Philip Heymann, a Harvard law professor and former deputy attorney general under Reno, said the Justice Department has always been vulnerable to allegations of playing politics with prosecutions."But these allegations are vastly greater and more credible," Heymann said. "Really good attorney generals go out of their way to keep appearances straight as well as realities. I think something serious has been going on, and I think it's terribly important that it come out.
"If politicians were going to the White House and saying they didn't want this or that case brought, and the White House was letting the U.S. attorneys know by firing them, it would be terribly immoral and destructive."
--David Kurtz
I'll wait to see more before judging just how this fits into the larger Bush administration voter suppression agenda. But let me take note of Friday's ruling in a case that pitted the Bush Justice Department against the State of Missouri, specifically, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan. There's a jurisdictional issue in the case: balancing the state's versus localities' responsibility for administering elections. But the heart of the case is that the Bush administration sued the state for not being sufficiently aggressive in purging voter rolls. (See the original DOJ complaint.)
This is a classic battleground in the voter suppression game. Voter roll purges strikes names of people who've died or moved. But they also knock off the lists of a lot of occasional voters. This is what the Bush administration calls voting right enforcement.
In addition to finding against the Bush administration on the jurisdictional issue and a number of factual points ...
[U.S. District Judge Nanette] Laughrey said it was difficult to gauge the scope of the problem "because the United States has not presented the actual voter registration lists and shown who should have been included or excluded and why.""It is also telling that the United States has not shown that any Missouri resident was denied his or her right to vote as a result of deficiencies alleged by the United States," Laughrey wrote. "Nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred."
It's all part of the same story.
(ed.note: At TPM we're actively pursuing a Missouri angle to the US Attorney Purge story which again turns on administration 'voter fraud' claims.)
--Josh Marshall
Harper's Scott Horton is a welcome new voice in the blogosphere. You can find his wit and wisdom at his blog No Comment.
--David Kurtz
An inside look at how the Department of Justice has changed under George W. Bush, and particularly under Alberto Gonzales.
Update: Some readers have asked me to further highlight the piece I linked to above, an interview that Daniel Metcalfe, a recently retired senior career DOJ lawyer, gave to the Legal Times' Tony Mauro. Gladly.
Metcalfe had been with the Justice Department since 1971, so much of the perspective what he is able to offer on the Bush Justice Department is historical. Here is Metcalfe on how quickly things changed after Alberto Gonzales became attorney general:
Ever since the Watergate era, when Edward Levi came in as attorney general to replace former Sen. William Saxby soon after Nixon resigned, the Justice Department maintained a healthy distance between it and what could be called the raw political concerns that are properly within the White House's domain. Even Reagan's first attorney general, William French Smith, did not depart greatly from the standard that Levi set; as for Meese, I knew him to be more heavily involved in defending himself from multiple ethics investigations than in bringing the department too close to the White House, even though he came from there.More recently, of course, the DOJ-White House distance hit its all-time high-water mark under Janet Reno, especially during Clinton's second term. And even John Ashcroft made it clear to all department employees that, among other things, he held that traditional distance in proper reverence; he proved that this was no mere lip service when, from his hospital bed, he refused to overrule Deputy AG Comey on what is now called the "terrorist surveillance program." Especially in the wake of 9/11, which strongly spurred the morale and dedication of Justice Department employees, myself included, I saw only a limited morale diminution in general during the first term.
But that strong tradition of independence over the previous 30 years was shattered in 2005 with the arrival of the White House counsel as a second-term AG. All sworn assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, it was as if the White House and Justice Department now were artificially tied at the hip -- through their public affairs, legislative affairs and legal policy offices, for example, as well as where you ordinarily would expect such a connection (i.e., Justice's Office of Legal Counsel). I attended many meetings in which this total lack of distance became quite clear, as if the current crop of political appointees in those offices weren't even aware of the important administration-of-justice principles that they were trampling.
Metcalfe also makes an interesting--and on its face, plausible--claim that I don't recall hearing before: namely, that the traditional second term decline in the quality of new political appointees is worse in Republican administrations:
I'll now say something that might sound partisan, even coming from a purposely nonpartisan registered independent, but it's really not: In my experience over 11 presidential administrations, from Nixon I to what can be called Bush III, there is an unmistakable drop-off in overall appointment quality during a second presidential term -- and this definitely is more so during a Republican administration. Perhaps this is due to there being a lower quality of political appointees in Republican administrations to begin with, given that, by and large, they give up more than Democrats do to enter government service, especially with the post-Watergate ethics restrictions that all government officials face.This observation is nothing new, by the way; one need only look at the relative ages and experience levels of comparable appointees in successive administrations to see it. So when you enter the second term of a Republican administration, you get the worst of all possible worlds: You actually see some influential political appointees who are, to put it bluntly, too subject-matter ignorant to even realize how ignorant they are. (This is assuming that, if they knew, they'd actually care.)
