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Kate Klonick | July 7, 2008, 9:58AM

For those hoping investigations by the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility might shine some light on the scurrilous activities at the Bush Justice Department, today's Los Angeles Times piece doesn't offer much solace.

The OPR, a watchdog of the Justice Department's lawyers and activities, has ceased to issue regular public reports of its investigations, some of which have resulted in the exoneration of attorneys accused of professional misconduct.

From the U.S. Attorney firing scandal; to selective prosecution of Democratic political figures; to unlawful detainment of terrorist suspects, the OPR is facing increasingly weighty caseloads, and meeting their investigations with decreasing transparency.

As the Times reports, the changes in disclosure have come with a new administration:

After President Bush took office in 2001, the Justice Department reversed a decade-old policy of publicly disclosing detailed summaries of OPR investigations of department lawyers found to have committed professional misconduct. Janet Reno, attorney general since 1993, had believed that publicizing the information would bolster confidence in the department; and during her tenure she had authorized the release of two dozen public summaries of misconduct cases -- including one against then-FBI Director William S. Sessions.

The OPR also has been far behind in producing required annual public reports summarizing its activities. Last month, it released its report covering fiscal year 2005. That means many investigations undertaken during the tenure of former Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales remain under wraps.

Two weeks ago the OPR issued a report, along with the Office of the Inspector General, that found that the two attorneys in the Justice Department broke federal law when they hired new lawyers for the DOJ's Honors Program based on "political and ideological" factors.

But besides the report with the Inspector General, the OPR has failed to disclose the results of its investigations of misconduct relating to the war on terrorism.

According the documents obtained by the Times, the OPR has exonerated lawyers involved in two high-profile terrorism investigations:

According to a redacted copy of a confidential OPR report obtained by The Times, the office found that department lawyers had not engaged in misconduct in connection with the controversial practice of using special warrants to round up and incarcerate men after Sept. 11 who were considered witnesses to crimes. Human rights groups said the technique was a way to illegally detain, sometimes for months, dozens of Muslims whom the government suspected but could not prove were engaged in criminal activity.

The report, issued more than a year ago, concluded: "Department of Justice attorneys involved did not misuse the material witness statute, and thus did not commit professional misconduct or exercise poor judgment."

There's nothing sinister going on in the lack of reports, insists Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis. He says that the decision was merely made to conserve resources and protect the privacy of accused attorneys:

"My goal is to get fair and speedy dispositions of allegations against our attorneys," he said, "and, to the extent possible, let the public know what we did and why we did it without unnecessarily or gratuitously . . . publicly humiliating our line attorneys as individuals."

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Kate Klonick | July 1, 2008, 10:00AM

A former senior executive at UBS, who pleaded guilty to conspiring to assist a wealthy client in hiding millions of dollars from taxes, is aiding the Justice Department in their fight to force the Swiss banking giant to give up their ultra-secret client list.

As the Wall Street Journal reports today, the former UBS executive, Bradley Birkenfeld, has shed light on the shady dealings of UBS with its wealthiest clients. Birkenfeld explained how the Zurich-based banking giant coached its executives to conceal assets, from lying on customs forms to smuggling jewels in toothpaste tubes:

Mr. Birkenfeld told U.S. prosecutors that UBS holds an estimated $20 billion in assets for U.S. clients in undeclared accounts. These accounts generated $200 million a year in revenues for the bank, prosecutors said.

. . . UBS trained private bankers in techniques to avoid detection by U.S. law enforcement, including instructing them to indicate on customs forms that they were coming to the U.S. on vacation instead of business, according to court documents.

Prosecutors say Mr. Birkenfeld also explained how bankers advised clients to hide their wealth by purchasing artwork and jewels with funds from Swiss accounts. For one client, Mr. Birkenfeld told prosecutors he smuggled diamonds into the U.S. inside a toothpaste tube.

After weeks of talking with UBS and Swiss banking authorities on divulging the identity of U.S. account holders, the DOJ has finally sought a court order. The so-called "John Doe" summons is usually used by the government to investigate tax fraud "by people whose identities are unknown." It has never been used before against a non-U.S. bank.

Revealing client lists would be a huge blow to UBS and all Swiss banks, who pride themselves on the secrecy and privacy for its clients. The DOJ's filing is likely to spark a long and tedious legal battle-- something not unfamiliar to UBS:

In a 2002 memorandum to clients following UBS's acquisition of PaineWebber, UBS bankers tried to assuage clients' worries that their secrets might be breached as a result of the bank's new connection to a U.S. firm. The memo, filed in court by prosecutors, reads in part: "information relative to your Swiss banking relationship is as safe as ever..."

The memo went on to point out that UBS has been doing business in the U.S. since 1939, without having U.S. authorities gaining "jurisdiction over assets booked abroad....Please note that our bank has a successful track record of challenging such attempts."

And perhaps being caught in the DOJ bear trap has convinced UBS to gnaw off its U.S. brokerage arm, leave the U.S. and head for the safety of the Alps. As the International Herald Tribune reported, UBS is currently in talks to sell off its U.S. wealth management base, PaineWebber.

Jim Gibbons

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Kate Klonick | June 27, 2008, 9:41AM

Yes, the caption at left is correct. That's Governor Jim Gibbons (R-NV), in a warm embrace with a former Playboy model who is most definitely not his wife.

Last we heard in the Gibbons v. Gibbons fiasco, the governor and the First Lady had called a truce in their acrimonious divorce proceedings.

But since that joint statement, Gibbons has been implicated in other acts of philandering: hundreds of text messages to a female "friend" and affectionate outings with younger women-- the most recent of which was caught on film.

The Nevada Appeal this morning, published a series of pictures of Gibbons and a female companion at a rodeo in Reno.

Gibbons responded in a brief statement to the Appeal:

What it shows, according to the governor, is him comforting a stressed out friend. "She was upset, crying," he said during a quick hallway interview with our reporter, who'd been trying to get a comment from the governor or his staff for two days. "She couldn't get her breath. I put my arms around her."

So who is the mystery parking lot woman seeking solace on Gibbons' shoulder?

According to the Appeal:

[W]e did a little checking on our own and now know his companion to be the ex-Playboy-model, ex-wife of an ex-Reno mayor. She is not the woman with whom he has widely been accused of having an affair of late and with whom he exchanged hundreds of text messages at all hours. But he has been seen around Reno with this woman, too. In fact, there are cell phone pictures of the two together at a Reno restaurant posted on area blogs.

Just for some context, the Appeal's photo spread comes in the midst of a huge budget crisis in Nevada.

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Kate Klonick | June 24, 2008, 9:42AM

The first in a series of inspector general reports investigating the politicization of the Justice Department is expected today, and the Washington Post has a sneak peek.

The report to be released today by DOJ Inspector General Glenn Fine will, according to the Post, chronicle how young conservative law students were favored hires in stocking the DOJ's prestigious -- and heretofore non-partisan -- Honors Program.

Under former Attorney General John Ashcroft, oversight for the Honors Program, which had traditionally been the responsibility of senior career officials, fell under the purview of Ashcroft's key political advisers.

The honors program, which each year places about 150 law school graduates with top credentials in a rotation of Justice jobs, historically had operated under the control of senior career officials. Shifting control of the program to Ashcroft's advisers prompted charges of partisanship from law professors and former government lawyers who had worked under Democratic administrations.

Critics complained that the honors program favored conservative applicants, and turned down highly qualified prospects because of left-leaning affiliations:

One Harvard Law School graduate said that when he applied for the honors program a few years ago he was warned by professors and fellow students to remove any liberal affiliations from his résumé.

Concerned Justice employees also raised alarms last year by sending a letter to lawmakers who had been examining whether political considerations led to the dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys.

Keep an eye out for Michael Elston in the report today. The former chief of staff to the deputy attorney generalwas named as a central figure in the politicization of the honors program over a year ago:

Allegations concerning political hiring for the Honors Program -- the Department's historically rigorous program for hiring entry-level lawyers -- have centered on Michael Elston, the chief of staff to the deputy attorney general. A group of anonymous Justice Department employees raised alarms with Congress last month, complaining that Elston rejected hundreds of potential applicants to the program last year seemingly based on their political backgrounds.

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Kate Klonick | June 18, 2008, 10:00AM

Yesterday we learned about the CIA's larger involvement in developing torture techniques at Guantanamo Bay -- techniques previously thought to have been developed primarily by the military.

In an epic eight-hour, three-panel hearing, the Senate Armed Services Committee examined dozens of documents and grilled former Pentagon officials involved in developing the interrogation methods introduced in 2002.

(Among several good articles on the hearings, a good place to start isSpencer Ackerman's article at the Washington Independent.)

Key to the hearings were the minutes of a meeting between CIA counter-terrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman and a group of military and intelligence officials who convened at the base in Cuba to discuss the use of harsher interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The techniques derived from a training regimen U.S. Special Forces troops used prepare troops to withstand torture --Survival Evasion Resistance Escape, or SERE.

The SERE program -- first introduced to many by a 2005 article by the New Yorker's Jane Mayer -- is not an interrogation program. Nor is it an intelligence-collection program. Instead, it's an obscure program across the different military services' special-forces wings that teaches troops how to withstand torture if captured. Instructors subject students -- under the rigorous watch of psychologists and physicians -- to various torture techniques, including waterboarding, prolonged stress positions, sleep deprivation and sensory manipulation. Waterboarding "is an overwhelming experience that induces horror, triggers a frantic survival instinct," Malcolm Nance, a former Navy SERE instructor who was himself waterboarded, testified to Congress in November. "As the event unfolded, I was fully conscious of what was happening: I was being tortured."

On July 25, 2002, the Defense agency that oversees the SERE program, known as the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, or JPRA, was contacted by a representative of Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes for information about SERE practices for the "exploitation process" -- that is, getting detainees to cooperate with their interrogators. The next day, JPRA's chief of staff, Air Force Lt. Col. Daniel Baumgartner, sent Haynes a lengthy memorandum explaining how the program worked.

. . . Baumgartner's memorandum was not the last time SERE techniques were introduced into the interrogation bloodstream. On the week of Sept. 16, 2002, JPRA officials invited a contingent of senior Guantanamo-based officers to a briefing session at Ft. Bragg, N.C. Haynes and his legal counterparts at the Central Intelligence Agency, Justice Dept. and the vice president's office visited Guantanamo the following week for an update on interrogations. The minutes of that meeting record that the commander of the detention facility "did take Mr. Haynes and a few others aside for private conversations."

Just the week after that, a senior CIA lawyer, Jonathan Fredman, instructed Guantanamo officers on various SERE-pedigreed torture methods, including waterboarding. "If the detainee dies," Fredman said, "you're doing it wrong." In response, the chief Guantanamo Bay attorney, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, said, "We will need documentation to protect us."

