Justin: Good Night, and Good Muck

Justin Rood | January 31, 2007, 6:36PM

A little-known story from the very beginning of TPMmuckraker: a few days into the gig, Paul and I were still messing around and trying to figure out how to cover all the scandals that were out there. Let's divvy it up by scandal, Paul said. He offered to take Abramoff. I took Duke Cunningham. And we were off.

A few months later the Cunningham scandal sprouted hooker rumors. What luck! I never asked Paul if has was sore I got the (alleged) hookers. Looking back, I wonder if he gave me the juicier scandal in yet another gesture of his genteel Southern manners (of all the persistent journalists I've known, Paul is by far the most polite).

Today's my last day at TPMmuckraker, and that more or less sums up my experience here. I've been incredibly lucky: Lucky to get to cover scandals all day, lucky to work with Paul, lucky to have the exceptionally talented and insightful Josh Marshall as an editor and blogging mentor.

So a great big thank-you to Paul and Josh. And thanks to our readers, whom I'll miss just as much. Your tips, your questions, your insights, your jokes and cranky dissents -- it's like working in the biggest, liveliest newsroom in the world. It has been a privilege. Rakers of muck, rake on.

Update: Paul just told me he wasn't sore about the hookers. If there were any.

Jerry Lewis

Lewis Legal Fees Hit $900K

Justin Rood | January 31, 2007, 6:30PM

Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), the longtime GOP appropriator who's facing a federal investigation as part of the Duke Cunningham scandal, dropped another $45,000 on legal fees in December, according to new documents filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Lewis, the highest-ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, has spent about $905,000 on legal fees so far. Ed. note: That's a lot of money.

Alan Mollohan

Under FBI Scrutiny, Mollohan Runs up $160K Legal Bill

Justin Rood | January 31, 2007, 1:08PM

West Virginia congressman Alan Mollohan (D) has used $160,000 worth of services by a white collar criminal defense firm, according to new campaign filings.

Mollohan, who chairs the House panel which controls the Justice Department budget (including the FBI), has been under investigation by the FBI for a rather knotty mess of nonprofits, friends and real estate deals that appear to have made a lot of money for a lot of people.

According to documents filed by his campaign with the Federal Elections Commission, the law firm Kellogg Huber Hansen Todd Evan has collected $140,000 from his campaign. The campaign says that as of Dec. 31, 2006, it owed the firm another $20,000,

Mollohan has said that because of the investigation he would recuse himself from decisions concerning the FBI's budget, but some believe that doesn't resolve the conflict of interest.

"Just the fact that he's not going to micromanage the FBI's budget doesn't mean he can't play havoc with the Justice Department budget," conservative watchdog Ken Boehm told CNSNews.com earlier this month. "When the Justice Department goes to his subcommittee - and they need all sorts of approval out of his subcommittee for other spending things and other things they want - they're going to a man they're investigating," he said.

Boehm's group, the National Legal and Policy Center, has extensively investigated Mollohan. The congressman's office did not immediately have a comment on the matter.

For the moment, Mollohan's records appear to show he's spent more on his defense than Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), who's spent around $120,000 for legal assistance relating to a federal investigation of his ties to Abramoff. But both men are dwarfed by the legal fees incurred by former Appropriations Committee chairman Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA). As of December, Lewis had spent $860,000 on lawyers. His campaign faces a deadline of today to deliver an updated report covering expenses for the month of December, which may include more fees. Doolittle and Mollohan have already filed that report.

Update: Through a spokesman, Rep. Mollohan gave us the following statement: "The legal expenses were incurred in responding to the claims of a right-wing group in Washington that there were irregularities in my financial disclosure documents. That resulted in the preparation and public release of an extensive financial disclosure report and analysis last June. That work debunked the claims and the accompanying innuendos."

Surveillance

Admin to Tell Congress NSA Spying Details

Justin Rood | January 31, 2007, 12:42PM

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will share with congressional leaders details of the NSA's domestic surveillance program that were seen by the court which approved the program's application, AP reports.

Gonzales said the documents will be shared with Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA), chairman and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as staff and members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. They will not be made public.

At a hearing two weeks ago, Leahy and Specter had pressed Gonzales on why the administration was not more forthcoming with Congress on details of the program.

Bob Ney

Crooked Congressman: Pay My Wife -- Please!

Justin Rood | January 31, 2007, 11:20AM

If that don't beat all.

Facing federal indictment last August, then-Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) shut down his re-election campaign. (He confessed his guilt a month later.) He fired all of his staffers -- but one: his better half, Elizabeth.

That's right -- from August to Dec. 31, 2006, Elizabeth has been the campaign's sole paid employee, bringing in about $1,700 a month, according to the Columbus Dispatch.

Who's to say she hasn't earned it?

Iraq

Former Bush Iraq Chief to Dems: Bring. It. On.

Justin Rood | January 30, 2007, 3:29PM

C'mon, everybody: Let's get ready to rumble!

We've just confirmed that the former Bush-appointed leader of the U.S. rebuilding effort in Iraq will face his longtime critic before a panel of the Democratic-led Congress to answer questions about his leadership.

L. Paul Bremer, onetime head of the former Coalition Provisional Authority, responded positively to an invitation extended ten days ago to testify along with his chief critic, Iraq audit and investigation chief Stuart Bowen, before Rep. Henry Waxman's (D-CA) Government Reform Committee.

"He's confirmed," a Waxman spokesman told me this afternoon, referring to Bremer, who stepped down in June 2004. President Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom six months later, despite a long series of scathing reports by Bowen about mismanagement, waste, fraud and abuse among Bremer's staff.

