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Banned
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Originally Posted by aceventura3
You called the people who resigned political hacks. I took that to mean Democrats don't have political hacks. I don't believe that for a second. <b>The question of party affiliation does not have to be asked for it to be a basis for someone getting a job at DOJ or any civil service position.</b> I don't know the technicalities of the law, but I bet some people in the future at DOJ will get appointed not based on being the best qualified candidate, but because of part affiliation (I did not say there would be a violation of the law). If you are certain this won't happen in the future and under and Democratic Party administration, I don't know what to say.
I grew up in the Chicago area and lived there during the 60's, 70's and 80's, in Chicago, I doubt many got good city jobs who were not a Democrat. They did not have to ask either, they knew who would get the jobs. I would love to visit the world you live in.
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ace...I share the articles/reports etc. that shape my opinions, suspicions, conclusions. I'll confide that I try hard to confine my posted "items" to the things that I can defend because I believe that they have a high probability of being accurate and reasonable, consistent with related items I'm posting, or I point out how they differ.
My impression of what you share here are mostly IBD.com editorials, and on occasion, news articles, along with what "you know"...unaccompanied by your information sources.
The following articles describe the research of the Boston Globe, based on what it learned from FOIA requested documents obtained from the DOJ, the testimony of DOJ officials, interviews with knowledgeable sources in or working with the DOJ, and from DOJ "document dumps" resulting from demands congressional investigative oversight committees.
The contents of these articles, and the e-mail photo at the bottom, tell what has changed in this presidential administration ace....supporting the accuracy of my conclusion that "this time", it is different.
Over on the "Al Gore/Diane Sawyer" thread, on wednesday (May 23) <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=2250729&postcount=27">I posted enough</a>, I think, to foster a reasonable (and strong) suspicion, that ace....as far as the Bush administration directed prosecutions of <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=2249878&postcount=4">baseless election fraud charges</a>, and the campaign of officially planned and executed vote suppression</a> that it supported, this time....as far as the planning and appointments of this executive branch and it's DOJ, this time....<b>it's criminal....compared to the conduct of past presidential administrations, and compared to what adherence to ethics and to the law require:</b>
Quote:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/wa...d_in_bush_era/
Civil rights hiring shifted in Bush era
Conservative leanings stressed
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | July 23, 2006
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is quietly remaking the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, filling the permanent ranks with lawyers who have strong conservative credentials but little experience in civil rights, according to job application materials obtained by the Globe.
The documents show that only 42 percent of the lawyers hired since 2003, after the administration changed the rules to give political appointees more influence in the hiring process, have civil rights experience. In the two years before the change, 77 percent of those who were hired had civil rights backgrounds.
In an acknowledgment of the department's special need to be politically neutral, hiring for career jobs in the Civil Rights Division under all recent administrations, Democratic and Republican, had been handled by civil servants -- not political appointees.
But in the fall of 2002, then-attorney general John Ashcroft changed the procedures. The Civil Rights Division disbanded the hiring committees made up of veteran career lawyers.
For decades, such committees had screened thousands of resumes, interviewed candidates, and made recommendations that were only rarely rejected.
Now, hiring is closely overseen by Bush administration political appointees to Justice, effectively turning hundreds of career jobs into politically appointed positions.
The profile of the lawyers being hired has since changed dramatically, according to the resumes of successful applicants to the voting rights, employment litigation, and appellate sections. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Globe obtained the resumes among hundreds of pages of hiring data from 2001 to 2006.
Hires with traditional civil rights backgrounds -- either civil rights litigators or members of civil rights groups -- have plunged. Only 19 of the 45 lawyers hired since 2003 in those three sections were experienced in civil rights law, and of those, nine gained their experience either by defending employers against discrimination lawsuits or by fighting against race-conscious policies.
Meanwhile, conservative credentials have risen sharply. Since 2003 the three sections have hired 11 lawyers who said they were members of the conservative Federalist Society. Seven hires in the three sections are listed as members of the Republican National Lawyers Association, including two who volunteered for Bush-Cheney campaigns.
Several new hires worked for prominent conservatives, including former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, former attorney general Edwin Meese, Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, and Judge Charles Pickering. And six listed Christian organizations that promote socially conservative views.
The changes in those three sections are echoed to varying degrees throughout the Civil Rights Division, according to current and former staffers.
