Do NOT - I repeat - DO NOT believe a single word that comes out of the White House

how many times have we read news stories about bush "backing down," "softening up," taking a "conciliatory stance," "signaling a willingness to 'cooperate'"...? huh...?? how many times...? and how many times was it nothing but a goddam smoke screen*, a deliberate red herring* to make everybody let down their guard...? huh...?? how many times...?

(* apologies for the mixed metaphors...)

from raw story...

After months of using politically loaded rhetoric and hyping "bogus" terror threats to push Congress to give him the domestic spying bill he's demanding, President Bush seems to be backing down.

The Wall Street Journal reports Tuesday that the White House is softening its hard-line approach to updating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The steps toward moderation and compromise come as House Democrats proved last month that they have enough votes to pass a FISA bill that includes more oversight of surveillance efforts within the US than Bush would like and also to block the immunity he has demanded for telecommunications companies that facilitated his warrantless wiretapping program.

the last time i posted a run-down on the bush administration's insatiable need for power and its absolute unwillingness to compromise on ANYTHING was back in mid-december... i think it's time to trot it out again...

take your time... read it carefully... NOTHING has changed... i repeat... ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAS CHANGED...

harry on george (december 2007)...

[Senator Harry Reid] said that in 40 years of public service he had not had a tougher relationship.

“He is impossible to work with,” the senator said. “There are times I say: ‘Is there something more I can do? Have I done something wrong?’ But even his own people tell me he won’t compromise.”

nancy on george (december 2007)...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., admitted Thursday that she had underestimated the willingness of Republicans to stand behind President Bush’s Iraq policy despite the drubbing the GOP took in the polls in 2006.

"The assumption I made was that the Republicans would soon see the light," she said. Instead, the minority stuck to the president’s war policy in the face of unrelenting pressure from congressional Democrats and powerful lobbying campaigns by anti-war groups.

kagro x on george (february 2006)...

So, is warrantless surveillance illegal or not? Well, not if you believe that the president has "inherent powers as commander-in-chief." That would answer the entire question.

"But there are no unwritten 'inherent powers,' or at least none that would simply justify warrantless surveillance on the president's say-so," you may object.

"Says you," answers Alberto Gonzales.

And you think he's nuts for saying so. But the problem is that you're still working under the old (albeit commonly understood) constitutional order, whereas Gonzales is proposing a new one. One under which there are such "inherent powers."

And that's when it hits you: If five Supreme Court Justices side with Gonzales, everything you knew (or thought you knew) about the Constitution is wrong. By which I mean, it now is wrong. It wasn't wrong yesterday, but now it is.

jack balkin on george (july 2006)...

What the press and the public must understand is that this Administration does not play by the rules. It does not take a hint. Instead it will continue to obfuscate and prevaricate, as it has so often in the past on issues ranging from detention to prisoner mistreatment. This Administration will not conform its actions to the Rule of Law unless it finds doing so politically infeasible. As a result, the Congress, the courts, the press and the public will have to object-- repeatedly and strenuously-- if they want the Executive to abide by its constitutional obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

time magazine on george (october 2006)...

In fact, when it comes to deploying its Executive power, which is dear to Bush's understanding of the presidency, the President's team has been planning for what one strategist describes as "a cataclysmic fight to the death" over the balance between Congress and the White House if confronted with congressional subpoenas it deems inappropriate. The strategist says the Bush team is "going to assert that power, and they're going to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court on every issue, every time, no compromise, no discussion, no negotiation."

sidney blumenthal on george (november 2007)...

[T]he Bush doctrine: The president as commander in chief can do whatever he wants regardless of Congress. There must be no checks and balances, no accountability. There must be no disclosure to other branches of government, whether legislative or judicial. Oral findings, or, if necessary, secret memos, make the illegal legal merely by saying they are legal in the name of presidential authority. The operational need to know determines who knows.

sheldon whitehouse on george (december 2007)...

“To give you an example of what I read,” Whitehouse said on the Senate floor, “I have gotten three legal propositions from these secret OLC opinions declassified. Here they are, as accurately as my note-taking could reproduce them from the classified documents”:

1. An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.

2. The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II.

3. The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations.

slowly, now... repeat after me...

N O T H I N G..H A S..C H A N G E D . . . !

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Mukasey wipes out Gonzo's White House/DOJ communication free-for-all

remember when senator sheldon whitehouse introduced this, the difference between white house/department of justice communication protocol under clinton vs. george bush, back at the senate judiciary committee hearing with gonzo on april 19...?



well, mukasey is putting a stop to that crap... i'm no mukasey fan, but this is about damn time...

