No surprises here. From McClatchy:

A U.S. attorney in Wisconsin who prosecuted a state Democratic official on corruption charges during last year's heated governor's race was once targeted for firing by the Department of Justice, but given a reprieve for reasons that remain unclear. A federal appeals court last week threw out the conviction of Wisconsin state worker Georgia Thompson, saying the evidence was "beyond thin."

Congressional investigators looking into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys saw Wisconsin prosecutor Steven M. Biskupic's name on a list of lawyers targeted for removal when they were inspecting a Justice Department document not yet made public, according to an attorney for a lawmaker involved in the investigation. The attorney asked for anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the investigation.

It wasn't clear when Biskupic was added to a Justice Department hit list of prosecutors, or when he was taken off, or whether those developments were connected to the just-overturned corruption case.

As I detailed earlier this week, Biskupic was almost certainly put on the purge list in late October of 2006 -- as a result of complaints from President Bush and Karl Rove that he was too soft on voter fraud. The outstanding question, of course, is why he was taken off.

As I pointed out earlier, one of the documents released today apparently catches Kyle Sampson in another bind.

And during a conference call with reporters today, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that Sampson had not been fully honest with the committee last month. At issue is whether Sampson gave a false impression when he said that he didn't have "in mind any replacements" for any of the U.S. attorneys who were asked to resign.

"He left a clear impression that they did not have people in mind for a replacement," Schumer said, calling it "extremely troubling."

"The contradictions continue to pile up.... The issue of replacements now becomes central."

But Sampson's lawyer Bradford Berenson released a statement that there's no contradiction here:

"Kyle's testimony regarding the consideration of replacements was entirely accurate. In December 2006, when the seven U.S. Attorneys were asked to step down, no specific candidate had been selected to replace any of them, and Kyle had none in mind. Some names had been tentatively suggested for discussion much earlier in the process, but by the time the decision to ask for the resignations was made, none had been chosen to serve as a replacement. Most, if not all, had long since ceased even to be possibilities."

So it goes.

Some talking points are so good they just bear repeating.

As we've pointed out before, in brainstorming for reasons that the U.S. attorneys were fired, one Justice Department spokesperson suggested that since three of the U.S.A.s were from border districts, "you could make the connection that DoJ is unhappy with the immigration prosecution numbers in those districts."

The Justice Department took that ball and ran with it. From The Washington Post:

Another document--internal Justice Department "talking points" about the fired prosecutors--shows that Justice officials used identical language to describe alleged shortcomings in immigration enforcement by two U.S. attorneys.

About Carol S. Lam of San Diego, the memo said: "Regardless of what was done by the office in this area, she failed to tackle this responsibility as aggressively and as vigorously as we expected and needed her to do." The same sentence was used for David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, except that "her" was replaced with "him."

Those talking points seem to have been assembled by Monica Goodling, who forwarded them to department official William Moschella the day before he testified before Congress last month.

But in her zeal to demonstrate Lam's failure to take that responsibility aggressively and vigorously, Goodling seems to have gotten too creative. One of the other talking points, for instance, is that 19 members of Congress "complained about her 'catch and release' policies." The only problem with that, of course, is that her office didn't have such a policy.

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It's just become a routine of the U.S. attorney scandal -- pinpointing a contradiction between something Kyle Sampson wrote or said and something else Sampson wrote or said... and then watching him try to wriggle out of it.

Here for instance, is a mind-bending dodge from last month's hearing. He carefully explained why he wrote in an email last year that Timothy Griffin's appointment was "important to Karl" and then prepared a letter to Congress in February that said the department wasn't aware of Karl Rove having any role in Griffin's appointment. I'd summarize his answer here, but it's complicated.

And here we go again.

As I noted earlier, one of today's documents shows Kyle Sampson suggesting possible replacements for U.S. attorneys to be fired. And as Dan Eggen points out in The Washington Post....

During the March 29 hearing, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked Sampson whether he had specific replacements in mind for seven of the prosecutors before they were fired on Dec. 7.

"I personally did not," Sampson replied. "On December 7th, I did not have in mind any replacements for any of the seven who were asked to resign."

But, of course, there's an answer. From ABC News:

"There was some early brainstorming about possible replacements for one or more of the U.S. attorneys who were ultimately terminated. By the time they were let go in December 2006, no specific replacements had been identified or decided upon among any of the seven," one source with knowledge of the discussions about the firings told ABC News.

Nothing to see here.

Nobody is going to be shocked by this, but it's indicative nonetheless.

One of the documents released today by the Justice Department is a chart with information on all 93 U.S. attorneys -- it appears to date from early 2006. The document is broken down into two main categories: prosecution experience (years of experience in various offices) and political experience. One of the subcategories under political experience (along with years on the Hill, at the Justice Department, etc.) is whether the attorney is a member of the conservative law group, The Federalist Society.

It's been apparent that Federalist Society membership was all but a prerequisite to work in the Bush Justice Department. But apparently it really is.

Via Thinkprogress.

Whoops. From the AP:

Karl Rove's lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush's chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican sponsored server, saying Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law....

"His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived," Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said.

The prosecutor probing the Valerie Plame spy case saw and copied all of Rove's e-mails from his various accounts after searching Rove's laptop, his home computer, and the handheld computer devices he used for both the White House and Republican National Committee, Luskin said.

The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, subpoenaed the e-mails from the White House, the RNC and Bush's re-election campaign, he added.

"There's never been any suggestion that Fitzgerald had anything less than a complete record," Luskin said.

Any e-mails Rove deleted were the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly, Luskin said. He said Rove had no idea the e-mails were being deleted from the server, a central computer that managed the e-mail.

Yesterday, I posted on CREW's revelation that there were as many as five million emails missing from the White House's system. These were emails totally separate from the emails on RNC-issued email accounts. They were in the White House system.

Today, during the White House press gaggle, Dana Perino gave an explanation of sorts:

But there was a conversion sometime between 2002 and 2003 to convert people that were using Lotus Notes when we first arrived to Microsoft Outlook. And I know that the tech people worked to get us all transferred over. We had to save our Word documents and all to make sure that they weren't lost in that transition.

I don't have a specific number for you. Again, I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million emails lost, but we'll see if we can get to you. If it was 5 million, I think that, again, out of 1,700 people using email every day, again, there was no intent to have lost them.

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Here's another new document from the ones released today. And it's a good one.

They are two pages of handwritten notes, apparently taken by Monica Goodling -- the now former Justice Department official who's pled the Fifth. The notes appear to have emerged from a brainstorming session on justifications for firing the U.S. attorneys in early February of this year.

