Media

Buchanan: Nicaraguan Leader Is "Scrub Stock"

Zachary Roth | April 24, 2009, 2:50PM

For the last decade or so, Washington has indulged Pat Buchanan as a sort of crazy political uncle. Everyone, it seems, has agreed to forget about his long track record of racially questionable commentary and writing, and to look kindly on his continued nativist leanings, because he's an entertaining and surprisingly insightful TV performer, and it's fun to watch him argue with Rachel Maddow.

But every now and then, the centrality to Buchanan's worldview of racial difference rises to the surface. In addition to his frequent MSNBC appearances, where he plays a mostly well-mannered, if hardline, conservative, Buchanan also writes a column for the far-right web magazine, Human Events. And that's where he gets himself into trouble.

His most recent effort, "The Rooted and The Rootless," takes as its premise the notion that there's a "blood-and-soil, family-and-faith, God-and-country kind of nation" that's competing with a minority represented by the "rootless" Obama and his "aides with advanced degrees from elite colleges who react just like him."

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Barack Obama

Obama: On Second Thought, Scratch That Commission Idea

Zachary Roth | April 23, 2009, 6:36PM

Is President Obama flipping back again on the subject of how to conduct torture investigations?

His press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told reporters today that Obama no longer favored the idea of a bipartisan commission to probe the issue. "The president determined the concept didn't seem altogether workable in this case," said Gibbs. And the Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, reports that Obama backed away from the position during a "lengthy exchange" earlier yesterday with House Minority Leader John Boehner.*

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Alberto Gonzales

Did Harman Break The Law?

Zachary Roth | April 23, 2009, 4:03PM

We've been wondering about something on this whole Jane-Harman/AIPAC story. (For the background, go here.)

When the Justice Department heard Harman on the wiretap, and as a result started to investigate her (a probe later reportedly shut down by Alberto Gonzales), what was the underlying crime she was suspected of, and how strong does the case against her appear to have been?

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Media

Maddow Cites TPMmuckraker On Sleep Expert

Zachary Roth | April 23, 2009, 1:05PM

Last night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow cited our interview with James Horne, the sleep expert who says his work was distorted by Steven Bradbury in one of the OLC torture memos, to justify keeping people awake for 11 days.

Thanks for the shout out, Rachel!

Bank of America

Cuomo: Paulson Kept SEC Out Of The Loop On B Of A

Zachary Roth | April 23, 2009, 12:19PM

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has just released documents from his investigation into Bank of America, its receipt of government money, and those billions in bonuses that went to Merrill Lynch executives.

Here's one quick nugget we found: It looks like then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson didn't keep the SEC -- whose role, of course, is to protect investors -- informed on the government's intense December 2008 discussions with B of A about Merrill's losses, and possible government assistance for B of A.

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Ted Stevens

Justice Picking Up Tab For Stevens Six Defense

Zachary Roth | April 23, 2009, 11:39AM

Guess who's footing the bill for those fancy lawyers the Stevens Six have hired? We are.

The Justice Department confirmed to TPMmuckraker that the prosecutors -- who are being investigated for criminal contempt in connection to misconduct in the Ted Stevens case -- requested representation under a DOJ provision that applies to employees who run into legal trouble while doing their jobs, and that the request was authorized.

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Alberto Gonzales

Report: Angry Intel Officers Tipped Pelosi To Harman Wiretap

Zachary Roth | April 23, 2009, 11:18AM

Another day, another advance by CQ's Jeff Stein on his Harman-AIPAC story...

Late last night, Stein reported that, after Alberto Gonzales quashed the FBI probe into Rep. Harman for political reasons, intelligence officials, angry about Gonzo's move, told Nancy Pelosi about the wiretap that had picked up Harman talking to a suspected Israeli agent -- defying the AG's order that Pelosi not be informed.

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George Bush

Senate Releases Declassified Narrative Of OLC Torture Opinions

Zachary Roth | April 22, 2009, 6:27PM

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) of the Senate Intelligence committee has just released a declassified narrative (pdf) of the OLC's development of its opinions on torture.

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder has already picked out a key excerpt, that sheds some light on just who in the Bush administration helped devise and approve the torture policies:

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Condi Rice

Condi Aide: Bushies Told Me Anti-Torture Memo Was "Inconvenient"

Zachary Roth | April 22, 2009, 5:50PM

As we noted, Philip Zelikow, a former top lawyer to Condi Rice at the State Department, yesterday wrote that the White House tried to destroy all copies of a memo he authored, which took issue with the legal opinions laid out in the infamous OLC torture memos.

