Here’s a good question for Alberto Gonzales at today’s hearing.

We already know that some 15 federal agencies and departments were subjected, at various times during the Bush Presidency, to briefings from Karl Rove’s White House political shop on the key battleground races facing the GOP. In today’s front page story in the Washington Post, we learn that even U.S. diplomats have been given Rovian briefings on GOP electoral priorities, as recently as January of this year.

What we don’t know is whether Rove or his crew gave similar briefings to DOJ officials.

Will someone press the Attorney General on this point today? And if he doesn’t know whether it happened, does he think it would have been appropriate if it did?

Here are the federal departments and agencies that have been confirmed as having received political briefings on U.S. domestic politics from Karl Rove’s shop, courtesy of the Washington Post:

State Department

Treasury Department

Agriculture Department

Interior Department

Labor Department

Department of Education

Energy Department

Commerce Department

Department of Veterans Affairs

Transportation Department

Department of Health and Human Services

Department of Housing and Urban Development

General Services Administration

Environmental Protection Agency

NASA

Small Business Administration

Office of Science and Technology Policy

Office of National Drug Control Policy

U.S. Agency for International Development

Peace Corps

The Department of Homeland Security should probably be on the list, too, but DHS has been vague about what kind of briefing it received.

If you’ve seen reporting that suggests additions to the list, let us know. And if you have first-hand knowledge of unreported briefings, we’d certainly like to hear from you, too.

Barack Obama at the Dem debate: “The time for us to ask how we were going to get out of Iraq was before we went in.” That and other items in our Election Central Debate Roundup.

Paul Kiel and Spencer Ackerman are live blogging the Alberto Gonzales hearing at TPMmuckraker, where they will have commentary and video highlights.

I must say this surprises even me …

A few months ago, [Condi Rice] decided to write an opinion piece about Lebanon. She enlisted John Chambers, chief executive officer of Cisco Systems as a co-author, and they wrote about public/private partnerships and how they might be of use in rebuilding Lebanon after last summer’s war. No one would publish it.

Think about that. Every one of the major newspapers approached refused to publish an essay by the secretary of state. Price Floyd, who was the State Department’s director of media affairs until recently, recalls that it was sent to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and perhaps other papers before the department finally tried a foreign publication, the Financial Times of London, which also turned it down.

As a last-ditch strategy, the State Department briefly considered translating the article into Arabic and trying a Lebanese paper. But finally they just gave up. “I kept hearing the same thing: ‘There’s no news in this.’ ” Floyd said. The piece, he said, was littered with glowing references to President Bush’s wise leadership. “It read like a campaign document.”

Floyd left the State Department on April 1, after 17 years. He said he was fed up with the relentless partisanship and the unwillingness to consider other points of view. His supervisor, a political appointee, kept “telling me to shut up,” he said. Nothing like that had occurred under Presidents Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush. “They just wanted us to be Bush automatons.”

I was actually remembering, only last night, how President Bush ran his 2000 campaign on a platform which charged the Clinton administration of making ‘everything about politics’. And how this crew was going to clean things up.

Politics is inevitably a very big part of governance. And to some degree that’s as it should be. But there’s truly never been an administration that has so relentlessly and cravenly politicized every nook and cranny of the governmental structure as this one. I’m not even sure there was anything like it in the 19th century, though the vast differences in the nature of the state itself make comparisons extremely difficult.

“We are going to try a dozen different things. Maybe one of them will flatline. One of them will do this much. One of them will do this much more. After a while, we believe there is chance you will head into success. I am not saying that we are absolutely headed for success.”
—A senior U.S. military officer, quoted in The New York Times, on the new new New Way Forward in Iraq

A short time ago in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing at which Alberto Gonzales is appearing, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) posed the question we were pondering this morning: Did Karl Rove or his crew give political briefings to officials at the Justice Department, as they did at more than a dozen other departments and agencies?

Here is Kennedy’s exchange with Gonzales:

So Gonzales claims he is not aware of any such briefings at DOJ, saying he thinks he would know about them if they had occurred (of course there’s been a whole lot going on in his department that you would think Gonzales should know about but hasn’t). As for whether such briefings elsewhere in the federal government violated the Hatch Act, Gonzales said, “We’ll look to see whether or not there’s something there.” Left unsaid was that Gonzales was White House Counsel when some of the earliest briefings were being given.

You may have also noticed in the clip Kennedy’s emphasis on today’s WaPo report that Rove’s political briefings were given to Peace Corps officials. That has to be a particularly bitter pill for Kennedy since the creation of the Peace Corps was one of the crowning accomplishments of his brother’s presidency.

Law professor Frank Askin has more on the history of Congress’ inherent power to enforce its own contempt citations.

On Monday night the Democratic candidates engaged in the first ever YouTube-fueled presidential debate. In case you weren’t able to witness the revolution in real time, we bring you a highlight reel of the action in today’s episode of TPMtv. Thanks to all readers/viewers who wrote in with suggestions!

Alberto Gonzales really is a national embarrassment. Even Arlen Specter displays a sneering contempt for the man. And that was before Gonzales began today’s soft-shoe shuffle in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

How many U.S. Attorneys has he fired? He’s not sure.

Why is he the man to fix the department he broke? That’s a good question, he admits.

Why didn’t the President’s new executive order on torture specifically ban waterboarding? “[S]ome acts are clearly beyond the pale, and that everyone would agree should be prohibited,” he testified. “There are certain other activities where it is not so clear, Senator.”

And so on.

We have ongoing coverage of the hearing at TPMmuckraker.