Has The US DOJ, Itself been Politicized into a Criminal Enterprise? - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

host · 04-28-2007, 11:12 AM

A year ago, we posted about the fact that president Bush had made the controversial appointment of Alice Fisher, an attorney with no criminal courtroom experience, to head the criminal division of US DOJ:

From the google archive:
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache...lnk&cd=3&gl=us

There was suspicion that Alice Fisher was installed at DOJ to obstruct the criminal investigation of the criminal political corruption associated with the lobbying activities of Jack Abramoff, especially since at least two lead prosecutors of Abramoff were promoted "away" from their positions at DOJ.

The misleading statements recently of Alberto Gonzales, and the resignations of his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, and his damning testimony about Gonzales and the firing of at least 8 US Attorneys....so far....without credible cause, along with the resignation of Gonzales key aid, Monica Goodling and the cloud of her refusal to testify to a senate committee, and her hiring and promotions, in view of her alumnus status from tele-evangelist Pat Robertson's Regency University....she was hired by the Bush installed OPM head, Kay Coles who had been dean of Regency U's government school, along with 150 other Regency grads....flooding the DOJ and other executive branch positions with grads from this academically mediocre "bible college", presumably at the exclusion of more qualified candidates graduated from much more academically superior, universities....provide a background for the news released by the DOJ, yesterday:

Quote:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/013887.php

(April 28, 2007 -- 12:17 PM EDT)

To follow up on the post below about the Attorney General Awards, DOJ's highest honor, I couldn't help but notice that one of the recipients of last year's <a href="http://www.justice.gov/jmd/ps/AGAwardProgram508.pdf">Attorney General Award for Fraud Prevention</a> was Robert E. Coughlin, II.

Coughlin was the chief of staff to the head of DOJ's criminal division until his quiet resignation earlier this month, first reported yesterday, allegedly because he is facing scrutiny in the Jack Abramoff investigation.

The award "recognizes exceptional dedication and effort to prevent, investigate, and prosecute fraud and white collar crimes." Coughlin was part of a team honored for its work on post-Hurricane Katrina fraud.

In September, Coughlin was honored for his work on fraud and white collar crime. By the following April, he was out because of his alleged connections to the one of the largest white collar crime investigations in DOJ's history. Only in the Gonzales Justice Department.

-- David Kurtz

Quote:

http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/162654.html
Justice official resigns; tied to probe?
He's a longtime friend of a former Doolittle aide who's linked to Abramoff.
By Marisa Taylor and David Whitney -
Published 12:00 am PDT Saturday, April 28, 2007

WASHINGTON -- A senior Justice Department official with ties to a former aide to Rep. John Doolittle has resigned after coming under scrutiny in the department's expanding investigation of disgraced superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to a Justice Department official with knowledge of the case.

Making the situation more awkward for the embattled department, the official, Robert E. Coughlin II, was deputy chief of staff for the criminal division, which is overseeing the department's probe of Abramoff.

He stepped down effective April 6 as investigators in Coughlin's own division ratcheted up their investigation of lobbyist Kevin Ring, Coughlin's longtime friend, a key associate of Abramoff and former legislative director to Doolittle, R-Roseville. Ring resigned his lobbying job on April 13, the same day FBI agents raided Doolittle's Virginia home seeking records from his wife's business in connection with the Abramoff matter.

Ring typically served as liaison with Doolittle for several Abramoff clients. In one e-mail, released in connection with a Senate investigation last year, Ring discussed the possibility of Doolittle's wife taking a job for an Abramoff charity in 2000. The position never materialized, and the Doolittles have said they have no recollection of the matter.

When contacted at his home in Washington, Coughlin said he resigned voluntarily because he was relocating to Texas. "I was not asked to resign," he said in an interview with McClatchy Newspapers. "It's important to me that it's made clear that I left voluntarily." He said he couldn't comment on the Abramoff investigation, nor on whether he has a job lined up in Texas. He referred all other questions to friend Michael Horowitz.

Horowitz, a criminal defense attorney and former Justice Department official and public corruption prosecutor, did not respond to questions, including about whether he is representing Coughlin.

Coughlin also would not say whether he had hired a lawyer.

McClatchy's source at the Justice Department asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the case.

Coughlin appears to be the first Justice Department official to come under scrutiny in the wide-ranging probe that has implicated a veteran congressman, a deputy Cabinet secretary, a White House aide and eight others. Abramoff has pleaded guilty to three counts in the corruption probe and could face up to 11 years in prison.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to respond to any questions about the Abramoff investigation because it is still ongoing.

Spokesman Bryan Sierra, however, confirmed Coughlin had resigned. He also said Coughlin had recused himself from the Abramoff investigation.

The disclosure, nevertheless, was another blow to a Justice Department already struggling to recover from the controversy over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. Democrats and a number of Republicans have criticized Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for his handling of the ousters, which critics charge were politically motivated.

Background:

Quote:

How a Lobbyist Stacked the Deck
Kevin Ring, Vasell's associate, responded: "This is a disaster." Abramoff weighed in minutes later, saying he would get Reed to ramp up efforts. ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...501539_pf.html -

Quote:

http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:...lnk&cd=3&gl=us.......he Marianas' lobbying paid off — it fended off proposals in 2001 to extend the U.S. minimum wage to island workers and gained at least $2 million more in federal aid from the administration.

Abramoff's team bragged to the cash-strapped Marianas government that the taxpayer money would cover its lobbying bill: "We believe that this additional funding — along with other funds we expect to secure by the end of the year — will make clear to even our biggest critics that we pay for ourselves," Abramoff teammate Kevin Ring wrote in October 2001, copying in Abramoff.

Quote:

http://lippard.blogspot.com/2007/04/...llions-of.html
CREW points out there are millions of missing White House emails

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington points out that there are millions of emails missing from the White House servers (the official ones, not the Republican National Committee ones):

Bush Administration Practice: In the wake of the scandals surrounding Jack Abramoff and the fired U.S. Attorneys, emails were released showing that top White House staffers routinely used Republican National Committee (RNC) email accounts to conduct official business. For example, J. Scott Jennings, White House Deputy Political Director, used an RNC account to communicate with the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales regarding the appointments of new U.S. Attorneys. Similarly, Susan Ralston, a former aide to Karl Rove, used RNC email accounts to communicate with Abramoff about appointments to the Department of the Interior.

PRA Violations: 1) The administration failed to implement adequate record-keeping systems to archive presidential email records; 2) two confidential sources independently informed CREW that the administration abandoned a plan to recover more than five million missing emails; 3) White House staff used outside email accounts to conduct presidential business, ensuring that emails were not adequately preserved. In fact, former Abramoff associate Kevin Ring said in an email to Abramoff that Ralston had told him not to send emails to her official White House account "because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc."....

