To excavate the depths of tragedy in Iraq, try this on for size: the attempted arrest of a minister accused of murdering another parliamentarian's sons is sparking the latest deterioration in sectarian relations. And the parliamentarian fears the Bush administration is helping the minister escape arrest in order to prevent the Maliki government from imploding.

Today the largest Sunni bloc in the Iraqi parliament, the Accordance Front, said that it was withdrawing its cabinet ministers -- including Iraq's defense minister -- to protest the attempted arrest of the outgoing culture minister, Asad Kamal al-Hashimi, an Accordance Front member. On Monday, Iraqi security forces executed a warrant issued by an Iraqi judge for Hashimi, who is wanted for the 2005 murder of the adult sons of Mithal al-Alusi, one of Iraq's most prominent secular, liberal politicians. Escaping a raid on his home, Hashimi fled to the al-Rashid hotel in the Green Zone, while his party blamed PM Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, of unfair treatment. (Maliki says he had nothing to do with the raid.)

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Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), ever the optimist, thinks it's just peachy that federal investigators have contacted as many as six of his former aides:

Doolittle said Thursday, during a weekly telephone conference with reporters, that he has no problem with his former aides talking to prosecutors because he thinks it might hasten his dismissal as a focus of the Abramoff probe.

"Why didn't they do this a year and a half ago when I wrote the attorney general, or even before that?" Doolittle said of the prosecutors.

"I finally wrote him (Attorney General Alberto Gonzales) and said please investigate," Doolittle said. "To have this dragged out for over three years is ridiculous. They've had three years to get to the bottom of this. At least they've started."

"I've always believed that the truth vindicates us," he said. "I am glad they are going to delve more into it."

It's a familiar stance from Doolittle, who's been goading prosecutors for the past couple years. In January of 2006, he announced that he'd written that letter to the attorney general, asking the Department of Justice to "come investigate me." In October of last year, his spokeswoman announced that his lawyers had been having conversations with prosecutors "which we believe have been helpful toward clearing the congressman's name." Those contacts, the spokeswoman said, had been initiated at Doolittle's request.

The thing is, prosecutors don't seem to need much encouragement (here are the reasons why). Doolittle has been in investigators' sights dating back to the very beginning of the Jack Abramoff investigation -- back in 2004, investigators subpoenaed records for Doolittle's wife's consulting firm due to her work for Abramoff. Finally, in April of this year, prosecutors offered Doolittle an opportunity to plead guilty. After he refused, FBI agents raided his Virginia home (for some reason, Doolittle wasn't happy about that).

So it's apparent the Justice Department has taken Doolittle up on his offer to "come investigate me," and they've obviously much more than just "started." But I'm sure they appreciate the support.

July 9 is the new June 28 in the U.S. attorneys scandal, if House and Senate judiciary committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and Pat Leahy (D-VT) have anything to say about it. That is, it's the next phase of the White House-Judiciary Committee showdown.

In a just-released letter (posted in full below) to White House Counsel Fred Fielding, Conyers and Leahy signal their intent to hit back against the White House's claim yesterday that its internal discussions about the firings of nine U.S. attorneys are outside congressional scrutiny. The two chairman write that unless Fielding specifies the claim of privilege for each document being withheld by July 9, they'll "consider whether the White House is in contempt of Congress." A contempt vote in committee is the first step, to be followed by a vote in the full House or Senate. Experts say the process has never gotten further. But if the clash between Congress and the White House continued, the next step would be a referral to the District of Columbia’s U.S. attorney to enforce the subpoena by seeking an indictment from a grand jury.

From the letter:

A serious assertion of privilege would include an effort to demonstrate to the Committees which documents, and which parts of those documents, are covered by any privilege that may apply.

Indeed, the subpoenas themselves specifically stated that for each document withheld, you should provide a description of the nature, source, subject matter, and date of the document; the name and address of each recipient of an original or copy of the document and the date received; the name and address of each additional person to whom any of the contents of the document were disclosed along with the date and manner of disclosure; and the specific legal basis for the assertion of privilege. Such privilege logs have been provided by the White House in previous Administrations, and this Justice Department has provided similar logs in this very matter, which have been used to help resolve disputes about the production of documents. Yet, you have failed to provide any such information.

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It's looking grim for the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The Act, one of the final masterstrokes of the GOP Congress, stripped war-on-terrorism detainees of access to U.S. courts and entrenched the Bush administration's system of military tribunals.

First, at the beginning of the month, military judges at Guantanamo Bay dismissed charges against two detainees, ruling that the detainees weren't properly classified as "unlawful enemy combatants," as the act demands. That prompted Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) to worry aloud that the commissions created "too many shortcuts in the whole process." Then, barely a week later, a panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the entire legal category of "unlawful enemy combatant," a neologism crucial for the Military Commissions Act. And now, today, the Supreme Court announced it will hear a case brought by two other detainees challenging the constitutionality of the act:

The Supreme Court, reversing course, agreed Friday to review whether Guantanamo Bay detainees may go to federal court to challenge their indefinite confinement.

The action, announced without comment along with other end-of-term orders, is a setback for the Bush administration. It had argued that a new law strips courts of their jurisdiction to hear detainee cases.

In April, the court turned down an identical request, although several justices indicated they could be persuaded otherwise.

The move is highly unusual.

The court did not indicate what changed the justices' minds about considering the issue. But last week, lawyers for the detainees filed a statement from a military lawyer in which he described the inadequacy of the process the administration has put forward as an alternative to a full-blown review by civilian courts.

Last week, Defense Secretary Bob Gates failed to convince President Bush to shutter Guantanamo. The court won't hear the case until at least the fall, as its term is concluding, so Gates will have several months to argue that the administration is at risk of having its entire legal edifice for Guantanamo Bay collapse.

The salmon are fighting back. The House Resources Committee has announced an investigation into Cheney's involvement in Klamath River water management following a WaPo report that Cheney helped to push a federal water policy that benefitted farmers but also killed over 70,000 salmon. A date for the hearing has not been set. (McClatchy)

U.S. companies are partly to blame for civil unrest in Colombia, according to Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-MA), who said at a congressional hearing yesterday that Chiquita Brands International and an Alabama coal company were funding paramilitaries with millions of dollars. (AP)

Cheney's expense account is safe. The House narrowly rejected Rep. Rahm Emanuel's (D-Ill.) proposal to cut off funding for the Office of the Vice President. (AP)

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So, the White House has claimed executive privilege, and Congress has thrown down the gauntlet. So where are we now?

Enter the legal scholars! If there's one thing they agree on, it's that there's no easy answer.

Marty Lederman over at Balkinization, no fan of the administration, calls Solicitor General Paul Clement's arguments for privilege "serious and substantial" and "consistent with similar arguments in analogous privilege memos in Democratic and Republican Administrations alike." That doesn't mean they're right, but that does mean they must be reckoned with.

Such a reckoning would be a long and murky process. It would start with a congressional vote of contempt against the White House, which would in and of itself take months. "Since 1975," USA Today tells us, "10 senior administration officials have been cited but the disputes were all resolved before getting to court. No president has mounted a court fight to keep his aides from testifying on Capitol Hill."

A long court fight is clearly more in the administration's interest than Congress', a fact that led Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) to argue yesterday that if Congress wants anything from the White House in the short term, they should take what they can get on the president's terms -- and then escalate later if they're unsatisfied. Given Democratic reactions yesterday, that seems unlikely. And as I pointed out yesterday, the White House is unlikely to go along with such a plan.

