TPM Reader RW puts down his wager …
My Purgegate bracket goes like this: Wed-Thurs. Stonewalling and statements. Fri. morningâsecret negotiations. Fri. Afternoon, 4:30. White House agrees to allow testimony under oath for all persons requested, claims victory. 12:35 PM SaturdayâGonzales resigns, stating that he felt his continuing presence was hindering the Administrationâs efforts to protect American from the terrorists.
Yours?
Shades of Rose Mary Woods? An 18 day gap?
I think a commenter in our document dump research thread may have been the first to notice that the emails released by the Justice Department seem to have a gap between November 15th and December 4th of last year.
(Our commenter saw it late on the evening of the dump itself — see the comment date-stamped March 20, 2007 02:19 AM in the research thread)
The firing calls went out on December 7th. But the original plan was to start placing the calls on November 15th. So those eighteen days are pretty key ones.
Mike Allen spotted it this evening in the Politico.
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Today’s Must Read: with the Bush Justice Department, you’re a star today, canned tomorrow.
For the White House, the most damaging force thus far in the US Attorney Purge story has been the group of fired US Attorneys themselves. And as a knowledgeable observer pointed out to me this morning, one of the key hints in President Bush’s press conference yesterday afternoon was the attempt to make peace and quiet however many of the US Attorneys they can.
Along those lines, see this clip out of this morning’s Las Vegas Review-Journal …
Two weeks after firing him as chief federal prosecutor in Nevada last December, Justice Department officials were preparing to offer Daniel Bogden a new job as an immigration judge, according to documents examined on Tuesday.
The overture came from a top deputy to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who confessed on the day of the firing he was having second thoughts about removing Bogden as U.S. attorney in the state.
Subsequent discussions about the post went nowhere when it became clear there were no openings in Nevada, Bogden confirmed Tuesday.
A spokesman for Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said this week that Justice officials are in new talks with Bogden about opportunities to “restore his reputation” after his dismissal as part of a widening scandal engulfing the Bush administration.
Bogden declined to comment on the discussions.
Bears watching.
Now, there’s a pro-Clinton, anti-Obama version of the Apple 1984 ad. Somehow … well, I guess just watch. At least in this case I don’t think anyone will doubt that the creators weren’t professional video editors.
The Times has a story out in today’s paper suggesting that immigration enforcement issues may really have been the DOJ’s main beef with San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam.
Color me unconvinced. But you be the judge.
One of the problems is that the Times‘ authors seem to take as granted that Sampson took up the immigration issue with Lam one or more times when in fact there doesn’t seem to be any evidence he or anyone else ever did. Lam herself says they never did.
Note also the Times reference here …
The sporadic complaints [about Lam’s immigration enforcement] developed into a small crisis for the Justice Department by May 2006, when an internal Border Patrol document was leaked to the news media chastising Ms. Lamâs office for its âcatch and releaseâ approach.
May 2006, you’ll remember was when all the CIA/Foggo/Hookergate mess was hitting the fan in response to Lam’s investigation. So some of the suggestion here is that the bump in DOJ’s interest in Lam at this time was immigration-related rather than tied to disgruntlement over here expanding corruption prosecution.
But this can play both ways.
Did the immigration stuff happen to coincide with the uptick in the Lam investigation or was there more to it?
This immigration policy ‘crisis’ blew up on May 18th 2006. That’s when the aforementioned border patrol document was leaked — just days after the resignations of CIA Director Porter Goss and his deputy Dusty Foggo and the searches of Foggo’s home and CIA office.
But why then exactly? We know who ‘leaked’ the document. It was Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Lam’s critic, according to the AP story that first reported on the leaked report. Apparently it had been written the previous August, upwards of a year earlier.
Issa had been on the border issue since 2004. But his focus on Lam in particular seemed to notch up in the summer of 2005, around the time the Cunningham investigation got started. And he was a close political ally of Cunningham, whose district borders his. When Cunningham announced he wouldn’t be standing for reelection in July 2005, Issa said “I know this was a difficult decision for a committed public servant like Duke Cunningham. But I fully support it and hope it allows him to concentrate on cooperating with the current investigation while continuing to serve the people of his district.” A few weeks earlier he was calling Duke’s home sale scam “a mistake in judgment.”
This is a murky story no doubt. But there’s plenty of reason to believe that rather than being the reason for disgruntlement with Lam, the immigration issue, from the start, was the best available cudgel to use against her for her aggressive pursuit of the Cunningham case.
Watchdog wants answers about the Justice Department’s handling of the Jack Abramoff investigation.
House committee authorizes subpoenas for White House officials.