In addition to the news that DOJ's Deputy Chief Criminal Division Attorney Robert Coughlin was a close friend of former Rep. Doolittle COS Kevin Ring...who was a close associate of Jack Abramoff, Kevin Ring was connected to Gonzales predecessor, John Ashcroft, nine years ago:

Quote:

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001052.php
Abramoff Had Access to DoJ, Ashcroft
By Paul Kiel - July 5, 2006, 1:26 PM

"John Ashcroft" is a name that doesn't come up very often in the Jack Abramoff mucky muck. But it should.

The former Attorney General and his staff had extraordinary ties to Abramoff and his team, as numerous emails and the recent report out from the Justice Department Inspector General make clear.

With Ashcroft, as with so many other power players, Abramoff gained access by hiring someone who already had it. It was former Ashcroft aide Kevin Ring, who joined his firm in 2000. Ring had been Ashcroft's counsel when he was a Senator on the Judiciary Committee.

After Ring left Ashcroft's office, the two stayed in close contact. An Abramoff email shows that the two played basketball together while Ring was with Abramoff (let the eagle soar!). And you can see Ring graciously inviting Ashcroft's staff to bask in the splendor of Abramoff's MCI Center skybox in this email obtained by TPM. In late September of 2001, Abramoff learned of a classified report on the Northern Marianas from Ashcroft's Chief of Staff, who was in Abramoff's box at the FedEx Field.

That access came in handy. Abramoff used it when he set out to "get rid of Fred Black," the pesky US Attorney for Guam and the Northern Marianas. In March of 2002, Abramoff dispatched Ring to work his insider connections with Ashcroft's office to find out how Black could be booted. Another Abramoff aide, Tony Rudy, worked contacts at the DoJ and White House as well.

The recent IG report also disclosed that Abramoff's buddy Ken Mehlman in the White House's Office of Political Affairs made an effort to keep Abramoff up to date on issues related to his client. Earlier, we learned that Mehlman had killed the nomination of one Interior Department official, and in this case he'd assigned the underling dealing with Guam and Marianas to reach out to Abramoff to make sure that he was happy with the US Attorney nominations.

So at one point - but too late for Abramoff to act on it - Mehlman's staffer, Leonard Rodriguez, called up Abramoff to give him the message that he should "feel free to contact me directly for any requests from Guam."

This access, both to Ashcroft and Mehlman, didn't turn out to be needed in the case of Fred Black. But they would have come in handy in the fall of 2002 when the Departments of Justice and Interior were on the brink of acting on a DoJ report on the Marianas. The report said the lax immigration standards on the islands was a national security threat and recommended federal intervention - a nightmare for Abramoff's garment industry clients, whose business depended on immigrant labor.

For some reason, the report never made it to Congress, where it would surely have been acted on.

That's up next...

Quote:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006635.php
<h2 class="date"> <a name="006635"></a> (September 27, 2005 -- 12:16 AM EDT // <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006635.php">link</a>)</h2>
There is a rather cryptic <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/politics/27lobby.html?hp&ex=1127793600&en=ff0ff80fa464904e&ei=5094&partner=homepage">article</a> in tomorrow's New York Times about Jack Abramoff's first brush with the law back in 2002 and how he got unbrushed. 

This is the case in late 2002, when the Acting US Attorney in Guam <a href="http://auctionhouse.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/8/7/12243/56304">opened a criminal probe</a> into Jack Abramoff's lobbying activities in the US Pacific island protectorate. Yet days after federal prosecutor Frederick A. Black notified the Justice Department's Public Integrity section of his inquiry into Abramoff, he was demoted. And his new bosses barred him from pursuing any other public corruption cases. That brought the entire Abramoff investigation to halt.

Administration officials argue there was nothing out of the ordinary with an acting US Attorney being replaced by a permanent apppointee. But Black had been the 'Acting' US Attorney in Guam for twelve years. So that explanation seems rather weak.

The news in the article is that FBI and DOJ IG personnel have been investigating just what or who might have been behind Black's timely demotion.

Former Attorney General Ashcroft comes in for some discussion, in part because Abramoff had apparently boasted of his close ties to the former AG and his staff at the Justice Department. Yet "a spokesman for Mr. Ashcroft," reports the Times, "said the former attorney general and his aides at the Justice Department had done nothing to assist Mr. Abramoff and his clients and had had no significant contact with him."

Now, it seems to me that Abramoff and Ashcroft must have been buddies on at least some level, because there's <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/ashcroft.abramoff.skybox.html">this heretofore unpublished email exchange</a> (just added to the TPM Document Collection) sitting on my desk, in which their staffers are hashing out which date Ashcroft, his wife and his staff could enjoy the pleasures of the Abramoff skybox at DC's MCI Center in late 2000. 

In the exchange, Abramoff's Kevin Ring hashes out possible dates with Ashcroft's Andy Beach. Ring later forwards the exchange on to Susan Ralston, Abramoff's <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/ralston.memo.4202000.html">skybox gatekeeper</a>, for approval. And I can't help but notice the February 2nd, 2001 piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which notes that Ashcroft brought Beach with him to the Justice Department. Presumably, two years later, Beach was still there as Ashcroft's scheduler at Justice Department. 

So who knows? Maybe there was just some line of communication after all.

Perhaps even more interesting, though, is a possibility that goes unmentioned in Tuesday's Times piece: Karl Rove. 

The Los Angeles Times article on the Guam story from August 7th, 2005 (<a href="http://auctionhouse.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/8/7/12243/56304">discussed here</a> and reproduced <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/08/08/bush_removal_ended_guam_investigation/">here</a> in the Globe) notes that Black's replacement, Leonardo Rapadas, apparently came at the behest of none other than Karl Rove. 

Wrote the Times ...

<blockquote>His replacement, Leonardo Rapadas, was confirmed in May 2003 without any debate. Rapadas had been recommended for the job by the Guam Republican Party. Fred Radewagen, a lobbyist who had been under contract to the Gutierrez administration, said he carried that recommendation to top Bush aide Karl Rove in early 2003.</blockquote>

It's probably worth mentioning that at the point Black got the ax in November 2002 and was replaced by the party-backed Rapadas, the aforementioned Ralston was working as Rove's executive assistant.

Small world.

<div class="posted">-- Josh Marshall

I quote Josh Marshall's talkingpointsmemo.com and tpmmuckraker.com because the larger news media, aka the "liberal" media....cannot seem to investigate much of this.

Now we know that DOJ sat on Robert Couhglin's resignation from April 6, until
yesterday, after 5:00pm....on a friday....so the fewest would notice the release of the news.

Is it any wonder that the indictments and prosecutions of those related to the crimes of Jack Abramoff and Randy Cunningham, to name just two corrupt republicans, seem to unfold at a snail's pace, if it all? We even see the Attorney General and his staff, and the White House staff, using private RNC email addresses to mask their official activities as they blend them with political and alleged criminal activity.

Some here have posted on other threads that congressional investigation of the DOJ and the rest of the administration is a "waste of time and money".