At the same time, the kinds of cases the Civil Rights Division is bringing have undergone a shift. The division is bringing fewer voting rights and employment cases involving systematic discrimination against African-Americans, and more alleging reverse discrimination against whites and religious discrimination against Christians.
``There has been a sea change in the types of cases brought by the division, and that is not likely to change in a new administration because they are hiring people who don't have an expressed interest in traditional civil rights enforcement," said Richard Ugelow, a 29-year career veteran who left the division in 2002.
No `litmus test' claimed
The Bush administration is not the first to seek greater control over the Civil Rights Division. Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan tried to limit the division's efforts to enforce school-desegregation busing and affirmative action. But neither Nixon nor Reagan pushed political loyalists deep in the permanent bureaucracy, longtime employees say.
The Bush administration denies that its changes to the hiring procedures have political overtones. Cynthia Magnuson , a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the division had no ``litmus test" for hiring. She insisted that the department hired only ``qualified attorneys."
Magnuson also objected to measuring civil rights experience by participation in organizations devoted to advancing traditional civil rights causes. She noted that many of the division's lawyers had been clerks for federal judges, where they ``worked on litigation involving constitutional law, which is obviously relevant to a certain degree."
Other defenders of the Bush administration say there is nothing improper about the winner of a presidential election staffing government positions with like-minded officials. And, they say, the old career staff at the division was partisan in its own way -- an entrenched bureaucracy of liberals who did not support the president's view of civil rights policy.
Robert Driscoll , a deputy assistant attorney general over the division from 2001 to 2003, said many of the longtime career civil rights attorneys wanted to bring big cases on behalf of racial groups based on statistical disparities in hiring, even without evidence of intentional discrimination. Conservatives, he said, prefer to focus on cases that protect individuals from government abuses of power.
Hiring only lawyers from civil rights groups would ``set the table for a permanent left-wing career class," Driscoll said.
But Jim Turner , who worked for the division from 1965 to 1994 and was the top-ranked professional in the division for the last 25 years of his career, said that hiring people who are interested in enforcing civil rights laws is not the same thing as trying to achieve a political result through hiring.
Most people interested in working to enforce civil rights laws happen to be liberals, Turner said, but Congress put the laws on the books so that they would be enforced. ``To say that the Civil Rights Division had a special penchant for hiring liberal lawyers is twisting things," he said.
Jon Greenbaum , who was a career attorney in the voting rights section from 1997 to 2003, said that since the hiring change, candidates with conservative ties have had an advantage.
``The clear emphasis has been to hire individuals with conservative credentials," he said. ``If anything, a civil rights background is considered a liability."
But Roger Clegg , who was a deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights during the Reagan administration, said that the change in career hiring is appropriate to bring some ``balance" to what he described as an overly liberal agency.
``I don't think there is anything sinister about any of this. . . . You are not morally required to support racial preferences just because you are working for the Civil Rights Division," Clegg said.
Many lawyers in the division, who spoke on condition of anonymity, describe a clear shift in agenda accompanying the new hires. As The Washington Post reported last year, division supervisors overruled the recommendations of longtime career voting-rights attorneys in several high-profile cases, including whether to approve a Texas redistricting plan and whether to approve a Georgia law requiring voters to show photographic identification.
In addition, many experienced civil rights lawyers have been assigned to spend much of their time defending deportation orders rather than pursuing discrimination claims. Justice officials defend that practice, saying that attorneys throughout the department are sharing the burden of a deportation case backlog.
As a result, staffers say, morale has plunged and experienced lawyers are leaving the division. Last year, the administration offered longtime civil rights attorneys a buyout. Department figures show that 63 division attorneys left in 2005 -- nearly twice the average annual number of departures since the late 1990s.
At a recent NAACP hearing on the state of the Civil Rights Division, David Becker , who was a voting-rights section attorney for seven years before accepting the buyout offer, warned that the personnel changes threatened to permanently damage the nation's most important civil rights watchdog.
``Even during other administrations that were perceived as being hostile to civil rights enforcement, career staff did not leave in numbers approaching this level," Becker said. ``In the place of these experienced litigators and investigators, this administration has, all too often, hired inexperienced ideologues, virtually none of which have any civil rights or voting rights experiences."
Dates from '57 law
Established in 1957 as part of the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Division enforces the nation's antidiscrimination laws.
The 1957 law and subsequent civil rights acts directed the division to file lawsuits against state and local governments, submit ``friend-of-the-court" briefs in other discrimination cases, and review changes to election laws and redistricting to make sure they will not keep minorities from voting.
