Sent to The BRAD BLOG by the House Judiciary Democrats concerning this morning’s oversight hearings on the U.S. Attorney firings (full statement posted at end of this article):
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“Today’s testimony signals that it is time to rein in this President and his Administration before they do any further damage to our democracy,” said Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers. “Today, we received strong evidence that the firing of these U.S. Attorneys was politically motivated, and we clearly need to follow up on these developments with further investigations.”
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David Iglesias, former U.S. Attorney from New Mexico, testified that U.S. Senator Pete Domenici and U.S. Representative Heather Wilson called him in the days before the close 2006 elections to discuss issuing an indictment against a local Democratic official. Mr. Iglesias said that after Senator Domenici abruptly hung up the phone, “I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Six weeks later I got the call that I had to move on.”
H.E. “Bud” Cummins III, a former U.S. Attorney from Arkansas, testified that Michael Elston, Chief of Staff to Deputy U.S. Attorney General Paul McNulty, called him with a warning that any of the fired prosecutors who publicly discussed their cases would be targeted by negative information campaigns.
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“The Department of Justice, which had no effective oversight during the previous majority, has been acting behind closed doors to empower political cronies and intimidate its own appointees,” said Chairwoman Sà¡nchez. “This thuggish behavior is beneath our democracy and underscores the importance of Congressional oversight, a function that Chairman Conyers and I are committed to continue.”
In regard to the alleged threats of retaliation against the attorneys for speaking out on this, an email from Cummins, published by Sacramento Bee, gives contemporaneous specifics. According to SacBee…
Of course, Gonzales today said none of it ever happened, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
The complete statement issued by the Judiciary Committee Democrats follows below…
Fired prosecutors dispute administration, tell of government attempts to intimidate them.
Washington – In testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law (CAL), six former United States Attorneys contradicted Bush Administration explanations for their terminations. Several testified about the partisan political pressures placed on them before their firings and stated that they were terminated to make way for Bush political loyalists.
CAL Chairwoman Linda Sà¡nchez subpoenaed the former federal prosecutors, most of whom had led investigations into cases of political corruption. The prosecutors cited positive job reviews and internal communications to dispel the Bush Administration’s stated reasons for the terminations, and testified about an attempt by the Department of Justice to prevent them from publicly discussing their cases.
“Our country decided after the Watergate scandal that ideological partisanship has no place in our system of justice,” said Chairwoman Sà¡nchez. “Unfortunately, the firings of these attorneys indicate that the Bush Administration has once again acted in the interest of its political party instead of the good of the nation.”
Former U.S. Attorneys David Bogden from Nevada and Paul Charlton from Arizona testified that Acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer told them that the prosecutors were not fired for job performance issues, as Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty had told the U.S. Senate in an earlier hearing.
“Today’s testimony signals that it is time to rein in this President and his Administration before they do any further damage to our democracy,” said Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers. “Today, we received strong evidence that the firing of these U.S. Attorneys was politically motivated, and we clearly need to follow up on these developments with further investigations.”
David Iglesias, former U.S. Attorney from New Mexico, testified that U.S. Senator Pete Domenici and U.S. Representative Heather Wilson called him in the days before the close 2006 elections to discuss issuing an indictment against a local Democratic official. Mr. Iglesias said that after Senator Domenici abruptly hung up the phone, “I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Six weeks later I got the call that I had to move on.”
H.E. “Bud” Cummins III, a former U.S. Attorney from Arkansas, testified that Michael Elston, Chief of Staff to Deputy U.S. Attorney General Paul McNulty, called him with a warning that any of the fired prosecutors who publicly discussed their cases would be targeted by negative information campaigns. Mr. Cummins warned his colleagues that the Department of Justice would view their testimony as a “major escalation of the controversy,” and that the fired prosecutors “might suffer some embarrassment from the disclosure of additional information” by the administration.