Don't some of you agree that there is still too little investigation, not that there is too much?

host · 05-06-2007, 11:59 PM

Schlozman was the first US Attorney appointed with the intention by "Main Justice" to use the obscure provision inserted into the renewal of the Patriot Act, that exempted Senate Judiciary committee approval or even oversight of prospective US Attorneys. Now, we are seeing why the obscure provision was slipped into that bill, and we see the premeditated and elaborate plan to not only politicize DOJ, but also to make "loyalty" to Bush and republican "ideals" the requirement for hiring, instead of a competition of graduates from the best law schools, combined with overall ability....all for the purpose of ending the mission of the Civil Rights Division and enforcement of civil rights and voting protection acts.

I predict many more investigations, and even the possibility of grounds for impeachment of the president, if thorough investigations and lower level prosecutions of DOJ officials can be accomplished in a timely fashion.

More than ever, I think suspicions that the president has never been legitimately elected to the office he is holding are valid. I think that we are witnessing the unfolding of discovery of the means by which criminals posing as politicians, have hijacked and manipulated the vote, to bring about their own fraudulent vote pluralities.

....and how many non-republicans have been falsely or zealously prosecuted, while investigations and prosecutions of deserving republicans have been stalled or avoided completely?

Quote:

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwash...n/17188481.htm
Posted on Sun, May. 06, 2007

U. S. ATTORNEYS
Congress considers broadening Justice Department inquiry
By Greg Gordon and Margaret Talev
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Congressional investigators are beginning to focus on accusations that a top civil rights official at the Justice Department illegally hired lawyers based on their political affiliations, especially for sensitive voting rights jobs.

Two former department lawyers told McClatchy Newspapers that Bradley Schlozman, a senior civil rights official, told them in early 2005, after spotting mention of their Republican affiliations on their job applications, to delete those references and resubmit their resumes. Both attorneys were hired.

One of them, Ty Clevenger, said: "He wanted to make it look like it was apolitical."

Schlozman did not respond to phone calls to his home Sunday. But he denied the allegations in an earlier phone interview with McClatchy Newspapers and through a department spokesman. In the interview he said he "tried to de-politicize the hiring process" and filled jobs with applicants from "across the political spectrum."

Attention is turning to Schlozman after the announcement last week that the Justice Department opened an internal investigation to determine whether Monica Goodling, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' White House liaison, illegally took party affiliation into account in hiring entry-level prosecutors. The department's inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility are conducting that inquiry jointly.

Federal law and Justice Department policies bar the consideration of political affiliation in hiring of personnel for non-political, career jobs.

A congressional aide, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that the House and Senate Judiciary Committees want to look beyond Goodling to see whether other department officials may have skewed recruiting and hiring to favor Republican applicants. Investigators have heard allegations that Schlozman showed a political bias in hiring and hope the department will permit him to be interviewed voluntarily, the aide said.

Sen. Claire McCaskell, D-Mo., told National Public Radio last week that she wants to hear testimony from Schlozman because "more answers under oath need to be given."

One of the former Justice Department employees, Clevenger, is pursuing a whistleblower suit alleging he was wrongly fired for exposing mistreatment of employees by his Special Litigation Section chief.

Clevenger and the other lawyer recounted Schlozman's odd handling of their job applications in the spring of 2005. Clevenger said his resume stated that he was a member of the conservative Federalist Society and the Texas chapter of the Republican National Lawyers Association. The other applicant's resume cited work on President Bush's 2000 campaign, said the attorney, who insisted upon anonymity for fear of retaliation.

They said Schlozman directed them to drop the political references and resubmit the resumes in what they believed were an effort to hide those conservative affiliations.

Clevenger also recalled once passing on to Schlozman the name of a friend from Stanford as a possible hire.

"Schlozman called me up and asked me something to the effect of, `Is he one of us?'" Clevenger said. "He wanted to know what the guy's partisan credentials were."

Schlozman, who recently completed more than a year's service as interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City that was marked with controversy, has drawn harsh criticism over his conduct as the top deputy in the Civil Rights Division starting in 2003 and a term of roughly seven months as its acting chief beginning in the spring of 2005.

Several former department lawyers assailed his treatment of senior employees and his rollback of longstanding policies aimed at protecting African-American voting rights. They blame him for driving veteran attorneys, including section chief Joseph Rich, to resign from their posts.

Rich recently told Congress that 15 of the 35 attorneys in the voting rights section have resigned since 2005. Former employees of the Voting Rights Section told McClatchy of at least eight hires since then of employees with conservative political connections.

The Boston Globe, which obtained resumes of civil rights hires under the Freedom of Information Act, reported Sunday that seven of 14 career lawyers hired under Schlozman were members of either the Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association.

Rich, who left the agency on April 30, 2005, and now works for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told McClatchy Newspapers that Schlozman was "central to implementation of the politicization of the Civil Rights Division" and said he treated career lawyers with "disdain" and "vindictiveness."

His former deputy, Robert Kengle, told McClatchy that "Schlozman was never wrong and to even raise that possibility was asking for retribution."

Schlozman's hiring favored lawyers "with one primary characteristic - links to the Republican Party and right-wing groups," said David Becker, who left the section the same day as Rich.

"The lawyers hired by Schlozman, in virtually every case, had very little litigation experience, lesser academic credentials and, if they had any civil rights experience, it was in opposing the enforcement of civil rights laws," Becker told McClatchy.

One of those hired, Joshua Rogers, had been a law clerk for Mississippi federal Judge Charles Pickering, whom President Bush nominated for an appeals court judgeship over objections from civil rights groups.

Shortly after assuming his new job, Rogers was the lone dissenter in a staff recommendation that the department oppose a new Georgia law requiring every voter to produce a photo identification card - a law later found unconstitutional by a federal judge.

Schlozman said in the interview that staff "were only treated professionally" while he was in the Civil Rights Division and that in hiring, "I didn't care what your ideological perspective was."

He pointed to the recruitment of Mark Kappelhoff, a former counsel for the liberal American Civil Liberties Union, to head the division's Criminal Section, and to the promotion of Chris Coates, a former ACLU voting counsel, to serve as the top deputy chief of the voting section.

Rich and other lawyers said politics had little or no bearing on Kappelhoff's job - overseeing prosecution of human trafficking and police misconduct. They said Coates seemed to grow more conservative after his superiors passed him over for a promotion in favor of an African-American woman, and he filed a reverse-discrimination suit.

host · 05-11-2007, 10:56 PM

Who is responsible for the appointments and the performance of the appointees.....at the US DOJ? Judging from these answers from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and from the account in the NY Times article below,
it certainly doesn't seem to be Gonzales, does it?

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...ny_051007.html

...... CONYERS: Thank you very much.

Mr. Nadler?

NADLER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Attorney General, when did Monica Goodling start in her role as special counsel to you and the White House liaison?

GONZALES: Congressman, I'm not sure the exact date, but I'd be happy...

NADLER: Roughly?

GONZALES: I'm not sure. Let me -- I'd have to get back to you.

NADLER: Can you give me the year?

GONZALES: You know, I don't whether or not it was in the fall of '05 -- sometime in '05.

NADLER: Roughly, you know -- OK.