At the top of the first page, for instance, is a one word question: "Reasons?"

The session resulted in a chart showing the different supposed deficiencies with each U.S. attorney. In the documents produced, the previous and following documents are emails from Monica Goodling forwarding versions of the charts to her DoJ colleagues. "Here is the chart the [Deputy Attorney General] mentioned wanting to brief and leave behind. Kyle has reviewed it," she writes in one February 12, 2007 email. Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty was preparing to meet privately with the Senate Judiciary Committee.

One of the justifications didn't make it into the chart, however.

Under the reasons for firing David Iglesias, Goodling writes: "Domenici says he doesn't move cases."

That would be Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM). Now, as has been demonstrated, there was a particular variety of case that Domenici wanted Iglesias to move faster on -- corruption investigations into Democrats. Domenici called Iglesias shortly before the election last November to ask if Iglesias was going to bring an indictment on such a case sometime soon.

Domenici has made a similar misleading claim publicly -- that he'd complained about Iglesias because he had been unable to "move more quickly on cases." But as overall statistics for Iglesias' office have shown, that's a bogus allegation. It's apparent that Domenici was really talking about a few very important cases in particular.

One wonders just how Domenici expressed this frustration to Goodling and others... and whether he was more specific in terms of which cases just weren't moving fast enough.

Well, we have our first notable document of the day.

On January 9, 2006, Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson wrote White House counsel Harriet Miers with a version of the U.S. attorney firing plan.

On his list of U.S. attorneys to be fired, he included four of the U.S. attorneys who were ultimately canned: U.S. Attorney for Little Rock Bud Cummins, western Michigan's Margaret Chiara, San Francisco's Kevin Ryan, and San Diego's Carol Lam.

Sampson suggested replacements for all of them. The only one who ultimately was installed was Karl Rove's former aide, Tim Griffin. In a previous version of the document, Sampson's suggested replacements for the others were redacted. But in this version, they're not.

And the documents show that the other replacements were similarly connected in the administration. Samspon recommended Rachel Brand, for instance, for western Michigan. She's been an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department since 2005.

Others of Sampson's candidates were eventually placed elsewhere as U.S. attorneys. Deborah Rhodes was suggested for Lam's spot -- she was a counselor at the Justice Department but was installed as the U.S. Attorney for southern Alabama instead. Jeffrey Taylor was also suggested Lam's spot -- but he's now the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. He was a counselor to the attorney general from 2002 until 2006.

The House Judiciary Committee has made the new documents available on their website here.

We'll be diving in -- and looking to see what readers come up with in the comments below.

As promised, the Justice Department has turned over hundreds (we're not sure how many) of documents to the House and Senate judiciary committees.

We'll let you know as soon as they're publicly available.

Swords at Dawn, Rove, for You Have Insulted the Honor of Multnomah!
"Voting officials from Multnomah County, Oregon strike back at Karl Rove and dissect his distortions leveled against their mail-in voting system." (Blue Oregon)

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You can read the letter White House counsel Fred Fielding sent last night to Congress about the U.S. attorneys investigation here.

But here's the shorter version of the "offer":

Dear Congress,

You'll get what we want you to get when we want you to get it, or you'll get nothing.

Best,
Fred Fielding

In the letter, Fielding says that the White House's offer of March 20th stands. It's a great offer, he says. And carping from Democrats and some Republicans like Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) about it fails "to credit fully the extraordinary nature of the disclosure we are prepared to provide."

The offer, remember, was 1) to turn over records of all relevant communications from a White House official to a party outside the White House (but no internal communications are to be turned over) and 2) Karl Rove and other White House officials would meet with Congress privately, but there would be no transcript and no oath. The offer also restricts the range of questioning.

But it gets better. Those RNC-issued email accounts belonging to White House staff are also to be covered under the deal. And Fieldings says "it was and remains our intention to collect e-mails and documents from those [RNC-controlled] accounts."

In other words, whatever emails Congress gets, they'll have to get through the White House -- and they won't get anything unless they get it as part of Fielding's "unified offer," his “carefully and thoughtfully considered package of accommodations.”

Democrats had asked if Fielding couldn't separately provide the White House's "external" communications, since he was offering them as part of the deal anyway.

But if they want those emails, they'll have to agree to the White House's terms for interviewing Rove and others. And they'll have to resign themselves to not receiving any "internal" White House communications, even if those communications occurred via RNC-issued email addresses. The executive privilege claim with regard to all internal White House correspondence is questionable, but it's even more questionable with regard to the RNC-issued email communications.

As House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) put it: “The White House position seems to be that executive privilege not only applies in the Oval Office, but to the R.N.C. as well. There is absolutely no basis in law or fact for such a claim.”

That's why Conyers is trying to get the emails straight from the RNC. In his letter to the RNC chairman yesterday, he demanded that the RNC provide the emails "directly" to Congress -- instead of giving them to the White House. Not providing the emails directly to Congress, Conyers wrote, would be "an unjustified delay" and "potentially... an obstruction of our investigation."

So it looks like things are about to get even nastier.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had his own summary of Fielding's offer: "‘We are stonewalling.’"

That's the word from Time:

Will Congress grant Monica Goodling immunity from prosecution in order to compel her to testify about the Bush Administration's firing late last year of eight U.S. Attorneys?

Sources tell TIME that discussions are under way on Capitol Hill about whether to offer just such a deal to the key former aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The discussions — still largely informal — follow Goodling's assertion of her Fifth Amendment privilege to refuse to testify about her role in the controversial firings. Were Goodling to receive some form of immunity, she could be legally compelled to testify or risk facing charges of contempt of Congress.

No decision to seek immunity for Goodling has yet been made....

With regard to those lost emails by White House officials using RNC-issued email accounts, there are a lot of unanswered questions.

And so Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) along with the panel’s Ranking Member, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), wrote to White House counsel Fred Fiedling today to try and get some answers.

Some of those questions that need answering:

...we would like to know what was done in the past and whether any private e-mail retention policies were in place. We would also like to know how and when the White House first learned of the problem with private e-mail account usage and when it first came to light that e-mails may have been lost.

You can read the letter here.

Oh, you knew it was coming.

Apparently some 1,000 pages of documents are forthcoming from the Justice Department as early as this evening or as late as tomorrow morning.

That's all about all that we can say at this point.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and subcommittee chairwoman Linda Sanchez (D-CA) wrote to the chairman of the Republican National Committee today to demand White House officials' emails related to the U.S. attorney firings investigation. You can see the letter here.