Today, Zelikow appeared on MSNBC to flesh out that story. Among other things, he reveals that the Bushies said his memo was "inconvenient to have around." (Would it have been too much for Andrea Mitchell to have followed up by asking him who, exactly, said that?)

Watch:

Don Siegelman

Seventy-Five Ex-AGs To Holder: Review Siegelman Case

Zachary Roth | April 22, 2009, 5:29PM

Former Alabama governor Don Siegelman is stepping up his campaign to persuade Attorney General Eric Holder to take another look at his case.

Seventy-five former state attorneys general, including ten Republicans, have sent a letter to Holder saying that Siegelman's defense lawyers have raised "gravely troublesome facts" about whether he got a fair trial, reports the New York Times. The letter cites Holder's recent decision to ask that the charges against Ted Stevens be dropped, thanks to prosecutors' failure to turn over evidence to the defense, as required. It argues that there is evidence of similar misconduct in Siegelman's case, and that the charges should similarly be dropped if that's borne out in an investigation.

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Alaska

Report: Stevens Prosecutor Hires Rove Lawyer

Zachary Roth | April 22, 2009, 4:40PM

The Stevens Six have lawyered up. And what lawyers they are.

Legal Times reports that Nicholas Marsh, one of the public integrity prosecutors, has hired Karl Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, of Patton Boggs.

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AIPAC

Harman-AIPAC: The Latest Developments

Zachary Roth | April 22, 2009, 3:48PM

Some recent developments in the fast-moving Harman-AIPAC story to update you on...

- Nancy Pelosi told reporters that she was briefed "a few years ago" by the NSA that they had wiretapped Harman, but wasn't told what was found, and never alerted Harman.

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Bailout

Bailout Fraud Prosecutor Nets First Catch

Zachary Roth | April 22, 2009, 1:41PM

In an interview with The Hill published yesterday, Neil Barofsky, the inspector general for the bailout, said that he was pursuing 20 criminal and civil investigations into potential fraud in the TARP program.

And it looks like at least one has now paid off.

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Jerrold Nadler

Nadler On Torture And Bybee

Zachary Roth | April 22, 2009, 11:47AM

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), who sits on the House Judiciary committee (and also happens to be TPM's congressman) went on MSNBC's Countdown last night to repeat his call for the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee, who, while a member of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, wrote one of the torture memos released last week.

Nadler also said he supported the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate whether Bush administration officials, including Bybee, committed crimes.

Watch:

Torture

Turley: We Need A Special Torture Prosecutor, Not Some Lame Commission

Zachary Roth | April 22, 2009, 10:02AM

Jonathan Turley, the media-friendly George Washington Law School professor, who's an outspoken advocate of curbing executive power, gave a bravura performance on MSNBC's Countdown last night, on the subject of possible torture prosecutions.

Arguing that investigations aren't just necessary but long overdue, Turley made two important points that have been getting a bit lost in the rapid-fire debate lately.

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Jane Harman

Blitzer v. Harman

Zachary Roth | April 22, 2009, 9:00AM

We didn't get to this yesterday, but as part of her media blitz to beat back CQ's report, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) went on CNN to again deny that she intervened with anyone on the AIPAC case.

And Wolf Blitzer actually did a pretty good job of pressing her...

Watch:

Jay Bybee

Feingold Latest To Call For Bybee Impeachment

Zachary Roth | April 21, 2009, 6:17PM

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) is the latest to call for the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee, in response to the release of those torture memos last week.

Bybee wrote one of the memos in 2002, when he served in the Justice Department's Office of Special Counsel.

Here's Feingold's statement:

The just released OLC memos, including the 2002 memo authored by Jay Bybee, are a disgrace. The idea that one of the architects of this perversion of the law is now sitting on the federal bench is very troubling. The memos offer some of the most explicit evidence yet that Mr. Bybee and others authorized torture and they suggest that grounds for impeachment can be made. Clearly, the Justice Department has the responsibility to investigate this matter further. As a Senator, I would be a juror in any impeachment trial so I don't want to reach a conclusion until all the evidence is before me.

