Did the United States Attorney in Milwaukee 'railroad' a state employee on corruption charges so that her Democrat boss could be tainted, helping to skew the results in a close race?
"The Chicago-based United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit seemed shocked by the injustice of her conviction. It took the extraordinary step of releasing Ms. Thompson from prison immediately after hearing arguments, without waiting to issue a ruling. One of the judges hinted that Ms. Thompson may have been railroaded. “It strikes me that your evidence is beyond thin,” Judge Diane Wood told the lawyer from Mr. Biskupic’s office."
E-mails contradict testimony in U.S. attorneys scandal
WASHINGTON - 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.
It wasn't clear when Biskupic was added to a Justice Department hit list of prosecutors, or when he was taken off, or whether those developments were connected to the just-overturned corruption case.
Nevertheless, the disclosure aroused investigators' suspicion that Biskupic might have been retained in his job because he agreed to prosecute Democrats, though the evidence was slight. Such politicization of the administration of justice is at the heart of congressional Democrats' concerns over the Bush administration's firings of the U.S. attorneys.
Republicans had cited the June 2006 conviction as evidence that Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's administration was rife with corruption as he ran for re-election last year. He won anyway - the first Democratic governor of the state to win re-election in 32 years.
This revelation about Biskupic is expected to be the subject of questions to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales when he testifies Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
I couldn't agree more with you when you say, "I wouldn't put anything past these people anymore".
I have gotten to the point that I assume that whatever the Bush Administration says, then probably the opposite is true. Or least the truth is hidden behind layers of duplicity.
Dwight
Posts: 4318 | Location: Anchorage, AK | Registered: 06-05-02
'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.
However, some of those RNC accounts were used to discuss official matters, including the firing of eight federal prosecutors, which has triggered investigations on Capitol Hill. Democrats contend that politics was improperly inserted into Justice Department decision-making about which attorneys should leave...'www.truthout.org
The NYT has an interesting line on what the scandal involved in the firings of the prosecutors actually is:
"Last week, we learned that the administration edited a government-ordered report on voter fraud to support its fantasy. The original version concluded that among experts “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud.” But the publicly released version said, “There is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud.” It’s hard to see that as anything but a deliberate effort to mislead the public.
Sound familiar? In President Bush’s first term, a White House official, who had been the oil industry’s front man in trying to discredit the science of global warming, repeatedly edited government reports to play down links between climate change and greenhouse gases. And then there was the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which turned reports on old, dubious and false tales about weapons of mass destruction into warnings of clear, present and supposedly mortal dangers.
It’s obvious why the Bush administration would edit those documents, but why the voting report? Because charges of voter fraud are a key component of the Republican electoral strategy. If the public believes there are rampant efforts to vote fraudulently, or to register voters improperly, it increases support for measures like special voter ID’s, which work against the poor, the elderly, minorities and other disenfranchised groups that tend to support Democrats. Claims of rampant voter fraud also give the administration an excuse to cut back prosecutions of the real problem: officials who block voters’ access to the polls.
There is one big catch, as Eric Lipton and Ian Urbina reported in The Times last week. After a five-year crackdown, the Justice Department has not turned up any evidence that voter fraud actually is a problem. Only 86 people were convicted of voter fraud crimes as of last year — most of them Democrats and many on trivial, trumped-up charges.
The Bush administration was so determined to pursue this phantom scourge that it deported a legal Florida resident back to his native Pakistan for mistakenly filling out a voter registration card when he renewed his driver’s license. And it may well have decided to fire most of the eight federal prosecutors because they would not play along."New York Times
White House has used Justice Department to restrict voting and help Republicans
"For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates."
'The Congressional investigation into the US attorney firings has revealed that Bush administration officials have been communicating through unofficial email accounts, many of which are administered and archived by the Republican National Committee.
The RNC has stated that some records of these emails exist, but the RNC has yet to turn over any of the information to Congress, despite repeated requests from multiple Congressional committees.
Now, in an extraordinary move, the White House is demanding preemptive access to the emails held by the RNC, claiming the emails may contain information regarding ongoing Congressional investigations.
In a letter to the RNC, the White House instructed the committee to turn the emails over to the president's lawyers before Congress has access to them...'
This from the people who couldn't be bothered to get even retrospective warrants for telephone taps on others.
'... Shane says that the president's privacy privilege is outweighed in this case by the Congressional need to conduct investigations. Also, a claim to executive privilege in this case could backfire as it would be an admission that privileged communications were made using an email system under the control of an outside agency. According to Shane this would be a violation of the Presidential Records Act.
"This is the Catch-22 the Bush administration is caught in," Shane said. "If they say that the subject matter of these communications makes them susceptible to executive privilege claims, then they should have been sent through official government channels, not through unofficial emails. If these communications are of this kind, the Bush administration is clearly in violation of the Presidential Records Act."'www.truthout.org
I guess they'd rather admit to breaking the Presidential Records Act than let people see what they were saying.
'There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website – which gave the world the presidential election results – was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s firing of eight federal prosecutors.'
This is truly outrageous but I have to say I am not shocked.
If the Democrats hadn't taken control of Congress last year, this country would have been truly and royally screwed - I think Rove's plan of a permanent Republican majority would have become a reality.
Posts: 1933 | Location: Boise, Idaho, USA | Registered: 06-03-02
'...the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.
The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.
First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part...
...The question of improper political influence over government decision-making is at the heart of the controversy over the firing of U.S. attorneys and the ongoing congressional investigation of the special e-mail system installed in the White House and other government offices by the Republican National Committee.