The Washington Post today emphasized that the meeting records, specifically Feldman's statements, revealed the CIA's larger involvement in advising on the torture techniques, the creation of which was previously thought to fall mainly under the purview of the Defense Department.

Baumgarten and Beaver testified about their involvement:

Before the Senate panel, Baumgartner said he did not realize that Haynes wanted to use SERE techniques on enemy combatants. "I had no idea how it would be used," he testified. "When tasked by my higher headquarters... I can't really turn around and tell the flag officers and the senior executive service people no."

Beaver testified today for the first time since Haynes declassified her guidance in mid-2004. She said she intended for the techniques to be used under supervised and restricted circumstances. It turned out that not a single other military lawyer submitted written guidance in support of the SERE-derived techniques. "In hindsight," Beaver told the Senate panel, "I can only conclude that others chose not to write on this issue in order not to be linked to it. For me, that was not an option."

Meanwhile, Haynes attempted to distance himself from the policy.

Haynes, who retired from the Pentagon in April, after his nomination to the federal judiciary foundered, pled ignorance. "No, sir, I don't remember it at the time," Haynes said when asked if he had received Baumgartner's memorandum. "But I saw it a long time ago... it's possible I saw it at the time."

Pressed by Levin on how he could not have seen a memorandum concerning terrorism detentions and interrogations, Hayes replied, "the recipient is the Office of the Secretary of Defense General Counsel, which [was] not my precise title."

For more coverage, also see Ackerman's live blog of the hearing as it took place.

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Kate Klonick | June 16, 2008, 12:01PM

Brad Schlozman, the former Justice Department official who left the Department in August 2007 after he openly admitted to "boasting" about his hiring of conservative Republicans, is the focus of a new turn in the DOJ's investigation into the 2006 U.S. attorneys firing scandal.

You might remember Schlozman as the head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division-cum-U.S. attorney in Kansas City, and most recently, his work at Main Justice. Schlozman famously talked of replacing Clinton appointees with "good Americans" and keeping tabs on a lawyer who he had heard, "didn't even vote for Bush."

The Wall Street Journal reports today that lawyers have filed for a grand jury referral, which could lead to criminal charges, in order to investigate Schlozman's involvement in improper prosecutions during his time running the DOJ's civil-rights division in general. The referral appears specifically tied to possible perjury in his 2007 congressional testimony.

The Journal, summarizes Schlozman's past role in the investigation:

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Schlozman conceded boasting to associates about the number of Republicans he managed to hire at the department. The allegations against him helped feed months of scandal that eventually forced the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in August.

. . . At a Senate hearing last June, Democrats zeroed in on allegations that Mr. Schlozman was part of an effort by Republican political officials to pursue vote-fraud investigations in important swing states as a way to gain electoral advantage.

Mr. Schlozman's promotion to the U.S. attorney's office in Kansas City came after the department asked his predecessor, Todd P. Graves, to resign. Mr. Graves was among several U.S. attorneys who had shown reluctance to bring vote-fraud-related cases, according to testimony and documents gathered by Senate investigators last year.

After Mr. Schlozman's arrival in Kansas City, prosecutors filed charges against workers from a left-leaning activist group, Acorn. The workers eventually pleaded guilty to violations related to voter registration. The timing of the indictment, five days before a close Senate election, drew criticism from Democrats.

Schlozman filed a clarification of his Congresional testimony, in which he had first stated that he was "directed" to pursue the timely prosecution of the voting group by superiors. In his later revision he took "full responsibility" for prosecutorial discretion:

"I want to be clear that, while I relied on the consultation with, and suggestions of, the Election Crimes Branch in bringing the indictments when I did, I take full responsibility for the decision to move forward with the prosecutions related to Acorn while I was the interim U.S. Attorney," he said in the clarification.

DOJ inspectors are hoping to complete the investigation in the coming weeks:

Separate investigations into the department's handling of the prosecutor firings and related issues, which are being conducted by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility and the Inspector General, are expected to be completed within the next few weeks, lawyers familiar with the probe said. Both want to abide by department guidelines aimed at clearing up politically sensitive investigations well before the elections, to avoid accusations they could influence the outcome.

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Kate Klonick | June 11, 2008, 9:45AM

A convicted hedge fund manager, set to start his 20-year prison term next week, disappeared into the night, in what investigators suspect is a faked suicide.

The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that Samuel Israel III, the former chief of Bayou Management LLC, disappeared on Tuesday. His car was found near Bear Mountain Bridge over Hudson River, with an enigmatic message written in dust on his car: "suicide is painless."

Despite the ominous note, no body has been recovered and no witnesses saw anyone jump from the bridge:

[Bruce] Cuccia, [a New York state police investigator] said that, since 1980, more than 40 people have jumped to their deaths from the bridge, which marks one of the deepest points of the Hudson River. He said it would be impossible to survive the 150-foot fall.

The bodies of almost all jumpers are found quickly, Mr. Cuccia said. "I will be satisfied in a few days that if the body doesn't come up, he didn't jump," he said.

U.S. Marshalls have taken over the case and launched an international manhunt, a sign that Israel is indeed the latest white-collar criminal to go on the run:

Police in 2006 found one fugitive money manager, Kirk Wright, 37, living in Miami Beach. He had disappeared after his hedge fund collapsed, costing investors $150 million. A federal jury recently found him guilty of defrauding thousands of investors in International Management Associates, including many professional football players.

Mr. Wright had claimed the fund was performing well, when it was actually losing money, and he was spending client's money on jewelry, real estate, cars and a wedding. Over Memorial Day weekend, shortly after being brought to an Atlanta jail, he hanged himself.

In another instance, in January 2006, shortly before being sentenced for stealing at least $27 million from investors, hedge-fund manager Angelo Haligiannis had double-parked his Jeep Cherokee in Manhattan, cut off his ankle monitor and fled. Last fall the 35-year-old was arrested in a luxurious resort on the Greek island of Crete, vacationing with his wife and daughter.

Also last year, Michael Berger, who defrauded clients of his Manhattan Investment Fund, was arrested by Austrian police, driving toward Salzburg five years after he had originally disappeared. Betting that technology and Internet stocks would fall in the late 1990s, Mr. Berger lost roughly $400 million when his hedge fund collapsed in 2000.

If Israel did not in fact jump from the bridge, this will be the second faked suicide attempt for Bayou. Early in the federal investigation, a note was found in the empty offices of the company by a beleaguered investor. The note, penned by Daniel Marino the firm's chief financial officer, began: "This is my suicide note and confession." Marino never attempted suicide.

Police have recently recovered $100 million of the $400 million lost by investors through Bayou. Both Israel and Marino were convicted on fraud charges in 2005 and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

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Kate Klonick | June 10, 2008, 11:25AM

Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army reports for The Nation on the shadowy Blackwater's growing foray into the world of private espionage.

The privatization of intelligence has grown dramatically under President Bush, with Washington paying $42 billion annually in private intelligence contracts, compared to just $17.5 billion in 2000. As Scahill points out, it means that 70% of the U.S. intelligence budget is going to private companies, which creates an interesting market for government operatives.

Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, started Total Intelligence Solutions in April 2006 in order to capitalize on this growing demand for privatized intelligence services:

"Total Intel brings the...skills traditionally honed by CIA operatives directly to the board room," [Blackwater's vice chair Cofer] Black said when the company launched. "With a service like this, CEOs and their security personnel will be able to respond to threats quickly and confidently -- whether it's determining which city is safest to open a new plant in or working to keep employees out of harm's way after a terrorist attack."

As Scahill writes, Total Intel's leadership "reads like a Who's Who of the CIA 'war on terror'":

In addition to the twenty-eight-year CIA veteran Black, who is chair of Total Intelligence, the company's executives include CEO Robert Richer, the former associate deputy director of the agency's Directorate of Operations and the second-ranking official in charge of clandestine operations.

From 1999 to 2004, Richer was head of the CIA's Near East and South Asia Division, where he ran clandestine operations throughout the Middle East and South Asia. As part of his duties, he was the CIA liaison with Jordan's King Abdullah, a key US ally and Blackwater client, and briefed George W. Bush on the burgeoning Iraqi resistance in its early stages.

Scahill points out there are drawbacks to this kind of free-market approach to national security and intelligence:

In Iraq, Blackwater has banked on the idea that it is a sort of American Express card for the occupation. But for the future, Prince has a different corporate model, as he indicated in his speech. "When you send something overseas, do you use FedEx or the postal service?" he asked.

There are serious problems with this analogy. When you send something by FedEx, you can track your package and account for its whereabouts at all times. You can have your package insured against loss or damage. That has not been the case with Blackwater. The people who foot the sizable bill for its "services" almost never know, until it is too late, what Blackwater is doing, and there are apparently no consequences for Blackwater when things go lethally wrong. "We are essentially a robust temp agency," Prince told his fans in Michigan. He's right about that one. A temp agency serving the most radical privatization agenda in history.

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Kate Klonick | June 6, 2008, 11:02AM

Phase II, the 200+ page Senate intelligence committee's report on pre-war intelligence in Iraq, has revealed the disconnect between what was espoused by Bush Administration officials in the days building up to the war in Iraq, and what was actually known. Besides the simple absence of intelligence, it has also been revealed that the Administration advanced arguments in contradiction of what the intelligence actually showed, in making its case for war.

We've covered Rumsfeld's false testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, and the general outcry from both sides of the aisle over the report.

Today, the LA Times has a good summary of excerpts from the report, which highlight the chasm between what was said by the President and Vice President, and what was actually known:

Statements in dozens of prewar speeches and interviews created the impression that Baghdad and Al Qaeda had forged a partnership. But the report concludes that such assertions "were not substantiated by the intelligence" being shown to senior officials at the time.

Claims that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi agent in Prague, for example, were dubious from the beginning and subsequently discounted. The idea that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had provided chemical and biological weapons training to Al Qaeda hinged on intelligence from a source who soon was discredited.

Bush officials strayed even further from the evidence in suggesting that Hussein was prepared to provide weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda terrorist groups -- a linchpin in the case for war.

In October 2002, for example, Bush warned in a key speech in Cincinnati that "secretly, and without fingerprints, [Hussein] could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own." The threat was repeated frequently in the run-up to war but was "contradicted by available intelligence information," the committee says.

On post-war prospects, the report contrasts the rosy scenarios conjured by Cheney and others with more sober intelligence warnings that were being presented to senior officials.

Cheney's prediction that U.S. forces would "be greeted as liberators" was at odds with reports from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which warned nearly a year earlier that invading U.S. forces would face serious resistance from "the Baathists, the jihadists and Arab nationalists who oppose any U.S. occupation of Iraq."

Other findings show that it seems Pentagon officials were duped by known Iranian counterintelligence. From McClatchy:

A small group of Pentagon officials collected dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran from Iranian exiles whom Defense Department counterintelligence investigators said might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," the Senate Intelligence Committee reported Thursday.