Media

White House Press Corps Badgers Gibbs On Torture Stance

Zachary Roth | April 21, 2009, 4:45PM

The White House press corps gave Robert Gibbs a hard time today about President Obama's comments this morning that left the door open to prosecutions of Bush officials for torture.

It's true that the president's comments go further than anything he'd said before, and could suggest that the White House is tacking this way and that on a crucial subject. That impression is strengthened by the fact that the White House has now had to walk back Rahm Emanuel's comments from Sunday that the Bushies wouldn't be prosecuted.

Late Update: Looks like The Huffington Post's Sam Stein had the same response to the briefing that we did.

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John Conyers

Conyers To Hold Hearings On Torture Memos

Zachary Roth | April 21, 2009, 4:39PM

Rep. John Conyers, who chairs the House Judiciary committee, has announced that he plans to hold hearings into the Bush-era OLC memos released last week.

Despite his pledge to hold hearings in his own committee, Conyers said he agrees with President Obama's statement that he favors a probe conducted by a bipartisan commission, rather than solely by a congressional committee.

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George Bush

CAP Circulating Petition To Impeach Bybee

Zachary Roth | April 21, 2009, 2:46PM

Think Progress, the blog of the Center for American Progress, is circulating an online petition calling on Congress to impeach Jay Bybee, who, while at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, wrote one of the torture memos released last week. Bybee is currently a federal judge.

CAP is led by John Podesta, a close White House ally who helped run Barack Obama's transition.

Think Progress joins Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Rep. Jerry Nadler, the New York Times, and the Center for Constitutional Rights in calling for Bybee's impeachment.

Late Update: Sen. Pat Leahy, who chairs the Judiciary committee, has called on Bybee to step down from the bench, though he doesn't seem to have mentioned anything about impeachment.

Condi Rice

State Dept Lawyer: White House Tried To Destroy My Alternative Memo On Torture

Zachary Roth | April 21, 2009, 2:06PM

As David noted over at TPM, there was some potentially big news in a blog post that was written this morning over at Foreign Policy by Philip Zelikow, a top State Department lawyer under Condoleezza Rice.

Zelikow wrote that, in 2005, he had written a memo on the legality of harsh interrogation techniques that expressed an "alternative view" to the OLC memos. He continued:

My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department's archives.

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Jane Harman

CORRECTED: CQ's Stein On Countdown

Zachary Roth | April 21, 2009, 1:35PM

We didn't have the chance to get to this earlier but CQ's Jeff Stein went on MSNBC's Countdown last night to talk about his now-famous report on Jane Harman and AIPAC*.

Among other things, Stein said that there are "several people who have known this for some time."

And interestingly, he adds that, according to his sources,the investigation into Harman that Time first reported on back in 2006 "never got started" because it was quashed by then-AG Alberto Gonzales.

The whole segment is worth watching...

* This sentence has been corrected from an earlier version that wrongly said Stein had appeared on Hardball.

Alberto Gonzales

Harman: "If There Are Tapes Out There, Bring It On!"

Zachary Roth | April 21, 2009, 1:19PM

Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) just appeared on MSNBC to give a guns blazing denial of the allegations in CQ's explosive report from yesterday.

The congresswoman, speaking to Andrea Mitchell, reiterated her claim that she didn't intervene with anyone -- not the Justice Department, or the White House -- in the AIPAC case. And she renewed her call for DOJ to disclose all the material associated with the investigation into her that, according to CQ's report, Alberto Gonzales helped stymie.

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Barack Obama

Obama: Torture Prosecutions For Bushies Is A Question For AG

Zachary Roth | April 21, 2009, 12:27PM

President Obama is leaving the door open for prosecutions of Bush DOJ officials who provided the legal rationale to support torture policies.

In comments to reporters this morning, Obama said he didn't support prosecuting CIA officers who were carrying out the policy. But:

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Jane Harman

Harman Calls For Release Of Wiretapping Materials

Zachary Roth | April 21, 2009, 11:56AM

Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) has just released a letter she sent to Attorney General Eric Holder. Harman calls on Holder to give her all materials related to the government wiretapping of her, and to the investigation into her, so that she can release them publicly.

Harman also, crucially, takes her denial further than yesterday, saying she never contacted either DOJ or the White House or anyone else to seek favorable treatment for anyone.