Yep, time is on President Bush's side. From McClatchy:

Mark J. Rozell, a political science professor at George Mason University, said presidents historically had put up a fuss and exerted executive privilege only to reach some sort of accommodation with Congress....

But Rozell said Bush might decide to dig in this time.

With low popularity ratings, time running out on his presidency with no anointed successor and a penchant for secrecy, "It's a nothing-to-lose presidency at this point," said Rozell, the author of "Executive Privilege: The Dilemma of Secrecy and Democratic Accountability."

"Bush lacks the kind of incentives that other presidents had to accommodate," Rozell said.

As for the impact of Bush's action Thursday on the congressional investigation into the Justice Department, Rozell said: "Clearly the president is trying to stall or shut down access to critical information that Congress feels it needs. For now, it slows the investigation and puts the two branches on a collision course constitutionally."

It's been one subpoena-crazy day, what with the White House refusing to comply with congressional demands for information about nine fired U.S. attorneys. But there's at least one set of subpoenas that won't be issued today. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has been able to come to terms with the White House about the deepening White House Security Office scandal.

On Tuesday, Waxman wrote to White House Counsel Fred Fielding to detail new allegations that the WHSO -- entrusted to ensure compliance with procedures to safeguard classified information -- is dysfunctional. The heads of the office, just-departed director James Knodell and deputy Ken Greeson, took no action when presented with charges that aides to President Bush and Vice President Cheney left classified documents strewn throughout hotel rooms and across their desks, and they themselves took cellphones and Blackberries into secure facilities in violation of protocol. A frustrated Waxman told Fielding that unless House Government Oversight Committee investigators received access to interview three current and former White House officials who could speak to the alleged pattern of abuse, Waxman would ask the committee for authority to subpoena them.

Waxman said he'd seek the subpoena authority at the committee's business meeting today. But committee aides explain that the meeting is off, as Fielding and Waxman have reached an agreement, averting the subpoenas for now. The White House has consented to "transcribed interviews" with Alan Swendimen, director of the Office of Administration; Mark Frownfelter, an ex-security officer; and former WHSO head Jeff Thompson. "The fact that we were able to reach an agreement on testimony and getting the interviews to take place will be helpful in moving the committee's inquiry forward," says an Oversight Committee staffer.

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So what does Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, have to say about the White House's invocation of executive privilege?

Sen. Specter has supported the Democrats' rejection of the White House's offer -- private testimony by aides with no oath and no transcript -- saying that such interviews should only be conducted with a transcript.

At a press conference today, he still insisted on a transcript, but softened his stance a little, reasoning that a court battle over the White House's claim of executive privilege would drag on for years. And given that "this investigation is lagging very, very badly," he said,

I think we ought to give consideration to bringing in those individuals and finding out what we can under the president's terms. It doesn't preclude us from compulsory process and proceeding with the subpoenas at a later time.

So Specter's plan is to conduct the informal interviews offered by the White House and then get tough if need be. The thing is, the White House's offer was very clear on this point. From White House counsel Fred Fielding's letter to the House and Senate judiciary committees back in March:

Such interviews would be private and conducted without the need for an oath, transcript, subsequent testimony, or the subsequent issuance of subpoenas.

The White House has made it very clear it's all or nothing with their offer -- on their terms, exclusively on their terms, or not at all. Maybe Specter thinks they'll be able to strike a deal, and given that he speaks relatively frequently with Fielding, maybe he has good reason to think so. But the White House's actions so far don't give good reason for optimism.

An extended excerpt from Specter's remarks today are below.

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The White House is only willing to permit aides to be interviewed in private, with no oath and no transcript. To which Congress says, OK, except for the lack of a transcript. As Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) argued on the Senate floor earlier this month, they need a transcript in order to hold aides to account for lying. It's a crime to lie to investigators, but without a transcript, it becomes much more difficult to prosecute that crime.

Which, it would seem, is precisely the point. During a backgrounder with reporters today, a "senior administration official" said that the arrangement had been offered in order to "provide information, not to appear to be having testimony without having testimony." False testimony is a crime; whereas false information is, well, lamentable. Transcripts would mean testimony and that would create "a perjury trap" -- I guess in the sense that a liar might get caught.

The official continued soothingly: "misleading Congress is misleading Congress, whether it's under oath or not. And so a transcript may be convenient, but there's no intention to try to avoid telling the truth."

But for some reason, Specter, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and others just won't trust in the White House's good intentions.

While Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) hasn't "expressed a specific opinion yet on this latest development," according to spokesman John Hart, the White House-Senate Judiciary Committee showdown over the U.S. Attorney firings puts him in mind of GOP blunders with the Clinton administration. It would be better for the Democratic majority to focus on government waste than "witch hunts," in Coburn's view. Says Hart:

"Recall that Dr. Coburn is perhaps the only Senator who called for Gonzales' resignation to his face so he can't be dismissed as an administration apologist. He would rather see the Majority engage in waste hunts rather than witch hunts. If Congress spent a fraction of the time it spends on political oversight on real, objective oversight of agencies we could save the taxpayers billions of dollars every year. Also, if the Majority wants to set the standard for openness and transparency they should follow Senator Obama's lead and disclose their special interest pork-barrel requests.

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Several readers have asked how it is possible that former Gov. Don Siegelman (D-AL) might go to prison for 32 charges when he was acquitted on 25 of them.

I asked Nora V. Demleiter, who wrote the case book Sentencing Law and Policy and is the managing editor of the Federal Sentencing Reporter, about the legality of the judge's decision to consider all 32 charges. She said that in fact federal judges can consider those charges during sentencing thanks to the Supreme Court's 1997 decision in United States v. Watts. In that case, the Supreme Court held that as long as the government shows that the acquitted charges pass a "preponderance of evidence" standard, they can still be entered as evidence in a sentencing hearing. (This is clearly a lower hurdle to clear than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard necessary for a criminal conviction.)

So even though Siegelman was acquitted on 25 charges, that alleged conduct can still be reviewed for sentencing.

Federal investigators are continuing on Rep. Tom Feeney's (R-FL) trail. The latest pin to drop -- the FBI has asked Florida Today for a video of an interview with Feeney. During the interview, from September of last year, Feeney minimized his relationship to Jack Abramoff to the vanishing point, saying that "“My office has never done anything for Jack Abramoff” and that "he’s never asked us for anything.” (The St. Petersburg Times later found a possible exception to that.)

“We didn’t have any relationship at all with him other than he gave us a contribution" was the kicker.

Feeney, of course, accompanied Abramoff on one of his infamous golf junkets to Scotland in 2003. Feeney was one among three lawmakers on the trip -- the other two were ex-Reps. Bob Ney (R-OH) and Tom DeLay (R-TX).

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Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) took a filleting knife to Vice President Dick Cheney's attempts to elide the Archives' Information Security Oversight Office on the House floor just now. Following through on his promise to defund the veep's office if it doesn't comply with an executive order mandating the ISOO inspect how each executive "entity" handles classified information, the House Democratic Caucus Chairman introduced an amendment to slice funding for the vice
president's office from the executive branch's budget. Watch:

Some choice excerpts:

Yesterday the vice president was forced to admit what even an eighth-grade student knew: there is no Cheney branch of government. While the vice president's excuses may change, his desire to ignore the rule remains just as strong as ever. The vice president is unwilling to risk that the documents detailing the flawed intelligence or faulty assumptions that led us into the war in Iraq [sic]. He has been held unaccountable for six years, and now he wants to be held unaccountable in the historical record as well...