The division is managed by a president's appointees -- the assistant attorney general for civil rights and his deputies -- who are replaced when a new president takes office.
Beneath the political appointees, most of the work is carried out by a permanent staff of about 350 lawyers. They take complaints, investigate problems, propose lawsuits, litigate cases, and negotiate settlements.
Until recently, career attorneys also played an important role in deciding whom to hire when vacancies opened up in their ranks.
``We were looking for a strong academic record, for clerkships, and for evidence of an interest in civil rights enforcement," said William Yeomans , who worked for the division for 24 years, leaving in 2005.
Civil Rights Division supervisors of both parties almost always accepted the career attorneys' hiring recommendations, longtime staffers say. Charles Cooper , a former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Reagan administration, said the system of hiring through committees of career professionals worked well.
``There was obviously oversight from the front office, but I don't remember a time when an individual went through that process and was not accepted," Cooper said. ``I just don't think there was any quarrel with the quality of individuals who were being hired. And we certainly weren't placing any kind of political litmus test on . . . the individuals who were ultimately determined to be best qualified."
But during the fall 2002 hiring cycle, the Bush administration changed the rules. Longtime career attorneys say there was never an official announcement. The hiring committee simply was not convened, and eventually its members learned that it had been disbanded.
Driscoll, the former Bush administration appointee, said then-Attorney General John Ashcroft changed hiring rules for the entire Justice Department, not just the Civil Rights Division. But career officials say that the change had a particularly strong impact in the Civil Rights Division, where the potential for political interference is greater than in divisions that enforce less controversial laws.
Joe Rich , who joined the division in 1968 and who was chief of the voting rights section until he left last year, said that the change reduced career attorneys' input on hiring decisions to virtually nothing. Once the political appointees screened resumes and decided on a finalist for a job in his section, Rich said, they would invite him to sit in on the applicant's final interview but they wouldn't tell him who else had applied, nor did they ask his opinion about whether to hire the attorney.
The changes extended to the hiring of summer interns.
Danielle Leonard , who was one of the last lawyers to be hired into the voting rights section under the old system, said she volunteered to look through internship applications in 2002.
Leonard said she went through the resumes, putting Post-It Notes on them with comments, until her supervisor told her that career staff would no longer be allowed to review the intern resumes. Leonard removed her Post-Its from the resumes and a political aide took them away.
Leonard said she quit a few months later, having stayed in what she had thought would be her ``dream job" for less than a year, because she was frustrated and demoralized by the direction the division was taking.
The academic credentials of the lawyers hired into the division also underwent a shift at this time, the documents show. Attorneys hired by the career hiring committees largely came from Eastern law schools with elite reputations, while a greater proportion of the political appointees' hires instead attended Southern and Midwestern law schools with conservative reputations.
The average US News & World Report ranking for the law school attended by successful applicants hired in 2001 and 2002 was 34, while the average law school rank dropped to 44 for those hired after 2003.
Driscoll, the former division chief-of-staff, insisted that everyone he personally had hired was well qualified. And, he said, the old hiring committees' prejudice in favor of highly ranked law schools had unfairly blocked many qualified applicants.
``They would have tossed someone who was first in their class at the University of Kentucky Law School, whereas we'd say, hey, he's number one in his class, let's interview him," Driscoll said.
Learning from others
The Bush administration's effort to assert greater control over the Civil Rights Division is the latest chapter in a long-running drama between the agency and conservative presidents.
Nixon tried unsuccessfully to delay implementation of school desegregation plans. Reagan reversed the division's position on the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools and set a policy of opposing school busing and racial quotas.
Still, neither Nixon nor Reagan changed the division's procedures for hiring career staff, meaning that career attorneys who were dedicated to enforcing traditional civil rights continued to fill the ranks.
Yeomans said he believes the current administration learned a lesson from Nixon's and Reagan's experiences: To make changes permanent, it is necessary to reshape the civil rights bureaucracy.
``Reagan had tried to bring about big changes in civil rights enforcement and to pursue a much more conservative approach, but it didn't stick," Yeomans said. ``That was the goal here -- to leave behind a bureaucracy that approached civil rights the same way the political appointees did."