There was a tantalizing tidbit in the letter, related to the U.S. attorney in Milwaukee, Steve Biskupic:

"We have also been advised that there may be RNC e-mail traffic relating to Republican Party concerns about the United States Attorney in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, prior to his announcing, on the eve of the hotly contested 2006 gubernatorial election, that he was indicting an official in the incumbent Democratic governor's administration. This prosecution was a topic of energetic discussion by Republicans in Wisconsin in the days leading up to the election, but was apparently so lacking in merit that the panel of judges on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reviewing the case, after a thirty-minute oral argument, immediately ordered, from the bench, that the official be released from prison and indicated it was reversing the conviction because it was unsupported by sufficient evidence."

So Karl Rove's emails seem to have mysteriously disappeared from the RNC's servers.

And it's clear that Rove really wouldn't want record of his emails. Why? Because it's well established he's a manic Blackberry user. A longtime TPM reader sent in this dispatch:

To find out how Karl Rove has used his RNC e-mail account, I turned to published profiles and assembled this pastiche:

Karl Rove is "a manic package of intensity and energy" who is "surgically attached to his Blackberry." "When he's not on the phone, he's tapping e-mail messages into his handheld Blackberry," "staying in the loop" even when he's out of the office. It's a passion with some history; Karl had "one of the earliest experimental e-mail programs." He can be found "'chipmunking' as he steps off of Air Force One," perhaps keeping "in constant contact with Mr. Mehlman by BlackBerry." He's used the Blackberry in the Eisenhower building while sharing "discreet chuckles with Andrew Card...and Condoleezza Rice," and in "a domestic policy meeting in the Roosevelt Room." He's been known to use it "in bed and while driving," and "when quail hunting down in South Texas...tapping away...during the shoot." In fact, "he even uses it to e-mail colleagues in the same room."

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In a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales today, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, asked that the Justice Department retain all emails received or sent to a White House official's RNC-issued email address.

But he also provided more details about those emails on the RNC servers -- details derived from his staff's interview with the RNC's counsel Rob Kelner. According to Kelner, the RNC stopped deleting all of the White House staff's emails in response to "unspecified legal inquiries" (i.e. Pat Fitzgerald's investigation) in August of 2004. And there are some very tantalizing details concerning Karl Rove...

From the letter:

According to Mr. Kelner, the RNC had a policy, which the RNC called a "document retention" policy, that purged all e-mails from RNC e-mail accounts and the RNC server that were more than 30 days old. Mr. Kelner said that as a result of unspecified legal inquiries, a "hold" was placed on this e-mail destruction policy for the accounts of White House officials in August 2004. Mr. Kelner was uncertain whether the hold was consistently maintained from August 2004 to the present, but he asserted that for this period, the RNC does have alarge volume of White House e-mails. According to Mr. Kelner, the hold would not have prevented individual White House officials from deleting their e-mail from the RNC server after August 2004.

Mr. Kelner's briefing raised particular concems about Karl Rove, who according to press reports used his RNC accountfor 95%o of his communications. According to Mr. Kelner, although the hold started in August 2004, the RNC does not have any e-mails prior to 2005 for Mr. Rove. Mr. Kelner did not give any explanation for the e-mails missing from Mr. Rove's account, but he did acknowledge that one possible explanation is that Mr. Rove personally deleted his e-mails from the RNC server.

Mr. Kelner also explained that starting in 2005, the RNC began to treat Mr. Rove's emails in a special fashion. At some point in 2005, the RNC commenced an automatic archive policy for Mr. Rove, but not for any other White House officials. According to Mr. Kelner, this archive policy removed Mr. Rove's ability to personally delete his e-mails from the RNC server. Mr. Kelner did not provide many details about why this special policy was adopted for Mr. Rove. But he did indicate that one factor was the presence of investigative or discovery requests or other legal concerns. It was unclear from Mr. Kelner's briefing whether the special archiving policy for Mr. Rove was consistently in effect after 2005. [my emphasis]

From Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington:

In a startling new revelation, CREW has also learned through two confidential sources that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over five million emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005. The White House counsel’s office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these emails, but to date nothing has been done to rectify this significant loss of records.

To be clear: these are emails controlled by the White House -- not emails on RNC servers, like those other lost emails.

When I spoke to CREW's Naomi Seligman Steiner, she could only say that the missing emails were generated over a period of "hundreds of days within that two year period." Furthermore, it's not clear whose emails they are, or why those emails are missing as opposed to others. "We're dealing with people who are only willing to tell us so much," she said.

But apparently this issue came up in the course of Plame investigation. Among the exhibits attached to CREW's new report, Without A Trace: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records, is a January 31, 2006 letter from Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to Scooter Libby's lawyer about pre-trial discovery.

One of the final paragraphs of the seven-page letter reads:

We are aware of no evidence pertinent to the charges against defendant Libby which has been destroyed. In an abundance of caution, we advise you that we have learned that not all email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.

I'm sure we'll hear more about this.

Yesterday, McClatchy ran a piece about the high number of Justice Department employees who are also apparently active members of the Republican National Lawyers Association. Here's something to bring that story home for you.

The Justice Department, we like to think, is a nonpartisan institution. And yet, on the Republican National Lawyers Association website, you can find 25 Justice Department employees listed under "Find a Republican Lawyer". The listings, according to McClatchy, "strike some current and former Justice Department lawyers as inappropriate, especially given that several members of the group work in the Justice Department's voting section, criminal division or as assistant U.S. attorneys."

Take two of those listed names in particular:, Christian Adams and Joshua Rogers, both lawyers in the voting section. As I detailed last week, the section, which is charged with protecting minority voters from discrimination, has filed only two cases on behalf of African American voters during the Bush administration (and one of those cases they inherited from the Clinton administration).

But the section has, remarkably, pursued the first case to allege discrimination against white voters ever filed under the Voting Rights Act.

That case is United States v. Ike Brown and Noxubee County. It's a case essentially against the Noxubee County Democratic Party -- it's one of the named defendants in the complaint. And Ike Brown is chairman of the county Democratic committee. The complaint alleges that Brown has been trying to limit whites' participation in local elections.

And who are the two lawyers in the section handling the case? Christian Adams and Joshua Rogers.

Do you think there's an appearance of conflict there?

OK, so maybe Karl Rove and his aides deleted their emails twice. But did they scrub hard enough?

From Justin over at ABC:

...But “deleted” doesn’t mean what it used to, according to computer forensic experts. Indeed, deleted emails and files, even years-old ones, are recovered all the time.