Now, to your knowledge, was Ms. Goodling involved in the hiring decisions of career assistant U.S. attorneys at any point?

GONZALES: I'm certainly aware, now, of allegations that -- well, she used to be the deputy, of course, in the Executive Office of the United States Attorneys. And so there she would have some role with respect to the hiring of career assistant United States...

NADLER: As special counsel and White House liaison, when she had that position, was she involved?

GONZALES: I think she did have some role in that position.

NADLER: Isn't that process reserved for U.S. attorneys, and in some cases for the Executive Office of the United States Attorneys?

GONZALES: Is what...

NADLER: The selection process for assistant USAs.

GONZALES: Typically, that is something that is conducted within the office of the specific United States attorneys' offices. There would be, however -- if you're talking about a situation where you had an interim United States attorney, there are...

NADLER: Well, we weren't talking about interim attorneys. We were talking about generally.

Now, allegations have been might that Ms. Goodling considered the political affiliations of career AUSA applicants. Would you agree that, if that is true, that practice would violate not only Department of Justice policy but also federal law?

GONZALES: In fact, those are very, very serious allegations. And if that happened, it shouldn't have happened.

NADLER: Now, Mr. Attorney General, when this committee asked Ms. Goodling to testify in front of us, she claimed her Fifth Amendment right not to -- the Fifth Amendment says you can't be forced to -- what's the word -- incriminate yourself with respect to a crime.

Can you tell this committee what crimes she might have thought -- from your stewardship of the department, what crimes there were that it might have been reasonable for her to think that her testimony might incriminate her or anybody else in?

GONZALES: Well, I can't do that, Congressman.

Obviously, it's always been my expectation and hope that Justice Department employees or former Justice Department employees would come forward and cooperate in connection with this investigation.

(CROSSTALK)

GONZALES: I offered up everyone.

NADLER: But you're not aware of any -- when someone who is the deputy attorney general, or special counsel to the attorney general, says that her testimony about the U.S. attorneys matter might implicate her in a crime, you're not aware of any crimes that she might have been referring to?

GONZALES: I offered her up...

NADLER: Or speaking of, I should say.

GONZALES: ... to come testify.

NADLER: What.

GONZALES: As an initial matter of course, I offered her up -- I offered up people on my staff...

NADLER: You're not aware of that.

Now, you have testified that you ask yourself every day whether you can be effective as the head of the Department of Justice.

Did you consider that, by many accounts, the morale at the Department of Justice and throughout the U.S. attorney community is at its lowest level since just after Watergate?

GONZALES: Did I consider that -- I don't know what's the source of that statement.

NADLER: Well, let me give you a different statement, then.

The recent ABC/Washington Post poll reports that 67 percent of the American people believe that the firings of U.S. attorneys were for political reasons, not for performance-based reasons. And, indeed, former Deputy Attorney General Comey said that the people who were fired had the highest performance, that they weren't for performance-based reasons.

If the American people don't believe you about this matter, how can they have confidence in other things you claim or that public corruption cases brought by your department are not similarly based on political considerations?

GONZALES: I think the American people are most concerned about the things that I alluded to earlier, Congressman. And that is, is our country safe from terrorism? Are we making our neighborhoods safe? Are we protecting our kids?

I will work as hard as I can -- working with this committee and working with DOJ employees -- to reassure the American people that this department is focused on doing its job.

NADLER: But you have a situation where most people believe that you didn't tell the truth about the U.S. attorneys.

And if that is the case -- they may be concerned about terrorism and ought to be, obviously, but it's a separate issue.

If most people believe that the United States attorney general has not told the truth about why these U.S. attorneys were fired, how can they have confidence in your job?

GONZALES: I don't believe that's an accurate statement.

And what I'm trying to do in appearances like this is to set the record straight.

NADLER: Well, the 67 percent -- 67 percent of the American people, according to the ABC/Washington Post poll, believe that the firings of the U.S. attorneys were for political reasons and not for performance-based reasons, which is exactly the opposite of what you have testified to.

GONZALES: I don't know when that poll was taken.

But, again, we've been very, very forthcoming, Congressman, in terms of our testimony...

NADLER: Well, I don't -- all right. That's a matter of opinion.

NADLER: But let me ask you this: If it is true, as you have testified, that you had very little personal involvement in the decision to fire the eight U.S. attorneys, you delegated that, you weren't really familiar with the reasons and the specifics -- and that's what you said -- and did not know the reasons some of them were on the list, how can we believe that you were involved in a hands-on manner in running the department in numerous other important issues?

GONZALES: Look at the record of the department. Look at the record of the department.

NADLER: No, that doesn't answer the question.

If you have stated to this committee and to other committees that in the matter of firing eight U.S. attorneys which you signed off on, you signed off on it without really knowing why or what their performance was, how can we believe that you really know what's going on in the department?

GONZALES: I think -- I think I was justified as head of that department to rely upon the people whose judgment that I valued, people who would know a lot more about the performance of United States attorneys. I think as head of the department I was justified in doing so.

Now, in hindsight, I've already said, I would have used a process that was more vigorous. There's no question about that.

But, again, Congressman, I would say, look at the record of the department in a wide variety of areas and...

NADLER: Well, let's look at the record of the department in a different area: national security letters.

Why is the government issuing NSLs to conduct fishing expeditions or, as the I.G. put it, to access NSL information about parties two or three steps removed from their subjects without determining if these contacts are real suspicious connections?

GONZALES: Well, of course, the I.G. also said that national security letters are indispensable -- indispensable.

NADLER: That's not the question.

(CROSSTALK)

NADLER: Excuse me. National security letters properly used may be indispensable. But they were abused. That was the I.G...

GONZALES: There is no question about that.

NADLER: So why is the department issuing NSLs to conduct -- I'll just repeat the question -- to conduct fishing expeditions, as the I.G. put it...

CONYERS: The gentleman's time has expired.

NADLER: May I have one additional minute?

CONYERS: Finish the question.

NADLER: Thanks.

To access NSL information about parties two or three times removed from their subjects without determining if these contacts are real suspicious connections?

Let me add to that, why is there no policy or practice of destroying information collected thusly, wrongly collected on innocent Americans?

GONZALES: There's a long answer I need to give with respect to NSLs. I'm not sure whether or not now is the time to do it.

But the I.G. identified some very serious issues with respect to the FBI's use of national security letters. No question they're an indispensable tool, but they've got to be used in a responsible manner, and we failed to do that. There's no -- we did. We failed to do that.

GONZALES: And the American people need to understand that we are taking steps to ensure that that doesn't happen again. The standard is whether or not is it relevant to a national security investigation?

NADLER: Are you taking steps to destroy information on people who are not involved in terrorism?

GONZALES: Yes. If it's not relevant to a national security investigation, yes, we are taking steps.

NADLER: Well, the testimony was that those records were not being destroyed. ........

“She believes you’re a Democrat and doesn’t feel you can be trusted.”

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/12/wa...pagewanted=all
May 12, 2007
Colleagues Cite Partisan Focus by Justice Official
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, May 11 — Two years ago, Robin C. Ashton, a seasoned criminal prosecutor at the Department of Justice, learned from her boss that a promised promotion was no longer hers.

