Justice Is A Political Football

The DOJ just cannot get its stories straight, when 8 US Attorneys were fired it was a simple personnel change and had something to do with performance. Time passes. The Federal Prosecutors object to the performance issue, with glowing performance evaluations in hand. The little 'appoint without Senate approval' clause comes to light, and scepticism mounts. Oh, a Karl Rove flunky is appointed, a political hack. More doubts are spoken. Congress starts nosing around and it appears that there was some coercion of Prosecutors to not complain - since some didn't seem to like being called incompetent. The idiot AG who can't find a right to Habeas Corpus in the Constitution insists that this is simply a personnel matter that's gotten out of hand. Then it comes out that a couple Republican Congresspeople were nosing around an investigation and were displeased that it wasn't going to impact the '06 election. There's a certain amount of impropriety involved, enough that Pete Domeneci lawyers up - big time. Things are starting to look a little more complicated than a simple personnel matter, in fact things are starting to look political. More AG 'there's nothing to see here,' kind of stuff, just a personnel matter that wasn't handled too well. Harriet Miers fingers show up in the pie, Kyle Sampson resigns as Deputy AG - the personnel guy - and the AG is back, and he was mislead (sound familiar?) and had incomplete info and didn't know what was going on and ...

So, now it appears that Karl Rove was one of the instigators. What struck me about the actual email that shows he was messing about was Kyle Sampson's question as to whether Karl thought "there is the political will to do it," asked of David Leitch who had forwarded Colin Newman's note that Rove wanted to know what they were going to do about the US Attorneys. This was a month before when the White House has admitted they were thinking about it. And what they were thinking about was how "loyal" to the Administration these guys were and how dedicated they were to the Administration's agendas, primarily voter fraud - Democratic. You know, voter purges like they got in Florida under Katherine Harris, almost completely Democratic and to a great extent unwarranted. What they were getting was competent prosecutions of federal crimes, not what they apparently wanted.

You remember that Gonzales didn't know about all this? Odd considering he and Sampson had discussed the idea while he was still White House council. He'll be explaining this one somehow, pretty soon.

So here's the deal, the Dept of Justice which is supposed to look out for the interests of all Americans is more interested in Democratic votes than crimes, and evidently, considering that Carol Lam bit it after Duke Cunningham's prosecution, way more interested in something other than political corruption. She wasn't doing enough about immigration cases, that may be important, but it might have been farther up the "to do" scale if the Republicans hadn't afforded so much corruption prosecution time. I'd guess that out of all the Republican appointed Republican US Attorneys there might be some who aren't doing such a hot job and could easily have superior replacements found, maybe they're just very "loyal Bushies." (a direct quote from Sampson's email)

There's a lot the AG "doesn't know about," somehow a person would think he'd be a little better informed, he doesn't know anything about any FBI misuse of the Patriot Act, the Constitution's provisions regarding Habeas Corpus, the Geneva Convention (it's "quaint"), in fact what he seems to know about is being George II's bitch.