“We do it every day of the week,” said Beryl Howell of Stroz Freidburg LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that specializes in recovering lost data for businesses complying with court orders, criminal investigators and others....

“They look at their backup systems and backup tapes,” Howell said, adding that “with any electronic storage media, you can do forensic recovery and find deleted data.”

Highlights from this morning's White House press gaggle, during which spokesman Scott Stanzel did his best to explain the White House's email retention policies to a very skeptical press corps.

Here's one highlight in particular. Until 2004, the RNC automatically deleted the emails of White House staff after 30 days. But after that, the policy was changed. The RNC wouldn't delete the email, but the staffers' themselves could. But to do that, they would not only need to delete the email but then delete it again from the trash folder (there's a larger question of whether even that would actually delete the email, but we'll get to that later). A reporter asked if that didn't mean that certain staffers had made two affirmative decisions to delete certain emails. Stanzel responded:

Since 2004, the RNC has had a policy of excluding White House staff from their automatic deletion policy, which means that the RNC every 30 days has automatic deletion policy. Since 2004, it's our understanding, that White House staff who have political email accounts provided by the RNC have been excluded from that policy. And in terms of the double delete, what you're talking about is the user's ability, if they are sitting at their laptop, and decide that, 'gosh, I've got a hundred emails here that I just -- are cluttering up my inbox, I want to put them in the deleted file, and I right-click the deleted items to empty my deleted file.' It's possible, possible, that those records could have been lost....

More below.

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It's been a busy day at the Senate Judiciary Committee:

A U.S. congressional panel investigating the firing of federal prosecutors authorized subpoenas on Thursday for e-mails the White House has declared may be missing.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., challenged the White House assertion, saying, "It's not a question of e-mails being lost, it's e-mails they don't want to retrieve."

The White House disclosed on Wednesday some of its staffers, including President George W. Bush's senior political adviser, Karl Rove, and several of his deputies, wrote e-mail messages on official business on Republican Party accounts, and some may have been wrongly deleted.

On a voice vote, the Judiciary Committee authorized subpoenas for these and other White House documents as well as for records it has sought from the Justice Department.

The panel also authorized subpoenas for Associate Deputy Attorney General William Moschella, and Scott Jennings, an aide to Rove, permitting Leahy to sign subpoenas compelling the Bush administration to surrender hundreds of new documents and force Moschella and Jennings to reveal their roles in the firings.

The votes authorize subpoenas to be issued if the administration records are not turned over and if Moschella and Jennings decline to appear before the panel.

Update: Here's the rundown, from a press release from the committee:

The authorization approved Thursday covers all documents in the possession, control or custody of the Department of Justice and the White House related to the committee’s ongoing investigation. Another authorization for subpoenas was approved by the committee for J. Scott Jennings, Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of Political Affairs; and William E. Moschella, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General.

The Committee is expected to vote on a similar authorization next week for Sara M. Taylor, Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Political Affairs.

Update: Here's video of Leahy this morning expressing his, ahem, skepticism about the White House's story on the emails.

Yesterday, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel spent about 80 minutes yesterday trying to explain to reporters how it was that the White House had "mishandled" Karl Rove's and dozens of other staffers' emails.

Despite all that explaining, the situation is crystal clear. 22 White House staffers also have an RNC-issued email account. Dating back to 2001, it's been about 50 staffers total. Through 2004, the RNC simply deleted all of those emails after 30 days -- that policy changed then, though that didn't stop the erasing. The staffers themselves could clean out their accounts. The White House only recently began preventing that.

Stanzel blamed the oversight on insufficient guidance. The rationale for the parallel email system, remember, is that it is a violation of the Hatch Act to use government resources for political purposes. The Clinton White House also had a similar parallel system. But since the distinction between politics and official duties is blurred beyond distinction in the Bush White House, many staffers have understandably erred on the side of politics. As Stanzel puts it:

"I can say that historically the White House didn't give enough guidance to staff on how to avoid violating the Hatch Act while following the Records Act. We didn't do a good enough job."

But it's apparent from emails that the White House avoided the governmental email system because it was vulnerable to investigators. The Hatch Act just provided a good excuse. In 2003, for instance, a lobbyist for Jack Abramoff Kevin Ring wrote him that emails about Abramoff's clients shouldn't be sent to White House addresses because "it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc." That warning, Ring told The Washington Post, came from Jennifer Farley, a deputy in the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. Susan Ralston, Rove's personal aide, used RNC provided email accounts when corresponding with Abramoff, her old boss.

And remember that Karl Rove reportedly uses his RNC-provided account for approximately 95% of his communication.

In other words, it was an open secret at the White House that the parallel system was to be used for everything you didn't want coming out later -- an understanding that was most likely never made explicit, but a situation that was carefully preserved by not providing apparently any parameters for what sort of communication should be done via the White House system.

In 5 Years, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud
"Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews. Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year." (NY Times)

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From McClatchy Newspapers:

In his day job, Christian Adams writes legal briefs for the voting rights section of the Justice Department, a job that requires a nonpartisan approach.

Off the clock, Adams belongs to the Republican National Lawyers Association, a group that trains hundreds of Republican lawyers to monitor elections and pushes for confirmation of conservative nominees for federal judgeships.

Vice President Dick Cheney credited the 3,000-member association in 2005 with helping the Republicans win the previous two presidential elections. Last year, President Bush's political adviser Karl Rove shared with the group his insights on winning elections in key battleground states. At a conference the association organized last month, speakers called the controversy over whether eight U.S. attorneys had been fired for partisan political reasons "farcical" and "ridiculous."

According to the group's Web site, Adams is one of dozens of Bush administration appointees or civil servants who are members, including at least 25 in the Justice Department, nine in the Department of Defense and others in the Labor and Commerce departments, the White House and the Office of Special Counsel, which oversees investigations into allegations of ethical misconduct by government employees.

It's sad. The Bush Justice Department, the Republican National Lawyers Association...who can tell the difference?

Here's what the evidence shows. Karl Rove wanted evidence that there had been a Democratic criminal conspiracy to stuff the ballot box in Milwaukee and New Mexico in 2004. But the U.S. attorneys there didn't deliver. In the case of New Mexico's David Iglesias, that likely cost him his job. Wisconsin's Steve Biskupic only avoided being fired by the skin of his teeth.