“You have a Monica problem,” Ms. Ashton was told, according to several Justice Department officials. Referring to Monica M. Goodling, a 31-year-old, relatively inexperienced lawyer who had only recently arrived in the office, the boss added, “She believes you’re a Democrat and doesn’t feel you can be trusted.”

Ms. Ashton’s ouster — she left the Executive Office for United States Attorneys for another Justice Department post two weeks later — was a critical early step in a plan that would later culminate in the ouster of nine United States attorneys last year.

Ms. Goodling would soon be quizzing applicants for civil service jobs at Justice Department headquarters with questions that several United States attorneys said were inappropriate, like who was their favorite president and Supreme Court justice. One department official said an applicant was even asked, “Have you ever cheated on your wife?”

Ms. Goodling also moved to block the hiring of prosecutors with résumés that suggested they might be Democrats, even though they were seeking posts that were supposed to be nonpartisan, two department officials said.

And she helped maintain lists of all the United States attorneys that graded their loyalty to the Bush administration, including work on past political campaigns, and noted if they were members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

By the time Ms. Goodling resigned in April — after her role in the firing of the prosecutors became public and she had been promoted to the role of White House liaison — she and other senior department officials had revamped personnel practices affecting employees from the top of the agency to the bottom.

The people who spoke about Ms. Goodling’s role at the department, including eight current Justice Department lawyers and staff, did so only on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Several added that they found her activities objectionable and damaging to the integrity of the department.

Ms. Goodling, who is under investigation by the department’s inspector general and ethics office, as well as Congress, has declined to testify before a House panel, citing her Fifth Amendment privilege to avoid making self-incriminating statements. Her lawyer, John M. Dowd, declined to comment on Friday.

A judge in Federal District Court in Washington signed an order Friday to grant Ms. Goodling limited immunity, which will allow House investigators to compel her to answer questions.

Justice Department officials declined to respond to questions about Ms. Goodling’s actions and refused to allow some agency employees to speak with a reporter about them.

“Whether or not Ms. Goodling engaged in prohibited personnel practices is the subject of an ongoing investigation,” a written statement said. “Given the ongoing nature of the investigation, we are unable to comment on the allegations.”

H. E. Cummins III, one of the fired prosecutors, said Justice Department officials should have recognized that Ms. Goodling’s strategy was flawed from the start.

“She was inexperienced, way too naïve and a little overzealous,” said Mr. Cummins, a Republican from Arkansas. “She might have somehow figured that what she was doing was the right thing. But a more experienced person would understand you don’t help the party by trying to put political people in there. You put the best people you can find in there.”

Ms. Goodling, now 33, arrived at the department at the start of the Bush administration after working as an opposition researcher for the Republican National Committee during the 2000 presidential campaign.

Her legal experience was limited; she had graduated in 1999 from Regent University School of Law, which was founded by Pat Robertson. Deeply religious and politically conservative, Ms. Goodling seemed to believe that part of her job was to bring people with similar values into the Justice Department, several former colleagues said.

She joined the department in the press office. Soon after, two lawyers said, Ms. Goodling complained that staff members in Puerto Rico had used rap music in a public service announcement intended to discourage gun crime.

“That is just outrageous,” she told one department lawyer. “How could they use government money for an ad that featured rap music? That kind of music glorifies violence.”

Ms. Goodling’s shift to the executive office, which oversees budgets, management and performance evaluations of United States attorneys, occurred as officials in the White House and Justice Department were considering replacing a number of the top prosecutors. The first lists of possible targets had already been drawn up. But while those lists were being refined, Ms. Goodling, who would become deputy director of the executive office, was quietly helping make other changes.

In addition to making clear that she wanted Ms. Ashton out, a Justice Department employee still in that office said, Ms. Goodling took actions that encouraged a second experienced prosecutor, Kelly Shackelford, to move on. James B. Comey, who served as deputy attorney general from 2003 to 2005, said Ms. Ashton and Ms. Shackelford were excellent lawyers, whose politics he did not know nor would he ever have asked. Ms. Ashton and Ms. Shackelford declined to comment.

Ms. Goodling helped recruit new office managers who included John Nowacki, another Regent University graduate, who had little experience as a prosecutor, but had previously served as the director of legal policy at a conservative research group, the Free Congress Foundation.

She also insisted that she be given final approval in hiring assistant United States attorneys in offices where there was an interim chief prosecutor. Interim United States attorneys always had to seek permission for hiring, but the review was typically lower level and involved checking that sufficient slots were available, current and former employees said.

But Ms. Goodling’s reviews delayed hiring decisions for weeks or months, creating problems in busy offices, and her concerns at times appeared to be for partisan reasons.

In one case, Ms. Goodling told a federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia that she was not signing off on an applicant who had graduated from Howard University Law School, and then worked at the Environmental Protection Agency.

“He appeared, based on his résumé, to be a liberal Democrat,” Ms. Goodling told Jeffrey A. Taylor, the acting United States attorney in Washington, according to two of the department employees who asked not to be named. “That wasn’t what she was looking for.”

Mr. Taylor ultimately found a way to go around Ms. Goodling in hiring the applicant.

She appeared to take similar concerns about political leanings into account when making decisions about promotions and special assignments for Justice Department lawyers.

Robert Nicholson, a career lawyer from the Southern District of Florida, was asked some unusual questions when he applied for a post at the Justice Department headquarters, according to two department lawyers, including Margaret M. Chiara, the former chief prosecutor Western Michigan.

“Which Supreme Court justice do you most admire and why? Which legislator do you most admire and why? And which president do you most admire and why?” Mr. Nicholson was asked by Ms. Goodling, according to Ms. Chiara and the other lawyer, who asked not to be named.

Mr. Nicholson, who did not get the job, did not dispute the account, but he declined to comment, citing the investigation of Ms. Goodling.

In another instance, two Justice Department officials said, Ms. Goodling decided she did not like the applicants for one prestigious posting at department headquarters and decided to offer the job to David C. Woll Jr., a young lawyer who she knew was a Republican. In the interview, a department official said, she asked Mr. Woll if he had ever cheated on his wife. Mr. Woll declined to comment for this article.

Last month, a group of department employees wrote anonymously to Congressional investigators alleging that political considerations were influencing the selection of summer interns and applicants for the Attorney General’s Honors Program, which hires promising lawyers right out of law school. The letter did not say if Ms. Goodling was involved in the process. Department officials declined to comment on the matter.

Hundreds of applications for the honors slots were winnowed by career lawyers, then reviewed by top political appointees, who removed many candidates, the letter said. “Most of those struck from the list had interned for a Hill Democrat, clerked for a Democratic judge, worked for ‘liberal’ causes, or otherwise appeared to have ‘liberal’ leanings,” the letter said.

Ms. Goodling worked less than a year at the executive office, then moved to the attorney general’s office, where she became the White House liaison and collected a $133,000 annual salary, according to federal records. She insisted that she retain her power to review hiring of assistant United States attorneys, two department employees said.