“The Department of Justice, which had no effective oversight during the previous majority, has been acting behind closed doors to empower political cronies and intimidate its own appointees,” said Chairwoman Sà¡nchez. “This thuggish behavior is beneath our democracy and underscores the importance of Congressional oversight, a function that Chairman Conyers and I are committed to continue.”
“The testimony we heard today made a convincing case for passage of H.R. 580 to restore checks and balances in the appointment of U.S. attorneys,” said Chairwoman Sà¡nchez.
Keep in mind, this wouldn’t be happening, if we still had the “rubber stamp” GOP majority, who “rubber-stamped” the downfall of our great country.
Thank you for this excellent coverage. What is the full value of HR 580?
To “restore checks and balances in the appointment of US attornies?” Dorothy..i thinks dis Congress wants to remind itself location USA. When voting time comes around on this HR580, we’ll see how the bushlickers and the corporate sellout congressional robots VOTE on this bill. It will take a very strong man Mr. Conyers to take down these lying criminals warmongers in the wake of their 9/11 wargames. Brought to you by.. if you got 6 seconds we can take down a 47 story steal concrete building #7.
Lastly, outside the stolen Florida election in 2000, 9/11 is the earliest and greatest crime to date that really set the bushit administration bar. Therefore i quote Rudolph Giuliani right before the 1st tower fell controlled demolition. “we were told the tower(South tower) was gonna collapse in 10-15 minutes.” He knew.
He said this even though no tower has ever collapsed in the history of buildings on fire.
He knew. He’s still walking around free AND now he’s trying to convince people he should be the next neo-con president. what a shithead criminal.
Checks and Balances See how badly this is needed. By the time this is all over I think we are going to see a lot of Republicans going to jail.
P.S. Brad, I love the new site. Really nice.
*singing*
The wheels on the bus are falling off, falling off, falling off, the wheels on the bus are falling off…
John Conyers comes down from the mountain!
Gonzales makes the same excuse as they did for the war which has probably killed a million by now:
Yeah, Bush hired an idiot for a lawyer and then made him the Attorney General.
I broke the first link to this story here a week or so back. It was when “Momma” asked us what we had “learned children” that day from the Libby trial.
I explained that I had learned that Fitz and other US Attorneys were in the gunsights of the fascist regime.
The firings continued and I kept posting about it here and elsewhere until Conyers et. al. also got wind of it.
Now the fascist pig Gonzales is in the gun sights, along with The Dick (apologies to The Donald).
OT sorta
Has anyone noticed that the MSM is calling Fitz a “Special US Attorney” or “Special Prosecutor”. He directly disavowed that because the statute allowing special US Attorneys or prosecutors went out of existence some time ago.
The truth is that he was appointed because Ashcroft had a conflict of interest, and is not a special prosecutor. He is a regular US Attorney and he handled the Libby case like he has handled his prosecutions of the mob in earlier cases.
Just dispelling a myth …
JEEZE ……………….ABOUT TIME!!!!!
THANKS BRAD AT EL.
Shakespeare: “The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers.” (Henry VI) That quote is thrown out by the ignorant to assert that Shakespeare had a very low opinion of lawyers, but it is actually in praise of lawyers. The proposal to kill all the lawyers was intended to eliminate those who might stand in the way of a contemplated revolution — thus underscoring the important role that lawyers can play in society.
The neocons are a long way down the road to their contemplated revolution … not for democracy, but for facism. They are killing the careers of those lawyers who will not perform as their puppets. How will those eight lawyers vote in the next election … if there is one?
And then Greg Palast reveals who one of the REPLACEMENTS is in this expose.
And our Congress will probably not even call this person to tesify under oath about why he should be put in charge of ANYTHING other than cleaning a prison toilet.
Hey, did any of you folks see this story from Greg Palast (just came out today – 3/7/07) about the US attorney replacement for the fired Arkansas USA, former Rove aide Griffin? I think this should be highlighted by Brad Friedman ASAP:
There’s only one thing worse than sacking an honest prosecutor. That’s replacing an honest prosecutor with a criminal.
