list.

White House aides complained privately that Mr. McNulty’s testimony gave Democrats a significant opening to demand more testimony from the Justice Department and presidential aides. Several aides said he should have been combative in defending the dismissals.

His appearance also prompted several United States attorneys, who had until then said little about their dismissals, to question openly the motive for their removal, in part because their offices had received highly favorable performance reviews from the Justice Department.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who has led the Congressional investigation, said, “It seems ironic that Paul McNulty, who at least tried to level with the committee, goes while Gonzales, who stonewalled the committee, is still in charge.”

Other casualties include Mr. Sampson and his deputy, Ms. Goodling, who was the Justice Department liaison aide to the White House. Another official who has left is William A. Battle, the Justice Department official who contacted most of the prosecutors to tell them they were being replaced.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/wa...kw&oref=slogin

[Punzie]

Zippy:
Would you consider lopping off these Justice Dept. posts and turning them into a separate topic?

[ManhattanKnight]

May 15, 2007

Gonzales Pressed Ailing Ashcroft on Spy Plan, Aide Says

By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, May 15 — On the night of March 10, 2004, a high-ranking Justice Department official rushed to a Washington hospital to prevent two White House aides from taking advantage of the critically ill Attorney General, John Ashcroft, the official testified today.

One of those aides was Alberto R. Gonzales, who succeeded Mr. Ashcroft as Attorney General.

“I was very upset,” said James B. Comey, who was deputy Attorney General at the time, in his testimony today before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I was angry. I thought I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me.”


Mr. Comey’s account offered a rare and titillating glimpse of a Washington power struggle, complete with a late-night showdown in the White House after a dramatic encounter in a darkened hospital room — in short, elements of a potboiler paperback novel.


Mr. Comey related his story to the committee, which is investigating various aspects of Mr. Gonzales’s tenure as Attorney General, including the recent dimissals of eight United States attorneys and allegations that applicants for traditionally nonpartisan career prosecutor jobs were screened for political loyalties.


Although Mr. Comey declined to say specifically what the business was that sent Mr. Gonzales, who was White House counsel at the time, to the bedside of Mr. Ashcroft in George Washington Hospital, where he lay critically ill with pancreatitis, it was clear that the subject was the National Security Agency’s secret domestic surveillance program. The signature of Mr. Ashcroft or his surrogate was needed by the next day, March 11, in order to renew the program, which was still secret at that time.


Since the existence of the program was disclosed in late 2005, it has been reported that it was the subject of a tense debate at the highest levels of the Bush administration, with some officials concerned about the very legality of the program.

Mr. Comey told the committee today that when Mr. Ashcroft was ill and he was in charge at the Justice Department, he told the White House he would not certify the program again “as to its legality.”

On the night of March 10, as he was being driven home by his security detail, he got a telephone call from Mr. Ashcroft’s chief of staff, who had just been contacted by Mr. Ashcroft’s wife, Janet.

Although Mrs. Ashcroft had banned visitors and telephone calls to her husband’s hospital room, she had just gotten a call from the White House telling her that Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales were on their way to see her husband, Mr. Comey testified. “I have some recollection that the call was from the president himself, but I don’t know that for sure,” Mr. Comey said.
He said his security detail then sped him to the hospital with sirens blaring and emergency lights flashing, while he telephoned the director of the F.B.I., Robert S. Mueller 3d, from the car. Mr. Mueller shared his sense of urgency: “He said, ‘I’ll meet you at the hospital right now,’ ” Mr. Comey testified.
When he got to the hospital, Mr. Comey recalled, “I got out of the car and ran up — literally, ran up the stairs with my security detail.”

“What was your concern?” asked Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who was the chairman of today’s committee session.

“I was concerned that, given how ill I knew the attorney general was, that there might be an effort to ask him to overrule me when he was in no condition to do that,” Mr. Comey replied.

Mr. Comey recalled arriving at the darkened hospital room, where Mr. Ashcroft seemed hardly aware of his surroundings. For a time, only Mr. Comey and the Ashcrofts were in the room. Meanwhile, Mr. Mueller, who had not yet arrived, told Mr. Comey’s security detail by phone “not to allow me to be removed from the room under any circumstances,” Mr. Comey testified.
Minutes later, he said, Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card entered the room, with Mr. Gonzales carrying an envelope. “And then Mr. Gonzales began to discuss why they were there, to seek his approval for a matter,” Mr. Comey related.
“And Attorney General Ashcroft then stunned me,” Mr. Comey went on: He raised his head from the pillow, reiterated his objections to the program, then lay back down, pointing to Mr. Comey as the attorney general during his illness.