All administrations are political, but this White House has systematically brought electoral concerns to Cabinet agencies in a way unseen previously...'Low-key office launches high-profile inquiry
'...Some Democratic Congressional leaders, such as Rep. Henry Waxman, chair of the Government Oversight Committee, who is also looking into Rove's use of RNC email accounts, as well as his role in the firing of the US attorneys, would not immediately comment on the announcement that Bloch's office is spearheading the probe into Rove's work. However, there are concerns among Democratic officials on Capitol Hill that the investigation as headed by Bloch would amount to a whitewash.
Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said Bloch's own questionable behavior as special counsel makes him the "wrong choice" to investigate Rove....'Rove Investigator Himself Under Investigation
Turns out that the Office of Special Counsel's investigation of Rove is in response to a complaint filed by fired United States Attorney David Iglesias!
"Iglesias said that on April 3, he filed a Hatch Act complaint with the OSC, charging that Karl Rove and others may have violated the law by firing him over his failure to initiate partisan-motivated prosecutions. Iglesias said he subsequently spoke with OSC chief Scott Bloch, who made clear that he was planning to launch an investigation. Despite suggestions that the White House may have initiated the OSC investigation to obstruct parallel congressional probes, Iglesias expressed confidence in Bloch."
I wonder if this story will go anywhere. Much of it reads like any old conspiracy weblog. But there do seem to have been conflicts of interest, plenty of dirty tricks and determined attempts to destroy the records involved in the Ohio count.
'The inquiry began as a question about whether U.S. attorneys — presidential appointees who serve as the top federal law enforcement officials in their state districts — were fired for political reasons.
It has grown, however, into an investigation of whether the agency let politics affect criminal investigations and whether officials made employment decisions for political reasons.
Lawmakers want to question Schlozman, who now works for the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, about a voter fraud lawsuit he filed against Missouri in November 2005.
Committee members said they wanted to know whether U.S. Attorney Todd Graves of Kansas City, Mo., was forced out for not endorsing that lawsuit, which was ultimately dismissed. Graves resigned from his post in March 2006 and Schlozman replaced him as interim U.S. attorney.
Five days before the November 2006 election, Schlozman filed another lawsuit, this time accusing members of a liberal activist group of voter registration fraud. Justice Department policy discourages such lawsuits so close to the election.'
'Several of the e-mails that the Bush administration is withholding from Congress, as well as papers from the White House counsel's office describing other withheld documents, were made available to National Journal by a senior executive branch official, who said that the administration has inappropriately kept many of them from Congress...'Administration Withheld E-Mails About Rove
The mainstream media doesn't seem all that interested lately, but this "Attorneygate" thing is still going and blowing. The No. 2 official at the Justice Department, Deputy U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty, is resigning on Monday.
"...But in the last few months, there has been evidence of tension between the attorney general and his deputy. Justice Department documents related to the U.S. attorney dismissals included an e-mail sent by Justice Department official Brian Roehrkasse the morning after McNulty testified on Capitol Hill. Roehrkasse wrote, "the Attorney General is extremely upset" and says Gonzales "thought some of the DAG's statements were inaccurate."
McNulty was the first to admit to Congress that one of the fired U.S. attorneys, Bud Cummins of Arkansas, was dismissed so that a man who used to work for White House political adviser Karl Rove could take the job. Prior to that testimony, the attorney general had insisted that all of the prosecutors were fired for performance-related reasons.
Efforts to stop `voter fraud' may have curbed legitimate voting
"During four years as a Justice Department civil rights lawyer, Hans von Spakovsky went so far in a crusade against voter fraud as to warn of its dangers under a pseudonym in a law journal article.
Writing as "Publius," von Spakovsky contended that every voter should be required to produce a photo-identification card and that there was "no evidence" that such restrictions burden minority voters disproportionately.
Now, amid a scandal over politicization of the Justice Department, Congress is beginning to examine allegations that von Spakovsky was a key player in a Republican campaign to hang onto power in Washington by suppressing the votes of minority voters.
"Mr. von Spakovsky was central to the administration's pursuit of strategies that had the effect of suppressing the minority vote," charged Joseph Rich, a former Justice Department voting rights chief who worked under him."
'For more than 15 years, clean-cut, square-jawed Tom Heffelfinger was the embodiment of a tough Republican prosecutor. Named U.S. attorney for Minnesota in 1991, he won a series of high-profile white-collar crime and gun and explosives cases. By the time Heffelfinger resigned last year, his office had collected a string of awards and commendations from the Justice Department.
So it came as a surprise — and something of a mystery — when he turned up on a list of U.S. attorneys who had been targeted for firing.
Part of the reason, government documents and other evidence suggest, is that he tried to protect voting rights for Native Americans...
...Heffelfinger resigned last year for personal reasons and says he had no idea he was being targeted for possible firing. But his stance fits a pattern that has emerged in the cases of several U.S. attorneys fired last year in states where Republicans wanted more vigorous efforts to legally challenge questionable voters.
Politics have always played a role at Justice and other Cabinet-level departments. But, critics say, Bush administration strategists went beyond most of their predecessors — Democratic or Republican — in seeking ways to convert control of the federal government into advantages on election day.
And the Heffelfinger episode has contributed to a backlash among some Minnesota Republicans. Sen. Norm Coleman, a Bush loyalist in the past who is facing reelection next year, has called on Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales to resign — largely as a result of the U.S. attorney firings and the revelations about Heffelfinger...' www.latimes.com