Her mandate over hiring expanded significantly in March 2006, when Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales signed a confidential memorandum delegating to her and D. Kyle Sampson, his former chief of staff, the power to appoint or fire all department political appointees other than the United States attorneys. That included interim United States attorneys and heads of the divisions that handle civil rights, public corruption, environmental crimes and other matters.

At the same time, Ms. Goodling, Mr. Sampson and Mr. Nowacki, according to e-mail released to Congressional investigators, were helping prepare the final list of United States attorneys to be dismissed. Ms. Goodling was also calling around the country trying to identify up-and-coming lawyers — and good Republicans — who could replace them, said one Justice Department official who received such a call.

Mr. Comey said that if the accusations about Ms. Goodling’s partisan actions were true, the damage was deep and real.

“I don’t know how you would put that genie back in the bottle, if people started to believe we were hiring our A.U.S.A.s (Assistant United States Attorneys) for political reasons,” he said at a House hearing this month. “I don’t know that there’s any window you can go to to get the department’s reputation back if that kind of stuff is going on.”

host · 05-22-2007, 04:34 AM

There appears to be a common denominator between the Abramoff corrupted and now jailed, former Ohio congressman, Bob Ney (R-OH), Bush-Cheney 2004, Karl Rove, and the fired US Attorney investigation?

(I have tried to put the quote boxes in chronological order. The recent article from www.slate.com, at the end of this post, ties in all of the supporting documentation. As with the other facets of intertwined republican scandals that I have posted about....this is complicated...)

Quote:

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=1277
BLOGGED BY Brad Friedman ON 3/22/2005 7:01PM
New 'Non-Partisan' 'Voting Rights' Org Appears Little More than Republican Front Group!
6-Day Old Tax-Exempt Group Run by High Level GOP Operatives!
(GOPUSA/Talon News, Anyone?)

.....And yesterday, Ohio Republican Congressman, Bob Ney, chairman of the U.S. House Administrative Committee held hearings in Columbus on the massive reported problems during the 2004 Presidential Election in the Buckeye state...

..But it's a brand-spanking new, outta-nowhere, just-in-time-for-yesterday's-hearings, Talon News-like "Voting Rights" organization that has caught our eye for the moment.

As <a href="http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001275.htm">reported here earlier today</a>, the U.S. House Administrative Committee hearings yesterday in Columbus featured testimony from St. Louis attorney, Mark F. (Thor) Hearne, II of the "non-partisan" American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR).

According to Internic records, the ACVR was established on the web just last Thursday and early investigation into this group would seem to indicate that it is little more than a front group for Republican operatives with little or no interest in actual "Voting Rights" at all.

While Hearne is listed as a witness for yesterday's hearings on the U.S. Committee for House Administration website as "National Counsel, American Center for Voting Rights", there is no mention of his affiliation or extensive work for Bush/Cheney '00, '04 and other Republicans.

Hearne, a former Reagan Administration official, is the National Election Counsel to Bush-Cheney '04 Inc. and was Missouri counsel to Bush-Cheney 2004 Inc. As well, he was General Counsel to Republican Missouri Governor Blunt.

He is pictured, at a March 5, 2005 Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA) reception in Ohio, at the bottom of this article. The RNLA is an off-shoot of the national Republican Party.

But Hearne is not the only high-level Republican operative working for the tax-exempt "non-partisan" 501(c)3 organization...

ACVR publicist, Jim Dyke --- the contact person given on a press release issued by ACVR yesterday --- is the one-time Communications Director for the Republican National Committee!

On January 15, 2005 in an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Hearne was asked directly about "voter fraud"...
Does a lot of voter fraud occur?

I do not know. It would be hard for me to see that you could commit voter fraud on a level that you can influence an election, only if the election was within more than 1 percent, well maybe 2 percent.

None the less, in a 31 page report [PDF] --- named "ThorReport.pdf" on the ACVR website --- turned into the House Admin Committee yesterday to coincide with Hearne's testimony, "voter fraud" is suddenly the utmost concern to Mr. Hearne.

The report, in which Mark F. (Thor) Hearne, II is listed as the leading "contributor", details problems in Ohio's 2004 Presidential Election. No, not the ones where thousands of votes appeared out of nowhere for George W. Bush, or the hundreds (thousands?) of reports of voters attempting to vote for Kerry on touchscreen machines only to have their votes counted for Bush. The ACVR report claims that several Progressive and Liberal organizations committed criminal acts of fraud by illegally registering non-existant voters...

....The fraudulent voter registrations, however, appear to be only part of the effort of these organizations to influence the election.

As we've had only limited time to look into this story so far today, we've not yet been able to reach Hearne or Dyke for comment. Nor have we had time to look into the backgrounds of the other names included as "contributors" to the Thor Report available on the ACVR website.

The listed "contributors" include:

Mark F. (Thor) Hearne, II
Lathrop & Gage, L.C.
10 South Broadway; 13th Floor
Saint Louis, Missouri 63102

James E. Burke
Patrick F. Fischer
R. Patrick DeWine
Charles H. Gerhardt, III
Drew M. Hicks
Keating, Muething & Klekamp, PLL
One East Fourth Street, 14th Floor
Cincinnati, Ohio 45202

Douglas G. Haynam
Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, LLP
1000 Jackson Street
Toledo, Ohio 43624

William M. Todd
Mary C. Mertz
Squire, Sanders & Dempsey LLP
41 South High Street
Columbus, Ohio 43215

Mark R. Weaver
Mark Landes
Jeffrey Stankunas
Isaac, Brandt, Ledman & Teetor, LLP
250 East Broad Street
Columbus, Ohio 43215

Jack Morrison, Jr.
Thomas M. Saxer
Thomas R. Houlihan
Amer Cunningham Co., L.P.A.
159 S. Main St.
Sixth Floor, Key Building
Akron, Ohio 44308

Tim A. Greenwood
James P. Silk, Jr.
Spengler Nathanson P.L.L.
608 Madison Avenue, Ste. 1000
Toledo, Ohio 43604-1169

<center><img src="http://www.bradblog.com/Images/AC4VR_Hearne_RNLAOhio.jpg"</center>
For some odd reason, we have the feeling that this story is still...DEVELOPING...

UPDATE 3/23/05: BRAD BLOG interviews with both Mark F. (Thor) Hearne, II and Jim Dyke are now online here!

Quote:

http://web.archive.org/web/200503241...biography.html
Mark F. (Thor) Hearne
Biography

Mark F. (Thor) Hearne, II is a member and principal of the Lathrop & Gage law firm and serves on the firm�s government relations committee. Hearne is General Counsel to the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR) and serves as a member of the organization�s Board of Directors.

Prior to joining ACVR, Hearne served as National Election Counsel to Bush-Cheney �04 and Missouri counsel to Bush-Cheney �00. Hearne has also served as General Counsel to Missouri Governor Blunt, and was appointed by then Secretary of State Blunt as an advisor for the implementation of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Hearne testified before the Missouri commission established by Blunt to investigate the 2000 Missouri general election and voter fraud in the city of St. Louis....