If his office is not in the executive branch, then there is no executive branch office to fund. And perhaps more importantly, it underscores that the vice president is not above the law, and cannot ignore the rules. The law should follow him, whatever branch of government he chooses to hang his hat in.

Update: From Raw Story:

With limited members in the chamber, Rep. Emanuel's amendment appeared to be defeated by a voice vote. However, the bill is set to receive a recorded vote later in the day. A Democratic leadership staff member told RAW STORY that a party-line vote in favor of the amendment was expected.

Scooter Libby has a new name: inmate number 28301-016. That's according to the Bureau of Prisons, which is ready and waiting for Libby's arrival.

After losing a motion earlier this month to delay his first day in prison, Libby's currently trying a last ditch appeal before reporting to prison later this summer. If he wins, he'll remain free until an appeals court decides whether to uphold the verdict against him; if he loses, only a pardon could save him from beginning to serve his 2 1/2 year sentence.

Ed. Note: Thanks to TPM Reader HC.

The judge on Gov. Don Siegelman's (D-AL) case announced yesterday that the 25 charges a jury found Siegelman not guilty of committing are fair game during sentencing, The Birmingham News reports:

Fuller decided that charges on which Siegelman was acquitted at trial could be used in considering his sentence. Prosecutors had argued that, even though a jury did not find him guilty, there still was evidence of some wrongdoing.

The hearing continues today where prosecutors are still pressing for a 30-year prison term.

Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT), the ranking member on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, says it's a low-down dirty shame that the White House had to exert executive privilege over the U.S. attorneys subpoena. If only the Democrats, promulgating a "myth of wrongdoing," hadn't opted to "shred the Constitution":

“It is unfortunate that the Majority has seen fit to turn down reasonable offers of cooperation in favor of court battles that will do nothing except draw headlines and further distract the Judiciary Committee from work that needs to be done. After close to 10,000 pages of documents, dozens of interviews and testimony under oath, this investigation has not led, as the majority has speculated, to the White House. This investigation has spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours of work to discover politics play a part in political appointments. If the Majority had accommodated the White House in the early part of the year, we could have already interviewed these people and moved forward with the investigation.

Cannon continued, “Instead, the Majority has stonewalled and denied the Committee the ability to interview the White House staff with the intent to promulgate a myth about wrongdoing. The Majority’s stonewalling has led the American people down a path of ‘constitutional crisis’. We take an oath to defend the Constitution, not shred it.”

Here's the full statement from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

"This is a further shift by the Bush Administration into Nixonian stonewalling and more evidence of their disdain for our system of checks and balances. This White House cannot have it both ways. They cannot stonewall congressional investigations by refusing to provide documents and witnesses, while claiming nothing improper occurred. "

"Increasingly, the President and Vice President feel they are above the law --- in America no one is above law."

Update: More from Leahy, who says he'll "take the necessary steps to enforce our subpoenas backed by the full force of law":

More than three months ago, we rejected the White House’s “take it or leave it” offer of off-the-record, backroom interviews as unacceptable. Since that time, despite many attempts to narrow the dispute and begin to obtain the information we need, the White House has not made any effort to work with us on a voluntary basis. Instead, since that time, and again today it has merely restated its initial, unacceptable offer. Today, the White House has ended its charade of empty proposals and revealed its disdain for our system of checks and balances.

I issued the subpoenas after three months of exhausting every avenue of voluntary cooperation from this White House. Evidence gathered by the investigating Committees in the House and Senate shows that White House officials, including Karl Rove and Sara Taylor, were heavily involved in these firings and in the Justice Department’s response to congressional inquiries about them. Yet, even with a subpoena, the White House has not produced a single document or allowed even one White House official involved in these matters to be interviewed. The White House cannot ... stonewall congressional investigations by refusing to provide documents and witnesses, while claiming nothing improper occurred.

From the Sacramento Bee:

Federal prosecutors have recently contacted as many as a half dozen former aides to Rep. John Doolittle, seeking information from them in their investigation of the Roseville Republican's association with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, The Bee has learned.

A statement just out from House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI):

"The President's response to our subpoena shows an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government. The executive privilege assertion is unprecedented in its breadth and scope, and even includes documents that the Adminstration previously offered to provide as part of their 'take it or leave it' proposal. This response indicates the reckless disrepect this Administration has for the rule of law. The charges alleged in this investigation are serious - including obstruction of justice and misleading Congress - and the White House should be as committed to this investigation as the Congress. At this point, I see only one choice in moving forward, and that is to enforce the rule of law set forth in these subpoenas."

Update: And this just in from Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), the chairwoman of the subcommittee that's led the House's investigation:

"It's tough to get lectured on the Constitution from the same Administration that said the Vice President is his own branch of government. The fact is that the Bush Administration, which has publicly declared its commitment to getting the truth on this issue, has stonewalled from the beginning. Mr. Fielding should understand two things: that nobody in their right mind would accept a White House offer that would condone perjury, and that saying 'take-it-or-leave-it' for months is not actually negotiation."

And so the constitutional battle begins. For only the second time in its six-plus years in office, the White House today asserted executive privilege after the House and Senate judiciary committees subpoenaed White House documents about the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys.

Update: You can read the letter from White House counsel Fred Fielding here.

"With respect, it is with much regret that we are forced down this unfortunate path which we sought to avoid by finding grounds for mutual accommodation," White House counsel Fred Fielding said in a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. "We had hoped this matter could conclude with your committees receiving information in lieu of having to invoke executive privilege. Instead, we are at this conclusion."

Thursday was the deadline for surrendering the documents. The White House also made clear that (former counsel Harriet) Miers and (ex-political director Sara) Taylor would not testify next month, as directed by the subpoenas, which were issued June 13. The stalemate could end up with House and Senate contempt citations and a battle in federal court over separation of powers.

In his letter, Fielding said Bush had "attempted to chart a course of cooperation" by releasing more than 8,500 pages of documents and sending Gonzales and other senior officials to testify before Congress. The White House also had offered a compromise in which Miers, Taylor, White House political strategist Karl Rove and their deputies would be interviewed by Judiciary Committee aides in closed- door sessions, without transcripts. Democrats Patrick Leahy of Vermont and John Conyers of Michigan, the chairs of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, have rejected that offer.

On the other hand, Fielding said Bush "was not willing to provide your committees with documents revealing internal White House communications or to accede to your desire for senior advisors to testify at public hearings.

"The reason for these distinctions rests upon a bedrock presidential prerogative: for the President to perform his constitutional duties, it is imperative that he receive candid and unfettered advice and that free and open discussions and deliberations occur among his advisors and between those advisors and others within and outside the Executive Branch," Fielding said.

A third claim of executive privilege is probably not far behind. Fielding's move surely foreshadows the other looming battle between the Senate Judiciary Committee and the White House: yesterday's subpoenas for documents about the administration's warrantless surveillance program.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has a business meeting at 10 this morning. Stay tuned for its response to Fielding.

Update: Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, says the White House is engaged in "Nixonian stonewalling."