In a memo Wednesday to department lawyers, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said that only he and his deputy attorney general can initiate conversations with the White House about civil and most criminal cases — and then only to the president's counsel and deputy counsel. Only cases deemed necessary to the president's duties can be discussed, Mukasey said.

"This limitation recognizes the president's ability to perform his constitutional obligation to 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed' while ensuring that there is public confidence that the laws of the United States are administered and enforced in an impartial manner," Mukasey wrote in the two-page memo.

that's four - count 'em, four - people total in doj and the white house who can talk to each other about civil and criminal cases... eat shit, gonzo...

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Hey, Harry... Hey, Nancy... What is it about unfettered executive power that you don't understand...?

the senate majority leader and the speaker of the house are oh-so-surprised that george isn't working with them...

harry on george (december 2007)...

[Senator Harry Reid] said that in 40 years of public service he had not had a tougher relationship.

“He is impossible to work with,” the senator said. “There are times I say: ‘Is there something more I can do? Have I done something wrong?’ But even his own people tell me he won’t compromise.”

nancy on george (december 2007)...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., admitted Thursday that she had underestimated the willingness of Republicans to stand behind President Bush’s Iraq policy despite the drubbing the GOP took in the polls in 2006.

"The assumption I made was that the Republicans would soon see the light," she said. Instead, the minority stuck to the president’s war policy in the face of unrelenting pressure from congressional Democrats and powerful lobbying campaigns by anti-war groups.

well, goldurnit, there are quite a few folks out there who have been sounding the alarm for at least a couple of years, and, golly gee, they're all saying the samn damn thing...

kagro x on george (february 2006)...

So, is warrantless surveillance illegal or not? Well, not if you believe that the president has "inherent powers as commander-in-chief." That would answer the entire question.

"But there are no unwritten 'inherent powers,' or at least none that would simply justify warrantless surveillance on the president's say-so," you may object.

"Says you," answers Alberto Gonzales.

And you think he's nuts for saying so. But the problem is that you're still working under the old (albeit commonly understood) constitutional order, whereas Gonzales is proposing a new one. One under which there are such "inherent powers."

And that's when it hits you: If five Supreme Court Justices side with Gonzales, everything you knew (or thought you knew) about the Constitution is wrong. By which I mean, it now is wrong. It wasn't wrong yesterday, but now it is.

jack balkin on george (july 2006)...

What the press and the public must understand is that this Administration does not play by the rules. It does not take a hint. Instead it will continue to obfuscate and prevaricate, as it has so often in the past on issues ranging from detention to prisoner mistreatment. This Administration will not conform its actions to the Rule of Law unless it finds doing so politically infeasible. As a result, the Congress, the courts, the press and the public will have to object-- repeatedly and strenuously-- if they want the Executive to abide by its constitutional obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

time magazine on george (october 2006)...

In fact, when it comes to deploying its Executive power, which is dear to Bush's understanding of the presidency, the President's team has been planning for what one strategist describes as "a cataclysmic fight to the death" over the balance between Congress and the White House if confronted with congressional subpoenas it deems inappropriate. The strategist says the Bush team is "going to assert that power, and they're going to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court on every issue, every time, no compromise, no discussion, no negotiation."

sidney blumenthal on george (november 2007)...

[T]he Bush doctrine: The president as commander in chief can do whatever he wants regardless of Congress. There must be no checks and balances, no accountability. There must be no disclosure to other branches of government, whether legislative or judicial. Oral findings, or, if necessary, secret memos, make the illegal legal merely by saying they are legal in the name of presidential authority. The operational need to know determines who knows.

sheldon whitehouse on george (december 2007)...

“To give you an example of what I read,” Whitehouse said on the Senate floor, “I have gotten three legal propositions from these secret OLC opinions declassified. Here they are, as accurately as my note-taking could reproduce them from the classified documents”:

1. An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.

2. The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II.

3. The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations.

you gotta admire the man's consistency... when george says he's got unlimited powers as president, he means it, and he ain't gonna let anything as trivial as the u.s. constitution, checks and balances, separation of powers, or the rule of law get in the way...

