Is it possible that President Bush could bobble this back-and-forth with the Russians any worse than he has to date? Today the president managed to find himself answering a question in which he said there didn’t need to be a military response to Russian provocations. “As I said yesterday, Russia is not an enemy. There needs to be no military response because we are not at war with Russia.”
I should think not.
What is the president doing exactly? Can he be set up with a minder? Can the whole White House be set up with one, for that matter? We need an escalation in tensions with the Russians at the moment? We don’t have our hands full? Can someone step in and help the White House exercise any degree of competence in this situation? It’s bizarre and embarrassing and even dangerous.
This afternoon, the House Judiciary Committee released James Comey’s answers to written questions from Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA) about the Ashcroft hospital room incident. We’ve just added the written answers to the TPM Document Collection.
Separately, in written answers to 
questions from Sen. Leahy (D-VT), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey confirmed that Vice President Cheney blocked a subsequent promotion for a Justice Department official, Patrick Philbin, who played a key role in blocking the recertification of the NSA warrantless wiretap program.
In a telling detail about Gonzales, the Attorney General apparently planned to promote Philbin to be principal deputy solicitor general. In other words, it would appear that for all the rest we have learned about Mr. Gonzales, he was not inclined to punish Philbin for his role in the Ashcroft-Comey recertification incident. However, Cheney intervened. In Comey’s words: “I understood that someone at the White House communicated to Attorney General Gonzales that the vice president would oppose the appointment if the attorney general pursued the matter. The attorney general chose not to pursue it.”
So, two sides of Mr. Gonzales, but a composite that fits the profile of the man — not personally vindictive or perhaps even a person of malign will, but an obedient servant of bad men.
When Bradley Schlozman testified yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee he repeatedly claimed that he’d been authorized to issue a series of ‘vote fraud’ indictments just before the November 2006 by Craig Donsanto, director of the Election Crime Branch at the Department of Justice. That surprised the committee such indictments violate DOJ rules against bringing such charges just before an election. And Donsanto himself actually wrote the manual that includes that policy.
TPMmuckraker.com researcher Will Thomas 
thought he rememebered Donsanto’s name. So he searched through the Department of Justice document dumps from this spring. And he found Donsanto’s name referenced in an October 4th 2004 email from fired New Mexico US Attorney David Iglesias. And in that email Iglesias restates the policy against such late-campaign indictments. “I am not aware,” writes Iglesias, “of any prosecution which will commence before November 2, 2004. I know Donsanto would not authorize such action because he has stated the same.”
Then this afternoon, TPMmuckraker.com’s Laura McGann spoke to Iglesias by phone to ask him about the October 2004 email and his understanding of Donsanto’s policy on such late-campaign indictments. Iglesias told McGann: “I actually saw the email that I sent on TPMMuckraker and I know exactly what youâre talking about. I had numerous conversations with [Donsanto] over the course of two years, I canât believe that heâd have gone 180 degrees on that policy. I just donât believe it.”
It’s not an idle point. Given Schlozman’s record of supporting efforts to suppress minority voter turnout, purge non-Republicans from key jobs in the Civil Rights Division and other infamies, it looks very much like he timed the indictments to drop just before the 2006 election to provide Missouri Republicans with a cudgel to use against then-candidate now-Senator Claire McCaskill.
So what’s the truth here? Schlozman said repeatedly and unequivocally under oath that Donsanto had authorized the indictments. Did Donsanto change “180 degrees”, in Iglesias’s words? By my understanding of DOJ guidelines Donsanto is not permitted to speak to the press. So I think only the investigators on Capitol Hill can find out from him what really happened.
Gettin’ dicey for Sen. Stevens (R-AK).
Over the last week we’ve been bringing you news about the Veco Corp. corruption scandal in Alaska getting closer to Sen. Stevens (R-AK). Stevens’ problem is that Veco, the company at the center of the bribery probe, which is a smaller scale version of Halliburton (an oil services company) oversaw the 
renovation of Stevens’ house. And now the Post has more.
In what the Post terms a “brief interview” Stevens, who’s been refusing all comment about the Veco probe, concedes the FBI “put me on notice to preserve some records.”
I’ll bet.
As we noted on Monday, the main contractor on Stevens’s suspect home renovation, Augie Paone, has now lawyered up and clammed up after giving an interview to a local TV station that can’t have made Sen. Stevens very happy.
Paone told the Post: “My lawyers told me it would not be wise to talk while the investigation is ongoing. We’ll just see what happens in the next couple of weeks.”
Here’s our report on Stevens’ home renovation from Tuesday’s episode of TPMtv …
Today’s Must Read: Follow the Coconut Road… to find $10 million in earmarks from Rep. Don Young (R-AK)!
Edwards to deliver big speech on terrorism today. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.
Later today Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, will hold the first in a series of oversight hearings titled, “The Constitution in Crisis: The State of Civil Liberties in America,” delving into such issues as the NSA’s domestic wiretapping program. Earlier this week we caught up with Congressman Nadler (he’s TPM’s congressman, after all), and in today’s episode of TPMtv we talk with him about warrantless wiretapping, the politicization of the Justice Department, and that dusty old constitutional concept known as congressional oversight …
Lieutenant General Doug Lute has his confirmation hearings today before the Senate Armed Services Committee. And we’ve got live running coverage from Spencer Ackerman at TPMmuckraker.
Here’s an interesting article about Iran by Peter Hitchens in the American Conservative. Peter is the younger brother of Christopher Hitchens. And until a few years ago, Peter was the right-winger of the clan. Here though he’s poking holes in the scare-mongering about Iran as the new threat to bring down the West and generally take over the world. Take a look.
Youtube jumps the shark?
Youtube has just created a new ‘feature’ in which all their lame social networking ‘related video’ nonsense is forced into the videos you watch themselves. Here’s what I mean.
Below I’ve linked a short clip from Fox News we published yesterday.
Play the video and then wave your cursor over the video as it plays …
As it happens, you can go in and fiddle with the code and remove this new ‘feature’. And we’ll be doing that with all the videos on Youtube we post. But it’s hard not to see this as a case where Youtube, facing new competition among video sites, starts forcing annoying crap on users and generates a backlash. Tell us what you think.
Late Update: The Shark jumps Youtube? Most TPM Readers don’t seem to mind that much.
Later Update: The tide turns. More readers say it blows.