J. Scott Jennings, Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director, Office of Political Affairs to Karl Rove, Kyle Sampson, Fred Fielding, et al., February 28th, 2007: “[Sen. Domenici’s Chief of Staff Steve] Bell said Domenici’s idea is not to respond [to Iglesias’s accusations], and hopefully make this a one day story. They have already been contacted by McClatchy … They have not confirmed to the reporter they were one of the Members.”

AP, March 1st, 2007 …

In a brief interview Thursday, Domenici also denied the accusation. “I don’t have any comment,” he told The Associated Press. “I have no idea what he’s talking about.”

Condi takes another one for the team:

After intense internal debate, the Bush administration has decided to hold on to five Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence agents captured in Iraq, overruling a State Department recommendation to release them, according to U.S. officials.

At a meeting of the president’s foreign policy team Tuesday, the administration decided the five Iranians will remain in custody and go through a periodic six-month review used for the 250 other foreign detainees held in Iraq, U.S. officials said. The next review is not expected until July, officials say. . . .

Differences over the five Iranians reflect an emerging divide on how to deal with Iran. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went into the meeting Tuesday advising that the men be freed because they are no longer useful, but after a review of options she went along with the consensus, U.S. officials say. Vice President Cheney’s office made the firmest case for keeping them.

So much for Fred Fielding’s story (from the LAT) …

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.

Milwaukee US Attorney Steven Biskupic responds to revelation that he was on and then later taken off the Bush firing list …

Until the recent controversy surrounding the firings of eight United State Attorneys around the country, it was never communicated to me that my job could be in jeopardy or that I was considered to be disloyal to President Bush’s agenda.

– It is my understanding that my name appears on a list, which was a ranking of United States Attorneys. My name appeared in a category questioning my performance and loyalty to the President. That same list characterized esteemed Chicago United States Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as “mediocre.” I believe the list has no credibility.

– The charging decision in the Georgia Thompson case was made in consultation with the then-Democratic State Attorney General, and the Democratic District Attorney for Dane County. The decision to charge Thompson was based solely on the facts, and was not made with consideration of my job status. To my knowledge at the time, my job status was entirely secure.

– I am a career prosecutor, selected as United States Attorney through a bipartisan commission. My numerous public corruption cases include prosecutions of Democrats and Republicans. Our records show that since 2002 when I became United States Attorney, I have brought at least 12 cases against individuals who donated money to Republican candidates or who were aligned with the Republican Party.

White House agrees to coordinate with the Senate Judiciary Committee on choosing an independent consultant to recover all those lost emails.

Nice. The Senate gets to help pick who will find the emails but the White House still hasn’t agreed to let the Senate see the emails once they are found. Ah, compromise.

Update: Speaking of compromise, Fred Fielding has his work cut out for him:

Sources tell NPR that Fielding actually wants to negotiate with Congress about how the interviews [of White House staff] will take place. But Fielding has not been able to persuade President Bush to go along.

Walter Pincus reports on the Administration’s proposed revisions to FISA, which include immunizing telecommunications companies who cooperate in the Administration’s surveillance programs from lawsuits by their customers. That provision would be retroactive to Sept 11, 2001 (via War and Piece).

I’m afraid yesterday’s AP story on No Gun Ri is going to get lost in the swirl of more immediately pressing scandals, but it’s such an important piece, I want to draw your attention to it:

Six years after declaring the U.S. killing of Korean War refugees at No Gun Ri was “not deliberate,” the Army has acknowledged it found but did not divulge that a high-level document said the U.S. military had a policy of shooting approaching civilians in South Korea.

The document, a letter from the U.S. ambassador in South Korea to the State Department in Washington, is dated the day in 1950 when U.S. troops began the No Gun Ri shootings, in which survivors say hundreds, mostly women and children, were killed.

Exclusion of the embassy letter from the Army’s 2001 investigative report is the most significant among numerous omissions of documents and testimony pointing to a policy of firing on refugee groups — undisclosed evidence uncovered by Associated Press archival research and Freedom of Information Act requests. . . .

More than a dozen documents — in which high-ranking U.S. officers tell troops that refugees are “fair game,” for example, and order them to “shoot all refugees coming across river” — were found by the AP in the investigators’ own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None of those documents was disclosed in the Army’s 300-page public report. . . .

Despite this, the Army’s e-mail to the AP maintains, as did the 2001 report, “No policy purporting to authorize soldiers to shoot refugees was ever promulgated to soldiers in the field.” . . .

There’s a lot more detail in the AP piece about how the 2001 report which exonerated the Army left out or mischaracterized key pieces of evidence from the Army’s own records.

It’s never too late to get this sort of thing right, and given the looming historical accounting America will have to do on Iraq and the War on Terror, we better learn how to do it right.

An inside look at how the Department of Justice has changed under George W. Bush, and particularly under Alberto Gonzales.

Update: Some readers have asked me to further highlight the piece I linked to above, an interview that Daniel Metcalfe, a recently retired senior career DOJ lawyer, gave to the Legal Times‘ Tony Mauro. Gladly.