Iglesias and Biskupic were the only U.S. attorneys in the country to have launched task forces to investigate voter fraud in the 2004 elections. There's arguably not another U.S. attorney in the country to have so thoroughly investigated such allegations. A review of Biskupic's manifold efforts demonstrates that without a doubt.

Despite that fact, Karl Rove and President Bush himself passed along complaints to Alberto Gonzales in October 2006 about Biskupic's and Iglesias' performance on voter fraud. Iglesias was fired. Biskupic, for some reason, wasn't. But it looks like it was a very close call.

Here's a look at Biskupic's long-running investigation into voter fraud in the 2004 election, Karl Rove's longstanding preoccupation with it, and Biskupic's near escape from being fired.

In the 2004 election, John Kerry took Wisconsin by a scant 11,813 votes. The Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee (72% for Kerry) was key to that effort. But there were problems with the records in Milwaukee -- large discrepancies between the numbers of voters and votes. Republicans screamed bloody murder, saying that the faulty records provided a prime opportunity for fraud.

So in response, Biskupic formed his Joint Election Fraud Task Force in January of 2005. The U.S. attorney's office, the FBI, the District Attorney, and the metropolitan police department teamed up to investigate. Over the following two years, they'd identify individual cases for prosecution and determine whether there had indeed been a broad-based conspiracy by Democrats to stuff the ballot.

Even as Biskupic was investigating, Republicans kept the pressure on. In August of 2005, the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Republicans Rick Wiley sent a letter to Biskupic outlining nine voter fraud cases that demanded prosecution. Biskupic replied with a letter (pdf) knocking down all nine of Wiley's pet cases.

At about the same time, in the middle of 2005, Wiley had one of his staff members prepare a lengthy memo (see page 10) called "Fraud in Wisconsin 2004: A Timeline/Summary." According to Daniel Bice of The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the report was prepared for Karl Rove.

But Rove was already interested. We know this because one of the documents released by the Justice Department last month appears to be a printout from his computer of a February 2, 2005 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article about the city's voter records. A study by the paper had found sizeable discrepancies between the number of votes and voters in the records for more than a dozen wards.

How can we tell that this was printed off of Rove's computer? Well, though the letters are cut off, you can see "ROVE_K" among the file information at the bottom (click to see the whole page):

Rove was clearly interested, circling words (like Milwaukee) in the piece and scribbling in the margin "Discuss w/ Harriet" (see image on the right) -- Harriet presumably referring to White House counsel Harriet Miers.

So as early as February of 2005, Rove was paying close attention to Milwaukee.

But Biskupic would disappoint him. In December of 2005, Biskupic announced in a press conference that his investigation had yielded no evidence of a broad conspiracy. He said that his office would pursue isolated cases of suspected fraud (see the note below for those results) -- ultimately, eighteen cases.

All that didn't stop Rove from harping on voter fraud in Milwaukee. In April of 2006, during a speech before the Republican National Lawyers Association, Rove touched on voter fraud, and the case of Milwaukee in particular. When an audience member, saying that the Democratic Party "rests on the base of election fraud," asked about the issue, Rove said, "yes, this is a real problem. What is it -- five wards in the city of Milwaukee have more voters than adults?" (Actually the article he'd printed out showed that seventeen wards had had more votes than voters.)

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Finally, we hear from Christopher Baker of Shirlington Limousine. Now that his champion Duke Cunningham's in the slammer, he's lost his contract with the Department of Homeland Security, and he's not happy about it.

And in the interview, he finally airs his views on the characters in the Cunningham saga. Brent Wilkes? He's a nice, upstanding guy. But Mitch Wade? He's got a "bad spirit."

But above all, he wants the world to know that he's no pimp. Just bad luck with customers.

From The Hill:

A Washington transportation company that was questioned in the Randy “Duke” Cunningham investigation is on the verge of losing its contract with the Department of Homeland Security, but has gone to federal court to keep it.

Shirlington Limousine and Transportation Inc. filed a lawsuit last week accusing the department of “caving” to “political pressures” surrounding the Cunningham case by illegally changing its shuttle-services contract to exclude Shirlington....

In an interview, Baker said he did nothing wrong in his interaction with Cunningham, Wilkes and Wade, or in his performance of the Homeland Security contract. He said he became a scapegoat in the Cunningham scandal and was a convenient target for Democrats in election-year politics.

“It’s like someone has an axe to grind and they’re just going to make it happen,” Baker said. “I feel like one of the Rutgers girls. All this happens, and now I’m treated like I’m a pimp.”

Baker, who testified before a grand jury in the Cunningham case, said he started driving Wilkes in 1994. He said he drove Cunningham on occasion, but that he usually saw Cunningham driving himself in a green sport-utility vehicle.

Most of the time, he said, “I saw Mr. Cunningham in his green truck. On certain occasions I drove him to the Hill or to his apartment. Duke Cunningham was a self-sufficient gentleman. He liked to drive himself.”

He said he believes Cunningham and Wilkes started off as decent men steered into making mistakes.

“I believe Duke Cunningham to be a good man who made stupid decisions,” he said. “He has been a supporter of me as an African-American businessman.”

Of Wilkes, he said, “He was a winer and a diner. He liked to take people to eat. If a young lady gets in the car, or he asks us to pick up a young lady, we don’t know who it is. We’re drivers.”

As for any prostitution occurring, he said, “It might have happened. I don’t know anything about it. And from driving Brent Wilkes, I question it happening.”

He said he continues to believe that Wilkes was a decent person until he got involved with Wade.

“Brent Wilkes has morals,” Baker said. “He crossed his morals getting involved with Mitch Wade. Mitch Wade had a bad spirit.”

From The Los Angeles Times:

Most Americans believe Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales should resign because of the controversy over his office's firing of federal prosecutors, and a big majority want White House aides to testify under oath about the issue, the Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg Poll has found.

The survey, conducted Thursday through Monday, found that 53% said Gonzales should step down because he claimed he had no role in the dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys last year — an account later contradicted by Justice Department documents and congressional testimony by his top assistant....

Respondents were divided along party lines as to whether Gonzales should resign. Among Democrats, 68% said he should do so; among Republicans, 33% said he should depart.

Independents tip the balance — 57% said they supported calls for his resignation, while 22% said they thought he should stay.

Clearly the question about Gonzales was very narrowly tailored -- it based the question about whether he should step down on his denial that he was involved in "discussions about what was going on." I could think of a host of other reasons -- that his subordinates lied to Congress, that he personally lied to senators, that he's politicized and demoralized the ranks of federal prosecutors and done heavy damage to the rule of law -- but apparently that's enough for most people to say that he should go. Not a good sign.

