Let’s be clear:
The focus of the Bush White House and the Republican Party is obstructing justice
The shifting Bush/GOP defense of the US Attorneys purge is like a poorly built earthen damn around a million-gallon lagoon of pig feces as it fails in a heavy thunderstorm.
A river of foul smelling corruption is about to burst on the land.
As Tony Snow tries to spin the cesspool into a sweet stew of honey covered nuggets, the reality based community can see and smell this latest manifestation of the Republican Culture of Corruption for what it is.
And it is clear that more is involved than just the firing of eight USAs.
The key of the Prosecutor Purge story has been the efforts to obstruct justice in real cases while inflating imaginary cases.
In 2004 the Washington Post brought the misdeeds of Jack Abramoff to mainstream awareness. By 2005 Jack was synonymous with scandal. And he was just the tip of the iceberg. Holding back the lagoon of Republican scandal became Job #1 in the most corrupt Administration in American History.
To the Jump...
The focus in 2004 was to keep the Abramoff Scandal from impacting the effort to re-electappoint Bush President. Fortunately for the Republican Party they had John McCain to run interference. The Senator managed to slow down his investigation of Abramoff enough to limit its impact on 2004. The Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee collected more than 750,000 pages of Abramoff related documents. Less than 7,500 have been released.
McCain converted the scandal into Hollywood "heist/caper" film, knowing that American prejudices against Native Americans and tribal casinos would help hide the damning details of the Abramoff scandal.
- Jack’s role as a 25-year bagman for the GOP: hidden.
- Jack’s close working relationship with the Bush White House: hidden.
- Jack’s close working relationship with the Republican Congressional Leadership: hidden.
- Jack’s role in dirty tricks and off-the-books money for the GOP: hidden.
- Jack’s role in Medicare reform: hidden.
- Jack’s role in energy policy: hidden.
McCain actively controlled the story. He ensured that it was a not a factor in the 2004 election. He ensured that voters would not know about how closely Abramoff, Rove and Bush worked together.
McCain was easy.
The US Attorneys investigating the corruption were another matter. Unlike the Senator on the Curveball Express, some of the US Attorneys thought it was their job to exposed corruption where ever it led.
Abramoff was bad enough, but by the end of 2005 more and more Republican scandals were in the news. Cunningham, DeLay, Ney and many other elected officials were under investigation. As Karl Rove made his plans for the 2006 election, it was clear that something would need to be done.
The firings were part of the effort to obstruct justice. As were the US Attorneys pushed towards retirement or promoted to jobs they wanted (like being a Judge).
Another key part of the effort to slow down the investigations was the constant turnover within various investigative sections of the DoJ.
Last Friday, ckntfld posted an important Diary: Gonzales quietly appoints two new section chiefs.
It scrolled by quickly, but it deserves some attention. Since Abramoff's guilty plea, the Bush Administration has kept the DoJ Public Integrity and Fraud sections in a constant state of turnover. Back in February, The Legal Times, reported on the slow moving Abramoff investigation:
No End in Sight for Abramoff Investigation
Entering probe's fourth year, some question whether Justice Department prosecutors are moving fast enough
It is a long article, but important and worth a read.
Among the gems are these bits and bobs:
The public integrity section’s handling of the Abramoff scandal has led to some internal friction with prosecutors from other parts of the Justice Department as well as investigative agents. And despite the fact that the case has been Justice’s largest public-corruption matter in decades, the investigation has been beset by the high turnover of prosecutors and supervisors in the two sections running the probe, both of which have operated without a permanent leader for more than a year, according to current and former government officials and lawyers with knowledge of the case. (Legal Times interviewed more than a dozen such sources, all of whom were granted anonymity to discuss a pending investigation.)