The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have tried to use a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator and who remain determined to combat what President Bush this week called an "existential" threat from Iran.

A 2003 report by the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity, the Senate committee said, concluded that Michael Ledeen, the American civilian who brokered the contacts through Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile whom the CIA in 1984 labeled a "fabricator," and other Iranians "was likely unwitting of any counterintelligence issues related to his relationship with Mr. Ghorbanifar." [Emphasis ours.]

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Kate Klonick | June 5, 2008, 9:35AM

As the Bush years wind to a close, and administration officials slink back to jobs in the private sector, the road ahead of Daniel Gonzalez, the chief of staff for Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, seems bleak.

From the New York Times:

Hoping to pursue a career in an entirely different field from telecommunications, Mr. Gonzalez invested in a small energy company three years ago and then joined the company's board in 2006. The company, law enforcement officials say, turns out to have been a fraudulent venture that took more than $54 million from investors.

In what looks to be a Ponzi scheme, Gonzalez personally guaranteed bank loans to the company of over $10 million, even though his personal worth was only in the hundreds of thousands, the banks allege. Gonzales disputes that allegation.

The energy company, MCube Petroleum, was founded by Robert Miracle, who appears to have a more checkered past than he presented to investors. Gonzalez's involvement with the company, began when he was introduced to Miracle by a childhood friend.

Mr. Miracle, who was born in 1960, represented himself as a seasoned businessman. In a company overview, he said he had more than 20 years of experience at Toyota and NASA and served as an adviser to Frank G. Wells, the former president of Disney.

But an affidavit by a criminal investigator for the Internal Revenue Service said that Mr. Miracle had never worked for Mr. Wells, and that in 1994, Mr. Miracle had been convicted of felony theft in Oregon for stealing textbooks from a community college. The affidavit said that, rather than working at Disney, Mr. Miracle might have been involved in reselling textbooks from universities.

Through his lawyer, Miracle denies any wrongdoing:

Mr. Miracle's lawyer, Greg Hollon, denied that his client had committed fraud. "We are confident that when the whole story is heard, and all of the facts of this matter properly understood, he will be vindicated," Mr. Hollon said. He added he could not discuss the details of the case because of the pending criminal investigation.

Friends and colleagues are puzzled about why he took such a large risk. Asked why his client would guarantee a promissory note of $10 million when his net worth was so much smaller, Mr. Willey said, "I cannot give an answer."

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Andrew Tilghman | May 30, 2008, 9:45AM

Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons' still has two years left in office.

But Gibbons' divorce is getting nastier by the day, and many GOP operatives are getting more concerned about saving their party than his marriage.

The Las Vegas Sun reports on the latest in the court battle:

Wednesday's filing by Dawn Gibbons' attorney Cal Dunlap, a former district attorney who is said to love a public fight, is ostensibly an argument to open the now-sealed divorce filing. In fact, however, it's clearly part of an aggressive media strategy to paint the governor as a cold, philandering liar.

"Despite his disingenuous, shallow, and transparent protestations that his relationship with another man's wife is a mere friendship, his infatuation and involvement with the other woman is the real, concealed and undisclosed reason for his voluntary departure from the marriage," the court filing states.

Gibbons has been refusing to comment about the divorce proceedings. A judge has sealed the case, but Dawn Gibbon's attorney released her filings because of the "importance of the First Amendment and the public's right to have open access to the courts and court proceedings."

The court documents did not identify the woman Gibbons is accused of having an affair with. But local reporters in Nevada did. The Las Vegas Review Journal reports:

The woman is Kathy Karrasch, said several sources who requested anonymity, the wife of Reno podiatrist C. Craig Karrasch.

Recent phone records obtained by the Review-Journal show a single call placed from the governor's cell phone to Kathy Karrasch's cell phone on Jan. 10.

A family member who answered the cell phone Wednesday said Kathy Karrasch and her husband have separated for reasons unrelated to the governor.

The Reno Gazette-Journal offers more details about the relationship.

Karrasch lives a few blocks away from the Gibbonses' Reno home. ... Jim Gibbons was seen having dinner with Karrasch and three other people May 10 at the Atlantis Sky Terrace Oyster and Sushi Bar. He also attended the Galena High School play on May 1 to see Karrasch's daughter perform.

Although he attended the play alone, he spent the second half standing with Karrasch in the back of the room while she filmed her daughter, according to video footage provided to the Reno Gazette-Journal.

Gibbons' spokesman Ben Kieckhefer said the governor attended the play at the invitation of an unnamed neighbor.

In previous interviews, Gibbons has maintained he and Karrasch are "friends."

We've been reporting Gibbons' run of embarrassing political moves in recent months. The investigation of his ties to a defense contractor still lingers. But the locals in Nevada say the final straw was when Gibbons tried to get his wife evicted from the governors' mansion.

The Sun reports:

Republicans say serious discussions are taking place around the state among political and business leaders about how to extricate the party from the increasingly messy divorce proceeding between Dawn and Jim Gibbons. They say Jim Gibbons has handled the matter poorly by attempting to evict the first lady from the mansion and not settling the matter quickly and quietly.

And the implications could reach far beyond Nevada, one Republican tells the New York Times

"This absolutely could depress Republicans who are already depressed," said Chuck Muth, a Republican political consultant and blogger. "This could hurt McCain's ability to hold on to Nevada. It could also affect the chances of (Rep.) Jon Porter (R-Nev.) to get re-elected."

[Late Update: The previous version of this post referring to Gibbons as a practicing Mormon has been corrected. Gibbons was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but has described himself as a non-observant Mormon.]

John McCain

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Andrew Tilghman | May 29, 2008, 10:17AM

John McCain's go-to economics adviser isn't holding up very well under close scrutiny.

Phil Gramm, the former Texas senator and economist, is taking a lot of heat after reports that up until April 18 he was a registered lobbyist for UBS, the Swiss bank that is the world's largest manager of private wealth.

A former economics professor at Texas A&M, Gramm has long advocated for tax cuts, supply-side economics and less government regulation. But as David Corn over at Mother Jones reports in "Foreclosure Phil?" Gramm also played an integral role in the financial scandal commonly known as the "subprime meltdown."

Read more »

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Andrew Tilghman | May 28, 2008, 11:37AM

Criticisms leveled in former White House spokesman Scott McClellan's new memoir are sure to get a lot of attention over the next few days.

What separates McClellan's account from other tell-all books from former Bush Administration officials is the personal tone. McClellan followed Bush from Texas and left the White House on good terms. But he's obviously not pleased with some decisions that were made -- and the way he was treated at times.

To some degree, McClellan's book tells us a lot of things we already know.

From today's Washington Post:

Bush is depicted as an out-of-touch leader, operating in a political bubble, who has stubbornly refused to admit mistakes.

But he also takes a swipe at the Bush public persona that exudes confidence.

"A more self-confident executive would be willing to acknowledge failure, to trust people's ability to forgive those who seek redemption for mistakes and show a readiness to change," he writes.

Among the most interesting stories McClellan recounts is his role in the CIA leak investigation that led to Scotter Libby's conviction for obstruction of justice last year. Here is where McClellan seems to get personal.

"I could feel something fall out of me into the abyss as each reporter took a turn whacking me," he writes of the withering criticism he received as the story played out. "It was my reputation crumbling away, bit by bit."

Intriguingly, he recounts his suspicions about a previously undisclosed West Wing meeting between Rove and Libby:

"There is only one moment during the leak episode that I am reluctant to discuss," he writes. "It was in 2005, during a time when attention was focusing on Rove and Libby, and it sticks vividly in my mind. ... Following [a meeting in Chief of Staff Andy Card's office], ... Scooter Libby was walking to the entryway as he prepared to depart when Karl turned to get his attention. 'You have time to visit?' Karl asked. 'Yeah,' replied Libby.

"I have no idea what they discussed, but it seemed suspicious for these two, whom I had never noticed spending any one-on-one time together, to go behind closed doors and visit privately. ... At least one of them, Rove, it was publicly known at the time, had at best misled me by not sharing relevant information, and credible rumors were spreading that the other, Libby, had done at least as much. ...

"The confidential meeting also occurred at a moment when I was being battered by the press for publicly vouching for the two by claiming they were not involved in leaking Plame's identity, when recently revealed information was now indicating otherwise. ... I don't know what they discussed, but what would any knowledgeable person reasonably and logically conclude was the topic? Like the whole truth of people's involvement, we will likely never know with any degree of confidence."

McClellan writes in a way suggesting he really didn't see this at the time. Really?

Immigration

Today's Must Read

Andrew Tilghman | May 27, 2008, 10:07AM

Looks like the 'crackdown' against illegal immigrants crossing over the Mexican border has been a boon for corrupt border guards.

Federal officials say their decision to dissolve the Internal Affairs unit at Customs and Border Protection unit a few years ago was a bad idea (go figure), and now the Department of Homeland Security is reconstituting it. Reborn with a whopping five investigators last year, the unit is projected to grow to 200 by the end of this year.

The New York Times reports this morning that a growing number of border patrol guards are under investigation for taking bribes from smugglers and letting vehicles packed with drugs and people pass into the U.S. unchecked.

There's a lot of money out there for border agents on the take:

In another recent case, Margarita Crispin, a customs inspector in El Paso, Tex., began helping smugglers just a few months after she was hired in 2003, according to prosecutors. She helped the smugglers for four years before she was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison and ordered to forfeit up to $5 million.

The number of border patrol agents has almost doubled since 2001, swelling the force to nearly 20,000. But the smugglers are savvy.

The smugglers use any ruse available to lure border workers but seem to favor deploying attractive women as bait. They flirt and charm and beg the officers, often middle-aged men, to "just this once" let an unauthorized relative through. And then another and another.

In recent years, Texas has seen the most corruption investigations, with California a close second.

One law enforcement expert describes "policing the border as 'potentially one of the most corruptible tasks in law enforcement' because of the solitary nature of much of the work and the desperation of people seeking to cross."

Defense Department

Today's Must Read

David Kurtz | May 26, 2008, 11:35AM

Maybe we'll eventually get to the bottom of just what the Pentagon was up to when it cultivated the TV networks' supposedly independent military analysts as part of a massive PR push to support Bush Administration policy in Iraq. Well, it's pretty obvious what it was up to. But maybe we can better learn the full scope of the domestic PR effort undertaken.

The New York Times' April expose on the massaging of public opinion through "message force multipliers" (a term only the Pentagon could come up with) has now prompted at least two investigations. The program was suspended following the initial NYT report.

The Department of Defense inspector general announced last Friday that it was undertaking a investigation of the program, and the Congress' own General Accountability Office has "already begun looking into the program and would give a legal opinion on whether it violated longstanding prohibitions against spending government money to spread propaganda to audiences in the United States."