...Hearne is a longtime advocate of voter rights and an attorney experienced in election law and litigation. Hearne has spoken to numerous groups and organizations about issues of election reform and served as chair of the RNLA National Election Law School in 2003 and 2004. The RNLA Election Law School is a continuing education program for attorney�s involved in election law and is accredited by the bar associations of various states. Hearne was named one of Missouri�s ten best attorneys by the Missouri Lawyers Weekly in 2004.
Hearne also served as an attorney and law clerk in the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights during the Reagan Administration....

.. He is a licensed pilot who has provided commentary for National Public Radio, FOX News and MSNBC and has authored a number of law review articles on various aspects of Missouri law.....

....and here is support for the suspicion that the National Election Counsel to Bush-Cheney \04, Mark F. (Thor) Hearne, was a principal in a "sham", propaganda group that issued a false and misleading "report" to the DOJ, concerning "vote fraud" in the 2004 election:

Quote:

http://web.archive.org/web/200602100...r.com/Reports/
March 24, 2005

ACVR Refers Ohio Voter Fraud Report To Department of Justice

<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20060210053601/http://www.ac4vr.com/reports/032405/OhioElectionReport.pdf">Ohio Election Report (pdf)</a>

Exhibits (pdf) A-E | F-L | M-Q | R-U
Press Release

Quote:

http://web.archive.org/web/200602111...tail.aspx?id=8

Monday, March 21, 2005

ACVR Refers Voter Fraud Investigation To Department

Report Shows Third Party Effort to Circumvent Law and Register Illegal Voters

Contact: Jim Dyke, 843/722-9670

COLUMBUS, OHIO – Today the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR) referred a compendium of preliminary findings of registration fraud, intimidation, vote fraud and litigation to the U.S. Department of Justice. The report was previously made available to the House Administration Committee who will hold a field hearing on election fraud in Columbus today....

The Ohio report states, “Third party organizations, especially ACT, ACORN and NAACP engaged in a coordinated “Get Out the Vote” effort. A significant component of this effort appears to be registering individuals who would cast ballots for the candidate supported by these organizations. This voter registration effort was not limited to the registration of legal voters but, criminal investigations and news reports suggest, that this voter registration effort also involved the registration of thousands of fictional voters...
After giving the report to the Department of Justice, ACVR General Counsel Thor Hearne stated in testimony prepared for delivery before the House Administration Committee, “there can be no doubt that election safeguards are critical to protecting our elections. When Dick Tracy’s fraudulent vote is counted, an honest Ohio voter is disenfranchised. So I find it is beyond the pale that the same organizations who unsuccessfully sought to remove election safeguards by judicial fiat during the election are once again seeking to eliminate these safeguards by state and federal legislation while continuing their battle in the courts.”

Hearne will testify on this issue today before the House Administration Committee.

ACVR is a non-partisan 501(c)(3) legal and education center committed to defending the rights of voters and working to increase public confidence in the fairness and outcome of elections. The group is compiling similar reports for the states of Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin which will be released in the coming weeks.

From the 368 page report that was the result of Bob Ney's March 21, 2005 "hearing" on the November, 2004, Ohio vote:

Quote:

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-...house_hearings

From page 273:

STATEMENT OF MR. MARK HEARNE
Mr. HEARNE. Thank you, Chairman Ney and members of the
House Administration Committee. ...

...My name is Thor Hearne. I am a principal of the Lathrop and
Gage Law Firm, I am a long-time advocate of voter rights and an
attorney experienced in election law. I was asked and served on the
Missouri HAVA implementation committee which helped Missouri
comply with HAVA and bring Missouri into compliance. I was
asked to serve in that capacity by Secretary of State Matt Blunt.
Today I am here in my capacity as the counsel for the American
Center for Voting Rights. The American Center for Voting Rights
is a nonpartisan watchdog voting rights organization and legal defense
organization which is committed to defend the rights of voters
and to work to increase public confidence in the fairness of our
election process.

I am joined in this effort by almost a dozen different Ohio lawyers
who were involved in this past election representing several
of this state’s most prestigious law firms. During the conduct of the
last election different events were brought to our attention. This report
of these events has been assembled and we presented it to the
committee. I would ask, Mr. Chairman, that this report be included
in the record.
The CHAIRMAN. Without objection.

Mr. HEARNE. The essence of my remarks go to the role, which
has been much discussed today that third parties played in the
conduct of this election. ....
274

....One of these means by which that was done is the type of voter
registration fraud that we have seen. We had a reference earlier
today to the absolutely outrageous case which happened in Defiance
County, Ohio, in which an individual was paid by the NAACP
Project Vote in crack cocaine to submit more than 100 fraudulent
voter registration forms ....

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Hearne. Without objection.
Mr. Foley.
[The statement of Mr. Hearne follows:]

Following Mr. Hearne's "statement" the 368 page hearing report contains the 31 page,
"sham" report from Mark Hearne's hastily assembled "non-partisan" voting research group,
"American Center for Voting Rights"....the group actually made up of partisan republican lawyers...the group that Slate.com now reports, has suddenly disappeared:

Quote:

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pitt.../s_360812.html
'Study' is political fraud

The supposedly nonpartisan American Center for Voting Rights -- which purports to expose voter fraud -- is a fraud.

The organization's 368-page study "Vote Fraud, Intimidation & Suppression in the 2004 Presidential Election," which was released last week, indicated that Democrats were the instigators in every case from Alabama to Wisconsin -- except two.

It also said that the two complaints regarding Republicans had no merit.

The "findings" about Democrat wrongdoing are not surprising considering that the three public faces of the nonpartisan group are very partisan Republican operatives -- including one who claims to be a sounding board for senior White House adviser Karl Rove.

More disturbing than blatant partisanship in the guise of objectivity is that the Republican State Committee of Pennsylvania shamelessly cites the study's findings to claim Philadelphia is No. 1 in election fraud. More disturbing still is that the committee claims it knew virtually nothing about the ACVR and yet stands by its decision to parrot its assertions.

"Quite frankly, I do not know who did the report," said Eileen Melvin, state GOP chair.

And most disturbing is that Mrs. Melvin admits she will use studies from other organizations that she knows virtually nothing about to support the party's positions.

"I did not know it existed prior to the study's release," said Josh Wilson, the state committee's media maven, about the ACVR.

Mr. Wilson also was unconcerned when informed about the staunch, well-connected Republican operatives running it.

"We stand by the report," he said. "To our knowledge they are nonpartisan. The report satisfies us." The Republican state committees in Washington and Wisconsin also used that study in news releases, Wilson said. "There likely were others."

Mark F. (Thor) Hearne II, the ACVR legislative fund counsel, and board member Brian A. Lunde signed off on the study.

Mr. Hearne, counsel to the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign in 2004, said, "Our intention is not to have a partisan document. Let the chips fall where they may."

