"But the probe was shut down when Bush denied investigators the security clearances necessary for the investigation. Such a denial was unprecedented and arbitrary. "

The FBI investigates for clearances, even for military clearances. FBI is part of the DOJ. WHO exactly GRANTS the clearances for USA's? Is it the FBI itself or some little Bushie holed up in the Whitehouse?

In other words...how close can this be placed to Bush himself?

This is tooo rich ! We knew all along there was a reason behind Gonzo's reaction to AttorneyGate, that he was hiding something worse.
And now he deftly sidesteps Bush's attempt to throw him under the bus, leaving Bush metaphorically naked in the dspotlight.
Sorry..did not mean to ruin anyone's dinner with THAT image.

If you were Bush trying to protect your AG, you would prefer him to look emasculated than to appear to have behaved in the way Waas describes. Bush has nothing to lose, personally. He still thinks he's invulnerable in his role as unitary exec. So, he takes the hit (his approval can't slip any more anyway) to protect his buddy. Really, the Associate AG's story doesn't make any sense. How could Gonzales NOT know the probe would touch him? He was involved, and the very competent OPR would find out. This is a no-brainer.

Forgive me but Gonzales' reasoning is full of shit. It is the Attorney's General's job to enforce the law . . . Especially if the individual doing the criminal action is the President of United States of America.

THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THIS FAILURE BEGINS AND ENDS WITH HIM.

Since they were NSA wiretaps, they would have to get NSA clearances. Gonzales wouldn't have the option to give them the clearance. They would have been denied by Bush himself or the Defense Department. If Gonzales were a legitimate Attorney General, he would have refused to go along with the Bush Administration's defacto suspension of the Bill of Rights. Anyone worth their salt would have resigned their office and gone public rather than help tear up the US Constitution. Hopefully each and every individual responsible for illegal wiretaps, illegal searches, and illegal seizures will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law once a responsible Attorney General takes office. To do otherwise would send a clear signal that America is clearly sliding towards being a police state.

Libby was Cheney's fall guy for Plamegate and Gonzales is starting to look like Bush amd Rove's fall guy for the most blatant political corruption of the Justice Department in its history.

The career employees in Foggy Bottom , from OSD to Interior are all in right now in open revolt against BushCo.
Which senior DOJ official sent that letter -perhaps someone associated with former Assitant AG Comey.
Dubya &Cheney will both be impeached -and if there are enough predicates laid down - Dubya & Cheney will both be convicted in the Senate.
The predicates are all about the corrupt Money that allows the corrupt denial of our civill liberties- it all ties togather follow the MONEY .
USA Lam was following the money she got fired .
BushCo must be resisted by any and all means necessary.
We have nothing to fear but fear itself .
How many predicates you reckon Leahy & Conyer already have without the testimony of the Evil Minions ?

I wonder how Gonzo is gonna dodge this...no link on the docs though...

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2978026

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/03/23/us.attorneys.firings/index.html

Interesting:

"Dick Armey, the Republican former House majority leader who now is chairman of the conservative activist "Freedom Works" organization in Washington, said Thursday that President Bush is on "thin ice" in claiming executive privilege.

He added that it is "hard for me to imagine that Karl Rove has any matters of information that are so important to the nation's security or its ability to conduct the business of our government that there's any reason he shouldn't testify."

Even former Republican conresspersons are coming out against the exec privelege argument.

They must have burned all the records and disappeared the IT people at the RNC already.

Um, guys...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Newly released documents show Attorney General Alberto Gonzales approved plans to fire several U.S. attorneys in a November meeting, contrary to claims he was not closely involved in
the dismissals.

Exactly what did Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales know, and when did they know it, concerning Mark Foley, a fellow neo-con Republican, who had a sexual predilection for young House pages?

And what did and when did George W. Bush and Dick Cheney know?

(Note: in early 2006, Karl Rove "talked" Mark Foley (R-FL) into running for another term in office, even as the House Republican leadership was covering for Mark Foley's sexual predatory practices, as they'd been doing for years)

And did Alberto Gonzales, after Foleygate broke with a fury into pre-election news last October, use his position as Attorney General to get as many Republican-appointed federal prosecutors as possible to bring bogus voter fraud cases against Democrats in an attempt to replace negative news coverage of Foleygate with negative news coverage of alleged Democratic improprieties?