When Mr. Mueller arrived, “he had a brief, a memorable brief exchange with the attorney general, and then we went outside in the hallway,” Mr. Comey said.

Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card departed, but after a while, Mr. Card telephoned Mr. Comey and “demanded that I come to the White House immediately,” Mr. Comey said.

“After what I just witnessed, I will not meet with you without a witness, and I intend that witness to be the solicitor general of the United States,” Mr. Comey said he told Mr. Card.

Whereupon, Mr. Comey said, he contacted the solicitor general, Theodore B. Olson, who was at a dinner party, and arranged to go with him to the White House. At first, Mr. Card would not let Mr. Olson enter his office, Mr. Comey said; he then had a considerably calmer private chat with Mr. Card for a quarter-hour, after which Mr. Olson entered the room and took part in the conversation.

“Mr. Card was concerned that he had heard reports that there were to be a large number of resignations at the Department of Justice,” Mr. Comey recalled.

The surveillance program was reauthorized on March 11, 2004, without a signature from the Department of Justice “attesting to its legality,” Mr. Comey testified.

Mr. Comey said today that he intended to resign the next day, March 12. But on that day, terrorists carried out deadly train bombings in Madrid, and he put his plans on hold.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[Punzie]

This is definitely "for gleaning only"; it's too wordy, inflamatory and "cutsie" for most site members' taste. I posted it because I like most of the passages/links Mr. Kurz chose.

On second thought, maybe I just fell for the Gonzo-Meter


OPINION (Blog)
The Washington Post
May 18, 2007

When Justice is Hospitalized

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer

By the standards of Washington, where the most exciting development usually involves someone writing a memo or inserting an amendment, what happened with Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft is right out of a Hollywood movie. A low-budget B-movie, perhaps, but it has a cinematic quality nonetheless.

The attorney general, seriously ill and hospitalized. The president, wanting to get his secret eavesdropping program authorized by the Justice Department. The White House counsel (Gonzales), rushing to the hospital to try to get the incapacitated Ashcroft to sign the document. The deputy attorney general (James Comey), convinced that the program is illegal, racing to the scene to foil the plan. The weakened Ashcroft refusing to sign. The deputy threatening to quit.

And this is no mere rumor or secondhand account. Comey described the 2004 incident in dramatic fashion in his congressional testimony this week.

And that prompted this question yesterday, at the Bush-Blair farewell presser, from NBC's Kelly O'Donnell:

"Sir, did you send your then Chief of Staff and White House Counsel to the bedside of John Ashcroft while he was ill to get him to approve that program? And do you believe that kind of conduct from White House officials is appropriate?

"PRESIDENT BUSH: Kelly, there's a lot of speculation about what happened and what didn't happen; I'm not going to talk about it. It's a very sensitive program."

Excuse me, it's not speculation. It is the sworn testimony of the man you appointed as the second-ranking law-enforcement officer in the land. And while the program may be sensitive--it's no longer secret--the question wasn't about the inner workings of attempts to spy on terrorists. It was about whether the attempt by Gonzales and Andy Card to get the ailing Ashcroft to sign from his sickbed was proper. Bush chose to dodge the question instead.

"Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's standing in Congress became even shakier today as Senate Democrats called for a vote of no confidence in him," the New York Times reports, "and the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee and others predicted that the furor over Mr. Gonzales's leadership of the Justice Department would end with his resignation."

How many times have we heard that prediction?

"Mr. Gonzales's position was weakened by disclosures this week about his involvement in 2004, when he was White House counsel, in an attempt to circumvent Justice Department officials who had refused to renew authority for the Bush administration's secret domestic eavesdropping program.

"Those disclosures were cited this afternoon by Senators Charles E. Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California, both Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, called for a no-confidence vote on Mr. Gonzales."

Says the L.A. Times: "After appearing to have weathered the worst of the Justice Department scandal, Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales found himself under fresh assault Thursday on the heels of this week's revelations about his conduct in the Bush administration. Gonzales suffered withering attacks from two Republican senators and a former prosecutor as Senate Democrats added pressure of their own, calling for a no-confidence vote on the attorney general's performance."

But the Gonzo-Meter is only up to 57 percent. It used to be so much higher.