And compounding this, as mentioned earlier, is the strong drive of political appointees at all levels (perhaps more so if they are attorneys, whose background is amenable to legal positions throughout the executive branch) to obtain that maximum capstone position before the second term ends. What happens to bureaucracy at such a time is that it becomes sluggish to the point of constipation, driven only by expediency as gauged from a political or personal agenda, and it sometimes yields some truly mind-boggling results, such as the current U.S. Attorney nightmare.
Metcalfe's perspective is worth considering. It is, in some respects, a more benign explanation for some of what we have seen than I might favor. I use "benign" guardedly because what Metcalfe witnessed in the last two years of his tenure at DOJ was clearly distressing to him and, in his view, marred the department's reputation, something he took great pride in.
What I mean is that the dysfunction he describes at the staff level can be seen as the cause of the purge scandal or it can be seen as a means to an end. If you subscribe to the former view, then Purgegate is a mess that could have been avoided if it had merely been handled better, a public relations snafu due to poor staffing. The latter view, which is perhaps more cynical but I also think more realistic, is that placing young, inexperienced, impressionable staffers in high level department positions enabled higher-ups in the Administration to exert far greater control in promulgating the Rove political agenda. (That staff level youth and inexperience could be blamed when and if the crap hit the fan was merely another advantage to the plan.)
Second term malaise may have a historical precedent, but the politicization of the Justice Department is classic Karl Rove.
--David Kurtz
I'm afraid yesterday's AP story on No Gun Ri is going to get lost in the swirl of more immediately pressing scandals, but it's such an important piece, I want to draw your attention to it:
Six years after declaring the U.S. killing of Korean War refugees at No Gun Ri was "not deliberate," the Army has acknowledged it found but did not divulge that a high-level document said the U.S. military had a policy of shooting approaching civilians in South Korea.The document, a letter from the U.S. ambassador in South Korea to the State Department in Washington, is dated the day in 1950 when U.S. troops began the No Gun Ri shootings, in which survivors say hundreds, mostly women and children, were killed.
Exclusion of the embassy letter from the Army's 2001 investigative report is the most significant among numerous omissions of documents and testimony pointing to a policy of firing on refugee groups — undisclosed evidence uncovered by Associated Press archival research and Freedom of Information Act requests. . . .
More than a dozen documents — in which high-ranking U.S. officers tell troops that refugees are "fair game," for example, and order them to "shoot all refugees coming across river" — were found by the AP in the investigators' own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None of those documents was disclosed in the Army's 300-page public report. . . .
Despite this, the Army's e-mail to the AP maintains, as did the 2001 report, "No policy purporting to authorize soldiers to shoot refugees was ever promulgated to soldiers in the field." . . .
There's a lot more detail in the AP piece about how the 2001 report which exonerated the Army left out or mischaracterized key pieces of evidence from the Army's own records.
It's never too late to get this sort of thing right, and given the looming historical accounting America will have to do on Iraq and the War on Terror, we better learn how to do it right.
--David Kurtz
Walter Pincus reports on the Administration's proposed revisions to FISA, which include immunizing telecommunications companies who cooperate in the Administration's surveillance programs from lawsuits by their customers. That provision would be retroactive to Sept 11, 2001 (via War and Piece).
--David Kurtz
White House agrees to coordinate with the Senate Judiciary Committee on choosing an independent consultant to recover all those lost emails.
Nice. The Senate gets to help pick who will find the emails but the White House still hasn't agreed to let the Senate see the emails once they are found. Ah, compromise.
Update: Speaking of compromise, Fred Fielding has his work cut out for him:
Sources tell NPR that Fielding actually wants to negotiate with Congress about how the interviews [of White House staff] will take place. But Fielding has not been able to persuade President Bush to go along.
--David Kurtz
Milwaukee US Attorney Steven Biskupic responds to revelation that he was on and then later taken off the Bush firing list ...
Until the recent controversy surrounding the firings of eight United State Attorneys around the country, it was never communicated to me that my job could be in jeopardy or that I was considered to be disloyal to President Bush's agenda.- It is my understanding that my name appears on a list, which was a ranking of United States Attorneys. My name appeared in a category questioning my performance and loyalty to the President. That same list characterized esteemed Chicago United States Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as "mediocre." I believe the list has no credibility.