The poll also found that 74 percent of the public (and 49 percent of Republicans) think that Karl Rove and other White House aides should testify before Congress under oath.

Panel Said to Alter Finding on Voter Fraud
"A federal panel responsible for conducting election research played down the findings of experts who concluded last year that there was little voter fraud around the nation, according to a review of the original report obtained by The New York Times. Instead, the panel, the Election Assistance Commission, issued a report that said the pervasiveness of fraud was open to debate." (NY Times)

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Here's another legacy for the Bush administration: plummeting fraud, identity theft, and civil rights investigations by the FBI.

The reason is plain: in the wake of 9/11, the administration ordered the FBI to reorganize with a heavy influence on counterterrorism. Hundreds of agents were reassigned, and many who weren't were put on the beat anyway. Far fewer agents were left to handle other investigations.

When FBI Director Robert Mueller asked Attorney General John Ashcroft and then Alberto Gonzales for help, he was rebuffed, according to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Says a former FBI assistant director: "We were told to do more with less."

But, of course, they've done less with less. The P-I gives a rundown:

-- Overall, the number of criminal cases investigated by the FBI nationally has steadily declined. In 2005, the bureau brought slightly more than 20,000 cases to federal prosecutors, compared with about 31,000 in 2000 -- a 34 percent drop.

-- White-collar crime investigations by the bureau have plummeted in recent years. In 2005, the FBI sent prosecutors 3,500 cases -- a fraction of the more than 10,000 cases assigned to agents in 2000....

-- Civil rights investigations, which include hate crimes and police abuse, have continued a steady decline since the late 1990s. FBI agents pursued 65 percent fewer cases in 2005 than they did in 2000.

The result is not pretty:

"There's a niche of fraudsters that are floating around unprosecuted," said one recently retired top FBI official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They are not going to jail. There is no law enforcement solution in sight."...

By the time the bureau started putting together its fiscal 2007 budget in mid-2005, "we realized we were going to have to pull out of some areas -- bank fraud, investment fraud, ID theft -- cases that protect the financial infrastructure of the country," [Dale Watson, who left in 2002 as the FBI's executive assistant director over counterterrorism programs] said...

[FBI Assistant Director Chip Burrus] acknowledges that the bureau has reduced its efforts to fight fraud. He likened the FBI's current fraud-enforcement policies -- in which losses below $150,000 have little chance of being addressed -- to "triage." Even cases with losses approaching $500,000 are much less likely to be accepted for investigation than before 9/11, he said.

There is "no question" that America's financial losses from frauds below $150,000 amount to billions a year, Burrus said. The top security official for a major American bank agreed, saying unprosecuted fraud losses easily total "multibillions."

The whole thing is worth a read.

We already know that Karl Rove passed along complaints to Alberto Gonzales about certain U.S. attorneys' performance on voter fraud prosecutions. And in the case of New Mexico's David Iglesias, that complaint likely contributed to his firing.

But it's clear this is something of an obsession to Rove.

One year ago, April 7, 2006, he gave a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association, in which he covered a number of topics of interest to his audience (i.e. tort reform), but one topic seemed to hold the audience's attention in particular: voter fraud. To quote an audience member: "The Democrats seem to want to make this year an election about integrity, and we know that their party rests on the base of election fraud."

Rove had clearly spent a lot of time on it -- rattling off statistics and referring to problem counties in far-flung states with familiarity. He also showed no shyness at over-hyping the issue: "We are, in some parts of the country, I'm afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where they guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses."

Now, two of the fired U.S. attorneys -- John McKay of Seattle and David Iglesias of New Mexico -- provoked anger among the Republican leadership in their respective states by not prosecuting instances of voter fraud. Both have said they didn't prosecute after prolonged investigations because, in McKay's words, there "was no evidence."

Tellingly, both Washington and New Mexico get a special mention in Rove's remarks.

Excerpts from the speech (some of which were featured in a McClatchy piece last month), and the question and answer session that followed, are below.

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Earlier today, House Democrats subpoenaed a host of Justice Department documents, saying that they'd tried everything else, but could reach no agreement. Well, it looks like the Justice Department will continue to fight.

From The Washington Post:

Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said, "We still hope and expect that we will be able to reach an accommodation with the Congress," but signaled that Justice will consider opposing the congressional demand.

"Much of the information that the Congress seeks pertains to individuals other than the U.S. attorneys who resigned," Roehrkasse said. "Furthermore, many of the documents Congress is now seeking have already been available to them for review. Because there are individual privacy interests implicated by publicly releasing this information, it is unfortunate the Congress would choose this option."

Legal experts said the standoff will likely end up in court unless the two sides reach agreement on a compromise.

Apparently Alberto Gonzales just won't give anybody a job in the Justice Department if they're not already a U.S. attorney.

Today, Gonzales tapped U.S. Attorney for Connecticut Kevin O'Connor to be his chief of staff. O'Connor replaces U.S. Attorney for eastern Virginia Chuck Rosenberg, who served on an interim basis after Kyle Sampson stepped down.

So Gonzales has twice replaced the guy who handled the U.S. attorney purge with U.S. attorneys. Sampson, remember, was rapped by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) during the Senate hearing for being the point man on the firings while at the same time having very little prosecutorial experience (he's tried one case). And it might also have something to do with the fact that relations between Gonzales and his USAs are reportedly strained.

As The Washington Post reported this morning, many question the department's increased use of U.S. attorneys in double roles, since they must necessarily neglect their home offices.

That doesn't seem to be much of a concern. According to today's press relase from the Justice Department trumpeting O'Connor's appointment, after four to six months, "O'Connor and the Attorney General will determine whether he continues to hold both positions."

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) issued a subpoena today for a host of Justice Department documents related to the U.S. attorneys firings.

From the AP:

"We have been patient in allowing the department to work through its concerns regarding the sensitive nature of some of these materials," Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., wrote Gonzales in a letter accompanying the subpoena. "Unfortunately, the department has not indicated any meaningful willingness to find a way to meet our legitimate needs.,"

"At this point further delay in receiving these materials will not serve any constructive purpose," Conyers said.

We'll have a copy of Conyers' letter and the subpoena up soon.

Update: Here they are.

