A number of you have written in to ask whether John Albaugh — the last DOJ catch in the Abramoff investigation — is related to Joe Allbaugh, Bush power-crony who turned FEMA over to Michael Brown. The names appear to be spelled differently so I believe the answer is no.
John Albaugh, the former chief of staff to retired Oklahoma Rep. Ernest Istook (R) pleaded guilty today to one count of conspiracy to defraud the House as part of the Jack Abramoff scandal.
From McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay …
The presumptive Republican nominee for president and the leading contender for the Democratic nomination are exaggerating what’s known about Iran’s nuclear program as they duel over how best to deal with Tehran.
Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., say that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
The U.S. intelligence community, however, thinks that Iran halted an effort to build a nuclear warhead in mid-2003, and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, which is investigating the program, has found no evidence to date of an active Iranian nuclear-weapons project.
Like any big scandal, the US Attorney firing scandal had any number of tendrils and vines stretching out from the main body of the plant. In this particular story some of the most interesting were a series of prosecutions of Democrats around the country which may or may not have been evidence of the push for politicized prosecutions that got those other US Attorneys fired. The shining example seems to be that of former Gov. Don Siegelman (D) of Alabama, which is still playing out. Then there was the case against Dr. Cyril Wecht, the high-profile coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.
Then there was the case of Geoffrey Fieger, who you probably know best as the longtime lawyer for Dr. Jack Kevorkian, but is also a reasonably high-profile Dem and was actually the Democratic nominee for governor of Michigan in 1998. Feiger was indicted last year for allegedly making more than $100,000 in illegal campaign contributions to John Edwards’ 2004 presidential campaign.
Late last year, during pre-trial proceedings Fieger’s attorneys convinced the federal district judge in the case that there was at least some reason to think that politics may have been behind the prosecution. And today a jury acquited Fieger of all charges.
I try to assume as little as possible about the intent behind these various prosecutions. Some cases like the Siegelman prosecutions I’ve looked very closely at. And I’ve always thought that that one stunk to high heaven. This case I know less about. But a jury of Fieger’s peers seems to have thought this one didn’t pass muster. And there was so much corruption in the Gonzales DOJ that, for better or worse, every indicted Democrat under his reign (or probably more fair to say Bush’s and Rove’s) has a presumption in his or her favor.
Scott McClellan’s surprisingly critical memoir of his time as White House Press Secretary put the White House in full-on damage control mode. McClellan’s book may have been off-message, but the White House and its surrogates were conspicuously “on” in their response …
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
From the AP …
Vice President Dick Cheney threw a verbal insult at West Virginians on Monday, but quickly apologized.
Talking about his family roots and how he’s distantly related to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, the vice president noted that he had Cheneys on both sides of his family.
“And we don’t even live in West Virginia,” Cheney quipped.
“You can say those things when you’re not running for re-election.”
I’d of course seen Mayhill Fowler’s piece on Bill Clinton going after Todd Purdum in Huffpo. But I hadn’t seen this nugget buried down in the transcript, which TPM Reader LD flagged for me …
They had all these people standing up in this church cheering, calling Hillary a white racist, and he didn’t do anything about it. The first day he said ‘Ah, ah, ah well.’ Because that’s what they do– he gets other people to slime her. So then they saw the movie they thought this is a great ad for John McCain– maybe I better quit the church. It’s all politics.
Like so many things I’ve seen from Bill this cycle, I think I just pass the punch of this passage on without comment.
But there’s one subnugget of this nugget that grabbed my attention. I think the most revealing thing about this quote is that Bill refers to the youtube viral video of Rev. Pfleger as “the movie.” In a sense, of course, this is just a triviality of word choice; he’s a little out of touch with the lingo. But for me — maybe just the personal prism through which I see the drama — it communicates the larger truth: that Bill is a man out of his time, out of his element, which is something painful to watch and must be a unique agony for him to experience.
Bill Clinton was on so many levels the master of the politics of the 1980s and 1990s, the magic with words and connection with people, intuitively sizing up the tempo and undercurrents of the political moment. Hate him or love him, I think anybody with a feel for politics knew this. And I loved him.
I don’t mean to write his epitaph. He’s obviously got the same shrewdness and political canniness on many levels. But again and again through this cycle, in little ways and big, he’s shown he’s not quite in sync with this political era, doesn’t quite grasp the new mechanics — both the ideological texture and the nuts and bolts of the networked news cycle. Attacks have backfired. And while Clinton’s emotions and impulsiveness have always been key to his character and political sensibility, whereas in the past it was him riding the tiger of his outsized personality and passions, now it’s the tiger riding him.
If you step back from the carnage and electricity of this nomination battle, you see a vast drama that compares in its own way with any other in modern American history. And part of that shows you that it’s on the Democrats’ side of the aisle today that the questions roiling the country are being hashed out and decided. But if I were a novelist, it’s not Obama or Hillary but Bill, in the current moment, who would fire my imagination. Perhaps some hybrid of Arthur Miller and William Faulkner, fresh from the cloning laboratories, could put it all together on paper. The incandescent rage, the political master just out of touch with the moment. The level of his investment in Hillary’s campaign (on any number of novel-bearing levels) is palpable and not fully explained by anything as mundane as the hunger for power or as simple as guilt. And yet the circumstances of the race have forced him to stand just off-stage, where he’s close enough to interfere but not to control or direct. It must be a unique kind of hell for him.
With so much going on in the news and at TPM, I wanted to take a moment to introduce you to our two new reporter-bloggers at TPMmuckraker.com. Reporting from Washington, DC is Andrew Tilghman — see his bio here. And working from the New York headquarters is Kate Klonick.
We got a lot of great applications. (If our means allowed it we probably would have hired a half dozen of them.) And one thing I will say is that these are really challenging jobs to hire for because there’s no real track record of anyone doing precisely what we have these folks doing. If I were hiring for a politics reporter at a big city paper or a story editor for a magazine, I know that would be hard too. But there’s a track record of people doing this kind of work and with a resume and clips and recommendations you can make reasonable judgments about whether the applicant has the experience and skills to do the job.
In our case, we need to rely a lot more on intuition since by definition, almost no one we hire has done what we’re hiring them to do. But we took a lot of time with this process. And we’re confident that we’ve got a pair of new reporter-bloggers who are going to carry on the tradition of their predecessors at the site and dig like crazy to find the stories that others are missing and bring you the nimble mix of aggregation and original reporting that the site has gained a reputation for.
So I encourage you to drop either or both of them a line welcoming them aboard, offering encouragement, advice, critiques and tips on stories that you think are ripe for more digging.
A Kos diarist reports in on a townhall meeting Rep. Robert Wexler (D), a prominent Obama supporter, held tonight with his predominantly Clinton-supporting constituents.