Stonewalling Now Acceptable?

THREE DECADES AFTER NIXON, DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE AND STONEWALLING APPEAR ACCEPTABLE TO MANY

More than three decades ago, people speculated about whether Richard M. Nixon could have saved his corrupt and criminal regime had he burned the famous tapes on the White House lawn. Now a far more corrupt and lawless political banditti has disposed of a great deal of probably incriminating evidence—though not ceremonially burning it---
and there has been very little outcry.

Congress has unsuccessfully sought White House e-mails to find out if Karl Rove was involved in exposing covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. These e-mails could also provide information on whether 9 United States Attorneys were fired for political reasons. They would also have shed light on sworn testimony that Rove was behind the selective prosecution of Governor Donald Siegelman.

The few e-mails that have surfaced showed that Rove was at the center of the plan to fire U.S. Attorneys. It might be recalled that many e-mails concerning outing of Valery Plame disappeared, perhaps because the order to save them was issued twelve hours after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the White House that he was beginning an investigation and needed all records.

The National Journal reported that Rove used a Republican National Committee account to conduct 90% of his electronic correspondence. One could not be blamed for seeing this as a flimsy effort to evade the requirements of the Presidential Records Act. The RNC reported that thousands of Rove’s e-mails were lost.

White House press Secretary Dana Perino has announced that over 5 million e-mails have been “lost.” The National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics have gone to court to have the e-mails restored. E-mails are different from the old Nixon tapes. Lost and deleted e-mails can often be restored. The National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics have brought suite to force the Executive Branch to save and back up e-mails and to restore those that were improperly destroyed. Federal Judge Henry Kennedy issued a temporary restraining order requiring the Executive Office of the President to preserve e-mail under the matter is settled.

The White House has plowed new ground in claiming that employees do not even have to appear before Congressional Committees to claim that executive privilege prevents them from providing information. In the cases of Rove and Josh Bolten, the White House developed a doctrine of blanket executive privilege. Blanket executive privilege holds that these people could say nothing about anything, nor could they explain why it was necessary to assert executive privilege. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy noted, “And they contend that their blanket claim of executive privilege cannot be tested but must be accepted by the Congress as the last word." Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said this claim meant the White House insisted upon “grading its own paper.”

With two Republicans joining 10 Democrats, the Committee voted to recommend contempt citations for Rove and Bolten. Earlier the House judiciary panel took this action against Bolten and Harriet Meyers. However, a certain Senate Republican filibuster will prevent action on the contempt charges, and this will add weight to the new doctrine of blanket executive privilege.

Now the Bush Justice Department and White House are busy trying to block Congressional investigations and head off a possible special counsel looking into why the CIA in 2003 destroyed videotapes of hundreds of hours of interrogation of detainees. Jose Rodriguez, then head of the covert division, was advised by lawyers not to destroy the tapes, and Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, wrote to him advising that the tapes must be retained. Her letter was essentially a warning that if the committee passed into Democratic hands, the tapes would be considered important evidence. The man who destroyed the tapes has not been disciplined, and the administration is saying the tapes were destroyed to protect the identities of covert agents.

We know how much the Bush Administration cares about protecting covert agents. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan had vigorously denied that anyone in the White House was involved in the leak. After he left that post, he wrote, “I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the Vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the President himself.” From the beginning of the affair, the administration has issued an endless stream of lies covering its involvement in the outing of Plame. The official story about a seasoned intelligence professional being addicted to gossip and accidentally leaking Plame’s identity fails to pass serious scrutiny.

We also know that from day one, the George W. Bush administration has been busy erecting walls of secrecy and spinning intricate webs of deceit to hide its intentions and actions. Moreover, the Republican Party has consistently defended the lies and secrecy, as though transparency and honesty were somehow poisonous for a democracy. In Nixon’s day, stonewalling and lying were considered criminal acts by many Republicans. Today, destruction of evidence, stonewalling, and lying are defended by that party and overlooked by most of the mainstream press.

