The walls come falling in on the US Attorneys story
Check this out. (Forwarded by Reality Based Educator.)
Also, the NYTimes adds more. A coordinated effort,
(In the grand scheme of the breakdown of a coverup, we're at the point where secondary characters begin to tell their stories for self protection, ("I only did this, but he did THAT,") and just beginning the section where primary characters offer partial revelations of truth in a desperate attempt to make it go away. ("What I did was unethical, but not illegal")
These things break open when someone from Group A, in an effort at exculpation, throws a member of Group B under the bus.)
Hearings next week.
Presidential advisor Karl Rove and at least one other member of the White House political team were urged by the New Mexico Republican party chairman to fire the state's U.S. attorney because of dissatisfaction in part with his failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation in the battleground election state.
I'm not an expert on the legalities in these firings. As I understand it, they can fire them at any time without reason.
However, any actions taken to influence their prosecutions may well be illegal, and the evidence is mounting that Rep. Heather Wilson, Sen. Pete Domenici, the chairman of the New Mexico Republican party, and elements in the White House were all attempting to exert pressure to get indictments against Democrats before the 2006 election.
And, take a look at how the original case against the Democrats in New Mexico was introduced,On Sept. 30, nine donors were summoned to Weh's house for a $5,000-a-plate luncheon with Rove.
Also, the NYTimes adds more. A coordinated effort,
Mickey D. Barnett, another top Republican lawyer in the state, who once served as an aide to Mr. Domenici in Congress and represented the Bush campaign in New Mexico in the 2000 and 2004 elections, said he had also complained.
(In the grand scheme of the breakdown of a coverup, we're at the point where secondary characters begin to tell their stories for self protection, ("I only did this, but he did THAT,") and just beginning the section where primary characters offer partial revelations of truth in a desperate attempt to make it go away. ("What I did was unethical, but not illegal")
These things break open when someone from Group A, in an effort at exculpation, throws a member of Group B under the bus.)
Hearings next week.
12 Comments:
In many ways, this scandal could be so much bigger than the CIA leak case. For one, there is a Democratic House and Senate to push the investigation of this rather than a Rubber Stamp GOP Congress to make believe it never happened or it wasn't significant. Secondly, it's a pretty easy story to get - WH and high-level GOP figures pressure U.S. attorneys to either bring indictments against prominent Dems at politically expedient times for the GOP or not to bring indictments against prominent Republicans engaged in wrongdoing. Those U.S. attorneys who don't play by the rules are canned. Those who do are rewarded (I'm speculating here, but you have to think some prosecutors did play ball w/ Rove, et al. - as Paul Krugman pointed out this week, the N.J. prosecutor who leaked the damaging info about Senator Bob Menendez right before the midterm election might be one guy to take a closer look at.) The integrity of the federal judicial system is thus undermined as the WH and the GOP use it to reward friends and cronies and punish political enemies (sounds like Nixon using the IRS to get back at the members of his enemies list, doesn't it?)
The echoes of Watergate are all over this story. That doesn't mean it will break into a big-time scandal where administration officials will have to resign and/or go to jail, but the potential is there for that to happen. And all I can say is, thank god there is a Democratic Congress to look into these matters now. There was nothing so frustrating as the past four years when the GOP Congress would coordinate w/ the political arm of the WH to kill any emerging scandal/story that was potentially damaging to the WH. Now the GOPers can't do that anymore. No wonder Gonzales, Rove, Domenici, Wilson, Hastings, et al. were so eager to lean on prosecutors before the November midterms to make moves that would help the GOP retain control of Congress - they were afraid of what a Dem-controlled Congress would do to their criminal enterprise known as the Republican Party.
By Reality-Based Educator, at 9:23 AM
I think the key to this really opening up would be some proof of the other side, that someone did manage a prosecution, like Menendez, for political reasons.
The one difference I see between this and Watergate is that the targets of the investigations were not necessarily the "enemies." Like in New Mexico, they wanted to taint the whole party rather than targeting individuals for prosecution.
Doesn't make it any better, in fact it might make it worse (targeting the unrelated to damage someone else.)
And, the shift in Congress has unlocked a "surge" of past shifty behavior. When they came in, everybody expected them to look at Iraq and contracting, but we're now pegging out at about a scandal a week.
And those are just the ones coming to them.
Mike
By mikevotes, at 11:22 AM
The one thing I would add, though, is that they are "on the clock."
The Bush administration now has a game ending buzzer to try to get to.
Even if they don't all bear fruit by the end of the season, the damage to the legacy will still be there.
That's important. It is the best way to discourage the practices and policies in the future.
If Bush leaves tainted, many of his wrongheade policies will not find supporters, and that's a good thing.
Economic policies, preemptive war, etc. The defenders will have to say, "Well, Hitler did do a few good things...."
I think that would limit the policy promoters somewhat.
Mike.
By mikevotes, at 11:27 AM
Nixon was using the plumbers and the IRS and the FBI to do exactly what this administration was apparently using the DOJ and the US attorneys to do - to discredit the other party and maintain power during a time of war.
Remember, Nixon felt the election in 1960 was stolen from him and he was adamant that the Dems and the Kennedys and Johnson and the rest of those rotten bastards (in Nixonian terms) weren't going to do it to him again.
That's what the Watergate break-in and attempted bugging was all about.
While it's true that Nixon also used the plumbers and the IRS and the FBI to go after his perceived personal enemies (like Jack Anderson), even that had a political element to it.
Nixon thought they were trying to help out the Dems, the Kennedys, etc to take power away from him.
I suspect that Nixon's rationale and Rove's/Cheney's/Bush's et al. are very, very similar.
By Reality-Based Educator, at 12:54 PM
How similar does your reading sound to all the Bush admin claims about the "career folks" at the CIA?
After all, that's why Rumsfeld was given so much room to develop his parallel intelligence system. That's why Feith's OSP was created, and that's one of the reasons that they went so hard after Wilson/Plame.
It's funny (but not really) that the same guys who served in Nixon and Reagan have brought back the bad elements of both.
Mike
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