- The charging decision in the Georgia Thompson case was made in consultation with the then-Democratic State Attorney General, and the Democratic District Attorney for Dane County. The decision to charge Thompson was based solely on the facts, and was not made with consideration of my job status. To my knowledge at the time, my job status was entirely secure.
- I am a career prosecutor, selected as United States Attorney through a bipartisan commission. My numerous public corruption cases include prosecutions of Democrats and Republicans. Our records show that since 2002 when I became United States Attorney, I have brought at least 12 cases against individuals who donated money to Republican candidates or who were aligned with the Republican Party.
--Josh Marshall
So much for Fred Fielding's story (from the LAT) ...
Karl Rove and other White House employees were cautioned in employee manuals, memos and briefings to carefully save any e-mails that might discuss official matters even if those messages came from private e-mail accounts, the White House disclosed Friday.Despite these cautions, e-mails from Rove and others discussing official business may have been deleted and are now missing.
White House officials spent much of Friday reiterating that the missing e-mails were the result of an innocent mistake. About 50 aides in the executive office of the Bush administration have used e-mail accounts provided by the Republican National Committee to keep campaign-related communication separate from their official White House business.
--Josh Marshall
Condi takes another one for the team:
After intense internal debate, the Bush administration has decided to hold on to five Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence agents captured in Iraq, overruling a State Department recommendation to release them, according to U.S. officials.At a meeting of the president's foreign policy team Tuesday, the administration decided the five Iranians will remain in custody and go through a periodic six-month review used for the 250 other foreign detainees held in Iraq, U.S. officials said. The next review is not expected until July, officials say. . . .
Differences over the five Iranians reflect an emerging divide on how to deal with Iran. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went into the meeting Tuesday advising that the men be freed because they are no longer useful, but after a review of options she went along with the consensus, U.S. officials say. Vice President Cheney's office made the firmest case for keeping them.
--David Kurtz
J. Scott Jennings, Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director, Office of Political Affairs to Karl Rove, Kyle Sampson, Fred Fielding, et al., February 28th, 2007: "[Sen. Domenici's Chief of Staff Steve] Bell said Domenici's idea is not to respond [to Iglesias's accusations], and hopefully make this a one day story. They have already been contacted by McClatchy ... They have not confirmed to the reporter they were one of the Members."
AP, March 1st, 2007 ...
In a brief interview Thursday, Domenici also denied the accusation. "I don't have any comment," he told The Associated Press. "I have no idea what he's talking about."
--Josh Marshall
Big News.
In yesterday's episode of TPM TV we discussed Milwaukee US Attorney Steven Biskupic and discussed the evidence suggesting he'd been targetted by the Justice Department for firing (he didn't come through on 'voter fraud') but then apparently got a reprieve. Was it tied to his recently reversed corruption case, targetting a Democratic administration?
To remind you ...
Well, tonight we have proof. Just out from McClatchy ...
A U.S. attorney in Wisconsin who prosecuted a state Democratic official on corruption charges during last year's heated governor's race was once targeted for firing by the Department of Justice, but given a reprieve for reasons that remain unclear. A federal appeals court last week threw out the conviction of Wisconsin state worker Georgia Thompson, saying the evidence was "beyond thin."Congressional investigators looking into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys saw Wisconsin prosecutor Steven M. Biskupic's name on a list of lawyers targeted for removal when they were inspecting a Justice Department document not yet made public, according to an attorney for a lawmaker involved in the investigation. The attorney asked for anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the investigation.
This will be big.
--Josh Marshall
I told a reporter a week or so ago that the turning point in my mind in the US Attorney story came the day we saw the report in Joe Monohan's New Mexico politics blog that David Iglesias had sent an email in which he had called his firing a "political fragging." That was the first time we had a hint of the real story out of one of the fired attorneys' mouths. And it looked like there was more coming. The next day he told McClatchy how two members of Congress had called him to pressure him about that election timed indictment.
That set off the alarm bells at the White House and we have the email in which Karl Rove's deputy Scott Jennings sends out an urgent message to Rove, Fielding, Perino, Sampson, et al.
Jennings had gotten an urgent call from Steve Bell, Sen Domenici's Chief of Staff. "Bell said Domenici's idea is not to respond, and hopefully make this a one day story," Jennings tells the gang.
Good luck.
Definitely check this one out.
