Okay, enough threatening. Like I said, we’re expanding our operations at TPM. That will include a redesign of TPM, with expanded coverage of breaking news. But what we really want to do is more reporting, more muckraking. And that’s where we want your help. We want to hire at least one reporter-blogger to report directly from Capitol Hill to you every day. And we’re asking for your contributions to make that happen.
You’ve seen the kind of work we do with the US Attorney Purge story, the Abramoff scandal, the Cunningham investigation and other shorter-term stories like the pre-election GOP robocall scam or Foleygate. That’s what we do. And now we’d like to do more of it. And that means more reporters.
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Now, over the next days and weeks I’ll be sharing other details of what we’ve got planned. But a few quick words about what we’re doing here. If you’re a regular reader and you think you get value out of TPM and the reporting we do, please consider contributing. The best way to think of this is as a voluntary subscription charge. You subscribe to HBO, to the daily paper, to a few of your favorite magazines, etc. Think of this like that. We have costs just like they do. It’s just that we don’t make people subscribe because its intrinsic to our mission to make the information we publish available to as many people as possible. And we’re going to use this money to bring you more of what you already read and enjoy in our virtual pages.
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Ahh. A special moment. One month before pleading guilty to felony corruption charges brought by US Attorney Carol Lam, Duke Cunningham signs on to one of those letters complaining about Carol Lam’s lax immigration enforcement policies. Apparently Duke thought she was focusing too much on corruption too.
We’ve been combing through reader comments and posting as fast as we can on the emails released by the Justice Department last night.
Some gems:
— Ousted U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was lauded as a “diverse up-and-comer” in 2004.
— Karl Rove’s former aide was apparently a party to the scheme to have him installed as the U.S. attorney without Senate confirmation.
— And the documents actually show DoJ officials brainstorming on the reasons that they’d fired the USAs. Hindsight’s 20/20!
Gotta love this. The White House will allow Rove and Miers to testify about the US Attorney Purge. But they can’t be under oath. It has to be behind closed doors and no transcript can be kept.
And probably the whole thing has to take place at an undisclosed location and the senators have to wear blindfolds.
Regrettably, only the last sentence is a joke.
Update: Here’s the letter from the White House outlining their offer.
The approval rating of the Dem-controlled Congress is starting to slip — is the culprit sluggish action on Iraq?
Maybe journalism like this is partly to blame.
This just went out from the White House:
*THE PRESIDENT WILL MAKE A STATEMENT ON THE U.S. ATTORNEY MATTER SHORTLY AFTER RETURNING FROM KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI AT 5:45 PM, EDT, TODAY, MARCH 20, 2007, IN THE DIPLOMATIC RECEPTION ROOM
Let’s be honest. Presidential advisors testify all the time. They don’t have the same responsibilities vis a vis Congress as members of the executive departments. But they can and do testify. There’s only one reason why you agree to ‘talk’ to Congress unsworn, in private and without a transcript: because you want to be able to lie or dodge questions in a way that’s too embarrassing to do in public.
Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH): Stories about horrible conditions at Walter Reed “overblown“.
A knowledgeable observer on the White House’s game: “The key issue isn’t oath v. unsworn; it’s that as to both the testimony and the documents, they’re not willing to provide anything on communications inside the Executive Office of the President — you know, in the place where the removals were actually decided and made.”