Is this why the Gonzales-controlled Justice Department is stonewalling (obstructing justice?) in not releasing all the emails related to the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys last December, two months after Foleygate severely hurt Republican chances in the November elections?

And how does Alberto Gonzales resolve the contradiction between his statement the other day that he wants to keep his job so he can go on protecting the kids, when the FACT is, he and Karl Rove, being chief White House political strategists, MUST have known about Mark Foley's sexual predatory practices long before the late September 2006 revelations about his activities?

So many questions, and so few answers...so far.

Holy Guacamole! The Little Latin Liar could be sent packing before Karl Rove Jr. testifies.

"..Asked to explain the difference between Gonzales' comments and his schedule, Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse largely sidestepped the question by saying the attorney general had relied on Sampson to draw up the plans on the firings.

"The attorney general has made clear that he charged Mr. Sampson with directing a plan to replace U.S. attorneys where for one reason or another the department believed that we could do better," Roehrkasse said. "He was not, however, involved at the levels of selecting the particular U.S. attorneys who would be replaced."

Gonzales this week directed the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate the circumstances of the firings, officials said. The department's inspector general also will participate in that investigation..."

Is Roehrkasse saying that Gonzales ordered Sampson to fire the USAs?

If Gonzales directed the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate the circumstances of the firings, did Gonzales order an investigation of himself?

The wording here is a bit tricky: "He was not, however, involved at the levels of selecting the particular U.S. attorneys who would be replaced."

What does "levels" mean?

This is the best Friday Night Happy Hour ever!

uh-oh...they're revolting and we're being invaded. should i get an attorney, too?

To paraphrase Conan Doyle, "I draw your attention to the curious incident of the bees in the night-time." "The bees did nothing in the night-time." "That was the curious incident."

AgriBusiness Giants like ADM have made huge donations to BushCheney. They have made an equally huge bet on genetically modified crops.

Now, research suggest that AgriBusiness giants’ genetically modified crops - such as those that contain foreign genes that result in crops killing pests that usually feed on them - may inadvertently be killing thousands of bee HIVES, especially on the US East and West coasts. Also in Europe.

No bees. No crops. No food. No joke. Google it. Compare, especially, the differential bee deaths in the US v. Europe, which plants a tiny fraction of the GM crops allowed in the US.

Bee warning cited earlier by other bloggers. I've repeated it after having read the materials cited in them. This could be more urgent than global warming, because it could take effect within a much shorter time.

It is worth repeating because of the huge influence of AgriBusiness lobbying, the huge bet they've made on GM crops, and the existing PR machinery - which rivals big tobacco - that AgriBusiness already has on hand, and which routinely pokes fun at "those nuts" who oppose their "sound food science".

We can't get the Bushies to acknowledge the science about global warming, or the even more basic science of ergonomics, which Justice Scalia's son has made a career of ruthlessly dissing.

From the doc-dump, it looks like Daniel P. Collins, now at Munger, Tolles & Olson and a co-blogger at ProteinWisdom.com, was the guy who came up with the legal 'fix' back in 2003/4 that got slipped into the PATRIOT reauth and allowed the purge to happen.

I'm sure he'd respond to interview requests on his role.

Security Code 'fire'. Heh.

Here's the link to the docs...have fun...

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/16964237.htm

Also, we see more from Scott 'gwb43.com' Jennings, but only from an email copied in a reply. No original emails. I now get the distinctfeeling that "Karl's shop" may have done all of its emailing on outside servers. The Dems in the judiciary committees may have to think carefully about what recourse they have to get documents that haven't been archived, as required by law.

Monica Goodling's departure is interesting: the only active role we see from the doc-dump is a degree of background/oppo workup on Feinstein re: Lam, though the 'intel' report (PDF 8) might be damaging once Senators see the unredacted bits.

Perhaps she got canned for archiving her email, since lots of doc-dump stuff appears to be from messages CC:d to her.

The copy of the Sampson/Miers firing plan appended to the e-mail string of December 4th dictates that vetting of replacement USA's begin "as soon as possible in November 2006". It was either not updated when its implementation was delayed, or they had already started looking for replacements a month before telling the USA's they were out.