Also, a side note. New White House Counsel Fred Fielding has been laying a lot of the blame for the lax email policies on his predecessors. But here we have Jennings sending out a group email that includes both Fielding and Rove. And Rove's getting it at one of his RNC email addresses. I guess it was still SOP as late as February 28th, the date of the email.
--Josh Marshall
What it's looked like from the very beginning.
From NPR (courtesy of TPM Reader DE) ...
NPR now has new information about that plan. According to someone who's had conversations with White House officials, the plan to fire all 93 U.S. attorneys originated with political adviser Karl Rove. It was seen as a way to get political cover for firing the small number of U.S. attorneys the White House actually wanted to get rid of. Documents show the plan was eventually dismissed as impractical.
Why do you think they're tossing everyone under the bus but Karl?
--Josh Marshall
In episode #3 of our new TPM TV show, we discussed those DOJ emails in which Justice Department officials are caught brainstorming cover stories for why they fired San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam. And today's document dump contains even more fun.
In one memo, apparently assembled by Monica Goodling, the DOJers get so creative that they get confused about which fired US Attorney they're talking about -- Lam, Iglesias, you say Tomato, I say Tomahto. (As you know, the Iglesias was bad on illegal immigration cover story is soo down the memory hole.) And in her zeal to get on Lam's case for lax immigration enforcement in a prep memo for senate testimony, Goodling blames Lam for enforcement policies actually run by the Department of Homeland Security.
The plan to blame her for America's dependence on foreign oil doesn't seem to have made it into the emails. But we're still looking ...
--Josh Marshall
More from the Justice Department documents:
Turns out that the Justice Department under Bush does pay close attention to who's a member of the Federalist Society and who's not.
And the Justice Department has said that no replacements were ready for the fired U.S. attorneys. But today's documents show that Kyle Sampson had a list.
--Paul Kiel
Ya don't say?
From the document dump, DOJ press spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos on strategy for dealing with the Attorney Purge story: "We are trying to muddy the coverage up a bit."
--Josh Marshall
M.J. Rosenberg in top form: whether David Brooks and the neocons like it or not, most "Arab anger about (and sympathy for) Palestinians is utterly genuine."
--Andrew Golis
The latest in the White House email follies:
Karl Rove's lawyer says that he didn't mean to delete his emails. He thought the RNC was keeping a copy. Just one big misunderstanding.
The White House now says that it may have lost millions of emails due to switching from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook.
--Paul Kiel
Aahhhhh, this one's a beaut ... As we've discussed before, the folks at the DOJ really had some brainstorming to do to come up with reasons to justify the Attorney firings. Here we have what appears to be Monica Goodling's notes from one of those brainstorming sessions. On Iglesias? "Domenici says he doesn't move cases." See the whole thing here.
--Josh Marshall
Who did Kyle Sampson want to install in Carol Lam's place? A new development out of this morning's document dump.
One of Kyle's suggestions for filling Lam's position in San Diego was Jeffrey A. Taylor, already a subject of interest for us here at TPM. Instead he became US Attorney for the District of Columbia.
--Josh Marshall
A Senator in the Book Club? Ron Wyden rejects the idea that we need to wait for a Democratic president to take on health care reform.
--Andrew Golis
Did Fred Hiatt break his own stated policies on Op-eds by publishing Liz Cheney's attack on Pelosi without identifying the writer as the Veep's daughter?
Update: Don't miss what may be the crowning absurdity of this whole affair.
--Greg Sargent
More documents forthcoming from the Justice Department this morning.
Update: They've arrived. We've set a document diving comment thread at TPMmuckraker here.
--Paul Kiel
The DCCC is up on the air with a new radio ad hammering GOP Rep. Heather Wilson over her role in the Attorney Purge. Check it out here.
--Greg Sargent
TPM Reader RL sends us along this editorial from the Milwaukee alt weekly, the Shepherd Express, which gives us more helpful background on Milwaukee US Attorney Steven Biskupic's curious habit of prosecuting Democrats and how it ties in to the US Attorney Purge.
--Josh Marshall
Shocked and somewhat awed (CNN)...
The alleged "D.C. madam" dropped a name in court documents filed Thursday, but the man named bristled at being accused of hiring the high-end escort service run by Deborah Jean Palfrey.Government prosecutors say Pamela Martin and Associates was actually a prostitution ring that Palfrey operated in the Washington area for 13 years. Palfrey denies that her business provided sexual services to its customers.
In her motion to reconsider appointment of counsel, Palfrey named Harlan K. Ullman as "one of the regular customers" of the business.