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Quote:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/wa...ypes_of_cases/
With new faces, new types of cases
July 23, 2006
After the Bush administration changed hiring rules, the Civil Rights Division has been bringing in more conservative lawyers. Here are three recent cases worked on by some of the new hires, along with information about their backgrounds:
Case: United States v. Southern Illinois University
Year: 2006
Issue: The university offered paid fellowships for minorities and women. The Civil Rights Division sued the university for discriminating against white men. To avoid a court battle, the university dropped the program.
Attorney: The case was handled by a graduate of Indiana University Law School who was hired in February 2004. He is a member of the Federalist Society and the Republican National Lawyers Association. Previously, he worked for the Center for Individual Rights, a nonprofit group that has filed many lawsuits opposing affirmative action in higher education.
Case: Georgia photo ID voting law
Year: 2005
Issue: Georgia enacted a law requiring voters to present a photo ID card, charging $20 for voters who didn't already have a driver's license or a passport. Five career Justice Department officials reviewed the law to see whether it discriminated against blacks. According to an internal memo that was later leaked, four of the five recommended objecting to the law because blacks were less likely to own licenses or passports, but the Civil Rights Division cleared it anyway. A judge later blocked the law, comparing it to a Jim Crow-era poll tax.
Attorney: The lone member of the review committee who favored the law was hired in May 2005. He is a graduate of the University of Mississippi Law School and a member of both the Federalist Society and the Christian Legal Society.
Case: Faith Center Church Evangelistic Ministries v. Glover
Year: 2006
Issue: A Christian group sued a public library for preventing religious organizations from using its facilities to hold worship services. The division filed a ``friend-of-the-court" brief saying that the library policy violates the Christian group's civil rights.
Attorney: The brief was written by a Notre Dame University Law School graduate who was hired in November 2004. He is a member of two groups that seek to integrate Catholic faith in law and society. He also clerked for then-appeals court Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., a conservative whom President Bush recently elevated to the Supreme Court.
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...701825_pf.html
Hiring Process Was Bypassed for Prosecutor
D.C. District Attorney Says Justice Officials Recommended Candidate but the Decision Was His
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 8, 2007; A04
When he was counsel to a House subcommittee in 2005, Jay Apperson resigned after writing a letter to a federal judge in his boss's name, demanding a tougher sentence for a drug courier. As an assistant U.S. attorney in Virginia in the 1990s, he infuriated fellow prosecutors when he facetiously suggested a White History Month to complement Black History Month.
Yet when Apperson was looking for a job recently, four senior Justice Department officials urged Jeffrey A. Taylor, the top federal prosecutor for the District of Columbia, to hire him. Taylor did, and allowed him to skip the rigorous vetting process that the vast majority of career federal prosecutors face.
As Congress and the administration spar over whether Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales allowed politics to unduly influence the work of the Justice Department, Apperson's hiring has been cited by government lawyers and others as an example of how a system that relies on apolitical prosecutors should not function.
It is not clear whether Apperson's hiring is part of the internal Justice Department investigation of Monica M. Goodling, until recently the agency's senior counselor and White House liaison, for allegedly considering applicants' political affiliation in hiring decisions. That probe began when Goodling allegedly tried to hold up the hiring of another prosecutor whom Taylor was recruiting, according to two law enforcement sources familiar with the inquiry.
Goodling said the candidate, a government civil rights lawyer, appeared to lean Democratic, two sources said yesterday. Taylor ultimately gained permission from the Justice Department to bypass Goodling and hire prosecutors without her review. He hired the civil rights lawyer, who is scheduled to start work on Monday.
But Chuck Rosenberg, the U.S. attorney in Alexandria, heard about Taylor's allegations and referred the matter to the agency's inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility while serving as Gonzales's interim chief of staff in March and April, according to two law enforcement sources.
Newsweek first revealed in its current issue the matter that led to the investigation.
Taylor, who formerly worked as Gonzales's counsel, said the decision to hire Apperson was his. But he said that Michael Elston, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, and Acting Associate Attorney General William W. Mercer urged him to consider Apperson. Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General William E. Moschella and Michael A. Battle, who at the time headed the office that oversees U.S. attorneys, also suggested that Apperson would be a good hire.
"They said, 'The guy needs a job. He'd do a good job for you,' " Taylor recalled in an interview this week. "But I want to be clear. No one ordered me to hire Jay Apperson. If someone says I made an error in judgment, that's fine."
Taylor said he "may have" discussed hiring Apperson with Goodling but does not recall doing so.
Apperson, 51, declined to be interviewed for this article. Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse referred to Taylor all questions on Apperson's hiring.