Sen. Leahy (D-VT) wants to know if a former White House lawyer testified truthfully during an appellate court nomination hearing about his role in formulating detention policies for enemy combatants. Kavanaugh testified that he had no involvement in the White House debate, but recent new stories from the Washington Post suggest otherwise. (Reuters)

Remember Shirlington Limo, the little firm that could who found its way into a contract with the Department of Homeland Security via ex-Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA)? The company was suing DHS for a wrongful termination of contract, but a judge threw the lawsuit out on the grounds that Shirlington submitted their original contract after the application deadline. Legal precedent: no points for late work. (Associated Press)

Gonzales returns to the Senate. July 26th. Get the TiVo ready. (The Politico)

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No other agency in the government has as much power over the lives of citizens as the Justice Department. That's what has made the U.S. attorney firings scandal so urgent.

And time and time again, the scandal has provided dispiriting glimpses of how the Department under Alberto Gonzales has handled that power. The latest came yesterday via Paul Charlton, the former U.S. attorney for Arizona -- who was among the eight fired last December.

One of the reasons that Charlton was fired, according to Justice Department officials, was "repeated instances of insubordination." There had been "multiple failures to follow [the attorney general's] instruction on death penalties," according to a chart officials prepared to justify the firings.

Yesterday, Charlton testified during a Senate committee hearing on the Department's implementation of the death penalty. Charlton is not anti-death penalty. He only believes, he explains, that "of all of the decisions that a prosecutor will make in his or her career, none will be more important than the whether to seek the death penalty." He takes the decision seriously.

So here's what counts as insubordination in Gonzales' Justice Department.

Last year, Charlton's office convicted Jose Rios Rico, a methamphetamine dealer who was charged with slaying his supplier. They decided against seeking the death penalty according to a simple rule: while the evidence had been sufficient to convince a jury that Rico was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, it was not sufficient to be sure beyond all doubt. Rico had been convicted based on the testimony of cooperating witnesses, despite the lack of forensic evidence (there was no body). Charlton explained:

This paucity of forensic evidence, evidence that doesn't forget and cannot lie, means, in my opinion, that Rios Rico should not be a death penalty case. If a government seeks to take another person's life it should do so on only the best of evidence.

It's not that prosecutors didn't know where Rico's body was -- it's in a landfill. But it would cost $500,0000 to $1 million to retrieve the body. When Charlton requested that money, the Department refused.

The attorney general's Death Penalty Committee makes the final recommendations in such cases, and so Charlton and his assistant U.S. attorneys sought to convince the committee that a life sentence was more appropriate for Rico. The committee decided against them. Instead, Charlton received a letter from the attorney general "authorizing" (read: ordering) him to seek the death penalty. Under John Ashcroft, Charlton says, he would have received notification of the disagreement before receiving such an "authorization."

The pattern was to continue. Charlton sought a reconsideration of the committee's decision. And here things went downhill:

My most memorable discussion took place with Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. After speaking with McNulty, I received a call from his chief of staff, Mike Elston. Elston indicated that McNulty had spoken to the Attorney General and that McNulty wanted me to be aware of two things. First, that McNulty had spent a significant amount of time on this issue with the Attorney General, perhaps as much as 5 to 10 minutes. Second, McNulty wanted me to know that in presenting my view, he, McNulty, had remained neutral, neither supporting nor opposing my position. I was struck that on an issue as important as whether to execute someone, so little time would be devoted to the topic and that the Deputy Attorney General would maintain a neutral position. Elston reported that the Attorney General remained in favor of seeking the death penalty.

Charlton asked Elston if he could speak directly with the attorney general, a request memorialized in an email, dated August 15, 2006. It's from Elston to Kyle Sampson, Gonzales' chief of staff:

In the “you won’t believe this category,” Paul Charlton would like a few minutes of the AG’s time. I explained that he had already been given extensive, unusual process and that I did not think that it was a good idea for him to press this, but he insisted on me making the request.

Your thoughts?

Sampson's reply was to the point: "Denied."

As in so many other instances, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey provided a striking contrast to the current leadership when he testified before the House Judiciary Committee on this question earlier this year.

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US District Judge Mark Fuller announced a sentence range today of ten to 12 years in prison for former Gov. Don Siegelman (D-AL) and eight to ten years for his codefendant.

From the AP:

After hearing attorneys for Siegelman and Scrushy object to findings in a sentencing report filed by federal probation officers, U.S. District Judge Mark Fuller issued his findings on a sentence range for the defendants.

He found that the range for Siegelman was from 121 months to 151 months, with a fine range from $17,500 to $175,000. The prison sentence range for Scrushy was from 97 months to 121 months and the fine range from $15,000 to $150,000.

Fuller does not have to follow the guidelines and can give final sentences that are harsher or more lenient.

The prosecution pushed again today for a 30-year sentence for Siegelman.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) continues his full-court press on Dick Cheney's claims to be exempt from oversight on how his office handles classified information. In a just-released letter (pdf) to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Waxman -- joined by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) -- asks after the status of a DOJ review requested by the head of the Archives' Information Security Oversight Office in January to settle the matter of whether the vice presidency resides in the executive branch:

Due to conflicting statements from your department, the status of your review in this matter is unclear. More than six months have passed since (ISOO Director J. William) Leonard's letter to you, and the Information Security Oversight Office has received no response to its inquiry. ... Last week, however, a spokesperson in the Department of Justice stated that this matter is under review in the department.

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And so it continues:

California GOP Rep. John Doolittle's former legislative director said Wednesday he was recently contacted by federal investigators in their probe of Doolittle's ties to jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Pete Evich, Doolittle's legislative director from 1998 to 2002 and now a lobbyist, told The Associated Press that he plans to talk to the Justice Department.

From the AP:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales met with federal prosecutors here Wednesday, where he caused an uproar by firing U.S. Attorney John McKay last December.

He also met with relatives of longtime Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Wales, who was shot to death at his Seattle home in October 2001. The murder remains unsolved, and Gonzales' now-former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, suggested in a congressional interview that the reason McKay was targeted for firing might have been that he was too aggressive in asking for additional resources to investigate the crime.

"Bringing those involved in his killing to justice is of the utmost importance to the (Justice) Department," Gonzales said in a statement issued Wednesday morning. "Together, we will work as long and hard as it takes to solve this crime and prosecute those responsible."

Gonzales has testified that he was not aware of DOJ officials using the Wales case as a reason to fire McKay, whose former office remains recused from the investigation. McKay has suggested that Sampson made up that explanation to disguise what might have been the real reason for McKay's firing: His decision not to bring election fraud charges in the extremely close 2004 governor's election in Washington state, won by Democrat Chris Gregoire after two recounts.

Ex-Gov. Don Siegelman (D-AL) is again questioning the motives and impartiality of the prosecutors who want to put him away for 30 years. And the prosecutors keep giving him good reason to.

Siegelman's sentencing hearing, which has extended into its second day today, has provoked his latest assertions.

His lawyers have also raised objections to prosecutors supporting their call for an extraordinarily tough sentence by using evidence connected to charges on which Siegelman was acquitted. Siegelman was charged with 32 counts, but acquitted of 25. According to the New York Times, Siegelman's lawyers have had it:

“The government is asking that he be penalized for every single thing he was charged with, whether he was acquitted or not,” said Susan James, a Siegelman lawyer. “The government drastically lost the case,” she said. “We strongly object to the court considering acquitted conduct.”