Ullman is one of the leading theorists behind the "shock and awe" military strategy that was associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"The allegations do not dignify a response," Ullman told CNN. "I'm a private, not a public, citizen. Any further questions are referred to my attorneys."
--Josh Marshall
There are so many shoes dropping tonight that it's hard to know which one to catch or grab on to. But here's a decent place to start. Various White Houses have made more or less copious claims for executive privilege. But even Richard Nixon was not half this audacious. Remember those Republican National Committee emails that seem to have gone missing? President Bush's lawyers says that if they're ever 'found' then they're covered by executive privilege too.
From the Times ...
The clash also seemed to push the White House and Democrats closer to a serious confrontation over executive privilege, with the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, asserting that the administration has control over countless other e-mail messages that the Republican National Committee has archived. Democrats are insisting that they are entitled to get the e-mail messages directly from the national committee.
This one is worth slowing down and seeing just what the White House is saying. Executive privilege doesn't just apply to conversations the president has with his top aides. It doesn't just apply to conversations his top aides have with each other. It doesn't even just apply to any presidential aides doing anything connected to the White House. Executive privilege applies to the outside political party work the president's aides do on their own time.
Remember, members of the White House staff have outside party-funded email accounts for doing political work they are not permitted to do on taxpayers' time. They do their official work with government phones, emails, blackberries, etc. But if they break the rules and do official work using outside party-funded email addresses then executive privilege covers that too.
--Josh Marshall
A bunch of you have asked, 'Hey, as long as you're taking the time to produce these daily video segments, why aren't you making it available as a podcast?' Well, we are. It's on itunes. And you can go download it or subscribe whenever you want. Just go to the itunes store and search for 'veracifier'.
Of course, that raises the question, 'What the hell's veracifier?' A good question with a good answer, which I'll answer in an upcoming post.
--Josh Marshall
Rudy: Don't believe the hype. I can be just as friggin' crazy as the other 'wingers.
Greg Djerejian brings us the news that Rudy is being advised on Iraq by none other than John Bolton. So basically Rudy's in with the one guy who was even too whacked for the Bushies.
The guy really knows how to pick good people.
--Josh Marshall
US Attorney Purge smoke comin' out of Wisconsin ...
Late Update: After we finished today's piece, Rep. Conyers (D-MI) put out the word that he now has evidence that some of those RNC emails contain more information about Wisconsin US Attorney Steven Biskupic. All eyes on Wisconsin.
--Josh Marshall
Fred Hiatt responds to our questions, explains why it's okay to publish a Liz Cheney Op ed piece bashing Nancy Pelosi without identifying her as Veep Cheney's daughter.
--Greg Sargent
AP: CBS cans Imus.
BREAKING!: David Gregory hangs tough against the anti-Imus lynch mob. Video Soon!
Late Update: There seems to have been at least one reader who didn't realize the 'breaking' line above was a sarcastic remark at David Gregory's expense. Please tell me he's the only one? Please?
--Josh Marshall
The new details keep coming fast and furious. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) just sent a letter to Alberto Gonzales, who I guess we might call the AG pro-tem. Waxman spoke to RNC Counsel Rob Kelner. According to Kelner, even after the RNC began saving Karl Rove's emails, in response to orders from Pat Fitzgerald, Rove himself apparently continued to delete the messages himself well into 2005. This one's pretty fishy. So you'll want to read the details Paul has in this new post at TPMmuckraker.
--Josh Marshall
Exclusive: We've obtained the full memo from Rahm Emanuel to fellow House Dem leaders urging them to hang tough in the face of White House pressure to fund the war. Check it out.
--Greg Sargent
Josh Green explains for us how Karl Rove once used the 'vote fraud' issue to get one of his clients' election defeats reversed in court. This isssue's really close to Karl's heart.
--Josh Marshall
Hillary heads to Rutgers to discuss women and politics. I guess probably no stop for the Imus show.
--Josh Marshall
It just never stops. According to CREW, there are millions of missing emails from the White House -- these from the White House servers.
--Paul Kiel
I think White House pressers Scott Stanzel can do a little better on telling us why the White House changed their email retention policy for RNC emails back in 2004. Some pretty canny reporter asked this question this morning in the gaggle ...
Reporter: On the change in policy in '04, wasn't that in response to Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the White House and the need, in response to his inquiries, to preserve records?Stanzel: I don't know the reasons for that change. That's our understanding of when that change occurred. But the White House Counsel's Office is working with the RNC counsel to be sure and to gather more information about when changes were made and why they were made....