Taylor said he allowed Apperson to skip the three-stage screening process for applicants because of Apperson's experience as a prosecutor in Virginia from 1987 to 1996.
That review normally begins with lengthy separate interviews with three hiring committee members, followed by a mock "opening argument" that applicants must deliver on videotape. If candidates are judged worthy after these two stages, they are interviewed by the U.S. attorney.
Taylor said he has hired 20 prosecutors since he took over in September and has allowed one other -- who was rejoining the Washington office after a few years' hiatus -- to bypass the screening process.
He said half a dozen other prosecutors in the office skipped the screening process because of their experience, but he acknowledged that many others were screened, particularly if they were assigned to D.C. Superior Court.
Laurie L. Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School who testified before Congress on Feb. 6 about the politicization of the Justice Department, said that she did not know the circumstances of Apperson's hiring but that politics should not be part of the equation.
She said it is not unusual for a political official to "put in a good word" for an applicant for a prosecutor's job. "The question is," she said, "did this one go beyond that? Did this open the door for someone they otherwise wouldn't have taken?"
Taylor said that in hiring Apperson, he took into account that the Eastern District of Virginia had signaled it would not rehire him. Apperson acknowledged that joking about a proposal for a White History Month was inappropriate, according to a source in the prosecutor's office.
Apperson, who worked for independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr on the Whitewater and Monica S. Lewinsky investigations, abruptly left his job as chief counsel for a House Judiciary subcommittee in July 2005 after he wrote a letter over the signature of his boss at the time, Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), to a chief judge of a federal appeals court. In the letter, Sensenbrenner demanded that the chief of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit rethink his court's pending sentencing decision and give a drug courier a longer prison term.
A Capitol Hill official familiar with the matter said at the time that Apperson's leaving "had everything to do" with his role in the letter.
Ethics experts said the letter violated House rules that prohibit lawmakers from intervening in court cases and from communicating with judges without notifying the other parties in the case. Several judges in Washington remember the letter well, describing it as part of a pattern by the then-Republican-led Congress to interfere with the judiciary.
Apperson also wrote 2003 legislation known as the Feeney Amendment, which instructed the U.S. Sentencing Commission to help reduce the number of times judges gave more lenient sentences than federal guidelines recommend. It required that Justice officials and courts create a system to report to Congress when individual judges showed leniency in sentencing.
Judges across the political spectrum, including then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, derided the provision as damaging and insulting.
Late last year and early this year, Apperson was working as legislative counsel for Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and was passing around his résumé. Taylor said he agreed in January, after conferring with several Justice Department officials, that the best fit for Apperson was as a prosecutor in his office.
"Sure, he's made some mistakes in judgment," Taylor said. "For gosh sakes, everybody deserves a second chance."
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The following is a seperate but related problem; the disqualification of politcally appointed US Attorneys (non-civil service positions) of anyone currently serving or anyone to be considered for appointment...who was not obviously a <b>"loyal Bushie"</b>...loyal and partisan beyond the constraints of ethics or of legality...perjury and Hatch Act violations, along with election fraud, and misuse of office to conspire to commit election fraud, and obstruction of justice...quickly come to mind as blatant and obvious examples of exhibiting <b>"loyalty to Bush":</b>
Quote:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...ip&btnG=Search
April 14, 2007
E-Mail Identified G.O.P. Candidates for Justice Jobs
By DAVID JOHNSTON and ERIC LIPTON
WASHINGTON, April 13 — A Justice Department e-mail message released on Friday shows that the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales proposed replacement candidates for United States attorneys <h3>nearly a year before they were dismissed in December 2006. The department has repeatedly stated that no successors were selected before the dismissals.</h3>
The Jan. 9, 2006, e-mail message, written by D. Kyle Sampson, who resigned last month as the top aide to Mr. Gonzales, identified five Bush administration officials, most of them Justice Department employees, whose names were sent to the White House for consideration as possible replacements for prosecutors slated for dismissal.
The e-mail message and several related documents provide the first evidence that Mr. Sampson, the Justice Department official in charge of the dismissals, had focused on who would succeed the ousted prosecutors. Justice officials have repeatedly said that seven of the eight prosecutors were removed without regard to who might succeed them.
Some of the new documents show the department’s acute awareness of individual United States attorneys’ political and ideological views. An undated spreadsheet attached to a Feb. 12, 2007, e-mail message listed the federal prosecutors who had served under President Bush along with their past work experience.