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Torture

Senator: OPR Torture Report Likely To Be "Devastating"

Zachary Roth | April 21, 2009, 11:28AM

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) went on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show last night, to talk about the fallout from the release last week of the Bush administration's torture memos. And his appearance added to the growing sense that pressure is mounting to hold the memos' authors accountable.

Whitehouse, who sits on the Senate Judiciary committee, did temporarily pour a little bit of cold water on the spate of calls to impeach Jay Bybee, the author of one of the memos, who is now a federal judge. He said that it's "certainly possible" that Bybee should be impeached, but that first, we should wait for the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility to release its long-held report into the authorship of the memos.

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Torture

White House: Rahm Didn't Mean What He Said On Not Prosecuting Bushies For Torture

Zachary Roth | April 21, 2009, 10:06AM

On Sunday, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel went on ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos and clearly declared that the Obama administration would not prosecute the Bushies who "devised" torture policies.

That seemed to go further than anything the administration had said before. So yesterday we called the White House to get a more formal statement on the issue. And when we didn't hear back, we got to wondering: had Rahm been freelancing, and gotten out ahead of White House policy?

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Jane Harman

NYT: Harman Said She'd Have More Pull With White House

Zachary Roth | April 21, 2009, 9:20AM

The New York Times adds some details to yesterday's blockbuster CQ report about Rep. Jane Harman and AIPAC.

Here are the key nuggets from the Times story:

* The report confirms that the call on which Harman agreed to take action in the AIPAC case in return for helping her get the House intel chair job was indeed picked up by the NSA, as Stein reported, rather than the FBI or other agencies, as some reports yesterday had suggested.

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Barack Obama

Tapper Presses Gibbs On State Secrets

Zachary Roth | April 20, 2009, 6:50PM

Jake Tapper of ABC News asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs today about a subject we've been writing about lately -- the administration's several invocations of the state secrets privilege, despite Barack Obama's criticism, as a presidential candidate last year, of President Bush's use of the privilege.

In response, Gibbs talked about the need to balance transparency with the need to protect national security.

Watch:

Allen Stanford

Stanford Rages: "I Start To Get An Itch To Grab Somebody By The Throat"

Zachary Roth | April 20, 2009, 6:05PM

Allen Stanford has gone on a PR blitz in an effort to clear his name. But from the looks of it, he may already be regretting doing so.

The Texas billionaire, accused earlier this year by the SEC of orchestrating a "massvie ongoing fraud," sat down today with the New York Times, in the office of his lawyer, Dick DeGuerin. That interview was preceded by one with the Houston Chronicle.

The Times' writeup is worth excerpting at length:

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Justice Department

The Harman-AIPAC Story: A Timeline

Zachary Roth | April 20, 2009, 5:29PM

CQ's blockbuster story, about a wiretap that picked up Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) discussing the AIPAC spying case with a "suspected Israeli agent", picks up on a sequence of complex events from several years ago, and involves several moving pieces.

So we thought it would be worthwhile to put together a timeline of events laying out the major reported developments in this sprawling story.

Without further ado:

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Wiretapping

Harman: I Never Contacted DOJ On AIPAC Case

Zachary Roth | April 20, 2009, 2:51PM

Rep. Jane Harman's office has released a statement in response to CQ's report that the congresswoman was heard on an NSA wiretap telling an "Israeli agent" that she would press the Justice Department to ease up on the AIPAC spy case in return for political help.

The CQ Politics story simply recycles three year-old discredited reporting of largely unsourced material to manufacture a 'scoop' out of widely known and unremarkable facts - that Congresswoman Jane Harman is and has long been a supporter of AIPAC, and that some members of AIPAC regarded her as well-qualified to chair the House Intelligence Committee following the 2006 elections. Congresswoman Harman has never contacted the Justice Department about its prosecution of present or former AIPAC employees and the Department has never informed her that she was or is the subject of or involved in an investigation. If there is anything about this story that should arouse concern, it is that the Bush Administration may have been engaged in electronic surveillance of members of the congressional Intelligence Committees.

George Bush

Nadler And NYT: Impeach Bybee For Torture Memo

Zachary Roth | April 20, 2009, 2:36PM

More fallout from last week's release of the Bush DOJ's torture memos...

Both Congressman Jerry Nadler and the New York Times are calling for Jay Bybee, the author of one of the memos, who's now a federal judge, to be impeached.

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