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Whitehouse (the Senator, not the building) affirms that the president is the SOLE decider

anybody who thinks these findings are at all surprising simply hasn't been paying attention... very clear, observable patterns have demonstrated these specific, criminal, unconstitutional approaches to the rule of law countless times over the past seven years... the "legal propositions" uncovered by senator whitehouse, taken together with the concrete, factually-demonstrated policies that they've informed, have led the united states to, and, some would argue, OVER the precipice to an authoritarian, police state... what more do we have to know to seriously tackle the challenge of getting these criminals out of office...? waiting for 20 january 2009 is simply not acceptable...

Whitehouse said he has “spent hours poring over” secret opinions issued by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) — and he took notes.

Whitehouse is a lawyer, a former U.S. Attorney, a former legal counsel to Rhode Island’s Governor, and a former State Attorney General. He said he sought and received permission to have his notes declassified because he wanted to show the public “what the Bush administration does behind our backs when they think no one is looking.”

“To give you an example of what I read,” Whitehouse said on the Senate floor, “I have gotten three legal propositions from these secret OLC opinions declassified. Here they are, as accurately as my note-taking could reproduce them from the classified documents”:

1. An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.

2. The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II.

3. The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations.

it is impossible for the united states to even BEGIN the long road back to regain everything we've lost until the current cabal is removed from office, and, to cling to the myth that electing and inaugurating a democratic president is going to fix things is both wrong and irresponsible...

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The Vice President and his counsel can seek info on ongoing DOJ investigations

remember when senator sheldon whitehouse introduced this, the difference between white house/department of justice communication protocol under clinton vs. george bush, back at the senate judiciary committee hearing with gonzo on april 19...?



well, marcy - emptywheel - wheeler, posting in the next hurrah, highlights an even more disturbing part of gonzo's testimony today...

The exchange started with Whitehouse getting Gonzales to agree that the most likely avenue of improper influence in ongoing investigations was the White House...

[...]

Then he goes on to review a memo that Gonzales himself signed, actually extending the structure Ashcroft set in place. And while Ashcroft's memo made several attempts to tamp down this structure, in key ways he opened it up, explicitly for the Fourth Branch. Whitehouse describes how the memo describes that the lines of communication open to the White House will "apply in parallel fashion in communications with the OVP." And then he points specifically to a paragraph at the end of the memo reiterating the communications open to OVP. Gonzales, typically, claims to have no idea how those items got into a memo he signed personally.

[...]

Lovely. Cheney--whose own Chief of Staff was indicted and convicted for impeding an ongoing investigation--now has usurped access to ongoing investigations, for himself, his Chief of Staff, and his Counsel, courtesy of AGAG. David Addington, the architect of the Unitary Executive, now gets to know what DOJ is doing with ongoing investigations.

oh. my. freakin'. god... i didn't think it could get worse, but, as always, i am proven wrong - usually on a daily basis...

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So many bread crumb trails to follow, but they all lead to the White House

think progress has a post up on an interview they conducted with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) regarding the source of the list of fired attorneys...

Whitehouse explained that tracking down who conceived of the list of fired U.S. attorneys was made much more difficult due to new rules employed by the Bush administration that greatly expanded the number of DoJ and White House employees that could talk to one another about criminal cases. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in April, Whitehouse forced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to admit previous firewalls between White House and DoJ staff had been torn down, allowing at least 400 White House officials and over 30 Justice officials to have discussions with one another about criminal cases.

that reminded me of the incredible visual whitehouse used to illustrate his point that i posted on in late april... at the time, my overwhelming impression was one of total chaos, but now i think it may very well have been created as a deliberate strategy for obfuscation...



whitehouse doesn't speculate on the deliberate strategy aspect, but he does see, as so many others have pointed out, all signs pointing to the white house...

WHITEHOUSE: So a Karl Rove to Kyle Sampson call about a case would have been out of bounds under the rules that had been developed for decades. Under the Bush Administration, they knocked down the rules, so there’s so many opportunities for that infiltration it’s hard to know where it came from. And that’s why I think we need to continue to pursue the investigation. By process of elimination if nobody in the Department of Justice knows where the list came from, then it may not have come from within the Department of Justice; it may have come from somewhere else. And given the likelihood here — it probably didn’t come from Congress; it probably didn’t come from the Governor of Iowa or, you know, the Mayor of Detroit. You can pretty well safely bet that the place that it came from was the White House.

follow those trails, guys...