At least one federal official — Interior Department Inspector General Earl Devaney — became so concerned about the progress of the case that he contacted DOJ supervisors in 2005. [snip]
Prosecutors have also had significant evidence at their disposal. Greenberg Traurig, Abramoff’s former law firm, turned over thousands of pages of the former lobbyist’s e-mails early in the investigation. Additionally, the investigation’s two central figures, Abramoff and Scanlon, began cooperating with investigators more than a year ago. [snip]
But in the Abramoff matter, the pace of the probe and its focus on congressional, rather than executive branch, officials led Interior IG Devaney to voice his concerns to then-public integrity section chief Noel Hillman and Hillman’s boss, Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher on at least one occasion in 2005, according to a government source with knowledge of the matter. [snip]
The major constant in the case has been Mary Butler, an experienced line prosecutor in the public integrity section who has served as the co-lead in the case since its beginning in early 2004. But Butler has seen counterparts come and go. William Jacobson, the initial fraud-section prosecutor assigned to co-lead the case, left the government to join Kirkland & Ellis in the winter of 2005 (Jacobson returned to the Justice Department last week, though not as part of the Abramoff probe). Jacobson was succeeded on the case by Guy Singer, who spent a year and a half as co-lead before leaving the government to join the D.C. office of Akerman Senterfitt in November.
There’s also been turnover among the supervisors of the two sections heading the case. Though supervisors play a smaller role than line prosecutors in developing a case, they sign off on key legal briefs, assign staff, and personally approve particularly sensitive activities — such as issuing subpoenas to members of Congress. [snip]
The turnover meant that new prosecutors had to be brought up to speed on the inner workings of a complex and closely scrutinized case.
"That whole section seemed like it was in transition," says a government source with knowledge of the case. "You had people leaving and new people coming in."
There is more in this story and in others. But the key is that the leadership of the Fraud and Public Integrity Sections of the Department of Justice has been in an induced state of constant flux for years. Even if the new folks are as good or better than the old folks, each transition at the top will delay the investigation by months. String several transitions together and you have cases like Enron and Abramoff only going to trial after Bush is safe and the next election is over.
I've written about the curious case of Noel Hillman who was promoted out of the Public Integrity Section just as the Abramoff case was heating up. For more than a year the section was without a leader. The impact of that status on the Abramoff investigation would not have been lost on Karl Rove. I do not think that the constant churn among the teams investigating Abramoff during an election year was a coincidence.
This deserves some more investigation.
And it is part of the reason that there is a growing call for a Special or Independent Prosecutor to investigate the Abramoff Scandal. At the very least, the delays in this investigation require some serious Congressional oversight.
It may be coming.
Last week, Congressmen Miller and Rahall called for a new investigation of the Jack Abramoff scandal and his work on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) and Guam. Pivotal to that scandal and the call for a new investigation was Jack’s effort to fire and suppress the work of US Attorney Fredrick Black.
Today’s issue of the Hill added more details about Black’s demotion:
Years before Abramoff was sent to jail, the Department of the Interior ignored an October 2002 letter from Frederick Black, then the acting U.S. attorney for Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, and had shut down the territories’ Inspector General’s office by the summer of 2003. [snip]
Black’s case may get another look from Congress. Reps. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) wrote to both the Senate and House judiciary committees last week, asking them to add Black’s demotion to their broader investigation of the U.S. attorney scandal. [snip]
The story points out another reason for Abramoff’s effort to remove the Guam-based Black. Jack wanted to remove Federal oversight from Guam and the CNMI and relocate the Feds to Hawaii—a seven hour flight away from the islands along the Marianas Trench:
Sent to Earl DeVaney, Interior’s inspector general, on Oct. 11, 2002, Black’s letter stated that "the loss of [the Inspector General’s office in Guam] would remove effective federal supervision over the local government’s expenditure of federal dollars, and would substantially handicap our investigations of official corruption." [snip]
Interior’s plan was to move the investigative office to Honolulu, Hawaii, where it would still oversee Guam. Black took exception.
"You cannot possibly provide a satisfactory level of audit oversight on a TDY basis from Honolulu," wrote Black in bold — "TDY" being a military abbreviation for temporary duty — with Guam being "seven hours flying time" from Hawaii.