This is not the first time Siegelman has called his prosecution biased. He has long maintained that the investigation was based on a Republican vendetta. He's pointed to an affidavit signed by Republican lawyer Dana Jill Simpson to support his claim.

As we've detailed before, Simpson says she heard Bill Canary, a state GOP operative, say Karl Rove had promised to get the Justice Department on Siegelman. Canary also allegedly said he'd get his "girls" on Siegelman, referring to two of the US attorneys in the state.

One of those US attorneys is Canary's wife. After launching an investigation, she was forced to recuse herself from the case after objections from Siegelman's lawyers. The head prosecutor on Siegelman's case now, Acting US Attorney Louis V. Franklin, has claimed he has had complete independence from Canary. He even goes so far as to say he was solely responsible for Siegelman's case.

But there is reason to think he protests too much.

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The CIA's declassification of its "family jewels" -- decades-old files on scandals past -- may have attracted a ton of attention, but the Senate Judiciary Committee this afternoon subpoenaed the Bush administration's family jewels: information on the origin and execution of President Bush's warrantless surveillance program. Circle July 18 on your calendars -- that's the compliance deadline. If it's not met, the committee will seek explanatory testimony from White House chief of staff Josh Bolton, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Cheney chief of staff David Addington, and National Security Counsel executive director V. Philip Lago.

The committee wants a ton of material: all documents from September 11, 2001 on the program's legality; the administration's filings to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court; deals reached between the administration and "telecommunications companies, internet service providers, equipment manufacturers, or data processors" on potential liability to these companies for complying with the program; everything from the now-famous Comey episode; and more. If the administration wants to assert privilege over any of the subpoenaed material or testimony, it must specify the basis of that assertion "in sufficient detail to ascertain the validity of the claim," rather than relying on blanket claims of congressional impertinence.

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The trigger is pulled. Breaking news from the AP:

The Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney's office Wednesday for documents relating to President Bush's warrant-free eavesdropping program.Also named in subpoenas signed by committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., were the Justice Department and the National Security Council.

The committee wants documents that might shed light on internal squabbles within the administration over the legality of the program, said a congressional official speaking on condition of anonymity because the subpoenas had not been made public.

Leahy's committee authorized the subpoenas previously as part of its sweeping investigation into how much influence the White House exerts over the Justice Department and its chief, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Get ready for a huge court fight. The White House has already indicated it will challenge the subpoenas on the grounds that the executive branch has a right to receive confidential advice.

At an acrimonious hearing underway of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on the surge, retired Major General John Batiste, a former division commander in Iraq turned critic of the war, got on the administration's case for recently attributing most violence in Iraq to al-Qaeda. The audio gets a little screwy, but bear with us:

I also believe we cannot attribute all the violence in Iraq to al-Qaeda. There's a tendency now to lump it all together, and call it al-Qaeda. We have to be very careful with that. This is a very complex region. al-Qaeda is certainly a component. But there's larger components. al-Qaeda is a worldwide organization. It recognizes no national boundaries. And it's in areas where we ought to be focused.

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The latest development in ex-Rep. Tom DeLay's (R-TX) looooong, winding legal road: DeLay successfully argued to have a conspiracy charge dropped against him -- but he's still on the hook for money laundering charges. Today a state appeals court upheld an earlier district court ruling, the AP reports. To give you a sense of how fast they move down there in Texas, it took a whole year for the appeals court to deliver its ruling.

DeLay was indicted in September of 2005 by Austin District Attorney Ronnie Earle -- since then, both camps have been battling over the charges. A trial date has still not been set.

The charges here deal with accusations that DeLay helped funnel corporate political contributions (illegal in Texas) through his political committees to state candidates. DeLay is also reportedly under federal investigation for his ties to Jack Abramoff, but he has not been charged.

Apparently that letter from David Addingtion to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) yesterday really did constitute a wholesale retreat from the "fourth branch" argument. No more will you hear Cheney's lawyers claim that the vice president isn't in the executive branch, reports Mike Allen at The Politico:

The White House has no plans to reassert the argument there is any vice presidential distinction from the executive branch, the officials said.

Two senior Republican officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the rationale had been the view of the vice president’s lawyers, not Cheney himself.

But as Addington made clear in his letter this morning (by a transparently weak argument), that doesn't mean that the vice president will submit to review by the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office. So the game's still on. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) is still planning a vote late today or tomorrow on cutting off the VP's office $4.8 million in executive-branch funding. We'll keep you updated as that approaches.

Those salmon never stood a chance.

As The Washington Post reports this morning in part four of the paper's series on Vice President Cheney, when the fate of some endangered salmon threatened Republican electoral prospects in Oregon, Cheney sprang into action. Farmers wanted water from the Klamath River basin diverted for irrigation, but federal biologists said that two species of fish were at stake. From the Post:

Bush and Cheney couldn't afford to anger thousands of solidly Republican farmers and ranchers during the midterm elections and beyond. The case also was rapidly becoming a test for conservatives nationwide of the administration's commitment to fixing what they saw as an imbalance between conservation and economics.

And as the Post details, Cheney reached deep into the Interior Department to make sure that the issue was dealt with.

But Karl Rove also weighed in -- in his own way. Just in case the vice president's heavy hand wasn't enough, Rove made sure that Department officials far and wide knew where the administration stood on the issue by way of one of his now famous PowerPoint presentations.

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Part IV of the Washington Post’s profile of Dick Cheney arrives today, with a focus on his interest in the environment. In 2001, Cheney reached down the chain of command to overturn the EPA in the case of the Klamath River; his intervention privileged the farmers and ranchers over government scientists in a hotly contested election state. (Washington Post)

Several complaints have surfaced recently that the Justice Department, which is tasked with documenting other agencies' progress in enforcing the Freedom of Information Act, produced reports that seriously overstated government-wide success in compliance. (Think Progress)

An institute director for the National Institute of Health has been found in gross violation of conflict-of-interest guidelines for, among other things, not divesting his holdings in biotechnology and pharmaceutical stocks. (Washington Post)

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Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman caught in the Dick Cheney information-security scandal, relies on the fact that she's not a lawyer to deflect questions on Cheney's claims to be outside both the executive and the legislative branches of government. What's David Addington's excuse?

Addington -- who served as Cheney's chief lawyer before becoming his chief of staff after Scooter Libby was indicted -- wrote a letter (pdf) to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) yesterday defending Cheney's asserted exemption from review by the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office. He's got two options: either argue that the Office of the Vice President is outside the scope of the executive order governing review of how executive branch agencies are supposed to handle classified material, or return to the claim that the veep is a unique branch of government and is exempt by default. Addington, somewhat surprisingly, chooses Option One.

The executive order on classified national security information -- Executive Order 12958 as amended in 2003 -- makes it clear that the Vice President is treated like the President and distinguishes the two of them from "agencies." The executive order gives the ISOO, under the supervision of the Archivist of the United States, responsibility to oversee certain activities of "agencies," but not of the Vice President or the President.

As TPMmuckraker highlighted yesterday, that amended order, known as Executive Order 13292, doesn't just deal with "agencies," it also deals with Executive Branch "entities." Former Justice Department lawyer Marty Lederman explains that because both the President's office and the OVP "are 'entities' within the Executive branch, they are 'agencies' covered by the E.O. (see section 6.1(b)) under a plain reading of the E.O."