Data released Friday, seems to appear in random order, as if the DOJ played fifty-two card pickup with it. Lots of dupes.

There is an often duplicated June 6, 2006, memo from Daniel Fridman to William Mercer that purports to analyze immigration cases by comparing caseloads in AZ, SoCA and NM. This appears to show SoCA caseload declining precipitously, which the memo explains by SoCA's purportedly restrictive guidelines for prosecuting these cases. A management problem laid at Carol Lam's door. Perhaps that's why there are so many copies of this memo.

I have not analyzed the underlying data Fridman is working with, but his discussion of it seems faulty.

Fridman starts by reminding Mercer that his report responds to questions raised by Cong. Issa, who had been provided a Border Patrol report that suggested Lam was not prosecuting enough immigration cases. Fridman fails to mention that the report was out of date and materially altered. [It now appears the report was leaked to Issa by someone in DHS.]

Fridman compares statistics among AZ, NM and SoCal. He briefly mentions differences among immigration crimes, from one-off walk-ins to "coyotes" bringing in small numbers, to large rings, but does not analyze them or compare differences among the three regions. He ignores differences in population, and human and physical geography. He touches briefly on staffing differences, but does not discuss budget differences. He fails to discuss any differences in the volume of competing, non-immigration crimes. San Diego is CA's second largest city, and has considerably more non-immigration crime than West Texas or the New Mexico border.

Fridman notes briefly that "there may be differences" that would affect the validity of his data comparison, but does not identify what they might be or how they might skew the data. He just launches into it, leaving the reader to assume that the differences, if any, are not material. If that's not true, this is a hatchet job.

Correction. The Fridman memo looks at AZ, CA, NM and TX border areas, not just the first three.

More than meets the eye

http://www.macsmind.com/wordpress/2007/03/24/im-holding-fire-on-on-the-newest-gonzales-memo/

Everyone's all ranting and raving about this latest outrage, but no one seems to have noticed that they just waived executive privilege by sentences two, three and four of the quoted statement:

The Attomey General was not told that he was a subject or target of the OPR investigation, nor did he believe himself to be. The Attorney General did not ask the President to shut down or otherwise impede the OPR investigation. The Attorney General recommended to the President that OPR be granted security clearances to the Terrorist Sur\~eillance Program. The President made the decision not to grant the requested security clearances.

Sentence one is a bald-faced attempt by Gonzo to (try to) avoid obstruction of justice charges against Gonzo - "I didn't know the investigation was coming my way, so I couldn't be the guy obstructing it". Not likely to succeed - this was just too controversial and too close to Gonzo (it ran through his office, dammit) for him to get away with that crap.

Sentence two describes a communication between presidential advisor (or consigliere/attorney - take your pick) surely made in and with the expectation of confidence (what do we hear every time about the NSA program - that it's confidential)(and, what do we hear about the executive branch - that everything going on there is confidential) and about a matter of state. Now, a spokesmodel is coming out and, as an official pronouncement, saying what the communication was about, the general substance of it, and who said (and didn't say) what to whom. Textbook waiver of executive (or any other) privilege.

Sentence three is a combination of the two purposes - I told the President to give them the clearances and let the investigation go forward (i.e., I didn't impede it, regardless of who was the subject/target) and this is the "confidential" stuff we talked about (waiver of privilege).

Sentence four is Gonzo laying the blame squarely on the President. HE obstructed the investigation. And, it's a further revelation and waiver of the allegedly privileged information.

No. This is not the WH throwing Gonzo under the bus. This is Gonzo lashing himself to the President in the hope the so-called "Unitary Executive" theory will stand up in court. If it succeeds, it will be because The President Can Do No Wrong. If it fails, it will bring down Bush.

The NSA wiretapping was done in part to spy on political enemies without the need of a warrant.

The politicization of USA's was done in part to intimidate & prosecute democratic candidates & officeholders.

Combine the two, and you have a method for the former to feed the latter.

hello

The President of the United States is himself created by that same Constitution.

Didn't we already know this.
The non-memory man was only doing what his owner demanded.