Hospitalgate is huge on the left side of the blogosphere, with some conservatives punching back. We'll start at the New Republic, with former Post editorial writer Benjamin Wittes:

"At least as Comey relates it, this affair is not one of mere bad judgment or over-aggressiveness. It is a story of profound misconduct on Gonzales's part that, at least in my judgment, borders on the impeachable. Put bluntly, faced with a Justice Department determination that the NSA's program contained prohibitive legal problems, the White House decided to go ahead with it anyway. In pursuit of this goal, Gonzales did two things that both seem unforgivable: He tried to get a seriously ill man to unlawfully exercise powers that had been conveyed to another man and to use those powers to approve a program the department deemed unlawful. Then, when Ashcroft refused, the White House went ahead and authorized the program on its own.

"In terms of raw power, the president has the ability to take this step. But it constitutes a profound affront to the institutional role of the Justice Department as it has developed. The Justice Department is the part of the government that defines the law for the executive branch. For the White House counsel to defy its judgment on an important legal question is to put the rawest power ahead of the law.

"The must-derided John Ashcroft, on the other hand, showed himself when it counted to be a man of courage and substance whom history will surely treat more kindly than did contemporary commentary. Few attorneys general get tested as Ashcroft did that night in 2004. One can disagree with him about a lot of things and still recognize the fact that ultimately, he passed the hardest test: From a hospital bed in intensive care, he stood up for the rule of law . . .

"There is no way to resolve this problem as long as the man at the Justice Department's helm is the sort of person who can lean on a hospitalized colleague to usurp the power to authorize something that the department has determined to be unlawful . . .If he cannot materially challenge Comey's account, he must be removed from office immediately."

Josh Marshall is pretty worked up:

"Remember just who it is we're dealing with here. This is John Ashcroft, not by many measures a staunch libertarian and a pretty committed Republican to boot. He was refusing to sign off on this. And according to Comey's testimony he was willing to resign over it, apparently along with most of the senior leadership of the Department of Justice. I think we need to know more about just what was being done with this program that would make Ashcroft put so much on the line.

"Another point: if we assume that the president sent Gonzales and Card over to the hospital room (and I think that's the only reasonable interpretation of yesterday's testimony), there must have been a meeting before that call was placed, probably at the White House. Who was in the meeting? And who got the president to authorize this? Gonzales? I doubt it. I think we probably needing to be looking toward the Vice President's office playing a driving role in all this."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald is ready to send some folks to jail, noting "how little we know (but ought to know) about what actually happened and how little accountability there has been for some of the most severe and blatant acts of presidential lawbreaking in the country's history . . .
"The overarching point here, as always, is that it is simply crystal clear that the President consciously and deliberately violated the law and committed multiple felonies by eavesdropping on Americans in violation of the law."

Karen Tumulty picks up on "some 2006 Gonzales testimony regarding the NSA wiretap program that's looking a tad, um, inconvenient at the moment:

" GONZALES: Senator, here is a response that I feel that I can give with respect to recent speculation or stories about disagreements. There has not been any serious disagreement, including -- and I think this is accurate -- there has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed. There have been disagreements about other matters regarding operations, which I cannot get into. I will also say --

"SCHUMER: But there was some -- I am sorry to cut you off, but there was some dissent within the administration, and Jim Comey did express at some point -- that is all I asked you -- some reservations.

"GONZALES: The point I want to make is that, to my knowledge, none of the reservations dealt with the program that we are talking about today."
Now for the conservative view, starting with John Hinderaker at Power Line:

"By March 2004, when the events described by Comey occurred, the NSA program had been in operation for 2 1/2 years, continuously certified as legal by the Department of Justice. It's no wonder that President Bush and his staff thought the program was legal. So why did DOJ raise a legal problem so long after the fact? In an exchange that has not been widely reported, Comey answered that question:

"It was simply the pace at which the work went on in the Office of Legal Counsel. We had a new assistant attorney general as of, I think, October of 2003. *** And the work got done in the beginning part of 2004. *** Concerns had reached the ears of the new assistant attorney general. And he undertook an examination--with my approval and with Attorney General Ashcroft's approval--of this matter. . .

"If you put the whole sequence together, it may well be that no actor in this admittedly lurid drama did anything wrong. Ashcroft and Comey apparently decided to go along with the conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and insist on changes in the program. Nothing wrong with that. Gonzales and Card may well not have known of Ashcroft's changed opinion, arrived at on the same day he went to the hospital--this is a key fact we don't know--and thought that Comey was trying to reverse his boss's judgment. So they went to see Ashcroft personally. Nothing wrong with that, as far as we know. Ashcroft set them straight; nothing wrong with that. (It's worth noting that Comey described Ashcroft's performance as a demonstration of physical and moral strength that was unprecedented in his experience.) President Bush then got into the act, learned the facts, and told Comey to do whatever he thought was right as acting Attorney General. Nothing wrong with that; on the contrary. The NSA program was revised to satisfy DOJ's concerns, and continued in effect, protecting Americans from terrorist attack, to the present time. Nothing wrong with that, to say the least.