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While former state Senate President Ben Stevens (R-AK) headed a seafood grant board that his father, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) funded with millions in federal dollars, the younger Stevens took in thousands of dollars in consulting fees from the very companies that won the allocations. At least some of those fees, one retired Alaska fisherman has said under oath, were veiled bribes.

The fisherman, Victor Smith, spoke with the FBI in Seattle last year, just before a grand jury in Alaska issued at least three fisheries subpoenas. Smith said the agents wanted information on how the Stevenses were connected to the fishery scandal that he and others have complained and written about for years. "They were mainly interested in payments to Ben Stevens and anything I had related to Ted Stevens," Smith told me.

In a signed affidavit (available here), Smith recounts a meeting between two affiliated fishery associations where the head of one group fielded a question from a member. The member wanted to know how Ben Stevens would be paid $500,000 now that his father had gotten $53 million for a project that would benefit the industry. According to Smith's affidavit:

* The reply from Zuanich was “I’m confident that, with a little convoluted accounting, we can keep the payments to Ben Stevens off of PSVOA’s books.”

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Prosecutors had asked for only five months imprisonment, coupled with five months house arrest for Steven Griles, the former #2 at the Interior Department who's pled guilty to lying to Senate investigators about his relationship with Jack Abramoff.

A federal judge, apparently unconvinced that Griles had learned anything from the whole affair, today sentenced him to twice that. From the AP:

The Interior Department's former No. 2 official was sentenced to 10 months in prison Tuesday for lying to senators in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, the highest administration official sentenced in the probe....

"Even now you continue to minimize and try to excuse your conduct," [Judge Ellen] Huvelle told Griles.

Griles had asked for three months home confinement and community service in the form of pro bono lobbying.

We knew from the Valerie Plame leak that the White House isn't exactly diligent with classified information. And we learned from Dick Cheney's claim that he's a fourth branch of government that he didn't really care who knew. But check out what Rep. Henry Waxman found.

In a letter today to White House Counsel Fred Fielding, Waxman disclosed numerous instances of sloppiness with classified material by both the president and the vice president's retinues, as well as what White House security officers told Waxman is a "systematic breakdown" in responding to security breaches. Indeed, according to Waxman, over half of the staff of the White House Security Office -- which is charged with protecting secrecy guidelines alongside the Archives' Information Security Oversight Office -- have quit over the last year.

To give the most baroque examples, Waxman's investigation found White House officials leaving classified material "unattended in a hotel room" as well as plopped on their desks at work. Typically, the White House Security Office did nothing in response.

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We noted last week that a Washington, DC grand jury -- rather than one in Anchorage --is investigating Sen. Ted Stevens' (R-AK) shifty involvement with oil services company Veco Corp. Today the Anchorage Daily News offers more fodder for why federal investigators would want to set up shop so far from home.

The story is about the headache prosecutors are nursing in selecting a jury for the trial of former state Rep. Tom Andseron (R-AK). Anderson is charged with taking $24,000 in bribes from a company hoping to build a number of private prisons in Alaska. Though the case is not directly tied to the Veco scandal, Anderson was a Veco consultant while in office.

Prosecutors are hitting two problems with potential jurors that cut in opposite directions: their apparent low regard for local politicians and the inevitable ties within a small community. Here's what two rejected jury candidates had to say about Anderson:

"I've already made up my mind," Donald Burns of Soldotna told a U.S. District Court judge on Monday. Burns, wearing a T-shirt and a baseball cap, said he listens to talk radio, watches TV news and reads two newspapers. "I hope they hang him," he said.

...

When longtime Anchorage resident Hannah Davis heard about the charges against Anderson, her reaction was, "Oh no, not another one," she told the judge. Too often, people in power, from Anchorage to Washington, D.C., use their positions for personal gain, she said.

As for community ties, one potential juror said she had gone on a date with Anderson and said she found the accusations "kind of unbelievable."

How a potential jury would receive Stevens if he were ever on trial is hard to say. Stevens has been in office since 1968 and is an Alaska icon, bringing his state millions in federal dollars. His re-election campaign has already raked in $1 million and no viable competitor has stepped up to the plate. But some in the state have called him less popular and more vulnerable than in past elections. However a jury might cut for Stevens, it's clear that a prosecutor won't find 12 Alaskans who've never heard of him.

Former Alabama governor, Don Siegelman (D), goes to court today for the start of his sentencing hearing which is expected to drag on for days. The former lawmaker faces up to 30 years in prison, while his his co-defendant, health care executive Richard Scrushy, could get 25 years -- both are ostensibly life sentences. Siegelman was convicted of appointing Scrushy to a public board in exchange for a donation to a lottery campaign.

Siegelman maintains his innocence and says the prosecution stemmed from a politically-motivated vendetta by Republicans. A Republican lawyer, Dana Jill Simpson, attested to this possibility in a sworn affidavit implicating Karl Rove in pushing the Justice Department to bring a case against Siegelman. (Simpson's affidavit is available here.)

Siegelman and others have called the prosecution's insistence on a long prison sentence further evidence of ulterior motives. As a contrast, Siegelman points to the last time an Alabama governor -- Guy Hunt (R) -- was convicted on political corruption charges, in 1993. A key prosecutor in that case, Steve Feaga, did not push for jail time. Now, that same prosecutor has fought for the 30-year term for Siegelman. From an editorial in the Birmingham News :

"The government doesn't contend I ever put a penny in my pocket, and they're asking for a life sentence," Siegelman said. "For the Republican governor who actually stole $200,000, Mr. Feaga did not ask for a day in prison, not a day."

The Los Angeles Times pointed out today that a 30 year sentence is longer than the average term served in Alabama for murder.

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Well, that clears that up. After a long are-they-or-aren't-they period, BAE, the British defense giant accused of paying $2 billion in kickbacks to Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia over 20 years, admitted today that the Justice Department is investigating the company.

For years, Tim Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who’s been at the center of the U.S. attorney controversy, has been dogged by allegations that he was a part of a 2004 scheme to block African-Americans in Florida from voting.

As Greg Palast first reported for the BBC, an August, 2004 email sent to a number of Republican National Committee operatives contained a spreadsheet of the names and addresses of more than 1,800 voters in Duval County, Florida, a mostly white county that includes the city of Jacksonville. Palast reported that the addresses were located in mostly black neighborhoods, and his story, followed by others posted this year on his website and the Brad Blog, alleged that the list was compiled in order to challenge African-American voters at the polls. We sought to test that conclusion through our own analysis of the data.

The result? Our comparative analysis of the spreadsheet with Duval County voter rolls shows that most names were of African-Americans. (For more on the analysis, see below.) Such a finding, voting rights experts told me, strengthened allegations that Griffin, working for the Republican National Committee, was involved in an effort to target African-American voters. “It is difficult to explain other than an effort to target Democrats and by extension, minority voters,” Toby Moore, a former political geographer with the Justice Department, said.

Michael McDonald, an Associate Professor at George Mason University and an expert on elections statistics, said that the chance that the list is randomly so different from the population is less than 1 in 10,000. It is illegal to target voters based on their race under the Voting Rights Act. Griffin resigned earlier this month as the U.S. attorney for Little Rock after a six-month stint.