The investigations come after the House last Thursday passed an amendment to this year's military authorization bill mandating investigations by the DOD IG and the GAO. Democrats argued that the program amounted to illegal domestic propaganda. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) called the program part of "a military-industrial-media complex" (with apologies to Eisenhower).

Meanwhile, the TV networks have remained largely silent, as their credibility and transparency have been tarnished by the revelations about the program. As Media Matters has documented, the military analysts named in the Times piece appeared or were quoted more than 4,500 times on broadcast networks, cable news channels, and NPR. One minute they were giving ostensibly objective analysis, the next they were fawning over Rummy in private as "the leader."

Must Read

Today's Must Read

David Kurtz | May 23, 2008, 11:54AM

It all depends on what your definition of "exclusive" is.

At the heart of the debate over warrantless wiretapping is whether FISA, by its own terms, is the exclusive means for the government to undertake electronic surveillance in counterespionage and counterterrorism cases.

The plain language of the FISA statute seems clear, stating that FISA is the "exclusive means by which electronic surveillance . . . and the interception of domestic wire, oral and electronic communications may be conducted."

But nothing is ever that simple with the Bush Administration.

This week Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) released a declassified sentence from one of John Yoo's notorious memos, written while he was serving in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. In it, Yoo managed to rationalize away the exclusivity provision of FISA in order to justify a warrantless wiretapping program outside of the FISA framework, without judicial oversight or regular reports to Congress:

"Unless Congress made a clear statement in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that it sought to restrict presidential authority to conduct warrantless searches in the national security area -- which it has not -- then the statute must be construed to avoid [such] a reading."

Poof! Just like that, exclusivity disappeared and the Bush Administration was free to pursue warrantless wiretaping with the official blessing of the OLC. (Former OLC attorney Jack Goldsmith has described his office's memos as "advance pardons").

The Bush Administration says it no longer relies on the Yoo memo as the legal underpinning for warrantless wiretapping, pointing instead to perhaps an even weaker rationale, the post-9/11 AUMF:

The Justice Department told the senators it no longer relies on Yoo's FISA memo. "The 2001 statement addressing FISA does not reflect the current analysis of the department," wrote Brian A. Benczkowski, principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legislative Affairs.

He "respectfully" requested that if the senators "wish to make use of the 2001 statement in public debate," they refer to the administration's current position, which pins the authority to choose non-FISA procedures on a law that Congress actually passed, not merely its failure to rule out alternatives.

When Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force of Sept. 18, 2001, it "confirmed and supplemented the President's Article II authority to conduct warrantless surveillance to prevent catastrophic attacks on the United States," Benczkowski said.

Exclusivity remains a key sticking point in passage of a new FISA law. Democrats are demanding language that erases whatever doubt there might be (although in fact there is none). The White House is balking.

Must Read

Today's Must Read

David Kurtz | May 21, 2008, 11:53AM

The focus of the news coverage of the report released yesterday by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine has been on what involvement the FBI had, if any, in the "enhanced interrogations" undertaken by the Bush Administration -- and to a lesser extent how the FBI's concerns were ignored at the highest levels of government.

Here's the Wall Street Journal's lede:

A Justice Department inquiry lauded Federal Bureau of Investigation agents for refraining from harsh interrogations of terror suspects but found fault with how senior officials handled agents' concerns about alleged abuses.

But as you dig down into the 370-page report (.pdf), it's most revealing for what it shows the U.S. government was actually doing to detainees. Because of the limited jurisdiction of the DOJ inspector general, the report was focused on the FBI. But in establishing the environment in which the FBI was operating, the report paints a picture of ghastly treatment of detainees by the United States on a consistent long-term basis.

In the course of his investigation, the IG interviewed 450 FBI agents who were detailed to Gitmo at one time or another. Nearly half reported witnessing or hearing about "rough or aggressive treatment of detainees, primarily by military investigators."

The report contains a chart of the conduct FBI agents reported at Gitmo and the manner in which the agents learned of the conduct. You can click on the image for a larger view:

Read more »

Global Warming

Today's Must Read

David Kurtz | May 20, 2008, 10:50AM

EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, perhaps the Administration's most accomplished stonewaller, goes before the House government oversight committee today to testify -- again -- about his refusal to grant a waiver for California to regulate vehicle greenhouse gas emissions despite unanimous staff support for such a waiver.

So far, Johnson has been a most reluctant witness, going so far as to schedule overseas trips to avoid attending congressional hearings. But Rep. Henry Waxman's committee staff has continued digging, reviewing thousands of documents and interviewing witnesses outside the public eye. Yesterday, in advance of Johnson's appearance, Waxman released a 20-page memo and supporting documents on what his committee has found so far.

The headliner of the memo is that a top EPA official conceded in sworn testimony that he believed that Johnson changed his mind about supporting the waiver after he talked to the White House:

In one deposition, EPA Associate Deputy Administrator Jason Burnett told congressional investigators that Johnson in August and September was "very interested in a full grant of the waiver," then said he thought a partial grant of the waiver "was the best course of action."

California has the right to enact tougher air pollution laws under the Clean Air Act but must secure a waiver from the EPA.

Johnson denied California's request in December. When asked whether the administrator communicated with the White House in between his preference to do a partial grant and the ultimate decision, Burnett said, "I believe the answer is yes."

With a flourish, the EPA dismissed the news that Johnson has initially supported the waiver. "I equate this to deciding whether to wear a red tie or a blue tie in the morning," an EPA spokesperson told Reuters. "It doesn't make much difference until I put the tie on. To go through and suggest that maybe (Johnson) had a different opinion during the process -- none of that matters."

As the Post's Juliet Eilperin notes, the details of the White House involvement remain murky:

It remains unclear how exactly senior Bush officials intervened in the decision. Burnett said he was instructed not to answer questions about the White House's involvement, and the White House maintains that Johnson was not influenced by his talks with White House officials.

"As Administrator Johnson said in his statement, he made an independent decision and his decision was based on the facts and the law," said Kristen Hellmer, spokeswoman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Given Johnson's previous refusals to divulge what he and the White House discussed, don't expect Waxman to make much progress with Johnson in today's hearing. The real fireworks may be between committee Democrats and Republicans. Ranking Member Tom Davis (R-VA) called yesterday's majority memo "a knee-jerk conclusion of nefarious intent by the White House derived from a manifestly incomplete investigation."

Must Read

Today's Must Read

David Kurtz | May 19, 2008, 10:43AM

Here's a new one to add to the federal government's blizzard of acronyms: CUI.

It stands for "Controlled Unclassified Information" and it's the latest designation the Bush Administration has chosen for a sprawling class of materials and documents that falls short of meeting the standards to be stamped as classified, but which for one reason or another is considered sensitive.

The new CUI designation was announced two Fridays ago, while the President was in Texas for Jenna's wedding, in a memorandum from the White House. Be advised: the memo doesn't make for light reading. [Late Update: It was first reported by Kos contributing editor Michael Clark.]

As Walter Pincus reports in the Washington Post, CUI replaces SBU: Sensitive But Unclassified. The SBU framework was a mess:

"Among the 20 departments and agencies . . . surveyed, there are at least 107 unique markings and more than 131 different labeling or handling processes and procedures for SBU information," Ted McNamara of the office of the director of national intelligence told the House Homeland Security Committee in April 2007.

The Archives was asked to create a single set of policies and procedures on the way materials should be marked, stored safely and disseminated. There are to be three categories of dissemination -- standard, specified and enhanced specified. The latter two require measures to reduce possible disclosure.

If the ostensible reason for the new designation is intended to regularize and standardize the system for handling that vast trove of unclassified data, there are nonetheless other reasons why the most secretive administration in history might be interested in this sweeping new designation.

For one, it may help shield information otherwise subject to FOIA from disclosure, at least indirectly. It will be a factor in determining disclosure:

The Archives will establish "enforcement mechanisms and penalties for improper handling of CUI." The "controlled" classification "may inform," but will not determine, whether information can be made public in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Secondly, as Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, notes:

[Th]e definition of what information may qualify as CUI, which includes anything that "under law or policy" requires protection from unauthorized disclosure, is vague and expansive.

The saving grace may be that many of the hard decisions about how CUI will work have not been made, and likely won't be made until after President Bush leaves office. So federal officials may dodge one of the memo's more comical requirements: "oral communications should be prefaced with a statement describing the controls when necessary to ensure that recipients are aware of the information's status."

It's a requirement that leads the Post's Pincus to imagine the absurd scenario where one government official talking to another about terrorists will have to preface the conversation with: "What I am about to tell you is controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination."

Global Warming

Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | May 16, 2008, 10:16AM

For those who've been watching the Environmental Protection Agency under the Bush administration, you're familiar with the following pattern: the EPA, over the objection of its own scientists, issues a new rule that weakens environmental controls, but when pressed for an explanation, EPA officials explain that the new rule has nothing to do with easing the restrictions on polluters. No -- the change is merely a clarification, or a technical fix to some nonsense bureaucratic rule, or the inescapable conclusion drawn from a sober appraisal of the law.

And here we go again. Here's the rule change (note the dissent from EPA scientists):

The Bush administration is on the verge of implementing new air quality rules that will make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas, according to rank-and-file agency scientists and park managers who oppose the plan.

The new regulations, which are likely to be finalized this summer, rewrite a provision of the Clean Air Act that applies to "Class 1 areas," federal lands that currently have the highest level of protection under the law. Opponents predict the changes will worsen visibility at many of the nation's most prized tourist destinations, including Virginia's Shenandoah, Colorado's Mesa Verde and North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt national parks.

And here is the explanation -- from a former EPA official who has departed to head the the environmental strategies group at the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani (yes, that Giuliani) no less:

Jeffrey R. Holmstead... helped initiate the rule change while heading the EPA's air and radiation office. He said agency officials became concerned that the EPA's scientific staff was taking "the most conservative approach" in predicting how much pollution new power plants would produce.

"The question from a policy perspective was: Do you need to have models based on the absolute worst-case conditions that were unlikely to ever occur in the real world?" Holmstead said in an interview Thursday. "This has to do with what [modeling] assumptions you're required to do. This is really a legal issue and a policy issue."

The new rule changes how pollution levels in parks are measured -- instead of frequent measures, the new rule "would average the levels over a year so that spikes in pollution levels would not violate the law." Just a common sense fix, you might say. But as one environmental advocate explains, "It's like if you're pulled over by a cop for going 75 miles per hour in a 55 miles-per-hour zone, and you say, 'If you look at how I've driven all year, I've averaged 55 miles per hour.'"

It looks like the EPA is really competing to not only be the most politicized of the agencies in the Bush Administration, but also to create the most lasting damage.