"This is not, of course, the story you will get from the fragmentary and incoherent accounts that are appearing in the press."

I thought the accounts were pretty coherent, actually.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, scourge of all those Clinton scandals, sees much ado about nothing:

"The implication is that the White House was trying to lean on Justice to do something illegal. But listen to what Mr. Comey actually said as Mr. Specter questioned him. Was he pressured by Mr. Card, Senator Specter asked? No. 'I don't know that he tried to pressure me, other than to engage me on the merits and make clear his strong disagreements with my conclusion.'

"Did they threaten him, or suggest he could be fired? 'No sir, I didn't feel threatened, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be read [as threatening].' And what about Mr. Bush, did he twist arms in the Oval? Through FBI director Robert Mueller, Mr. Comey explained, 'The president said the Justice Department should do what the Department thinks is right.'

"So where's the smoking gun here? When the program was reauthorized by the President alone, Mr. Comey and others planned to resign in protest. So, Mr. Specter asked, does that mean the program went forward illegally? Again, negative: 'The Justice Department's certification . . . was not [required] as far as I know.' That's because, as even Mr. Comey conceded, many judges and scholars believe a president has the Constitutional authority to approve such wiretaps, especially in wartime.
"In other words, per Mr. Comey's testimony, nothing illegal was done, he was never threatened by White House officials, and the president told him to do what he felt was right."

Then why does Comey sound so upset?

Not all right-wingers are knocking it down, though. The occupant of Right Wing Nuthouse, Rick Moran, actually invokes the I-word:

"Did Bush violate the law by authorizing the NSA program? A federal judge has said so, although many respected and knowledgeable legal observers -- not all of them Bush supporters -- pointed out numerous deficiencies in that judge's opinion that will most likely result in the decision being overturned. But if the president violated the law, is there any possible justification for it that would or should keep him from being impeached? . . .

"This is how important Comey's testimony is. It gives Congressional investigators a direct avenue to determining whether the impeachment and trial of President Bush is justified. And it does so because there is both a document trail to be unearthed and witnesses to be deposed who could possibly corroborate serious violations of the law."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...051800467.html

[BrooklynRider]

Faced with law-breaking Bush official, GOP plays the race card
Michael Roston
Published: Thursday June 14, 2007

In a hearing Wednesday examining the findings that Bush appointee Lurita Doan of the General Services Administration appeared to violate the Hatch Act by politicking in a federal workplace, several Republican Congressmen played the race card. On a number of occasions, Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA), the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, led his colleagues in accusing their Democratic counterparts of targeting Doan because she was a black woman and a Republican.

"You're an African-American Republican so you've got a big bull's eye on you," Davis, the former chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said to Administrator Doan at one stage.

Doan was brought before the committee to testify on the Office of Special Counsel investigation that found she violated the Hatch Act during a Jan. 26, 2007 briefing given to GSA political appointees by White House staff from Karl Rove's office. In the briefing, a PowerPoint presentation was given that included slides on vulnerable Congressional districts in the 2008 election where Republicans believed they could regain seats. According to attendees, Doan asked at the end of the meeting how the GSA can "help 'our candidates' in the next elections."

Davis wasn't the only Republican member in the House hearing to make such an allegation.

"You're a Republican, a minority, and a woman, a GOP contributor, and they've targeted you, they're circling you to come after you," said Rep. John Mica (R-FL), who objected to the hearing at various occasions.

Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT) also said, "I find that when an African-American is a Republican, somehow, she is treated differently by Congress."

One African-American Democratic congress member objected strongly to the Republican representatives' use of race in the proceedings.

"I am a female and I am an African-American, and I resent the fact that race and gender is always thrown into it," said Rep. Diane Watson (D-CA). "I do not feel that this committee, or the chairman of this committee would ever bring you in front of us because you're a woman, and you're black."

Doan compares critics to racist bullies

Doan for her part admitted that she didn't believe she was being targeted because she was a black woman.

"I believe this hearing has a completely different agenda that even I probably am not aware of and not experienced about, I think this is a political thing. I don't think this is a race thing," she said.

But Doan also started off her testimony in a prepared statement by comparing her critics to racist bullies she encountered in her youth.

"I grew up in Ninth Ward in New Orleans and being one of the first minority students in all white school taught me a lot about how to deal with unfairness, harassment, and hostile environments," she declared. "Quitting would be far worse that persevering the face of adversity."