At TPM, we've been taking a hard look at the U.S. Attorney in Milwaukee, Steven Biskupic. And so, apparently, have Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

A number of Democratic committee members signed a letter today to Alberto Gonzales seeking answers:

We are concerned whether or not politics may have played a role in a case brought by Stephen Biskupic, the United States Attorney based in Milwaukee, against Georgia Thompson, formerly an official in the administration of Wisconsin’s Democratic governor. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals was reportedly so troubled by the insufficiency of the evidence against Ms. Thompson that it made the unusual decision to issue an order reversing Ms. Thompson’s conviction and releasing her from custody immediately after oral arguments in her appeal.

Democrats are seeking all documents related to Biskupic's handling of that case, including "[a]ll communications between the Department of Justice and any other outside party, including political party officials, regarding the case against Ms. Thompson or the United States Attorney’s handling of that case."

Since Biskupic's district has come up again and again in relation to voter fraud -- Karl Rove's hobby horse --,the Democrats also want to know about that and ask for all related documents.

You can read the letter here, signed by Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

One last chance, or the subpoenas come out.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee along with ranking member Arlen Specter (R-PA) wrote Attorney General Alberto Gonzales yesterday to ask again for certain withheld documents relevant to the U.S. attorney firings. If Gonzales doesn't turn them over by tomorrow, the committee will issue subpoenas for them on Thursday, they write. You can read the letter here.

The committee wants all the relevant documents, all the lists, all the rankings of U.S. attorneys, every scrap of paper.

In particular, the committee members asked for Gonzales' cheat sheets on the firings -- The Washington Post reported last week that he was reviewing “thousands of pages of documents related to his upcoming testimony" to get ready.

They also targeted documents reported on by The American Spectator last week. The mag reported that certain files in the Deputy Attorney General's office had not been turned over to Congress: "the files include overviews and evaluations of at least a dozen current and now-former U.S. Attorneys, which were prepared by DAG and EOUSA staff to brief Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and his chief of staff Michael Elston."

The Washington Post today reports on how the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales has placed six of its 93 U.S. attorneys in top positions at the department.

The meat of the piece has to do with canned U.S. attorney David Iglesias. One of the department's cover stories for firing him, remember, was that he was an "absentee landlord." As department official William Moschella told Congress last month: "Quite frankly, U.S. attorneys are hired to run the office, not their first assistants."

Well, not only are there six U.S. attorneys who are absent from their offices full-time, but one of them is Bill Mercer -- the U.S. Attorney for Montana, the acting Associate Attorney General, and an architect of the purge.

Iglesias was gone from his office 45 days each year to do his Navy reserve duty. As I noted last week, the Office of Special Counsel has launched an investigation into whether Iglesias was wrongfully terminated.

But Mercer is gone all the time -- giving the chief judge in his district, Judge Donald W. Molloy fits:

Molloy wrote a letter to Gonzales in October 2005 demanding that Mercer be replaced.

Molloy wrote that Mercer's absence had led to "a lack of leadership" in the Montana office and created "untoward difficulties for the court" and for career prosecutors. The judge also questioned whether Mercer complied with residency requirements.

Gonzales wrote back the next month that Mercer was handling both jobs admirably, and suggested that Mercer's absence would be short-lived.

Relations between Mercer and Molloy have not improved since. Molloy berated Mercer during a court hearing last year, accusing him of bringing weak cases to court to pump up statistics and telling him: "You have no credibility -- none."

"Your lawyers are not getting their briefs in on time," Molloy said. "You're in Washington, D.C., and you ought to be here in Montana doing your work. Your office is a mess."

"Performance related." Ha.

Abramoff Could Get Sentence Reduced
"Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff may be getting out of jail earlier than he expected, NBC News learned on Monday. A federal judge Monday granted the government's request for a new hearing to determine an appropriate reduction in Abramoff's sentence, a reward based on his continued cooperation with investigators in several federal probes." (NBC News)

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Once again, the Bush White House shows that it has its finger firmly on the pulse of the Iraqi people.

From the press gaggle yesterday with National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe:

QUESTION: Have you got any reaction to Muqtada al Sadr's urging his followers to rise up against the U.S. forces in Iraq?

MR. JOHNDROE: You know, the reports I've seen are that Sadr has urged his various militias, who are, again I remind everyone, operating outside the rule of law in Iraq, to not fight Iraqi security forces. And I think this sort of comment is not surprising, given these Iraqi security forces are having some success against the Jaish al Mahdi militias. And so we, the United States, and you heard Prime Minister Maliki say, everyone operating outside the rule of law need to -- will be dealt with.

And I note today that Sadr called for massive protests. I'm not sure that we've seen that, those numbers materialize and the numbers that he was seeking in his call from his hangout in Iran. But Iraq, four years on, is now a place where people can freely gather and express their opinions. And that was something they could not do under Saddam. And while we have much more progress ahead of us -- the United States, the coalition and Iraqis have much more to do -- this is a country that has come a long way from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.

From today's New York Times:

Tens of thousands of protesters loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric, took to the streets of the holy city of Najaf on Monday in an extraordinarily disciplined rally to demand an end to the American military presence in Iraq, burning American flags and chanting “Death to America!”

Everybody's in on it -- and I mean everybody. From The Reno Gazette-Journal:

Gov. Jim Gibbons said Monday he’s heard a rumor that Democrats paid the Wall Street Journal to publish stories about his relations with a defense contractor and that the coverage is designed to help Democrats in the 2008 election.

Asked about rumors of a conspiracy among Democrats against him, Gibbons said he heard the same thing but did not name a source.

“I have heard that the Democrats have paid to have these Wall Street Journal articles written,” Gibbons said. The Journal has reported that Gibbons is under investigation by the FBI for allegedly accepting unreported gifts or payments from a Reno company that was awarded secret military contracts when Gibbons was in the U.S. House.

Gibbons said he first met the Journal reporter who broke the stories, John R. Wilke, when Wilke was in Elko the night of the debate between Gibbons and Democratic rival Dina Titus of Las Vegas. Gibbons said Wilke was brought to Elko by the Titus campaign.

“When I met this guy, (Wilke), he was brought to Elko by the Dina Titus campaign and that is where I met him. So I don’t know what his agenda is, but there is nothing there with any of these allegations.”

Now, let's take a step back and see how high and wide this conspiracy goes. Not only has the (apparently conservative) Wall Street Journal been paid to write these stories about poor Jim Gibbons, but since those stories revealed a federal corruption investigation into his dealings with a defense contractor when he was in Congress, that means the (ostensibly Republican run) Justice Department is in on it too -- the FBI, the U.S. attorneys' office in Washington, everyone. And how about this for a kicker: Wilke's last story revealed that Gibbons' wife had a consulting contract with a defense contractor for which Gibbons had earmarked millions in federal dollars. There's only one conclusion to be drawn: Gibbons' wife is on it too.