The chart included a category for Republican Party and campaign work, showing who had been a delegate to a Republican convention or had managed a Republican political campaign. The chart had a separate category indicating who among the prosecutors was a member of the Federalist Society, a Washington-based association that serves as a talent pool for young conservatives seeking appointments in Republican administrations.
Taken together, Democrats asserted, the e-mail supported their contention that the ousted prosecutors were dismissed to make room for favored candidates who were chosen on the basis of their political qualifications as much as prosecutorial experience. click to show
The latest collection of documents, the sixth batch produced by the Justice Department in recent weeks, also cast further light on the frantic scramble by the Bush administration since January to contain the public relations damage caused by the ouster of the eight.
The electronic messages, some written as recently as last month, offer a rare and almost contemporaneous account of the tactics used by a sitting administration trying to manage a political firestorm.
One e-mail message shows the White House urging the Justice Department to call Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, to give him information about the placement of J. Timothy Griffin, a former aide to Karl Rove, as the interim United States attorney in Arkansas.
“WH political reached out to Sen. Sessions and requested that he ask helpful questions to make clear that Tim Griffin is qualified to serve,” said a January 2007 e-mail message from Monica Goodling, a former senior aide to Mr. Gonzales, to other department officials. “Here are the talkers on Griffin, as well as a narrative that can be used by staff, and his résumé. I think it would actually be helpful for all of the Rs to have it.”
It was not clear whether the “talkers," shorthand for talking points, were sent to Mr. Sessions and other “Rs,” or Republicans. But Mr. Sessions, in a later hearing on the matter, ran through all of the highlights, praising Mr. Griffin’s résumé, just as the White House and Justice had apparently requested.
Other documents show that Ms. Goodling, the Justice Department’s liaison to the White House, prepared a list of reasons in February to explain publicly why the prosecutors had been ousted.
Notes in handwriting identified by a Justice official as Ms. Goodling’s run quickly through a list of alleged transgressions by the fired prosecutors, like “incredibly fractured office, morale low, lost confidence of her subordinates and superiors,” in describing Margaret Chiara, the former United States attorney from Western Michigan who disputes the claims.
In the case of David Iglesias, who was dismissed as the top federal prosecutor in New Mexico, Ms. Goodling writes of a complaint from Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, a Republican: “Domenici says he doesn’t move cases.”
The e-mail was among more than 2,000 pages of documents released by the Justice Department as part of a continuing outpouring of more than 6,000 pages of e-mail and other internal records produced in the last month in response to requests by House and Senate committees as the furor over the dismissals has grown. Mr. Gonzales is scheduled to appear on Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Justice Department said that Mr. Sampson’s e-mail message did not contradict either his sworn testimony or the department’s past statements. Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the department, said: “We have consistently stated that, with the exception of Griffin, individuals were not pre-selected for any of the eight U.S. attorney positions prior to asking the U. S. attorneys to resign. The list made public today had previously been shared privately with Congress, and it in no way contradicts the department’s prior statement. The list, drafted 10 months before the December resignations, reflects Kyle Sampson’s initial thoughts, not pre-selected candidates by the administration.”
Mr. Sampson’s lawyer, Bradford Berenson, also denied that the message contradicted Mr. Sampson’s testimony. “Kyle’s testimony regarding the consideration of replacements was entirely accurate,” Mr. Berenson said. “In December 2006, when the seven U.S. attorneys were asked to step down, no specific candidate had been selected to replace any of them, and Kyle had none in mind. Some names had been tentatively suggested for discussion much earlier in the process, but by the time the decision to ask for the resignations was made none had been chosen to serve as a replacement.”
The possible replacements selected by Mr. Sampson — with the exception of Mr. Griffin — never materialized, at least in part because the controversy regarding the ousters has pushed aside consideration of who will fill the vacancies. But it is clear from actions taken over the last two years that Justice officials had placed lawyers from department headquarters, who were known to be loyal to Mr. Gonzales and President Bush, into open posts.
The Jan. 9, 2006, e-mail message was sent by Mr. Sampson to Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, and William Kelley, another White House lawyer. In the e-mail, Mr. Sampson proposed the dismissal of a total of seven United States attorneys and named at least one replacement candidate for each prospective vacancy.
Because of deletions in the e-mail copies turned over to Congress, the document discloses only the names of four United States attorneys slated for removal and five of their possible successors. The names of the replacement candidates, in most cases, are followed by a question mark, suggesting that Mr. Sampson might have been uncertain about them.