I can say that I am very confident, very confident that that reporter is correct and that orders from Pat Fitzgerald were the reason for the change in White House policy in 2004. So the change in policy was tied to yet another criminal investigation of the White House. And the White House and the key employees in question -- namely Karl Rove and people working for him at the White House political office -- were specifically on notice not to destroy the emails they sent through the RNC servers. And yet they took affirmative steps to continue destroying them, even after all of this had happened.
--Josh Marshall
If you're a Republican lawyer, you just can't beat having the muscle of the Justice Department to pursue Democrats.
--Paul Kiel
From TPM Reader DS ...
You should post a shout-out to anyone who has ever been investigated by the federal government who claimed to have deleted some relevant e-mails. What did the Justice Department, IRS, or SEC do in response? Particularly relevant would be industries that have mandatory document retention policies, such as the financial sector. The tales would be rather amusing at this point, I imagine.
--Josh Marshall
He's so good he plays both sides of the argument. Jon Cohn makes the case against single-payer.
And if you're just tuning in to this week's Book Club, a summary of what you've missed.
--Andrew Golis
Check out the Republican National Committee's entire case against Nancy Pelosi -- all in one tidy memo.
--Greg Sargent
This morning's press gaggle with White House spokesman Scott Stanzel was a fun one.
A quote:
...what you're talking about is the user's ability, if they are sitting at their laptop, and decide that, 'gosh, I've got a hundred emails here that I just -- are cluttering up my inbox, I want to put them in the deleted file, and I right-click the deleted items to empty my deleted file.' It's possible, possible, that those records could have been lost....
--Paul Kiel
Check out Dan Froomkin's new piece just up on the Post website in which he shows how clear it must have been to the White House officials in question that they were violating the White House's own stated policies in this whole RNC email situation.
--Josh Marshall
Senate Judiciary Committee authorizes subpoenas for Justice Department documents, White House emails, White House officials....
--Paul Kiel
Interesting. More details coming from this morning's gaggle on how those RNC-White House emails just happened to get deleted.
--Josh Marshall
Kyle Sampson back up to the Hill tomorrow for "voluntary follow-up interview."
--Josh Marshall
McCain camp: All the bad press we got for the Baghdad Stroll is good for us.
--Greg Sargent
Today's Must Read: parsing the White House's "mishandling" (read:deletion) of Karl Rove's and other staffers' emails.
--Paul Kiel
Remember, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales goes to Capitol Hill to testify about the US Attorney Purge next Tuesday, April 17th.
--Josh Marshall
The 'lost' RNC emails story deserves and will get a lot of attention. But tomorrow's Times has another story that will probably generate less heat but is closer to the core of what the Purge story is about. Since President Bush came into office, the Justice Department has made 'voter fraud' prosecutions a high priority. Yet, not for lack of effort, they've barely been able to find any examples of it. The grand effort has boiled down to a program to send a few handfuls of folks -- mainly black -- to jail for what are in almost every case notional or unintentional voting infractions.
As those of you who follow this issue know, the vast number of the claims about 'voter fraud' are based on poorly kept voter rolls. Joe Smith is registered to vote in New Jersey and New York! The small print is that he lived in New Jersey but then moved to New York. The election board in New Jersey just hasn't taken him off the rolls yet. It may sound like I'm joking. But most of the scare stories about 'voter fraud' are just as stupid as that example.
At TPMmuckraker at the moment, we're giving a very close look to the 'voter fraud' claims in Wisconsin that Karl Rove was so interested in. GOP activists were incredibly disappointed and angry when the US Attorney in Milwaukee brought only a tiny handful of prosecutions, after the activists had charged a massive conspiracy to steal the 2004 elections from Republicans. But the government actually lost a stunningly high percentage of even those cases because they were so weak.
Cynthia C. Alicea, 25, was indicted for double-voting. The evidence was that election officials found she'd registered to vote twice. She was acquited because it turned out election officials told her to fill out another card because the first one had been filled out wrong. Pretty lurid stuff. There was no evidence she'd ever voted twice. The other three people indicted in Milwaukee for double voting were acquited too.
Out of the tiny number of bona fide voter fraud cases, the great majority fall into two categories. The first are cases where workers hired in voter registration drives appear to sign up non-existent people to get paid more money from the sponsors of the drive. The actual examples of this are exceedingly rare. But since the people don't exist, no one ever shows up to vote in their name.
The second are felons or parolees who either register to vote or actually vote, in most cases not knowing they're not eligible to vote.
One great example from the Times article is the case of 43 year old grandmother Kimberly Prude ...