The Committee's Chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), pointed out at one stage that race had been raised first by Rep. Davis. He made note of the fact after Davis accused the Committee's Democrats of making the hearing focus on race.

"The race and gender issue didn't come from Mrs. Doan. It was interjected on the other side today by introducing a two year old e-mail that they had discovered from you that you sent to the administration...when you were looking to be the head of the Small Business Administration," Davis argued. "She has never brought this in to this context, this was brought up by the other side, and now they're trying to make it look like you're hiding behind it."

The e-mail in question, brought up by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), was used to contradict Doan's claim that she was interested only in public service, and not in partisan political position.

"I believe that the party has a unique opportunity to make about a 5% swing of the black votes to the GOP....small black business owners who represent the largest percentage of participants in the various [Small Business Administration] programs," Doan wrote in an e-mail to the White House's Al Hubbard prior to joining the Bush administration when she sought to be appointed head of the SBA. "As the SBA administrator I would have an unparalleled ability to serve as an articulate and passionate ambassador for the president's agenda and at same time be in a position to encourage both funding and votes to the GOP."

Cummings pointed out the contradiction with her earlier statements.

"You said earlier that you weren't interested in the political stuff, the partisan stuff," the African-American Democrat from Maryland said. "When we combine everything it leans more toward not pure truthfulness under oath, than truthfulness, and I'm sitting here, I'm trying to get where do you stand in all of this....where do the mistakes end, and the truth begin?"

Waxman calls on Doan to resign from her post

Waxman and his fellow Democrats concluded that the OSC's findings against Doan were accurate, and the Chairman called on her to resign at the end of the hearing.

"This is my opinion, but it's unusual for me to call for the resignation of a federal official," the California Democrat said. "But in your case, I don't see any other course of action that will protect the interests of your agency and the federal tax payer."

Davis and other committee Republicans objected to the manner and the findings of the Special Counsel's report.

"The OSC report is remarkably harsh and hyperbolic, and extremely short on support," Davis said in his opening statement. "The report cites no evidence. There are not footnotes, no exhibits. OSC says they 'interviewed over 20 individuals in attendance' at the Jennings presentation. But the report quotes testimony from zero attendees. Why didn’t they talk to all attendees? How did they choose?"

He also accused the OSC of violating Doan's rights.

"Lurita Doan was not afforded basic due process rights, such as an opportunity to review the testimony submitted against her," he added.

One Republican, Rep. Shays, admitted that Doan had done some inappropriate things, but thought she only deserved a reprimand, not the level of scrutiny she had so far received.

"There are two things that happened that I think shouldn't have happened - a meeting shouldn't have happened," he said first, then adding, "A comment shouldn't have been made, 'how can we help our candidates.'"

For her own part, Doan showed no inclination to resign, at one point dismissing the investigation as "a game of political gotcha, with me as the 'gotchee.'" She said that her fate was in the hands of President Bush, who is reviewing the Special Counsel's report.

"He'll make a decision, and I'll live with it," she told the committee.

[Punzie]

All Plamegate and Scooter Libby posts (after he was indicted) were moved to a new thread:

"I. Lewis": Plamegate & the Scooter Libby Saga

And the thread is already hot!

[Ninjahedge]

Why do they call out the fact that he was the first hispanic attorney general in the very first sentance of the article?

I do not care if he was the first martian attorney general, the man either did VERY wrong, or was an amnesiatic idiot. Either way, he should have been let go, and PROSECUTED.

[Landwatch.com]

What happened with the case after all?? He resigned that is fine but was he prosecuted?

[lofter1]

Nothing has happened to Gonzalez ... he just disappeared.

Little Scooter Libby was convicted and sentenced but then our fearful leader George W. Bush commuted Libby's prison term:

The presiding trial judge, Reggie B. Walton, sentenced Libby to 30 months in federal prison, a fine of $250,000, and two years of supervised release, including 400 hours of community service, and then ordered Libby to begin his sentence immediately. When Libby's appeal of Judge Walton's order failed, President Bush commuted Libby's 30-month prison sentence, leaving the other parts of his sentence intact. In commuting Libby's prison term, Bush stated: "I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby's sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison. ... My decision to commute his prison sentence leaves in place a harsh punishment for Mr. Libby. The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged." After Libby paid his monetary fine and penalty totaling $250,400, Judge Walton queried aspects of the presidential commutation, and lawyers filed their briefs supporting Libby's serving supervised release, resolving the issue and thus clearing the way for Libby to begin the rest of his sentence, the two years of supervised release and 400 hours of community service.