Must Read

Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | May 15, 2008, 10:09AM

OK, that's it! Let no one say that the administration has not handled the situation with its typical forbearance and caution. Other, rasher leaders would have shunned Ahmad Chalabi after it became apparent that his network of informants were liars and that he could not be trusted. But the U.S. has not been overly swift to act. Sure, there were suspicions that he had passed classified information to Iran, but this is not a group that rushes to judgment.

Now, however, the straw has finally broken the camel's back:

Sources in Baghdad tell NBC News that as of this week American military and civilian officials have cut off all contact with controversial Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, the former favorite of Washington's once powerful neoconservatives.

The reason, the sources say, is "unauthorized" contacts with Iran's government, an allegation Chalabi denies. Iran has been accused of arming and training rebel Shiite forces in Iraq....

Since September 2007... American military officials and civilian officials working out of the U.S. Embassy had contacts with Chalabi. At that time he was installed as the head of a "services" committee for Baghdad that was to coordinate the restoration of services to the city's residents.

Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the Multi-National Forces-Iraq, even escorted Chalabi on a trip, on U.S. helicopters, to address reconstruction issues. And American officials attended meetings with him and supported his efforts.

Call it tough love.

Note: By the Charlie Black code of lobbying, it is now not OK to lobby for Ahmed Chalabi.

Must Read

Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | May 14, 2008, 10:09AM

You'd think that an Iraqi anti-corruption crusader who testified before Congress about his travails would find no great difficulty in obtaining asylum in the United States. You'd think the U.S. would be grateful for the news that $18 billion worth of corruption had virtually "stopped" reconstruction in Iraq. But not so much.

Former State Department officials told Congress earlier this week that, though Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, the former head of the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity, was able to get access into the U.S., he is not allowed to work and is living hand to mouth. Why has he fallen through the cracks?

It's always a toss-up between negligence/incompetence and malfeasance with this administration. On the negligence side of things, you have the disastrously impenetrable immigration system, which has allowed so few Iraqis to come to the U.S. As The New York Times reports today, U.S. soldiers have actually set up organizations to help their interpreters gain asylum, since the Iraqis, even though they face certain threat of death for collaborating with American forces, cannot navigate the system on their own. As one Army captain tells it, interpreters are required to produce a letter from a general, which he said was "like a junior associate at a Fortune 500 company asking the chief executive for a letter of recommendation."

But then there's the malfeasance side of things. One of the former officials testified that "a senior State Department official had ordered agency employees not to give al Radhi references or contact him" for help with his asylum.

That might have a lot to do with the trouble that Radhi gave Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the administration. Like pointing out that corruption ran rampant under Maliki and that he'd jiggered the system so that corruption judges could not bring charges against any of his senior officials without his approval -- that was a decree on which Secretary of State Rice refused to pass judgment when she testified late last year. Rice also refused to comment on Radhi's many accusations.

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) declared at the hearing early this week that he is "going to ask the State Department what in the hell are they thinking." Somehow I don't think Rice will be any more forthcoming this time around.

Must Read

Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | May 13, 2008, 10:15AM

Just in time to run during the Spring sweeps, the Pentagon has rolled out a slate of charges against five Guantanamo Bay detainees for conspiring in the 9/11 attacks. Kudos to the Convening Authority for beating expectations with a well-timed launch.

Unfortunately, the move does come shortly after one of the senior Pentagon officials working on the commissions was disqualified from dealing with Osama Bin Laden's alleged driver Salim Hamdan's case. For some reason, the judge didn't seem to appreciate Brig. Gen. Tom Hartmann's taste for "sexy" cases that grab the public's attention (he's obviously never tried to run a PR campaign himself). It was a black eye surely, but you know the old saying: there's no such thing as bad press. They are riding that wave.

Now, the naysayers will point to the fact that the nascent commissions are sure to drag on for possibly as much as a year before the actual trials begin. There are still plenty of kinks (allegations of torture, politicization, lack of due process, etc.). And then there's the small matter of the Supreme Court, which might overturn the applecart all over again in the near future. You can understand the frustration of the administration: they had hoped to roll out the trials before the 2006 election, and here we are in the run-up to the 2008 election, and the clock is ticking.

But all is not lost. The detainees should be arraigned in June. And there should be frequent opportunities between now and November to remind the public of what's going on down there. Finally, justice is served.

Note: The Convening Authority Susan Crawford had planned to include charges against Mohammed al Qahtani, the supposed 20th hijacker, along with the other five, but Qahtani has been struck from the charging sheet. Now, Qahtani's lawyer has immediately jumped to the conclusion that Crawford's decision to dismiss the charges affirms "that everything he said at Guantánamo was extracted through torture -- or the threat of torture," and that his treatment was "so well documented and unconscionable that he is unprosecutable.'' But I gotta figure that this crew is sharper than that. Crawford can bring those chargers against Qahtani at any time. The 20th hijacker deserves his own unique launch, to be sure. Maybe in October?

Must Read

Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | May 12, 2008, 10:01AM

The president has said that his administration is employing every tool at their disposal to foil terrorists while protecting the civil liberties of Americans. For some reason, The Los Angeles Times opted not to take him at his word.

The secrecy necessary for counterterrorism prosecutions has combined with the rampant secrecy of the Bush administration to make it all but impossible to measure that balance. But the Times chooses a method, however imperfect, to gauge what's going on. Simply put: spying is up while counterterrorism prosecutions are down. The specifics:

A recent study showed that the number of terrorism and national security cases initiated by the Justice Department in 2007 was more than 50% below 2002 levels. The nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which obtained the data under the Freedom of Information Act, found that the number of cases brought declined 19% in the last year alone, dropping to 505 in 2007 from 624 in 2006.

By contrast, the Justice Department reported last month that the nation's spy court had granted 2,370 warrant requests by the department to search or eavesdrop on suspected terrorists and spies in the U.S. last year -- 9% more than in 2006. The number of such warrants approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has more than doubled since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The department also reported a sharp rise in the use of national security letters by the FBI -- from 9,254 in 2005 to 12,583 in 2006, the latest data available. The letters seek customer information from banks, Internet providers and phone companies.

And as the Times notes, the Justice Department's performance in terrorism prosecutions has lately been underwhelming -- to wit, the farcical Seas of David case, where two juries have failed to reach a verdict.

As to what to make of these numbers, it depends on how much you're inclined to give the administration the benefit of the doubt.

On the civil liberty advocate of the question, the conclusion is clear:

"The number of Americans being investigated dwarfs any legitimate number of actual terrorism prosecutions, and that is extremely troubling -- for both the security and privacy of innocent Americans as well as for the squandering of resources on people who have not and never will be charged with any wrongdoing," said Lisa Graves, deputy director of the Center for National Security Studies, a Washington-based civil liberties group.

Meanwhile, the former head of the FBI national security law unit says it's just in the nature of the enterprise:

"Most of these threats ultimately turn out to be wrong, or maybe just the investigating makes them go away.... A lot more information is going to pass through government hands, and most of that is going to be about people who turn out to be innocent or irrelevant."

Must Read

Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | May 9, 2008, 10:09AM

Once again, Sen. John McCain's (R-AZ) invulnerability to the charms of lobbyists and his campaign supporters is put to the test.

This time it's The Washington Post going front page with the tale of McCain's role in a major Arizona land swap in 2005.

The basic thrust is this: a rancher owning 250 acres that intermingled with federally owned forest started pushing for a land swap that provide him with federal land in exchange for his own -- land that he could develop. Such land swaps are fairly common, though obviously easily abused. He was able to get the support of ex-Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ), but without McCain's backing the bill died in 2002.

After that, he decided to get smart and retained a number of lobbyists with connections to McCain. That, after all, is the way Washington works:

[The rancher Fred Ruskin], who is a pediatrician by training, said he realized he needed to hire lobbyists "to open communications with McCain's office."

He turned to some of McCain's closest former advisers. In 2002, he sought out Mark Buse, McCain's former staff director at the Senate commerce committee, which the senator chaired.

"I had gone to him to see if he had any advice as to how to deal with McCain," Ruskin said. "We had a couple of meetings and I paid him a little bit." Buse's federal lobbying records do not list the ranch as a client.

That year, lobbying records show, Ruskin also paid $60,000 to Michael Jimenez, another former McCain aide. Wes Gullett, who had worked in McCain's Senate office, managed his 1992 reelection bid, and served as deputy campaign manager for his 2000 presidential run, also lobbied on the bill, documents show. The watchdog group Public Citizen lists Gullett and his wife, Deborah, as bundlers who have raised more than $100,000 for McCain's White House bid. Ruskin also hired Gullett's partner, Kurt R. Davis, another McCain bundler and member of the senator's Arizona leadership team, to work with local officials and "to help with McCain if we needed help." Buse, Jimenez and Gullett did not return calls seeking comment.

With that sort of help, McCain became much more engaged. But McCain spokesman Brian Rogers "said that McCain does not recall being lobbied by his former staff members on the land swap and that 'no lobbyist influenced Senator McCain on this issue.'"

Nevertheless, somehow, some way Ruskin eventually ended up with his swap. And the company that's been hired to develop his new property is run by Steven A. Betts, "a longtime McCain supporter" who's raised $100,000 for McCain this election. (McCain's camp says that Betts' involvement was never discussed prior to the bill's passage.)

Now, is this is a major scandal? No. But like The New York Times' story last month, it shows McCain delivering for a campaign contributor in a way that belies his claim that he underwent a Road to Damascus conversion after the Keating Five scandal.

Surveillance

Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | May 8, 2008, 9:59AM

Three for three?

National Security Letters have been the FBI's favorite toy for the past several years, and who can blame them? With none of the hassle of a warrant and a gag order that ensures stealth, the NSL is a counterterrorism investigators best friend. The FBI issues tens of thousands of NSL requests each year (nearly 50,000 in 2006). After a major review by the Justice Department's inspector general last year found a host of abuses, FBI Director Robert Mueller promised that the FBI would clean up its act. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the number of NSLs issued has gone down -- just that agents are on alert that they can't be so sloppy.

Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU announced that they'd succeeded in getting the FBI to back down from an NSL request issued in late 2007. The request had gone to the Internet Archive and had requested personal information about one of the Archive's users, including the individual's name, address, and any electronic communication transactional records. It just so happens that the Archive's Digital Librarian Brewster Kahle is on EFF's board of directors, and he decided to fight the request. Except it wasn't easy due to the gag order that accompanied the letter: "Because they initially were not allowed to discuss the NSL over the phone, Kahle and his attorneys had to drive to one another's offices whenever they wanted to talk about the case."

But Kahle's lawyers at the EFF and ACLU were ultimately successful -- and the ACLU says this means that they've won every time they've gone to court to fight a NSL:

Every time an NSL has been challenged in court, the FBI has backed off, said Melissa Goodman, an ACLU staff attorney. "That calls into question how much the FBI needed the information in the first place, and finally, whether the FBI needs this kind of sweeping and unchecked surveillance power."