Ms. Prude’s path to jail began after she attended a Democratic rally in Milwaukee featuring the Rev. Al Sharpton in late 2004. Along with hundreds of others, she marched to City Hall and registered to vote. Soon after, she sent in an absentee ballot.Four years earlier, though, Ms. Prude had been convicted of trying to cash a counterfeit county government check worth $1,254. She was placed on six years’ probation.
Ms. Prude said she believed that she was permitted to vote because she was not in jail or on parole, she testified in court. Told by her probation officer that she could not vote, she said she immediately called City Hall to rescind her vote, a step she was told was not necessary.
“I made a big mistake, like I said, and I truly apologize for it,” Ms. Prude said during her trial in 2005. That vote, though, resulted in a felony conviction and sent her to jail for violating probation.
The whole thing really does pretty much come down to a thankfully not very successful effort to send a bunch of poor blacks to prison for unintentional voting violations.
Past Justice Department policy was not to indict in cases where there was no clear intent to tamper with an election. But the Bush administration did away with that policy leading to serious time for hardened vote criminals like Ms. Prude.
Another example is that of Pakistani immigrant Usman Ali. He'd been in the US for ten years and owned a jewelry store. He was in line one day at the DMV when a clerk put a registration form in front of him along with other forms. Ali hastily filled it out. He never made any attempt to vote. But the mistake got him deported back to Pakistan where he's now trying to rebuild his life with his US citizen wife and daughter.
We're certainly lucky to be rid of Mr. Ali and his efforts to undermine our democracy.
Most of the examples, like these, are genuinely disgusting -- non-malicious errors for which people get serious punishment because federal prosecutors are under immense pressure to find someone to indict for voter fraud. But it's also easy to get lost in or distracted by the individual stories. The bigger picture is what you need to focus on. And the picture looks like this.
Republican party officials and elected officials use bogus claims of vote fraud to do three things: 1) to stymie voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts in poor and minority neighborhoods, 2) purge voter rolls of legitimate voters and 3) institute voter ID laws aimed at making it harder for low-income and minority voters to vote.
This sounds like hyperbole but it is simply the truth. (A great example of this in microcosm was the 2002 senate election in South Dakota -- Johnson v. Thune -- in which Republicans spent the entire election ranting about a massive voter fraud conspiracy on the state's Indian reservations, charges which turned out to be completely bogus but had the aim of keeping voting down on the reservations. You can find much more on this in the TPM archives. Go to the search feature and type in some combinatin of 'fraud south dakota' etc. I'll try to write more recapping the story soon.)
The tie-in with the US Attorney story is that the White House and the Republican National Committee have used the power of the Department of Justice to accomplish those three goals that I outlined above. Only most of the relatively non-partisan and professional US Attorneys simply didn't find any actual fraud. Choosing not to indict people on bogus charges got at least two of the US Attorneys (Iglesias and McKay) fired. And we are seeing evidence that others may have been nudged out less directly for the same reasons. In turn they've been replaced by a new crop of highly-political party operative prosecutors who, in the gentle wording of the Times, "may not be so reticent" about issuing indictments against people who have committed technical voting infractions with no intent to cast a fraudulent ballot. Along the way, the fever to find someone, anyone guilty of committing even a technical infraction has landed folks like Ms. Prude in the slammer. They are what you might call the prosecutorial road kill in the Rove Republican party's effort to ride roughshod over American citizens' voting rights to entrench the GOP as the country's permanent electoral majority.
Who's running all this? Who's put it all in motion? Look at the documents that have already been released. It's been run out of Karl Rove's office at the White House.
--Josh Marshall
I feel really bad about the server problems the White House/RNC seems (no, not a typo -- they appear to be a single entity) to be having on the email front. Believe me, I run a small business that is heavily dependent on cranky servers and other gizmos. So I know how hard this can be. But I think this might be a case where that NSA 'terrorist surveillance program' may really come in handy. I'm told the NSA has some very capable data recovery tools they've developed. And even if those guys are too busy hunting al Qaida, doesn't the FBI have some pretty good forensic computer geeks? What happens when, say, a company like Enron (okay, perhaps not a great example) says some emails were 'mishandled' and now are gone forever. I guess that's just the end of it, right? Normally, it's not kosher for a government agency to offer direct assitance to a private entity or political organization. But, hey, we're pretty far down that road I guess. So let's have the FBI go down and take a look at these servers and see if these emails have really disappeared forever.
--Josh Marshall
Gosh, accidents do happen, don't they?
Just off the AP wire ...