The Eight Ousted US Attorneys

(Revised April 11, 2007)

No US government officials has more power than the 93 US Attorneys. Historically, they have been expected to be completely non-political i n the way they exercise their powers. It appears that all this has changed under the Bush administration. In early 2007, eight were removed and replaced in a way that prevented the Senate from questioning their replacements. A new provision of the of the amended Patriot Act was used in to make them imterim US Attorneys, who could serve indefinitely and whose appointments did not require Senate confirmation. All the facts about why they were removed will never be known as they are protected by Executive Privilege. What is known strongly suggests they were remoed because they did not abuse their powers form partisan purposes.

The most important person purged was Carol Lam of San Diego. She put Congressman Randy Cunningham in prison, and even worse, was following up on connections to his case, and was close to obtaining House documents on Representative Jerry Lewis, a Californian who had been appropriations chairman. Three days before she was removed, Lam had won an indictment of Brenk Wilkes, an important Republican contributor. She was also looking into a Washington D.C. operation that provided media people, Senators, Representatives, and government officials with the services of prostitutes. It was wondered if sexual blackmail was involved in Congressional votes. Most of the people receiving the favors were Republicans, but one Democratic Senator and two liberal pundits were also involved. At the time she was removed, her office announced that there had been a sealed indictment, which now will probably never see the light of day. It is likely that it dealt either/or with Lewis or Hookergate.

The removal of Thomas Di Biagio in Maryland was attributed to his looking into people connected with the Republican governor funneling money from gaming interest to promote legalized slot machines. Senator Peter Domenici pressed for the removal of David C. Iglesias because he had not sped up an investigation in time to damage New Mexico Democrats in the 2006 elections. In Washington State, John McKay had angered superiors because he could not prove that the Democrats had stolen the gubernatorial election of 2004. He said he found no evidence and was unwilling to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury. Paul Charlton of Arizona was removed while he was investigating very questionable land deals on the part of Republican Congressman Rick Renzi. In Arkansas, Karl Rove associate Timothy Griffin was appointed to replace a man with a good record.Griffin had been research director of the Republican National Coimmittee and in 2004 masterminded the “caging” of 70,000 would be voters. “Caging” means they were set up for very effective procedures for challenging their positions on voter registration lists. In most cases they would not know they had been removed until it was too late. They were mostly minority people—some students, some soldiers, and some in homeless shelters.

It developed that Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales had discussed this purge even before Gonzales became Attorney General.However, Gonzales had said that he was not involved in the discussion of the removals. Kyle, Sampson, his former chief of staff, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Attorney General was very much involved in the process. However, Sampson added that he himself had no idea that any of those prosecutors were involved in versy sensitive political investigations. That seemed very implausible. But he admitted that he had suggested firing Patrick Fitzgerald, who was the special prosecutor in the Plame Case. No wonder Republicans on the committee wanted to shut down that hearing.

A study by professors Donald Shields and John Cragan showed that of 375 corruption cases handled by US attorneys under Bush to early 2007, 298 involved Democrats and 67 involved Republicans, and still another 10 were involving independents. These figures suggest what the administration expected from the ousted eight.

It has been recalled that U.S. Attorney Chris Christie on New Jersey opened an investigation of Senator Bob Menendez when he was in a close election contest, suggesting that the criminals he testified against at the risk of his life years ago were actually in league with him. It was also recalled that a career U.S. attorney in Guam was removed in 2002. He had been investigating Jack Abramoff’s activities there. That aspect of the Abramoff investigation ended.

Some Congressional Republicans were critical of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales because his department supplied changing and clearly contradictory explanations of what had happened. However, they fell in line in supporting George W. Bush's decision to hide the full truth by employing the Executive Privilege doctrine. Decades ago, Republicans--especially conservatives-- held themselves to the highest legal standards, but they have now made an exception for law-breaking in the service of partisanship.