The two other instances of NSL withdrawals involved a library and an Internet consulting business. In February 2004, the FBI served an NSL on the Internet firm. In November 2006, the FBI withdrew the letter, after a lawsuit by the ACLU, but maintained the gag order, which is why the firm has not been publicly identified. The lawsuit, which challenges the constitutionality of the law authorizing NSLs, is still pending.

In July 2005, the FBI served an NSL on Library Connection, a library consortium in Connecticut. That year, the ACLU sued on grounds similar to the other case. In April 2006, the FBI withdrew the gag order. Three months later, it withdrew the NSL as well.

Meanwhile the FBI says that the information requested was "relevant to an ongoing, authorized national security investigation." I guess they'll just have to get the information some other way.

Must Read

Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | May 7, 2008, 9:57AM

Nobody does compromise quite like the Bush administration.

If you're a regular reader of TPM, you're familiar with Hans von Spakovsky and in particular, Spakovsky's remarkable track record at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. It is because of that record -- one of ignoring, marginalizing, and intimidating career lawyers in order to institute restrictive voting laws all over the country, a pattern amounting to "institutional sabotage" as one former career attorney there put it -- that Senate Democrats (Barack Obama and Russ Feingold in particular) opposed his nomination to the Federal Election Commission.

Spakovsky was one of four nominees -- two Dems and two GOPers -- to the commission. The other three were uncontroversial. Senate Republicans insisted that all nominees be voted on together, and the Democrats objected: Spakovsky would have to get his own vote. The Republicans refused, and there things have stood for more than four months. Without the necessary number of commissioners, the FEC has essentially shut down.

It is a problem that has a relatively simple solution: if the White House were to submit another nominee, that nominee would more than likely be quickly confirmed without much trouble.

Instead, the Bush administration proposed something different yesterday.

Spakovsky remains a nominee. Instead, the administration has submitted a new nominee to replace the current chairman, David Mason. Mason is one of the only two seated commissioners, and it just so happens that he's been creating a whole lot of trouble for John McCain lately.

In February, the McCain campaign notified the FEC that it was withdrawing from the public financing system for the primary. Although McCain had once opted in, his campaign said that it had never received public funds and so could opt out. The move meant that McCain would not be bound by the $54 million spending limit for the system.

But Mason balked. McCain couldn't just opt out -- the FEC had to approve his request before he could. And Mason also indicated that a tricky bank loan might mean that McCain had locked himself in to the system. That would be disastrous for the campaign, since the Dem nominee would have a tremendous spending advantage through August. So McCain's campaign has continued to spend away, far surpassing the limit already. The Democratic Party has filed a complaint with the FEC and has also taken the matter to court.

And now Mason is getting the boot.

So where's the compromise, exactly? A White House spokeswoman tells The New York Times that Republicans are now willing to have a separate vote for Spakovsky. Whether that actually is the case, we shall see. If so, that means Democrats will have the chance to actually vote down Spakovsky once and for all.

But there is no shortage of cynicism about the White House's move. As Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21 put it: "The only apparent reason for President Bush to drop Commissioner David Mason at this stage, an FEC candidate he had twice proposed for the Commission, is to prevent him from casting an adverse vote against Senator McCain on important enforcement questions pending at the Commission. The questions deal with Senator McCain's request to withdraw from the presidential primary public financing system and the consequences of a loan the McCain campaign took out and the collateral provided for the loan."

Torture

Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | May 6, 2008, 10:13AM

Forget about the frustration at the slow pace of the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. You know it's got to really burn the administration to miss a good chance for a PR coup.

But as The Washington Post reports this morning, things are moving at such a glacial pace down in sunny Guantanamo that it seems impossible at this point that any of the September 11th suspects will begin trial before the election -- or even before the Bush administration leaves office.

You know that's got to burn because of comments made by the Pentagon officials heading up the trials. The former chief prosecutor there testified that he was told that he should really push to land plea deals or indictments before the election. And another member of the prosecution team said the Pentagon's top legal adviser in its commissions office wanted to pursue certain cases ahead of others because they would "seize the imagination of the American public" and make a splash.

But the only case that seems at all likely to go to trial before the election is that of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the alleged driver for Osama bin Laden. And the pretrial hearings for that have been far from pretty -- with Gitmo's former chief prosecutor testifying about the politicization of the system, and Hamdan, who says he has been addled by torture and prolonged solitary confinement, himself proclaiming that he won't participate in what he sees as a rigged system.

The apparent problem is that it just takes a long time to work out the kinks of a made-up process. As a lawyer from Human Rights Watch puts it, "Every little detail ends up being contested, because it's an entirely new system of justice."

But administration officials are trying to keep their chins up, their eyes on the prize. In answering criticisms that the process will be occasionally and arbitrarily shielded from the press, Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the top legal authority in the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions and the man who was, according to those prosecutors referenced above, so keen on landing indictments before the elections, is unapologetic. Certain things have to be blocked from the press to ensure that classified or sensitive information is not disseminated, he says. And besides, who needs publicity?

Hartmann said that within the military commissions process, "the principal obligation is not to the press," and that the cases are full, fair and open because of the rights afforded to the defendants. "That's what we do in the American system of justice," he said.

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Paul Kiel | May 5, 2008, 9:58AM

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, there seems to have been a rash of accounting lately.

Consider: in March, the Joint Forces Command released (after a pathetic attempt at squelching it) a report definitively proving that there were no operational links between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda. That same month, The New York Times provided a detailed account of Paul Bremer's infamous decision to disband the Iraqi Army. And then of course there's Doug Feith's book, which purports to show how things would have gone so much better if everyone had just listened to Doug Feith -- a thesis that's necessarily met incredulity in a number of brutal interviews.

Some of this is just because enough time has passed that the players feel safe giving interviews. But then there's also the case of suppressed information that's finally seeing the light of day. In February, for example, the Times revealed that a 2005 report by the publicly-funded RAND Corporation had been buried because its conclusions were inconvenient. The report faulted just about everyone in the administration for not adequately preparing for securing postwar Iraq.

And here's what appears to be another example of a buried report. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. Forces in Iraq from the beginning of the occupation until 2004, has written a memoir. And he has a couple scores to settle. One, to be sure, is that he thinks he was scapegoated for the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The other has to do with how he was left in command of Iraq with far too few troops.

In an excerpt from the book published in Time, Sanchez tells how Rumsfeld, two years after that disastrous year in Iraq, called Sanchez into his office to try to diffuse blame. Rumsfeld hadn't known that Sanchez, commander of the Army's V Corps, was left in charge while CENTCOM and CFLCC [coalition land forces] staffs had pulled out, he said, and he'd written a memo of that official version to prove it.

But Sanchez wasn't buying it, he writes, and told Rumsfeld, "I just can't believe you didn't know." Rumsfeld flipped out. The meeting ended, Sanchez writes, with Rumsfeld saying that he was going to order a report to find out what happened. But that didn't go so well:

[Adm. Ed Giambastiani, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs] assigned the task to the Joint Warfighting Center and gave them a pretty tight timeline. So it wasn't long before I was giving the investigative team a complete rundown of everything that had happened in Iraq between May and June 2003. I later learned that Gen. Tommy Franks, however, had refused to speak with them.

A few months later, I was making a presentation at the Joint Warfighting Center and ran across several of the people involved with the study. "Say, did you guys ever complete that investigation?" I asked.

"Oh, yes sir. We sure did," came the reply. "And let me tell you, it was ugly."

"Ugly?" I asked.

"Yes, sir. Our report validated everything you told us -- that Franks issued the orders to discard the original twelve-to-eighteen-month occupation deployment, that the forces were drawing down, that we were walking away from the mission, and that everybody knew about it. And let me tell you, the Secretary did not like that one bit. After we went in to brief him, he just shut us down. 'This is not going anywhere,' he said. 'Oh, and by the way, leave all the copies right here and don't talk to anybody about it.'"

"You mean he embargoed all the copies of the report?" I asked.

"Yes, sir, he did."

From that, my belief was that Rumsfeld's intent appeared to be to minimize and control further exposure within the Pentagon and to specifically keep this information from the American public.

Update: Here's William Arkin's take on Sanchez.

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Paul Kiel | May 2, 2008, 10:05AM

Can it really be true? Will the high priest of executive privilege actually submit to a Congressional subpoena?

When House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers (D-MI) invited a slate of current and former administration officials to testify about the authorization of torture, I was skeptical that he would meet much cooperation. But when it came to David Addington, Dick Cheney's chief of staff and longtime consigliere, the idea seemed downright ludicrous. If Addington has spoken publicly or even given an interview in the last eight years, I'm unaware of it.

But in a letter (pdf) to the committee yesterday, the vice president's counsel Kathryn Wheelbarger signaled a willingness to cooperate. It was, for sure, a long way from the original reply, which I summarized at the time as, "You're asking the wrong person, but even if you were asking the right person, you couldn't make him show up, and even if he did show up, he wouldn't say anything."

Yesterday's letter is a change of tone. Because the committee has signaled that it will limit the range of its inquiries (this is Addington only speaking for himself, he can't speak about communications with the Vice President or President, he has the right to invoke "applicable legal privileges), Addington seems to be leaning towards showing up.

That doesn't mean that the vice president's office has changed their mind about whether he has to show up, mind you. The courts would agree that Addington is "immune from compulsion," Wheelbarger writes. But Addington might show up out of the goodness of his heart, "as a matter of comity," as the letter puts it.

The letter falls short of saying that Addington will definitely show up to Tuesday's hearing, but Wheelbarger does write that "the Chief of Staff to the Vice President is prepared to accept timely service of a Committee subpoena for testimony for a hearing on May 6, 2008." When the Politico asked Cheney's spokeswoman whether this meant that Addington would comply, she said "Since he hasn't been issued a subpoena, it would be a little premature to comment on whether he would comply." He is a coy one, that Addington.

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Paul Kiel | May 1, 2008, 9:59AM

You know those secret legal opinions by the Justice Department that tell the administration how far it can go without breaking the law? After all the hullabaloo over John Yoo's five year-old torture authorization memo, Attorney General Michael Mukasey assured Congress that the Justice Department really was working on releasing other memos. But he made no promises.

And yesterday, during a hearing on secret law held by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) before the Senate Judiciary Committee, an official from the Office of Legal Counsel promised that the Department would allow members of the intelligence committees to see them -- but lawmakers won't be able to keep paper or electronic copies. The Department says that it's thinking really hard about whether the Senate Judiciary Committee can see them as well. For some reason, Feingold and his peers didn't seem satisfied.

The man who was the top classification official until January of this year appeared at the hearing and testified that the Department's decision to mark Yoo's torture memo "secret" and keep it classified for years after it was withdrawn showed "either profound ignorance of or deep contempt for" classification rules.