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Dana Perino, the occasionally flustered White House spokeswoman, has at least been consistent in her line that the executive order governing classification procedures that's gotten Dick Cheney into trouble lately also doesn't apply to President Bush. Today The Los Angeles Times' Josh Meyer points out why Perino's been saying that: the president's office itself rebuffed the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) found that in 2005, ISOO investigators came to the West Wing to inspect senior Bush aides' handling of classified information, only to be turned away by White House security officers. At the risk of a cheap shot, Saddam Hussein gave about as much access to UNMOVIC weapons inspectors in 2002 than Bush aides gave to the ISOO.

Now, here's the rub. If President Bush and Vice President Cheney clearly fall outside the scope of the executive order, as Perino said yesterday, why does ISOO, the agency directed under the order to ensure complaince, insist on inspecting them? The order, known as Executive Order 13292, gives the ISOO the authority "to conduct on-site reviews of each agency's program established under this order." Neither the president nor the vice president run any agency. But here's how EO 13292 defines "agency":

"Agency" means any "Executive agency," as defined in 5 U.S.C. 105; any "Military department" as defined in 5 U.S.C. 102; and any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information.

That's President Bush's language: he amended the executive order on March 25, 2003. (Basically, he gave the vice president power to automatically declassify information; it became an issue in the Valerie Plame leak case.) He could have easily cleared up any confusion about ISOO's ability to investigate his own office with a few uses of the word "exempt," but he didn't -- and now he's insisting that the order contains an implicit exemption.

It's an improvisatory kind of legal reasoning, it seems -- and it's no wonder Perino (who's apologizing all the time these days for her lack of a "legal mind") is having trouble keeping up.

David Lopez, former chief of staff to Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), has given several hundreds of documents to federal investigators looking into his one-time employer. (Associated Press)

What do you do when Cheney claims not to be part of the executive? Democrats are toying with the idea of blocking the budget of the Vice President, since Cheney’s budget is currently lodged in the executive-branch spending bill. (The Hill)

The House Ethics Committee sent a stern note reminding lawmakers of their responsibility to give the committee 30-day notice to approve any private travel requests. The new rule, which took effect earlier this year, seems to have been ignored by many thus far. (Roll Call)

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Wouldn't you know it. Where there's a corruption investigation, there's also the Solomonic wisdom of Dick Cheney. And so it went with the William Jefferson affair, according to part three of Bart Gellman and Jo Becker's Cheney series. Had Cheney not changed his mind on the FBI's power to seize Jefferson's files, the top tier of Justice Department and FBI officials would have quit.

In May 2006, the FBI executed a warrant on Jefferson's House office, seizing numerous documents relevant to its bribery investigation. House Republicans -- and, let's not forget, now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- demanded the FBI relinquish what they'd taken from Jefferson, fearing the precedent the raid would set for other members of Congress and elevating the dispute to a separation of powers issue.

According to Gellman and Becker, Cheney sided with Congress, one of the few times that he's done so since joining the executive ... er, since becoming vice president. And, as the series has demonstrated, Cheney more often than not gets his way with the administration. This time, however, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, his deputy Paul McNulty, and FBI Director Robert Mueller all threatened to resign if forced to return Jefferson's files.

Here's what happened next:

White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten called a meeting on May 25, 2006, to resolve the political and legal crisis. The president's lawyers and congressional liaison were in the room, and so was Cheney. Once again, it was the vice president who came up with a solution, according to a participant. Cheney's plan met his goal of keeping the files from federal investigators. The files would be placed under seal for 45 days. Within hours of the meeting, Bush made Cheney's recommendation official.

The irresistible question: has Cheney inserted himself in the investigation of any other high-profile corruption scandals?

Apropos of the Washington Post's exploration of Dick Cheney's role in the development of interrogations policy, TPMmuckraker has obtained a document from the 2002 trial of John Walker Lindh -- the American captured in Mazar-e-Sharif in 2001 fighting for the Taliban -- in which Donald Rumsfeld's general counsel, William J. Haynes II, is said to have advised the commander of U.S. forces in Mazar to "take the gloves off" when interrogating him.

The Los Angeles Times's Richard Serrano, in June 2004, first described the document, a statement of fact by Lindh prosecutor Paul McNulty (yes, that Paul McNulty) entered into the court record, about the circumstances behind Lindh's interrogation. But to our knowledge, this is the first time the document has become publicly available.

In the weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration feverishly debated what was legal and appropriate treatment for interrogations of al-Qaeda detainees. The Post reports today that the effort began with allowing the CIA access to interrogation techniques not permitted under the Geneva Conventions, but that Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted military interrogators to have the same expanded authority, a position shared by Haynes. According to the document, months before President Bush issued a February 2002 order calling for detainees to be treated humanely "subject to military necessity," Haynes instructed military interrogators to "take the gloves off" on an American citizen. From McNulty's discovery filing:

(An individual identified as U.S. Army #6)'s understanding was that he could not collect (intelligence from Lindh) that could be used in a criminal court. After the first hour of interrogation, he gave the admiral in charge of Mazar-e-Sharif a summary of what the interrogators collected up to that point. The admiral told him that the Secretary of Defense's counsel had authorized him to "take the gloves off" and ask whatever he wanted.

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On Friday, TPMmuckraker reported on an affidavit from Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Abraham, an Army reserve intelligence officer, that suggests widespread flaws in the process of classifying a detainee as an enemy combatant at Guantanamo Bay. Abraham was replying to his former boss at the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants, Rear Admiral James McGarrah, who testified last month that there was no significant problem with the military process, known as a Combatant Status Review Tribunal. Last week, Abraham accused McGarrah of knocking him off the CSRTs after he argued that a certain detainee shouldn't be considered an an enemy combatant. TPMmuckraker has Abraham's declaration here and McGarrah's here.

McGarrah presents a straight description of the process detainees have to challenge the facts of their designation: on their behalf, officials known as Recorders and Case Writers dig through Defense Department databases, and request access to those of other agencies, in order to present a fact-file of the circumstances behind their detention. (The CSRTs are administrative procedures, not legal ones, but the administration contends that such non-legal proceedings still constitute sufficient process rights for detainees.) And it's here that Abraham challenged McGarrah, contending that the Recorders and Case Writers typically don't know how to handle classified information and that the information the databases yield on detainees are frequently generic, incomplete or outdated.

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In 2005, the liberal Center for American Progress broke a long-standing Washington think-tank taboo: it called for a staggered withdrawal from Iraq. Despite being far from alone in believing the Iraq war was essentially lost, no other think-tank had put forth a strategy paper on actually winding down the U.S. troop commitment, preferring to propose discrete changes in war strategy instead of a broader re-think. However controversial the paper was at the time, several of the proposals in "Strategic Redeployment" -- combat-troop withdrawal by the end of 2007; a shift in emphasis toward counterterrorism operations by a residual force of 1,000 Marines and Special Operations Forces; intensified regional diplomacy -- have achieved the status of conventional wisdom in mid-2007, thanks in part to the partial blessing of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, which bore some similarities in its own recommendations.

Today CAP is at it again. In a just-released paper, "Strategic Reset," CAP's Iraq team expands "Strategic Redeployment" for a post-surge Middle East, "in order to counter the threat from global terrorist groups and ensure stability in the entire Middle East and Gulf region." The basic idea is to pull American forces out of Iraq -- and U.S. resources out of Iraqi politics -- while entrenching a diplomatic and military commitment to the region. Among two of its starker recommendations: "immediately" ending the "unconditional" training and equipping of the Iraqi security forces and abandoning the Iraqi political process, which shows little capability of resolving sectarian conflict.