Metcalfe had been with the Justice Department since 1971, so much of the perspective what he is able to offer on the Bush Justice Department is historical. Here is Metcalfe on how quickly things changed after Alberto Gonzales became attorney general:

Ever since the Watergate era, when Edward Levi came in as attorney general to replace former Sen. William Saxby soon after Nixon resigned, the Justice Department maintained a healthy distance between it and what could be called the raw political concerns that are properly within the White House’s domain. Even Reagan’s first attorney general, William French Smith, did not depart greatly from the standard that Levi set; as for Meese, I knew him to be more heavily involved in defending himself from multiple ethics investigations than in bringing the department too close to the White House, even though he came from there.

More recently, of course, the DOJ-White House distance hit its all-time high-water mark under Janet Reno, especially during Clinton’s second term. And even John Ashcroft made it clear to all department employees that, among other things, he held that traditional distance in proper reverence; he proved that this was no mere lip service when, from his hospital bed, he refused to overrule Deputy AG Comey on what is now called the “terrorist surveillance program.” Especially in the wake of 9/11, which strongly spurred the morale and dedication of Justice Department employees, myself included, I saw only a limited morale diminution in general during the first term.

But that strong tradition of independence over the previous 30 years was shattered in 2005 with the arrival of the White House counsel as a second-term AG. All sworn assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, it was as if the White House and Justice Department now were artificially tied at the hip — through their public affairs, legislative affairs and legal policy offices, for example, as well as where you ordinarily would expect such a connection (i.e., Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel). I attended many meetings in which this total lack of distance became quite clear, as if the current crop of political appointees in those offices weren’t even aware of the important administration-of-justice principles that they were trampling.

Metcalfe also makes an interesting–and on its face, plausible–claim that I don’t recall hearing before: namely, that the traditional second term decline in the quality of new political appointees is worse in Republican administrations:

I’ll now say something that might sound partisan, even coming from a purposely nonpartisan registered independent, but it’s really not: In my experience over 11 presidential administrations, from Nixon I to what can be called Bush III, there is an unmistakable drop-off in overall appointment quality during a second presidential term — and this definitely is more so during a Republican administration. Perhaps this is due to there being a lower quality of political appointees in Republican administrations to begin with, given that, by and large, they give up more than Democrats do to enter government service, especially with the post-Watergate ethics restrictions that all government officials face.

This observation is nothing new, by the way; one need only look at the relative ages and experience levels of comparable appointees in successive administrations to see it. So when you enter the second term of a Republican administration, you get the worst of all possible worlds: You actually see some influential political appointees who are, to put it bluntly, too subject-matter ignorant to even realize how ignorant they are. (This is assuming that, if they knew, they’d actually care.)

And compounding this, as mentioned earlier, is the strong drive of political appointees at all levels (perhaps more so if they are attorneys, whose background is amenable to legal positions throughout the executive branch) to obtain that maximum capstone position before the second term ends. What happens to bureaucracy at such a time is that it becomes sluggish to the point of constipation, driven only by expediency as gauged from a political or personal agenda, and it sometimes yields some truly mind-boggling results, such as the current U.S. Attorney nightmare.

Metcalfe’s perspective is worth considering. It is, in some respects, a more benign explanation for some of what we have seen than I might favor. I use “benign” guardedly because what Metcalfe witnessed in the last two years of his tenure at DOJ was clearly distressing to him and, in his view, marred the department’s reputation, something he took great pride in.

What I mean is that the dysfunction he describes at the staff level can be seen as the cause of the purge scandal or it can be seen as a means to an end. If you subscribe to the former view, then Purgegate is a mess that could have been avoided if it had merely been handled better, a public relations snafu due to poor staffing. The latter view, which is perhaps more cynical but I also think more realistic, is that placing young, inexperienced, impressionable staffers in high level department positions enabled higher-ups in the Administration to exert far greater control in promulgating the Rove political agenda. (That staff level youth and inexperience could be blamed when and if the crap hit the fan was merely another advantage to the plan.)

Second term malaise may have a historical precedent, but the politicization of the Justice Department is classic Karl Rove.

Harper’s Scott Horton is a welcome new voice in the blogosphere. You can find his wit and wisdom at his blog No Comment.

I’ll wait to see more before judging just how this fits into the larger Bush administration voter suppression agenda. But let me take note of Friday’s ruling in a case that pitted the Bush Justice Department against the State of Missouri, specifically, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan. There’s a jurisdictional issue in the case: balancing the state’s versus localities’ responsibility for administering elections. But the heart of the case is that the Bush administration sued the state for not being sufficiently aggressive in purging voter rolls. (See the original DOJ complaint.)

This is a classic battleground in the voter suppression game. Voter roll purges strikes names of people who’ve died or moved. But they also knock off the lists of a lot of occasional voters. This is what the Bush administration calls voting right enforcement.

In addition to finding against the Bush administration on the jurisdictional issue and a number of factual points …

[U.S. District Judge Nanette] Laughrey said it was difficult to gauge the scope of the problem “because the United States has not presented the actual voter registration lists and shown who should have been included or excluded and why.”

“It is also telling that the United States has not shown that any Missouri resident was denied his or her right to vote as a result of deficiencies alleged by the United States,” Laughrey wrote. “Nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred.”

It’s all part of the same story.

(ed.note: At TPM we’re actively pursuing a Missouri angle to the US Attorney Purge story which again turns on administration ‘voter fraud’ claims.)