Sen. Whitehouse: ‘You Can Safely Bet - The List Of Fired Attorneys Came From The White House"

[kpete]

Whitehouse: ‘You Can Safely Bet’ The List Of Fired Attorneys Came From The White House »

Earlier this week, ThinkProgress sat down with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and asked him whether he believes the plan for purging U.S. attorneys originated from the Bush White House.

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.

Whitehouse told ThinkProgress why that matters:

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.

...........

WHITEHOUSE: Whenever you see anybody from the Department of Justice — anybody from the Gonzales clique from the Department of Justice — talk about this, they say three things over and over again. They say that it would be improper to attempt to influence or interfere with a particular case — they always use that phrase — a particular case, for an improper partisan purpose.

Now, that is a very accurate, lay description of the elements of criminal obstruction of justice. So it looks as if they may be trying to basically kind of define deviancy down, if you will, so that anything less than criminal obstruction of justice is no longer viewed as improper. So, that’s absolutely the wrong place for an Attorney General of the United States to be establishing the standard for his office. Absolutely the wrong one. And Jim Comey and other people have recognized that.


more at:
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/06/09/whitehouse-part-2/

[blogslut]

1. Whitehouse was sooo disgusted with Bradley Schlozman

at the end of the hearing. He just stared at that little weasel for a good minute and then closed the hearing.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

2. And I'm pretty sure Leahy wasn't particularly enamored either...

:evilgrin:

[blogslut]

3. I wish I could find a transcript

What Leahy said at the end was so beautiful.

Whitehouse was adjourning and Leahy stopped him for a moment. What he said I can only paraphrase but it was something like this:

"I have great respect for US attorneys. I used to be one. I remember when I attended an orientation as a new USA. Our AG, at the time, told us how important it was not to play politics with law. The AG gave an example from his own life. The president that he served was being investigated and he made a point to refuse to stand in the way of that investigation. That Attorney General was Robert Kennedy."

made me cry.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

4. Can you imagine? A dep't of justice that has integrity

emanating from the top on down... :cry:

[Frustratedlady]

5. That brought up goosebumps. Oh, for those days to come back, again!

Robert Kennedy would be livid at what is going on today. Our political system is so corrupt and so damaged, I can't even imagine how long it is going to take to put it all back together again.

[DemReadingDU]

6. It's sad that these corrupt people have no conscience

It's as if they feel entitled to get whatever they want. They never feel remorse or accountable to anyone. And they're training our young people in these same corrupt methods. I wonder if our nation will ever be put back together again. Gonna take a very long time.

[Roland99]

13. Here ya go!!! >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?r110:2:./temp/~r1105hRZPk:: (link will be dead shortly, though)

Mr. LEAHY. Madam President, when I was a young law student at Georgetown, the event that stands out the most in my memory was a morning that I and a few other young law students working at various agencies for the summer had with the then Attorney General . It was Attorney General Robert Kennedy . In that meeting, he stressed to us over and over again the professionalism of the Department of Justice and how the professionals had to stay out of any kind of partisan politics and that he would insist upon it.

I was inspired by that meeting. I think it probably shaped my decision to go into public life more than any other single meeting I had.

I ask unanimous consent that an article in today's USA Today by Ronald Goldfarb entitled ``Crossing the Line at Justice'' be printed in the Record.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:


Crossing a Line at Justice
(By Ronald Goldfarb)

The current agonies of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales call to mind a dramatic moment in the Robert F. Kennedy Justice Department. Members of his organized crime section were in RFK's office reviewing our pending investigations and cases. One of our group advised Kennedy that his grand jury investigations were about to lead to the indictment of the then-mayor of a large Midwestern city, one that had voted for his brother John Kennedy in the close presidential election of 1960.

When my colleague completed his report about the big scalp about to be added to our list of political corruption cases, RFK was quiet. It happened that the scalp in question belonged to President Kennedy's ambassador-designate to Greece. The attorney general smiled slightly and facetiously remarked: ``Well, that's nice. Now my brother's going to have to put me on the Supreme Court.'' The indictment went forward and included others in the city's political (Democratic) machine. All were convicted.

That anecdote is relevant today as the Senate Judiciary Committee considers the attorney general's recent dismissals of several U.S. attorneys. When it comes to the proper administration of justice in the Department of Justice, there are politics and there are politics.

THE TWO P'S

Capital ``P'' politics--that is, party politics, such as the partisan personal shenanigans of Gonzales meddling with the independence of competent prosecutors' discretion in response to political pressures--are improper and have no place in the justice system. Small ``p'' politics, the imposition of discretionary preferences, policies and priorities in the focus of prosecutorial discretion, generally are proper. Partisans must accept them, like it or not. They are not the basis for replacing attorneys general .

The distinction is important. When the Justice Department that I served in during the Kennedy administration came to office, ``political'' priorities changed. The internal security division, active and robust during the Eisenhower administration when loyalty was a major concern, was de-emphasized and eventually was deactivated. The organized crime and the civil rights sections, small and quiet in earlier years, grew into major centers of departmental work and were the centerpiece of RFK's regime. That kind of priority setting is proper.

Administrations come to office offering change. Like these changes or not, people cannot claim they involve improper politics. Critics have the right to change administrations with their votes in subsequent elections. Had Al Gore been elected, no doubt environmental prosecutions would have taken front and center in the department's efforts.

