I’ve mentioned a few times recently that we’ve got some big changes coming soon at TPM. So with the good press TPMmuckraker.com has been getting for its reporting on the US Attorney Purge story, let me take a moment to tell you what we’ve got coming.
It’s been about a year and a half now since our reporting here went from being a one man operation to a small team of reporters. That’s when I got the idea to start the site that became TPMmuckraker.com. Needless to say, I really couldn’t be happier with the results.
For its first year, TPMmuckraker.com was primarily focused on the expanding web of congressional corruption scandals. We still think Congress is the big story this year, but in a different way. With the Democrats now in power, how are they running the place? Differently than the GOP barons, or more of the same with a new party ID label after the names? And how well are they performing oversight of the executive branch? We want to see how good a job they’re doing, what they’re finding and — perhaps most important — what we can find that they should be looking at too. So on both counts, we think Congress is the story this year. That’s why we want to put at least one full-time blogger-reporter on Capitol Hill every day to dig into the stuff we think our readers want to know more about, to dig in to stories that aren’t getting the attention they should.
This will be part of a relaunch of the entire site — with a redesigned TPM website with a expanded focusing on reporting and breaking news updated through the day, and daily video segements. We have either already hired or are in the process of hiring new staff to make all this possible. We’ll still have the traditional TPM blog. And with the changes we’re making I should be able to get back to doing more blogging myself, as I used to, which I’m glad about.
To regular readers, I’m eager to hear your comments and thoughts. I’ll be discussing more of the details over the weekend and next week, when we’ll be launching a new (voluntary) subscription drive to help make all this possible.
We’ve just unearthed the quote from Barack Obama that Bill Clinton is demanding that The Times pay more attention to.
White House tells Democrats that they’ll just have to wait until next week for an answer as to whether they’ll cooperate with the U.S. attorney probe.
Earlier, we noted that a document dump related to the U.S. attorney firings was on its way… but now we’re hearing that it’s been postponed until Monday.
Valerie Plame Wilson testifying before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Friday March 16th, 2007 …
In an effort to save his job, Alberto Gonzales apologized to all U.S. attorneys in a conference call today and brought in a veteran of the Ashcroft years as his interim chief of staff. The apology was not for the firings, but for how they were handled, according to McClatchy. and apparently included an apology for “inaccurate public statements about poor job performance.” The interim chief of staff is Chuck Rosenberg, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who previously served as chief of staff to then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey.
GOP smear-tactic financier Bob Perry, of swift-boat fame, climbs aboard the Mitt Romney campaign.
More well-deserved kudos for TPMmuckraker.
Late Update: Greg Sargent’s take on it all, straight from The Horse’s Mouth.
TPM Reader JT shares my reaction to last night’s McClatchy account of Alberto Gonzales’ conference call with U.S. Attorneys:
The Bushie justification of the firings rests entirely on their adamant insistence that the firings were based on poor job performance, even to the point of finding convoluted ways to explain away the consistently positive performance reviews so many were getting right up to the minute they were fired.
So, if Gonzales has now admitted that the public statements about job performance were ‘inaccurate’, what is left as a rationale for firing the USA’s except political reasons? Hasn’t he just blown their whole defense here?
As I say, that raised my eyebrows, too. Without calling into question McClatchy’s reporting here, because they have had a stellar record on this story, it is hard for me to believe that Gonzales didn’t give a very carefully hedged apology that would have stopped short of saying the public statements about job performance were “inaccurate.” This will be worth keeping an eye on because JT is right that if accurate this account leaves the Administration’s defense in tatters.