Come to think of it, that cocktail waittress who alleged in October that Gibbons drunkenly assaulted her... she was also on the Dems' dole, for sure. Where does it end?

Not since ex-Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) was brought down by the liberal conspiracy to have him investigated by the FBI has my worldview been so shaken.

Note: It should go without saying that the Journal denies Gibbons' allegation... but anyway the Journal denies Gibbons' allegation.

Who's in charge of how the Justice Department handles the investigations into the U.S. attorney firings?

Alberto Gonzales, we know, is holed up rehearsing his version of the story. And the Justice Department wrote last week to assure Democrats that Gonzales and his deputy, Paul McNulty, had nothing to do with the investigations relating to the U.S. attorneys purge.

Following the rules of succession at the Justice Department, according to the letter from Assistant Attorney General Richard Hertling, the guy in charge of all that is Solicitor General Paul Clement.

That means Clement was in charge of personnel decisions relating to Monica Goodling (in other words, it was his call to make her the first ever DoJ official to stay on the payroll after pleading the Fifth), he's supervising the Department's joint investigation into the firings by the Office of Professional Responsibility and Inspector General, and he's in charge of which documents are doled over to Congress and which aren't.

So who is Clement? Since 2005, as Solicitor General, he's been the administration's face before the Supreme Court. Legal Times profiled him earlier this year. Can you guess which Supreme Court justice he used to work for?

Here's the latest instance of what is becoming a flourishing genre in the new Congress: the spurned chairman letter. It comes when oversight efforts are met with deafening silence from the administration.

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) wrote Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice such a letter (pdf) today. Last month, Waxman wrote Rice, inviting her to an April 18 hearing on the Niger forgeries and the infamous sixteen words, and asking a list of questions about what she knew about the documents and how they got into the State of the Union address. What he got in return was a mostly irrelevant letter from one of Rice's subordinates forwarding previous correspondence that answered none of his questions. He's not happy and is pressing again for answers.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) delivered one of the classics of the genre last week, berating Alberto Gonzales for his silence in response to repeated requests for information over the past several months.

The administration's strategy, if indeed it is one, seems short-sighted. It's worked for the past six years. But the Dems are in charge now -- and anger and subpoena-power is a dangerous mix.

The Los Angeles Times delves deep into the issue of the White House's parallel RNC communications system today. Democrats, particularly the House's chief investigator, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), have been pushing to get their hands on those emails -- based on the suspicion that the White House has been using those alternate email addresses to avoid keeping a record that might be vulnerable to subpoena.

The piece doesn't satisfy my curiosity. Maybe, Tom Hamburger reports, they're chock full of revealing, embarrassing material (says one GOP activist, "There is concern about what may be in these e-mails") or maybe they're all long gone because the RNC has a policy of purging "some emails" after 30 days -- or maybe it'll be a long, long time before Congress sees any emails, because the White House is bound to fight it out based on a stretched claim of executive privilege.

But it's humorous to watch the administration justify the problem by pointing a finger at the Clinton White House, which first instituted a parallel communications system:

When Karl Rove and his top deputies arrived at the White House in 2001, the Republican National Committee provided them with laptop computers and other communication devices to be used alongside their government-issued equipment.

The back-channel e-mail and paging system, paid for and maintained by the RNC, was designed to avoid charges that had vexed the Clinton White House — that federal resources were being used inappropriately for political campaign purposes....

"The system was created with the best intentions," said former Assistant White House Press Secretary Adam Levine, who was assigned an RNC laptop and BlackBerry when he worked at the White House in 2002. But, he added, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Clinton's director of politcal affairs Doug Sosnik, quoted in the article, says that the Clinton White House did set aside a "small number of separate computers and cellphones."

But, of course, there's a difference here. The line between policy and politics wasn't so very blurry then. For instance, the recent focus on the White House's parallel system is due to Karl Rove's deputy Scott Jennings' use of his RNC address to communicate with the Justice Department's Kyle Sampson about the U.S. attorney purge. But no campaign computers or cellphones were used to communicate with the Justice Department during the Clinton years, Sosnik says.

Rove's habits are instructional. Rove, remember, has a White House address -- as well as an RNC-issued blackberry and laptop. But according to a former White House official quoted in National Journal, Rove "does ‘about 95 percent’ of his e-mailing using his RNC-based account."

So perhaps the system did start as an imitation of the Clinton system. But the similarities end there.

State GOP Official Pushed Voter Fraud Issue
"For weeks, it was unclear who whined to the White House last year that not enough voter fraud cases were being prosecuted in Milwaukee. Sources tell No Quarter that Rick Wiley, then the executive director of the state GOP, directed a staffer in 2005 to prepare a 30-page report on election abuses in Wisconsin so Wiley could pass it along to a top White House official. 'The report was prepared for Karl Rove,' said a source with knowledge of the situation. 'Rick wanted it so he could give it to Karl Rove.'" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

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The New York Times delivers the first major report on the surge's progress this morning, a painstaking effort involving statistics and on the ground reports. The verdict?

American casualties are down in Iraq's provinces, but way up in Baghdad.
Sectarian killings are down, but increased use of car bombs has kept the civilian death toll high -- and anyway the beheadings seem to be surging again.
And as the U.S. moves to confront insurgents, the groups seem to be fracturing, making the fight increasingly confusing.

Or as an American private in the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry puts it:

“The insurgents, they see what we’re doing and we see what they’re doing. Then we get ahead, then they figure out what we’ve done and they get ahead.

“It’s like a game of cat and mouse. It’s just a really, really smart mouse.”

Now, remember that the whole logic for the surge was to provide stability in Baghdad so that the government could have some breathing room. But as the Times makes clear, there's nothing mixed about the political progress: there's been none.

Meanwhile, Muqtada al-Sadr seems to have ended whatever semblance of cooperation he'd offered as the U.S. tried to stabilize Baghdad. Earlier, his Mahdi Army had stood down on his orders as troops entered Sadr City. But there can be no doubt -- that time is over.

How better to sum up the situation than this: the Iraqi government was chronically undecided on whether to proclaim April 9th, the day Baghdad fell to the U.S., a national holiday. But, in the end, the holiday was forced on them:

Security remained so tenuous in the capital on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the U.S. capture of Baghdad that Iraq's military declared a 24-hour ban on all vehicles in the capital from 5 a.m. Monday. The government quickly reinstated Monday as a holiday, just a day after it had decreed that April 9 no longer would be a day off.