The White House said Wednesday it had mishandled Republican Party-sponsored e-mail accounts used by nearly two dozen presidential aides, resulting in the loss of an undetermined number of e-mails concerning official White House business.Congressional investigators looking into the administration's firing of eight federal prosecutors already had the nongovernmental e-mail accounts in their sights because some White House aides used them to help plan the U.S. attorneys' ouster. Democrats were questioning whether the use of the GOP-provided e-mail accounts was proof that the firings were political.
I guess we'll just never know since the emails accidentally disappeared. Darn.
Late Update: See if you can find a major news site that has picked up this development.
--Josh Marshall
Fox News and Drudge still reporting that Pelosi's going to Iran -- hours and hours after her spokesperson unequivocally denied it.
--Greg Sargent
So impressed with our interior design that you'd like to join us at TPM World HQ? Apply for an internship!
What the job lacks in financial reward it more than makes up for in the spiritual reward of being a key part of a high-energy, if under-decorated, newsroom. TPM interns dig through muck, help us with our growing multimedia system, and even write stories. Past interns have gone on to such prestigious positions as ThinkProgress blogger, aspiring Argentinian novelist, and even Associate Editor of TPM Media.
If you'd like to apply, send an email to talk(at)talkingpointsmemo.com with the subject "TPM Summer Internship." Attach a cover letter outlining your interest in the position, a resume, and the contact information of two references.
We hope to hear from you!
--Andrew Golis
Here's our pick for most audacious passage in John McCain's big Iraq speech today.
--Greg Sargent
Wisconsin's U.S. attorney Steve Biskupic has been a frequent topic here at TPM.
That's mostly been because of a case Biskupic brought against a state bureaucrat named Georgia Thompson last year. The prosecution, which broadly implicated the Democratic governor Jim Doyle, was frequent grist for Republicans in political ads against Doyle. But though Biskupic somehow scored a conviction, the case was forcefully overturned on appeal last week. The evidence, one of the circuit judges said, was "beyond thin."
Because of this, we thought, here might be a prime example of a "loyal Bushie."
But take a look at this. There's strong evidence that, as a result of complaints from Karl Rove and President Bush himself, Biskupic was inches away from being purged last year.
The real question becomes -- what saved him? The Thompson prosecution?
--Paul Kiel
Behold TPM HQ and how you can help us add to the news coverage we bring you ...
(ed.note: Today's episode's soundtrack is from 'Laura Bush's Eyes', from music.podshow.com.)
--Josh Marshall
Pelosi's office shoots down the latest winger "scandal" surrounding the Speaker, confirming that she has no intention of going to Iran.
--Greg Sargent
This one's priceless. Remember Shirlington Limo, the slapdash outfit reportedly involved in ferrying Duke Cunningham, assorted bribers and sundry ladies of the night to poker parties over at the Watergate? They're suing DHS for "caving" to "political pressures" and canceling the company's contract to run its shuttle services. Stuff's tough all over.
--Josh Marshall
Check out this new poll: It finds that more Americans want Congress to withhold funding for the war if Bush vetoes the Dems' withdrawal bill.
--Greg Sargent
TPM Reader JP wrote in, so on the mark, saying this article in the Post reads like a joke piece ...
The White House wants to appoint a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies, but it has had trouble finding anyone able and willing to take the job, according to people close to the situation.At least three retired four-star generals approached by the White House in recent weeks have declined to be considered for the position, the sources said, underscoring the administration's difficulty in enlisting its top recruits to join the team after five years of warfare that have taxed the United States and its military.
The article's not the problem, mind you, but the subject matter. This is truly DC-czarism, 'we can't figure out what the hell we're doing so let's appoint a new bubble on the flowchart' run amok. Instead of 'czar' maybe we can just call the person 'training wheels'? Someone to oversee wars, the Pentagon, the State Department and everything else? Don't we elect that person every four years?
JP says it reminds him of this November 2005 piece from The Onion ...
In response to increasing criticism of his handling of the war in Iraq and the disaster in the Gulf Coast, as well as other issues, such as Social Security reform, the national deficit, and rising gas prices, President Bush is expected to appoint someone to run the U.S. as soon as Friday.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a better sign -- though wrapped in a humorous package -- of why this president really can't be trusted to be in charge of anything and why the Republic is genuinely in peril as long as this pitiful goof remains in office. Bush wants to find a general to do his job for him. But he can't get anyone to agree to do it.
--Josh Marshall
Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell on one of the journalistic heroes of the US Attorney Purge story.
--Josh Marshall