There was one big hoohah in Washington yesterday as House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers pulled down the pants on George Bush’s firing of US Attorneys to expose a scheme to punish prosecutors who wouldn’t bend to political pressure.
But the Committee missed a big one: Timothy Griffin, Karl Rove’s assistant, the President’s pick as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Griffin, according to BBC Television, was the hidden hand behind a scheme to wipe out the voting rights of 70,000 citizens prior to the 2004 election.
Key voters on Griffin’s hit list: Black soldiers and homeless men and women. Nice guy, eh? Naughty or nice, however, is not the issue. Targeting voters where race is a factor is a felony crime under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In October 2004, our investigations team at BBC Newsnight received a series of astonishing emails from Mr. Griffin, then Research Director for the Republican National Committee. He didn’t mean to send them to us. They were highly confidential memos meant only for RNC honchos.
However, Griffin made a wee mistake. Instead of sending the emails — potential evidence of a crime — to email addresses ending with the domain name “@GeorgeWBush.com” he sent them to “@GeorgeWBush.ORG.” A website run by prankster John Wooden who owns “GeorgeWBush.org.” When Wooden got the treasure trove of Rove-ian ravings, he sent them to us.
And we dug in, decoding, and mapping the voters on what Griffin called, “Caging” lists, spreadsheets with 70,000 names of voters marked for challenge. Overwhelmingly, these were Black and Hispanic voters from Democratic precincts.
[tim-griffin.jpg] The Griffin scheme was sickly brilliant. We learned that the RNC sent first-class letters to new voters in minority precincts marked, “Do not forward.” Several sheets contained nothing but soldiers, other sheets, homeless shelters. Targets included the Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida and that city’s State Street Rescue Mission. Another target, Edward Waters College, a school for African-Americans.
If these voters were not currently at their home voting address, they were tagged as “suspect” and their registration wiped out or their ballot challenged and not counted. Of course, these ‘cages’ captured thousands of students, the homeless and those in the military though they are legitimate voters.
We telephoned those on the hit list, including one Randall Prausa. His wife admitted he wasn’t living at his voting address: Randall was a soldier shipped overseas.
Randall and other soldiers like him who sent in absentee ballots, when challenged, would lose their vote. And they wouldn’t even know it.
And by the way, it’s not illegal for soldiers to vote from overseas — even if they’re Black.
But it is illegal to challenge voters en masse where race is an element in the targeting. So several lawyers told us, including Ralph Neas, famed civil rights attorney with People for the American Way.
Griffin himself ducked our cameras, but his RNC team tried to sell us the notion that the caging sheets were, in fact, not illegal voter hit lists, but a roster of donors to the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign. Republican donors at homeless shelters?
Over the past weeks, Griffin has said he would step down if he had to face Congressional confirmation. However, the President appointed Griffin to the law enforcement post using an odd little provision of the USA Patriot Act that could allow Griffin to skip Congressional questioning altogether.
Therefore, I have a suggestion for Judiciary members. Voting law expert Neas will be testifying today before Conyers’ Committee on the topic of illegal voter “disenfranchisement” — the fancy word for stealing elections by denying voters’ civil rights.
Maybe Conyers should hold a line-up of suspected vote thieves and let Neas identify the perpetrators. That should be easy in the case of the Caging List Criminal. He’d only have to look for the guy wearing a new shiny lawman’s badge.
2 South Dakota U.S. A.Gs were fired because of this but the crime still went unpunished. They would have to prosecute a State Judge who has way too much influence on how the state is run so they ignore what has happened.
31 fake social security numbers and 1 million booty and no prosecution because it would cut back federal funding to welfare programs.
Living in a low income 35 dollar apartment while driving a new SUV with the States approval.
As letter states law enforcement has some of the fake social security numbers and refuses to turn over for prosecution as the judge will not allow a prosecution
Federal funding is more important than the law.
email Sen. John Thune for confirmation.
southdakotagov.info google or msnlive or yahoo