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Obstruction of justice and perjury: a two-fer for Gonzo?

obstruction of justice and perjury were the two thoughts that kept circulating in my head while watching monica’s testimony yesterday… (of course, both have been circulating in my head for months about damn near every stonewalling action undertaken by the criminals that call themselves our country’s leaders…)

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) ... said “it is surprising how often a whiff of obstruction of justice has reared its head in the course of this investigation,” adding that the “standard of impropriety that Kyle Sampson and the attorney general and the Department of Justice, through its public spokesmen, have defined is, in effect — tracks almost exactly the standard for criminal obstruction of justice.”

[...]

Gonzales may also be guilty of lying under oath. His conversation with Goodling took place on either March 14 or 15, a week after Goodling found out that she was going to testify before the House committee. Yet on May 10, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had “not gone back and spoken directly with…others who are involved in this process.”

here’s hoping the damn congress will start to move expeditiously and stop their goddam pussyfooting around…

(thanks to think progress...)

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Feingold: Iraq funding cut-off by March 31, 2008

russ feingold...

“With brave Americans fighting and dying for a failed policy in Iraq, members of Congress shouldn’t delay action to end this misguided war for weeks or even months just for the sake of political comfort. That is why, when the Senate takes up the Iraq supplemental, I plan to offer the Feingold-Reid bill as an amendment to force the President to safely redeploy our troops by March 31, 2008 at which point funding for the war would be cut off.”

In addition to Reid's commitment to support the bill, the co-sponsors already on board as listed at Feingold's website include Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Chris Dodd (D-CT), Tom Harkin (D-IA), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), John Kerry (D-MA), Pat Leahy (D-VT), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

The legislation includes a few caveats sure to be ignored by the wingnuts when they begin to attack it, so we'll point them out here. Namely, that Feingold's bill will not cut off funding for the purpose of:

* "conduct[ing] targeted operations...against members of al Qaeda and other international terrorist organizations";
* "security for United States infrastructure and personnel"; or
* "to train and equip Iraqi security services"

(click here for announcement and here for full text...)

i'll be looking for big tent democrat's response over at talkleft...

(thanks to the brad blog via raw story...)

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Now that Elston's thrown McNulty under the bus, who's McNulty gonna throw?

murray waas does it again...

[Michael Elston, the chief of staff] to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty has told congressional investigators that phone calls he placed to four fired U.S. attorneys -- calls that three of the prosecutors say involved threats about testifying before Congress -- were made at McNulty's direction.

[...]

The U.S. attorneys have said that Elston, in effect, told them that if they kept quiet about their dismissals, the Justice Department would not suggest that they had been forced to resign because of poor performance.

[...]

On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee made public formal correspondence from three fired prosecutors who said they thought that Elston was trying to intimidate them into keeping quiet.

[...]

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., asked Cummins ... what they [he] would have done ... as [a] federal prosecutor[s] had they [he] learned that an interested party in one of their [his] investigations had tried to discourage a witness from providing information or testifying.

[...]

Whitehouse pressed Cummins: "But if that sort of approach had been made to a witness in an active proceeding that you were leading, and you were extremely proactive about it, that would lead you where?"

"Well, we'd certainly investigate it and see if a crime had occurred."

"And the crime would be?"

Cummins responded: "Obstruction of justice. I think there are several statutes that might be implicated -- but obstruction of justice."

looks like any thoughts i may have had about mcnulty being kept in the dark are now history...

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Bush White House DOJ protocol = utter chaos

when senator whitehouse [Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.] presented this chart in the hearing yesterday, i was occupied with something else and didn't get the full gist of what it showed, so today, i surfed around until i found it... fascinating and quite disturbing...

The chart compares the Clinton protocol for appropriate contacts between the White House and the DoJ on pending criminal cases with the Bush protocol. According to Whitehouse, the Clinton protocol authorized just four folks at the White House to chat with three folks at Justice. The chart had four boxes talking to three boxes. Out comes the Bush protocol, and now 417 different people at the White House have contacts about pending criminal cases with 30-some people at Justice.

calling the bush portion of the chart "protocol" demeans the term...

pro·to·col
Pronunciation: 'prO-t&-"kol, -"kOl, -"käl, -k&l
Function: noun

1 : an original draft, minute, or record of a document or transaction
2 a : a preliminary memorandum often formulated and signed by diplomatic negotiators as a basis for a final convention or treaty b : the records or minutes of a diplomatic conference or congress that show officially the agreements arrived at by the negotiators
3 a : a code prescribing strict adherence to correct etiquette and precedence (as in diplomatic exchange and in the military services)

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