After Sept. 11, 2001, homeland security would have been any attorney general's special interest, RFK's included. So if one deplores the values and priorities of the John Ashcroft and Gonzales administrations at Justice, USA Patriot Act excesses and the like, the recourse will be at the 2008 voting machines.

On the other hand, capital ``P'' party politics have no place in any Justice Department. That is the unique indictment of Gonzales, and one that should lead to his replacement. All attorneys general face political pressure to act against their parties' political enemies and to protect their friends. Those are the moments of truth for all attorneys general , the one that Gonzales failed, to the embarrassment of even his own party representatives.

RFK'S TESTS

When RFK was attorney general , two comparable moments stand out in my memory. In one, his notorious father's long-time attorney--James Landis, ``a virtual member of the immediate family,'' according to one biography--was charged with failing to file his tax returns for five years. Immense pressures were put on Kennedy to find an excuse not to indict the aging and prestigious former Harvard law dean. RFK stayed out of the decision-making process, and Landis pleaded guilty and received a brief incarceration. But for his close association with the Kennedys, Landis probably would not have suffered so. Everyone wanted to help Landis, but they were super self-conscious about the propriety of doing so.

A similar moment arose when an investigation showed that the brother of the influential congressman from New York, Eugene Keogh, had abused his office as a New York state supreme court judge. Kennedy agonized over the political pressures on him; he worried that the not open-and-shut case might not be winnable, after major political embarrassment to Kennedy loyalists. To his credit, Keogh told Kennedy he knew he'd do the right and fair thing. The attorney general's aides pressed him to do what he'd do in any other non-political case. Judge J. Vincent Keogh was indicted and convicted. That is the only way an attorney general can keep the balance of justice even and credible.

Gonzales needed aides who spoke to him with comparable candor and rectitude. Instead, he is falling on his sword over the U.S. attorney firings that he administered without knowing, as he has testified, much about them at the time. Like former vice presidential aide Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby in the Valerie Plame leak case, others set the political process in motion, and the loyal aide did the deed and took the rap. The Senate should not stop at Gonzales' actions, but should

S5493] GPO's PDF

press to find out who pressured him to take these unconscionable actions.

Ashcroft supermoralistically draped the body of the department's statue of justice to hide her contours; Gonzales amoralistically tore off her blindfold. Both diminished the prestige of an important government agency.

Should be accessible here, though:


http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2007_record&page=S5492&position=all

[Raksha]

15. Every time I think about that little weasel Gonzales

camped out in Robert Kennedy's office I could puke! :puke:

[The Backlash Cometh]

7. So basically. they undid all the laws that prevented a cronyistic, patronage

system? They put that much thought into it?

You know they did it, because cronyism and patronage run rampant in the private sector. And I can't say it's doing us a bit of good.

[Nikki Stone1]

11. Yep

:kick:

[livvy]

8. K'nR

Added to ER thread, too. I am so very sick of these criminals.
Remember the charts, the flowchart ones that Whitehouse put up during the April hearings? One showed who could talk to who in this administration, and the other one showed the same under the Clinton Administration. The differences are astounding.

In today's televised Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) presented a chart that illustrates the great extent that the Justice Department and White House communications have expanded under Gonzales's leadership. Under Bush/Gonzales over 400 persons within the White House and Department of Justice - as a matter of policy - can freely interact on official business. Unprecedented!! In the Clinton White House under AG Janet Reno, there were only seven. How many of these 400 plus individuals had RNC email accounts? What guarantees were there that specific cases and evidence were not being discussed? What guarantees or checks/balances were in place to insure that political partisan influence was not in play? How many of these 400 plus individuals were involved in the US Attorney firings? Did one of them 'author' the list?

Whitehouse presented the perfect flowchart for Congress to begin the issuance of Senate subpoenas for White House and Department of Justice officials. His questioning and pictorial display of the chaotic management of the Justice Department under Gonzales was groundbreaking and the most revealing evidence yet of how politicized our legal system has become. It depicts exactly who in the White House and Justice Department were authorized to communicate with each other.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_amanda_l_070419_senator_whitehouse__28.htm

Here they are...



http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/21/13224/6324

Good stuff, kpete.

[Mist]

9. "define deviancy down" --the * administration in a nutshell. nt

[bvar22]

10. Ruh-Roh!

I see another "strongly worded letter" for the bush* whitehouse.

Maybe even a non-binding resolution.

[Patsy Stone]

12. This is their MO

They have found the grey areas (in some cases created them) specifically to skirt the boundaries of the law.

One day, somewhere, somehow, each of them should be made to answer for their actions. That is my greatest wish.

[LiberalFighter]

14. It's up to the White House and Attorney General to disprove the charge

We can make the charge over and over during the campaigns.

Their response: White House and Attorney General will say it's not true.

Our response: Prove it!!

[L. Coyote]

16. Our other response, "Did you suddenly recall something?"

I can't wait for the YouTubes of Gonzolies being indicted in the Sanate today.

[opihimoimoi]

17. I am so Glad Whitehouse beat out Carl Sheeler in last years Senate Primary

Sheeler then supported the Pub Candidate revealing he was a PUB Plant...he even came to DU to suck us for $$$

Sen Whitehouse is doing an excelt job....