It will be the first time Bremer and Bowen will testify together before Congress, according to Bowen spokeswoman Christine Belisle. Get your popcorn ready.

Surveillance

FBI "Vacuum Cleaner" Sucks Up Americans' Internet Records

Justin Rood | January 30, 2007, 2:15PM

Cnet News reports:

The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.

Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords. . . .

"What they're doing is even worse than Carnivore," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. . . "What they're doing is intercepting everyone and then choosing their targets."

. . . [Bankston said] the FBI is "collecting and apparently storing indefinitely the communications of thousands--if not hundreds of thousands--of innocent Americans in violation of the Wiretap Act and the 4th Amendment to the Constitution."

Dick Cheney

Cheney Update: WH Phone Directory Found!

Justin Rood | January 29, 2007, 6:35PM

And we thought such a thing didn't exist: over at the tremendous Secrecy News , Steven Aftergood has just posted (pdf) a 2004 directory for the White House Office of the Vice President.

Stamped "For Official Use Only," the four-page document lists 81 employees, including six who worked for Lynne Cheney. That's well over the 30 or so names Cheney's office is said to submit routinely to directory services.

The directory shows 23 staffers who worked exclusively on national security and homeland security issues. Meanwhile, three positions were dedicated on domestic policy issues; one of those was vacant at the time of the directory's publishing.

It's not clear how much overlap there is with the list we posted earlier of 41 staffers serving Cheney from the Senate's payroll according to a 2006 report. But at least now we're in the ballpark of the 88 staffers Laura Rozen estimated to be there.

Dick Cheney

BREAKING: 41 VP Staffers Found!

Justin Rood | January 29, 2007, 5:14PM

Thanks to Reader PD, we've identified what appears to be the entire staff of Vice President Dick Cheney's Senate office.

As some of you have noted, Cheney maintains a White House staff, and a Senate staff, paid for out of separate accounts reserved for each body.

PD found the information on Legistorm.com, a site which tracks title and salary information for congressional staffers; it's recent as of Sept. 30, 2006. These lucky 41 ostensibly support Cheney's efforts as president of that august chamber. We're still hard at work identifying who he's got working at the White House.

Staffer names and positions, after the jump. (We didn't reprint salary info -- but if you're curious, click here.)

Read more »

Dick Cheney

Veep Keeps Staff Size under Wraps

Justin Rood | January 29, 2007, 1:50PM

At TPM, David Kurtz recently mused on the irrational secrecy which has cloaked the Office of the Vice Presidency's staff list since Dick Cheney set up shop there. "It's about a perverse sense of entitlement and a deep aversion to scrutiny and accountability," wrote Kurtz. ""Time to shine some light on the OVP."

If that's not throwing down the gauntlet to the muckrakers, we don't know what is.

We called Leadership Directories, Inc., a private company which publishes expensive telephone books listing federal officials. OVP routinely shares information on roughly 30 employees, they told us. Of course, that's likely less than half the number of staffers in his office: in the January issue of the Washington Monthly, Laura Rozen estimates Cheney's staff size to be 88, plus various experts assigned temporary duty to OVP by their federal agencies. (The largest concentration of staff in a single area is likely to be in Cheney's national security staff: in 2005, Foreign Policy's David Rothkopf asserted (reg. req.) that Cheney has the largest national security staff of any vice president ever, with guesses ranging from 15 to 35 at any given time.)

Cheney's office refuses to give any details to reporters. His office is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, so any such request would be futile. What's more, Cheney appears to have exempted his office from having to disclose the number of appointed officials in his ranks: all other agencies have to release theirs for a government directory known as the "Plum Book."

Published every four years, the volume is supposed to list every position in the federal government that is assigned to a political appointee. Cheney's list was a more dangerous secret than even the CIA's. In the most recent edition published in 2004, the book shows the CIA as having eight such spots; it shows none for the vice president's office. Instead there is a brief appendix (pdf) consisting of three rather wordy paragraphs that say a lot but say very little. It's important to note that past vice presidents have complied with the law. For example, here and here.

Update: Two Cheney aides are named in the 2004 Plum Book after all, although they are listed under the "White House Office": then-chief of staff Scooter Libby, and Brian D. Montgomery, "Deputy Assistant to the President, Deputy Director of Presidential Speechwriting and Assistant to the Vice President."

Scooter Libby

Libby Trial: Fitz Got a Haircut

Justin Rood | January 29, 2007, 10:52AM

Marcy "emptywheel" Wheeler is continuing her heroic efforts to report the events of the Libby trial live via Firedoglake.

Among other developments this morning, she reports that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald got his hair cut, and the jury appears to have lost one of its members.

Scooter Libby

Libby Trial: Immunized WH Ex-Flack to Testify

Justin Rood | January 29, 2007, 8:56AM

Former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer is set to testify today in the Scooter Libby leak trial, under a grant of immunity from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. He's the first -- and could be the only -- witness to testify under immunity.

"He is likely to turn out to be the most important witness to date," writes National Journal investigative reporter and professional Plameologist Murray Waas, "not in terms of whether the legal case against Libby is strong or not-- but rather in providing us with new information as to what went on inside the Whte House during the crucial time that Bush administration officials leaked to the press that Valerie Plame was a CIA officer."

Fleischer is expected to testify about a July 7, 2003, lunch he had with Libby, in which the former Cheney chief of staff told him that Valerie Plame, wife of Ambassador Joe Wilson, worked for the CIA. Prosecutors believe Fleischer later told members of the White House press corps about Plame's identity.

And here's some Libby trial trivia for you: both Fleischer and Libby are Miami Dolphins fans.