But as Donald Rumsfeld put it, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. And with this group, it's always a toss-up which is more worrying:

At the hearing, a department official, John P. Elwood, disclosed a previously unpublicized method to cloak government activities. Mr. Elwood acknowledged that the administration believed that the president could ignore or modify existing executive orders that he or other presidents have issued without disclosing the new interpretation.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, challenged Mr. Elwood, saying the administration's legal stance would let it secretly operate programs that are at odds with public executive orders that to all appearance remain in force....

Mr. Whitehouse, who sits on the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, has said the administration's contention that it can selectively modify executive orders "turns The Federal Register into a screen of falsehoods behind whose phony regulations lawless programs can operate in secret."

Mr. Elwood said publicly available legal opinions dating from 1987 make clear the Justice Department's view that the president has the power to change executive orders.

Mr. Whitehouse said, "There's an important piece missing from that, which is not telling anybody and running a program that's completely different from the executive order."

Only seven more months of the Bush administration to go, and plenty more to find out.

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Paul Kiel | April 30, 2008, 10:01AM

It's the Bush administration's special approach to accountability: stand staunchly beside an administration official as the allegations pile up and his or her credibility dwindles to nothing, and then months later -- long after the administration could derive any credit for the deed, and it is widely assumed that they are content to let the official fester in office for the duration -- the official abruptly and inexplicably resigns. So it was with Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales. And yesterday General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan stepped down.

But Doan, who gained mucky prominence for her clueless cronyism, wants everybody to know that she's not stepping down voluntarily. She was fired. And not only was she fired, but she was fired because she refused to cave to political pressure. Or something.

"I would rather get fired for something I believe in, and a cause I was willing to fight for, rather than to believe in nothing worth being fired for." That's what Doan told Government Executive in an email last night. It's far from clear precisely what this "something" she believes in is.

What we do know is that last June, the Office of Special Counsel recommended to the White House that Doan be fired for violating the Hatch Act. And that same month, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) told Doan to her face during a House oversight committee hearing that she should resign. And now, nearly a year later, the White House summons her for a meeting and asks for her resignation.

To refresh your memory on Doan's parade of horribles: her Golden-Duke-nomination-worthy testimony came in response to a meeting in early 2007, where Karl Rove's aide Scott Jennings came to brief GSA staff on the prospects for Republicans in the 2008 elections. The PowerPoint presentation detailed which seats were "House Targets" and which "Senate Targets", which states were "Republican Offense," and which "Republican Defense." For those who've never witnessed this proud moment in administration history, Doan's initial blubbering testimony on the topic is worth a watch:

After the presentation, Doan asked Jennings in front of everyone how GSA projects could be used to help "our candidates." Jennings replied that topic should be discussed "off-line," the witnesses said. Doan then replied, "Oh, good, at least as long as we are going to follow up." At least, that's the version given by "half a dozen witnesses" to The Washington Post and the Office of Special Counsel. Doan just couldn't remember saying anything like that.

And then there was Doan's alleged retaliation against employees who gave information to the Office of Special Counsel. Those were poor performers, she told investigators, and "[u]ntil extensive rehabilitation of their performance occurs, they will not be getting promoted and will not be getting bonuses or special awards or anything of that nature." In another cringe-inducing turn before Waxman's committee, Doan tried to explain away that comment by saying she had been employing the "hortatory subjunctive" -- an explanation remarkable for not only failing to exculpate her, but also being grammatically incorrect.

We'll miss you, Lurita.

Update: Government Executive reports that the timing of Doan's resignation might have something to do with her ongoing feud with the GSA's inspector general.

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Paul Kiel | April 29, 2008, 10:06AM

Just another day at Guantanamo, I guess.

On the witness stand was the former chief prosecutor for the tribunals, Col. Morris Davis. Called to testify by defense lawyers, he told the court what he'd told the press -- that he'd quit after becoming convinced that the political appointees overseeing the system were about politics first and justice second, that he was told "we can't have acquittals," and that he was pushed to land indictments or plea deals before the election. He also said that his superiors saw no problem with using confessions obtained through torture, including waterboarding. Everything is "fair game," he says he was told, "let the judge sort it out."

And then there's Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the alleged driver for Osama bin Laden. Hamdan's lawyers say that interrogators beat him and sexually humiliated him, among other things, and are arguing that he's unfit to stand trial because he's essentially been driven crazy by spending 22 hours in solitary confinement for the past several years. His lawyers say "he is suicidal, hears voices, has flashbacks, talks to himself and says the restrictions of Guantánamo 'boil his mind.'"

Nevertheless, Hamdan was there yesterday -- sort of:

But Hamdan, during the morning session, also appeared to show some evidence of mental deterioration, which his attorneys have ascribed to mistreatment and lengthy solitary confinement. He seemed in a daze as he was led into court in his khaki detention uniform.

He then engaged in a short, subdued rant to Allred about how he believes he is not being afforded human rights and would like to use the bathroom without soldiers watching him. He also tried at one point to get up from the defense table to leave the room. "I refuse participating in this, and I refuse all the lawyers operating on my behalf," Hamdan said. He returned for the afternoon session in traditional Yemeni garb and a sport coat and agreed to continue.

And just to complete the context for the scene, the Post notes, is the fact that the Supreme Court is nearing "a decision on whether the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that laid the legal foundation for these hearings violates the Constitution by barring any of the approximately 275 remaining Guantanamo Bay prisoners from forcing a civilian judicial review of their detention." In the meantime, the ugliness of Gitmo is on full display.

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Paul Kiel | April 28, 2008, 9:55AM

It's the same lesson from the administration over and over again: with torture, all things are relative.

Back in January, for instance, Attorney General Michael Mukasey patiently explained to Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) how relative that whole conscience shocking thing is. You have to "balance the value of doing something against the cost of doing it."

And this weekend, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) produced correspondence with the Justice Department showing a similar dance. From The New York Times:

The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law....

While the Geneva Conventions prohibit "outrages upon personal dignity," a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgments.

"The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act," said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public....

In one letter written Sept. 27, 2007, Mr. Benczkowski argued that "to rise to the level of an outrage" and thus be prohibited under the Geneva Conventions, conduct "must be so deplorable that the reasonable observer would recognize it as something that should be universally condemned."

It's become cystal clear from Mukasey's testimony to Congress that despite the Supreme Court decisions and efforts by Congress to prohibit the use of torture, there is still plenty of ambiguity. The president's executive order last year explicitly ruled out the worst of the worst techniques, like murdering, raping or sexually humiliating detainees, but was silent on what is allowed.

And the administration has been successful in keeping things ambiguous for CIA interrogators. When Democrats tried to limit the CIA to using techniques approved by the Army Field Manual, legislation that would have specifically and unambiguously ruled out those "enhanced interrogation" techniques that fall in the gray area, key Republicans like John McCain helped keep things hazy.

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Paul Kiel | April 25, 2008, 10:17AM

Ooh, that must sting. For ringing up his state's U.S. attorney at bedtime to interrogate him about whether that high-profile corruption case against a prominent state Democrat will result in an indictment before the election, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) has been branded with the dreaded QA: that's right, qualified admonition.

The Senate ethics committee says it left no stone unturned in coming to this conclusion, including interviewing "current and former executive branch officials and attorneys," but that the "Committee finds no substantial evidence to determine that [Domenici] attempted to improperly influence an ongoing investigation." The key word there being "substantial."

The U.S. attorney, David Iglesias, who was of course fired a little more than a month after Domenici's call, testified that the call made him sick. And so the committee says that Domenici "should have known" better -- that such a call would create an "appearance of impropriety." But appearance of impropriety aside, maybe the good senator was just looking for an update. You know, just ringing up the local prosecutor at home to see how things are going.

The modesty of the punishment matches the modesty of the investigation. It wasn't the committee's job to investigate the U.S. attorney firings in general: "We do emphasize, however, that the Committee confined its inquiry to your October 2006 call to Mr. Iglesias, its context and consequences and related actions by you or your office."

Nevertheless, as Domenici serves out his last year in the Senate, it's worth reminding ourselves of the broader context.

Such as the fact that when the story first broke that two lawmakers had called Iglesias shortly before the 2006 election, the lawmakers were not identified, resulting in a media scramble to identify them. When all other members of the New Mexico delegation responded that they'd never done such a thing, Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) went to ground and refused to comment. Finally, cornered by an AP reporter, Domenici said "I don't have any comment. I have no idea what he's talking about."

But when it became apparent that Iglesias would be testifying to Congress about the call, Domenici eventually developed an idea and fessed up. He apologized, but said "I have never pressured him nor threatened him in any way." In their letter yesterday, the committee thanked Domenici for the "candor" of that statement.

Neither Domenici nor Wilson have admitted that it was Iglesias' failure to speedily dispatch with a couple high-profile corruption investigations into state Democrats that led to their dissatisfaction. Rather, they both hewed to the coded criticism that Iglesias had been slow to move cases -- when it's evident that they were really only talking about a few cases in particular.

We know that Domenici was also instrumental in Iglesias' firing, making calls not only to the Justice Department, but also to the White House. Of course, Iglesias had plenty of enemies, so it's certainly possible that other Republicans got him canned for, say, not jumping on the voter fraud bandwagon, and that's always been Domenici's best alibi.

But if you're looking to find out more about the context of Iglesias' firing, the Justice Department's forthcoming inspector general report will be much more informative.

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Paul Kiel | April 24, 2008, 10:17AM

Whatever fellow said "ask and you shall receive" never tried to get anything out of the Bush administration.

More than six years after the administration initiated its now infamous battery of policies to fight the global war on terror, there is still a pitched battle over whether certain details can be released. Just earlier this month, there were new revelations about the involvement of senior administration officials in crafting the CIA's interrogation program, and the release of John Yoo's 2003 memo authorizing the military's use of torture shocked even those who didn't think they could be shocked any more.

The latest: Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU School of Law teamed up to press in a lawsuit for the release of documents related to the administration's programs of secret detentions, renditions, and torture. Now the CIA has replied that it has 7,000 responsive documents that it won't be turning over. Among them:

Nineteen of those documents were withheld from disclosure specifically because the Bush administration decided they are covered by a "presidential communications privilege," according to the filings, made in federal court in Manhattan. Some were "authored or solicited and received by the President's senior advisors in connection with a decision, or potential decision, to be made by the president."

Although the precise content of the documents is unknown, the agency's statements illustrate the extent to which senior White House officials were involved in decision-making on CIA detentions, interrogations, and renditions, a term for forced transfers of prisoners.

Among the protected documents are "dozens" of communications between the CIA and the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, John Yoo's old shop, otherwise known as the place where a fellow can get himself an "advance pardon." The CIA refuses to turn those documents over, but it's candid about what they were all about:

"The CIA's purpose in requesting advice from OLC was the very likely prospect of criminal, civil, or administrative litigation against the CIA and CIA personnel who participate in the Program," said a declaration from Ralph S. DiMaio, information review officer for the CIA's clandestine service. He added that the CIA considered such proceedings "to be virtually inevitable."