Several high-ranking government officials at the time, including Attorney General John Ashcroft and Interior Secretary Gale Norton, were copied on the letter.
In November 2002, about a month after Black had sent the letter, the acting U.S. attorney was demoted to a lesser position at the Justice Department.
Interior did move the office to Honolulu, shutting down its operations in Guam by the summer of 2003. Department officials confirmed the move, saying the staff is now one person. According to Black’s letter, the staff in Guam had consisted of eight members.
And without Federal oversight Jack and the Pirates of Saipan were free to plunder the US Territories of the Western Pacific.
And they did.
And part of the price of the corruption were more young women raped and forced into prostitution, not to mention the abuse of thousands of guest workers on the CNMI.
The removal of Black was a test run for standard operating procedure in the most corrupt Administration in US history. When Abramoff and the other scandals began to erupt in late 2005 and early 2006, the White House moved to block or at least slow things down. They also tried to inflate smaller issues or even fantasies (like 99% of all voter fraud stories) into scandals to compete with their own crimes on the evening news.
It didn’t work as planned and Rove took revenge. Eight US Attorneys went down. And worst than the firings were the many more folks in the DoJ who supported the effort of the White House to protect their own. And still more folks were caught in the waves of delay and disruption through the intentional churning of team leaders in various ongoing investigations.
And this aspect of the scandal is being noticed. Today TPM Muckraker reported that the good government watchdog group Democracy 21 has called on Gonzales to report on whether there has been political interference in the ongoing criminal investigation of Abramoff Scandals.
After making the case for concern, the Democracy 21 Letter (PDF) calls for action:
In conclusion, based on the recent serious questions that have been raised about the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys and about political interference and partisan intervention at the Justice Department, Democracy 21 believes it is incumbent that you make clear to the public whether there have been any attempts at political interference or partisan intervention in the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of the Abramoff scandals, by members of Congress, White House officials or others.
We also believe that you should provide the public with similar information regarding the criminal investigation in California and the criminal investigation involving Representative Jefferson that are discussed above.
Democracy 21 also calls on you to provide the public information requested regarding the resources currently available to conduct the criminal investigation into the Abramoff scandals.
It is clear that the Bush purge of US Attorneys is not going away. Everyday this scandal will grow. As Bush, Rove and the gang fight any effort to discover the truth, more and more details will emerge.
The scandal links will be made if we forced the issue (as we did in 2006).
It has been mentioned that an Abramoff scandal angle was involved in many firings and/or other "transitions" of USAs looking into corruption. (Take the recent Dairies, Purged USAs and Native American Issues: Abramoff? and USA's Firings, Ties to Jack Abramoff? as examples).
The suspicious nature of the recent DoJ "transitions" is especially true in California where the Abramoff and Cunningham scandal streams merge within the actions of the Republican Congressional delegation.
Perhaps Purging Prosecutors is just one of the tools the Bush White House uses to block investigations of their crimes. Sometimes they may move one to the Bench as a way to slow or block an ongoing investigation. Or they could encourage a retirement or a transfer. When bundled together these tactics are an especially useful tool for slowing down any investigation of the complex crimes at the heart of the Republican Culture of Corruption.
Rove is running the clock. If he can slow this down for just eighteen more months, the GOP will have a fighting chance in 2008 and he may keep his sorry ass out of jail.
We need to speed things up.
2007 is a year for gathering facts and holding their feet to the fire. 2008 is a year to defeat these scoundrels at the ballot box.
- Write letters, contact the press, call talk shows, post comments, and otherwise promote this effort.
- Research. Follow the money. Find the quid pro quos. Dig into the ties of the GOP to CNMI and Guam. Dig into the many other aspects of this cesspool of corruption.
- Get out the truth and hold the GOP accountable in 2007 and 2008. Perhaps Republican candidates will want to explain to voters why they wanted to kill the Abramoff and other corruption investigation. We should force the question.
Let’s push this hard.
Cheers!