The United States attorneys identified for removal are four who were ultimately dismissed: Ms. Chiara in Michigan, Kevin Ryan in San Francisco, Carol C. Lam in San Diego and Mr. Cummins in Arkansas. Justice Department officials have acknowledged that Mr. Cummins was an able prosecutor who was removed solely to make room for Mr. Griffin, a former aide to Mr. Rove, the White House senior political adviser who was appointed to the job on a temporary basis.
“Please treat this as confidential,” Mr. Sampson wrote in the message. He concluded, “If a decision is made to remove and replace a limited number of U.S. attorneys, then the following might be considered for removal and possible replacement.”
Mr. Sampson testified under oath on March 29 at a hearing of Senate Judiciary Committee that he had no candidates in mind to replace any of the fired prosecutors. In his prepared statement, he said that “none of the U.S. attorneys was asked to resign in favor of a particular individual who had already been identified to take the vacant spot.”
At one point in the hearing, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, asked Mr. Sampson, “Did you or did you not have in mind specific replacements for the dismissed U.S. attorneys before they were asked to resign on Dec. 7, 2006.”
Mr. Sampson, testifying under oath, replied: “I personally did not.”
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<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/04/13/washington/0414-nat-webATTORNEYS.gif">
I suppose if I was in Karl Rove's position...chief political strategist for a party that "offers" a platform, an ideology, and an agenda that is in the best interests of only a small number of voters who bother to inform themselves of it's history, performance, principles, and the commitment of it's elected officials and party administrators to following and supporting and enforcing the requirements of the constitution and of the criminal and civil statutes, I'd have few options, save the following....to influence election outcomes, either:
Quote:
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwash...n/17102319.htm
Posted on Wed, Apr. 18, 2007
Administration pursued aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout
By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - <b>For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.</b>
The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.
Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.....
..... Later in 2005, career lawyers wrote a memo recommending that the department oppose a new Georgia law requiring voters to present a $20 photo ID. They argued that the requirement would discriminate against poor blacks, but that was quickly rejected.
Toby Moore, one of the five career lawyers who reviewed the memo, said the only dissenter to the recommendation was a new hire, Joshua Rogers, a member of the National Republican Lawyers Association, a partisan organization interested in election issues.
Moore said that John Tanner, who'd just been appointed the new section chief, "doctored the memo ... reversing many of our findings," and used the occasion to change procedures so that he alone could make future recommendations.
A Georgia state judge, acting on a suit by civil rights groups, struck down the law as unconstitutional.
Moore, now the project manager for American University's Commission on Election Reform, said he believes that administration officials felt the Voting Rights Section was populated by "recalcitrant, embedded, liberal Democrats ... and they were determined to plant their DNA, change the institution and bring it to bear on behalf of Republican interests." .......
.... Just before the 2006 election, the California Secretary of State's Office rejected more than 20,000 registration applications, including 43 percent of Los Angeles County's new applicants. Those rejections were reversed before Election Day amid a public clamor.
Former Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, a moderate Republican, said in a phone interview that Justice Department officials reviewed his office's regulations and okayed the rejections, but gave no hint that they exceeded federal law.
The Bush administration also has shifted enforcement priorities under the National Voter Registration Act, known as the "Motor Voter" law because it provides for registration at state vehicle licensing and public assistance agencies.
In the last six years, the number of voters registered at state government agencies that provide services to the poor and disabled has been cut in half, to 1 million.
Instead of forcing lax agencies to increase registrations, the Justice Department sued at least six states and sent threatening enforcement letters to others requiring them to scour their election rolls for potentially ineligible voters.
Deputy Director Michael Slater of Project Vote, a national voter registration group, called this "selective enforcement. ... They've focused on purging of voters from registration rolls at the expense of enforcing provisions that encourage registration."
He said that Kentucky eliminated 4,000 people from its list of voters, but "did it poorly, and took off people who lived there and tried to vote."
One of the Justice Department suits was filed against Missouri's Democratic Secretary of State Robin Carnahan. Last week, U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey in Jefferson City, the capital, threw out the suit, noting that the motor voter law was intended to increase voter participation and eliminate fraud.
The judge wrote that the Justice Department had offered no evidence that anyone had been denied his right to vote as a result of deficiencies in voter rolls, and "nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred."
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Last edited by host; 05-23-2007 at 10:19 PM..
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