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From McClatchy:

Four days before the 2004 election, the Justice Department’s civil rights chief sent an unusual letter to a federal judge in Ohio who was weighing whether to let Republicans challenge the credentials of 23,000 mostly African-American voters.

The case was triggered by allegations that Republicans had sent a mass mailing to mostly Democratic-leaning minorities and used undeliverable letters to compile a list of voters potentially vulnerable to eligibility challenges.

In his letter to U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott of Cincinnati, Assistant Attorney General Alex Acosta argued that it would "undermine" the enforcement of state and federal election laws if citizens could not challenge voters’ credentials....

...Robert Kengle, former deputy chief of the department’s Voting Rights Section who served under Acosta, said the letter amounted to "cheerleading for the Republican defendants."

"It was doubly outrageous," he said, "because the allegation in the litigation was that these were overwhelmingly African-American voters that were on the challenge list."

As McClatchy points out, Tim Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who went on to become U.S. attorney for Little Rock, was accused of being involved in precisely the same sort of thing back in 2004 while working for the RNC. More on that later.

White House strategist Karl Rove has been markedly quiet on the subject of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D), despite being accused of orchestrating a political prosecution that now stands to land the former lawmaker in prison for 30 years.

A reporter from The Huntsville Times caught Rove on Thursday on a visit to the state with President Bush. The reporter asked Rove about the allegations made by a Republican lawyer in a sworn affidavit (available here). The lawyer, Dana Jill Simpson, claims that on a conference call in 2002, a GOP strategist said he and Rove spoke about having the Department of Justice investigate Siegelman purely to get him out of the way.

Rove's response (with a smile) to such an explosive accusation:

"I know nothing about any phone call," Rove said.

Then a White House press aide stepped up and said, "What he meant to say was that he has no comment."

No one has accused of Rove of being involved in the call -- just that his name was mentioned in it.

Siegelman was convicted last year of appointing a chief executive of a health care company, Richard Scrushy, to a hospital board in exchange for a $500,000 contribution to an education fund. Siegelman's sentencing hearing is scheduled for tomorrow. The prosecution seeks a 30 year prison term.

It probably shouldn't come as a surprise anymore. But in a report to be released today, Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, criticizes KBR for improper bookkeeping and overcharging in a portion of its multi-billion Iraq contracts. From the Washington Post:

As part of its contract, KBR provides gas for vehicles and generators in the Green Zone. In today's report, auditors wrote, "we found weaknesses in KBR's fuel receiving, distributing and accountability processes of such magnitude that we were unable to determine an accurate measurement of the fuel services provided."...

The fuel database kept by KBR also revealed flaws. More fuel had been sent out than generators could hold. When auditors looked at the database in September 2006, it showed that 12,622 liters had been issued for December 2006 -- "a future date and an obvious impossibility," the audit said.

Bowen is quoted as saying that both the administration and KBR have "aggressively responded" to the problems identified in his audit. We'll see: the next scheduled KBR-related report from Bowen is due in October.

With all the recent press about Dick Cheney's exemption from oversight, there is at least one person who is not interested in pursuing the matter further: Alberto Gonzales. (Think Progress)

This explains Cheney’s recent exemption from the oversight of a recent executive order: where the order said all executives agencies, the White House assumed it was understood that both the President and the Vice President’s offices were exempt. (LA Times)

Two lobby firms strike back at Harper’s editor Ken Silverstein for his article about the close ties between lobbyists and corrupt foreign governments, and Silverstein looks into their explanations. (Harper’s)

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Bart Gellman and Jo Becker continue their excellent series on Vice President Dick Cheney with an exquisite piece on Cheney's role in interrogations. At every stage in the post-9/11 debate, Cheney and his staff sought to enshrine torture as official U.S. policy, relying on a legalistic distinction between "torture" and "cruelty."

David S. Addington, Cheney's general counsel, set the new legal agenda in a blunt memorandum shortly after the CIA delegation returned to Langley. Geneva's "strict limits on questioning of enemy prisoners," he wrote on Jan. 25, 2002, hobbled efforts "to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists."

No longer was the vice president focused on procedural rights, such as access to lawyers and courts. The subject now was more elemental: How much suffering could U.S. personnel inflict on an enemy to make him talk? Cheney's lawyer feared that future prosecutors, with motives "difficult to predict," might bring criminal charges against interrogators or Bush administration officials.

Geneva rules forbade not only torture but also, in equally categorical terms, the use of "violence," "cruel treatment" or "humiliating and degrading treatment" against a detainee "at any time and in any place whatsoever." The War Crimes Act of 1996 made any grave breach of those restrictions a U.S. felony [Read the act]. The best defense against such a charge, Addington wrote, would combine a broad presidential direction for humane treatment, in general, with an assertion of unrestricted authority to make exceptions.

The vice president's counsel proposed that President Bush issue a carefully ambiguous directive. Detainees would be treated "humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of" the Geneva Conventions. When Bush issued his public decision two weeks later, on Feb. 7, 2002, he adopted Addington's formula -- with all its room for maneuver -- verbatim.

In a radio interview last fall, Cheney said, "We don't torture." What he did not acknowledge, according to Alberto J. Mora, who served then as the Bush-appointed Navy general counsel, was that the new legal framework was designed specifically to leave room for cruelty. In international law, Mora said, cruelty is defined as "the imposition of severe physical or mental pain or suffering." He added: "Torture is an extreme version of cruelty."

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The vice president's office -- where information goes, never to return.

From today's Washington Post profile of Cheney (one part of four):

Stealth is among Cheney's most effective tools. Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI." Experts in and out of government said Cheney's office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to "sensitive compartmented information," the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words "treated as," they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security."

Across the board, the vice president's office goes to unusual lengths to avoid transparency. Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. His general counsel has asserted that "the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch," and is therefore exempt from rules governing either. Cheney is refusing to observe an executive order on the handling of national security secrets, and he proposed to abolish a federal office that insisted on auditing his compliance.

In the usual business of interagency consultation, proposals and information flow into the vice president's office from around the government, but high-ranking White House officials said in interviews that almost nothing flows out. Close aides to Cheney describe a similar one-way valve inside the office, with information flowing up to the vice president but little or no reaction flowing down.

It's so hard to find good help these days.

That seems to be especially true in presidential campaigns recently. Rudy Giuliani’s South Carolina state chairman has just been indicted on charges of cocaine possession. And Mitt Romney’s campaign is already in hot water after an aide allegedly impersonated a state trooper.

But the most recent case strikes close to home for the former Massachusetts governor. This week The Hill reported on several lawsuits that continue to follow Robert Lichfield, Romney’s co-chair of his Utah finance committee. Lichfield owns and operates boarding schools for troubled teens, but many former students are speaking out about their treatment while in school. From The Hill:

The complaint, which plaintiffs amended and resubmitted to the court last week, alleges children attending schools operated by Lichfield suffered abuses such as unsanitary living conditions; denial of adequate food; exposure to extreme temperatures; beatings; confinement in dog cages; and sexual fondling.

A second lawsuit filed by more than 25 plaintiffs in July in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of New York alleges that Lichfield and several partners entered into a scheme to defraud them by operating an unlicensed boarding school in upstate New York. The suit does not allege physical or emotional abuse.

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