You can see the few documents that the groups were able to get from the CIA here.

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Paul Kiel | April 23, 2008, 10:08AM

People have been giving Bob Schaffer, the Republican candidate for Senate in Colorado, a hard time about his advocacy on behalf of the Northern Mariana Islands. But Schaffer thinks it's about time to give credit where credit is due: after all, he braved an interminable flight to the end of the earth to investigate human rights abuses.

But the trip was organized by Jack Abramoff, you might say, and has been demonstrated to have been just another cog in Abramoff's lobbying strategy. Abramoff's goal was to keep the federal government from spoiling the Marianas' "perfect petri dish of capitalism," and a key tactic was to attack Clinton's Interior Department to distract from the human rights abuses on the islands. Schaffer was a more than willing participant.

Schaffer took to the airwaves earlier this week to air his grudges on a local conservative talk radio program. The Denver Post had done him wrong, he said, by covering the issue with such clear bias.

But more than anything, he's not getting credit for going where so few other lawmakers dared to go:

And by the way, I'll tell you there's 435 members of Congress, these reports had been in circulation throughout the 90s, and there weren't very many who went and investigated them the way I did. I don't owe anybody any ... any kind of remorse or regret for investigating these abuses firsthand....

This is a controversial issue, this island has been at the source of great political conflict for quite a long time, on a number of levels, not just these allegations of sweatshops and so on, but there's a big political controversy taking place there about the sovereignty and relative independence that this commonwealth has compared to other states, or even compared to other U.S. protectorates.

So, a lot of people in Congress would walk away from that and not even look into it because of the controversy. I frankly didn't care, and went and saw what I saw, and followed my own instincts and inclinations based on both favorable and unfavorable reports about the island.

Of course, this might carry more heft if Abramoff hadn't been constantly ferrying lawmakers, staffers, and their families over to the Marianas in the late nineties -- some 85 people in all by mid-2000. It turns out that it wasn't that hard to lure people over for a free trip to tropical islands.

Abramoff didn't sponsor all the trips. Like, say, the one taken by then-Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-AK), who returned outraged by the conditions there and spent the next several years trying to pass a bill to reform the labor and immigration laws on the Marianas (Abramoff was able to block it with the help of his House Republican friends). But somehow those who took the Abramoff organized trips didn't come back so angry.

Omitting the fact that documents show that he knew Abramoff's lobbying firm had made the travel arrangements for his trip, Schaffer says that nobody led him around by the nose while he was on the islands. It was five days of unfettered and unrelenting access, he says:

Nobody led me around there, nobody showed me a sanitized version of what they wanted me to see. My wife and I, and a staffer, and the two individuals from the Family Values Coalition led an investigation according to what I as the member of Congress thought was the best way to spend five days.

We worked around the clock by the way and conducted dozens and dozens of interviews, both on-site and off-site.

Ignore that picture of him parasailing with his wife during his visit there and it's an inspiring evocation.

You can read a full transcript of portions of the interview below. The audio is here.

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Paul Kiel | April 22, 2008, 10:02AM

You know the story: after surviving the Keating Five scandal, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) vowed to be incorruptible. Sure, he surrounds himself with lobbyists, but that is only to test his vigilance.

The New York Times tests the limits of McCain's vigilance in a piece today about McCain's decades-old ties to a wealthy Arizonan developer named Donald Diamond.

The main thrust is this: on a number of key occasions, McCain played a key role in helping Diamond, a major campaign contributor, make deals that made him millions of dollars. The piece focuses on three deals in particular: two of those involved bills (in 1991 and 1994) co-sponsored by McCain that swapped public land for Diamond's land, and the other involved McCain doing a couple personal favors in order to help Diamond land an incredibly lucrative piece of land owned by the Army. In each of those cases, Diamond was able to secure the assistance of other members of the Arizona delegation, and it's crystal clear from the piece that Diamond knows how to work his lawmakers.

Part of what makes the piece so amusing is that while the McCain camp was obviously keen to minimize McCain's assistance -- pointing out, for example, that McCain refused a number of Diamond's requests -- Diamond doesn't seem to have much patience for pussyfooting. For example:

Mr. Diamond is close to most of Arizona's Congressional delegation and is candid about his expectations as a fund-raiser. "I want my money back, for Christ's sake. Do you know how many cocktail parties I have to go to?"

To raise money for Mr. McCain, Mr. Diamond invites local Republicans to make fund-raising calls from his Tucson office. Ray Carroll, a member of the council that controls zoning in Pima County, Ariz., said Mr. Diamond followed up on one fund-raising session with a thank-you note "on behalf of Mr. McCain," sending a copy to the senator.

"To reciprocate, if you need any zoning in the county, let me know," Mr. Diamond wrote. (Mr. Diamond said it was the kind of joke he often made.)

The most delicate of the three transactions for the McCain camp is undoubtedly the Army deal: an old base in Monterey County, California called Fort Ord. Helped along by a meeting with an Army official set up by a McCain aide, Diamond got the inside track on the land, which ultimately made him a $20 million profit. McCain had also written a letter to the city of Seaside, California, enthusiastically recommending Diamond, who was making a bid to buy Fort Ord's two golf courses that had been acquired by the city.

Sound like some pretty special treatment for a multi-millionaire campaign contributor? Not so, says the McCain camp. Any average Joe Arizonan making a bid for a luxury resort in another state would be sure to get the senator's assistance:

A spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, Jill Hazelbaker, said the senator, now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, "had done nothing for Mr. Diamond that he would not do for any other Arizona citizen."...

For the California projects, the campaign said the McCain aide arranged the introduction to an Army official for Mr. Diamond's team as "a constituent matter." The campaign said it had no knowledge of the aide helping to expedite the sale.

In Mr. Diamond's other project at Ford Ord, the campaign initially said that the senator "would not have issued" the letter vouching for Mr. Diamond "if he knew at the time it would be used to favor any particular party in the course of a pending competition." Later, the campaign described the letter as "a character reference" and said it was included only at a "pre-competition" stage in the selection process. The campaign also noted that two other members of the Arizona Congressional delegation provided similar letters.

And Diamond, typically, doesn't see why there would be any fuss:

Mr. Diamond, for his part, said Mr. McCain had only done his job. "I think that is what Congress people are supposed to do for constituents," he said. "When you have a big, significant businessman like myself, why wouldn't you want to help move things along? What else would they do? They waste so much time with legislation."

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Paul Kiel | April 21, 2008, 9:55AM

They've got the bark part down pat.

You heard about Freedom's Watch, the billionaire-backed, uber-connected attack group that was going to put a $250 million hurt on the Democratic nominee and a number of Congressional candidates to boot. Well, that hasn't turned out too well.

And now there seems to be no shortage of self-doubt amongst conservative insiders about their prospects for a good bite come the fall. The left has its act together, but a Swift Boat 2.0 has yet to emerge for the right.

From The Washington Post:

With Sen. John McCain facing the prospect of being dramatically outspent in the race for the White House, a collection of major Republican donors and party leaders that includes former Bush strategist Karl Rove is scrambling to catch up with the efforts of liberal groups aiming to influence the outcome in November....

This year, allies of President Bush such as Rove, billionaire T. Boone Pickens, New York financier Paul Singer and Florida developer Mel Sembler, who helped harness and direct millions of dollars to the 2004 campaign, are working to rekindle those efforts. But they are finding the 2008 landscape to be more challenging, according to Republican sources familiar with the ongoing talks....

"I hear rumblings," said Brad Freeman, a Bush donor in California. "People keep asking the question, 'What are we going to do this time?' "

Sembler, a big Bush donor and former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, confirmed that he and others are working to identify a group that could help shape the agenda for the presidential campaign and steer major donors to it. A motivating factor, he said, is the sense that Democrats are much further along in their efforts.

"They are very organized. They started a whole lot earlier," Sembler said. "We are not quite as organized. But our efforts are still going forward."

Now, maybe this is just a bunch of premature talk. After all, this is not a group that is just going to sit on its thumbs. But it does seem possible that rather than one prominent conservative attack group emerging this election, there will be a cluster who emerge at different times.

Another interesting dynamic this election will be whether Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) criticizes outside attack groups as he has in the past, and as he did speaking to Chris Matthews last week, and whether those groups respond. The Post's reporting suggests that McCain's criticism actually has had an impact, making conservative donors more skittish about taking the plunge. On the other hand, the McCain camp seems to be puzzled by the response:

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said Friday that he understands the cause and effect and is not bothered by it. He conceded that he has been surprised that no one group has emerged on the Republican side, in spite of the candidate's comments. "I would have thought by now someone would occupy that space," Davis said.

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Paul Kiel | April 18, 2008, 9:34AM

I suppose it was always the case that when top military professionals speak frankly about a war, it makes headlines. Still, given Gen. David Petraeus' famously obtuse presentation to Congress last week, this recent report (pdf) from the National Defense University by Joseph Collins, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations in the Pentagon until 2004, couldn't provide a starker contrast. It is titled "Choosing War: The Decision to Invade Iraq and Its Aftermath," and it begins:

Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle. As of fall 2007, this conflict has cost the United States over 3,800 dead and over 28,000 wounded. Allied casualties accounted for another 300 dead. Iraqi civilian deaths--mostly at the hands of other Iraqis--may number as high as 82,000. Over 7,500 Iraqi soldiers and police officers have also been killed. Fifteen percent of the Iraqi population has become refugees or displaced persons. The Congressional Research Service estimates that the United States now spends over $10 billion per month on the war, and that the total, direct U.S. costs from March 2003 to July 2007 have exceeded $450 billion, all of which has been covered by deficit spending. No one as yet has calculated the costs of long-term veterans' benefits or the total impact on Service personnel and materiel.

The war's political impact also has been great. Globally, U.S. standing among friends and allies has fallen.2 Our status as a moral leader has been damaged by the war, the subsequent occupation of a Muslim nation, and various issues concerning the treatment of detainees. At the same time, operations in Iraq have had a negative impact on all other efforts in the war on terror, which must bow to the priority of Iraq when it comes to manpower, materiel, and the attention of decisionmakers. Our Armed Forces-- especially the Army and Marine Corps--have been severely strained by the war in Iraq. Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East.

As this case study is being written, despite impressive progress in security during the surge, the outcome of the war is in doubt. Strong majorities of both Iraqis and Americans favor some sort of U.S. withdrawal. Intelligence analysts, however, remind us that the only thing worse than an Iraq with an American army may be an Iraq after the rapid withdrawal of that army.... No one has calculated the psychopolitical impact of a perceived defeat on the U.S. reputation for power or the future of the overall war on terror. For many analysts (including this one), Iraq remains a "must win," but for many others, despite the obvious progress under General David Petraeus and the surge, it now looks like a "can't win."