Mr. Lunde, who had worked for Democrat candidates, presumably is the nonpartisan organization's counterbalance to Hearne.

"These are not Republican facts or Democrat facts," Lunde said of the study. "These are just the facts as they happen. That's why we call them as we see them. We wanted to take the partisanship out."

Lunde was the national executive director of Democrats for Bush.

That might be why Mr. Rove asks Lunde to suggest potential appointees for the Bush administration, according to Lunde. He also claims he is Rove's sounding board. "It's a very informal thing," Lunde said.

Jim Dyke, the ACVR spokesman, had been communications director for the Republican National Committee, Lunde said.

When asked to name any contributors to his nonprofit, Hearne claimed he did not know but said Lunde did. When Lunde was asked, he claimed he did not know but said Hearne did.

"I do not know who is funding the group," Wilson said. "No review was done on that."

The executive summary of the study says, "This important task requires an honest accounting of activity during the 2004 election, so that we may move forward with a common set of facts to address the issues that undermine public confidence in American elections."

Quote:

http://www.sbj.net/weekly_article.as...101.697&page=1
FBI probe targets governor
State Democrats say a scandal is brewing with Republican Gov. Matt Blunt’s administration.

Democratic speculation points to a license bureau revenue scheme
By Cory Smith
Springfield Business Journal Staff
5/1/2006

State Democrats say a scandal is brewing with Republican Gov. Matt Blunt’s administration, and they point to a quiet federal investigation as proof that illegal actions may have occurred.

Jack Cardetti, Missouri Democratic Party spokesman, said Blunt improperly gave his political supporters control of the state’s 183 driver’s license offices during his administration’s mid-2005 privatization initiative.

However, that practice is nothing new. For decades the state has maintained operation of some of its license offices while friends of the governor operate the others through contracts with the state’s Department of Revenue. In 1952, for example, 110 state license offices were privately run.

The politically charged system has often drawn the ire of the party not residing in the governor’s mansion. License offices are powerful gifts that can generate up to $700,000 in annual revenues for those fortunate enough to land them.

This situation may be more than the usual political bickering, though.

The FBI probe may validate Cardetti’s accusation that Blunt abused his power by forming a system of umbrella companies established through Kansas City law firm Lathrop & Gage LC to run the state’s licensing network.

Cardetti speculates that Blunt’s scheme is to line his own pockets with revenues from the license offices through mysterious funding channels.

“That is the $64,000 question,” Cardetti said. “That is what is ultimately at the heart of this whole scandal.”

The next question is whether Blunt broke the law....

Quote:

http://users1.wsj.com/lmda/do/checkL...ics_primary_hs
By Evan Perez and Scot J. Paltrow
New York, N.Y.: Jan 16, 2007.

WASHINGTON -- As the Bush administration enters its last two years, a number of U.S. attorneys are departing, causing concern that some high-profile prosecutions may suffer.

As many as seven U.S. attorneys, including prosecutor Kevin V. Ryan, whose San Francisco office is overseeing the investigation of backdating of stock options, are leaving or being pushed out. Others include Carol Lam of San Diego, Daniel Bogden of Nevada, David Iglesias of New Mexico, Paul Charlton of Arizona and John McKay of Seattle. Ms. Lam and Messrs. Ryan and Bogden haven't officially announced their departures.

Democrats claim the administration is using a little-noticed clause in the Patriot Act to circumvent Senate confirmation for some of the interim replacements who otherwise might not be able to win confirmation. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) are pushing legislation to undo a 2006 Patriot Act amendment that for the first time gave the attorney general, rather than local federal courts, authority to appoint interim U.S. attorneys. The administration said it needed to be able to do that to ensure no disruption in prosecuting terrorism suspects.

The proposed legislation would restore to the federal courts authority to make the interim appointments.

There is no fixed term for U.S. attorneys. Instead, they typically are appointed at the beginning of a new president's term, and serve throughout that term. If the president is re-elected, they continue to serve, unless of course they decide for some reason that they want to leave.

Lawmakers plan to question Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about the turnover at a Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday. Justice officials say the U.S. attorney changes are normal and that at any one time it is common to have eight to 15 vacancies. Former Justice Department officials, however, say it is unusual for such a large number of U.S. attorneys to leave at one time.

Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said that interim appointments aren't "in any way an attempt to circumvent the confirmation process." He added that the administration's record since last year's Patriot Act amendment "demonstrates we are committed to working with the Senate to nominate candidates for U.S. Attorney positions."

The Justice Department counts 11 vacancies since March 2006. The administration has nominated candidates to fill four of those and is interviewing candidates to fill seven others, officials said. Several departing prosecutors have left for new, and often higher-paying, private-sector jobs.

The departure that started the uproar is that of Bud Cummins in Little Rock, Ark., whose replacement, Timothy Griffin, is a former political official in the Bush White House and the Republican National Committee. Mr. Cummins, in an interview, said a top Justice official asked for his resignation in June, saying the White House wanted to give another person the opportunity to serve....

Quote:

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/17168096.htm
Posted on Wed, May. 02, 2007

U. S. ATTORNEYS
2006 Missouri's election was ground zero for GOP
By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers

.....The threat to the integrity of the election was seen as so grave that Bradley Schlozman, the acting chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and later the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, twice wielded the power of the federal government to try to protect the balloting. The Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly also stepped into action.

Now, six months after freshman Missouri Sen. Jim Talent's defeat handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate, disclosures in the wake of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys show that that Republican campaign to protect the balloting was not as it appeared. No significant voter fraud was ever proved.

The preoccupation with ballot fraud in Missouri was part of a wider national effort that critics charge was aimed at protecting the Republican majority in Congress by dampening Democratic turnout. That effort included stiffer voter-identification requirements, wholesale purges of names from lists of registered voters and tight policing of liberal get-out-the-vote drives.

Bush administration officials deny those claims. But they've gotten traction in recent weeks because three of the U.S. attorneys ousted by the Justice Department charge that they lost their jobs because they failed to prove Republican allegations of voter fraud. They say their inquiries found little evidence to support the claims.

Few have endorsed the strategy of pursuing allegations of voter fraud with more enthusiasm than White House political guru Karl Rove. And nowhere has the plan been more apparent than in Missouri.

Before last fall's election:

-Schlozman, while he was acting civil rights chief, authorized a suit accusing the state of failing to eliminate legions of ineligible people from lists of registered voters. A federal judge tossed out the suit this April 13, saying Democratic Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan couldn't police local registration rolls and noting that the government had produced no evidence of fraud.

-The Missouri General Assembly - with the White House's help - narrowly passed a law requiring voters to show photo identification cards, which Carnahan estimated would disenfranchise 200,000 voters. The state Supreme Court voided the law as unconstitutional before the election.

-Two weeks before the election, the St. Louis Board of Elections sent letters threatening to disqualify 5,000 newly registered minority voters if they failed to verify their identities promptly, a move - instigated by a Republican appointee - that may have violated federal law. After an outcry, the board rescinded the threat.

-Five days before the election, Schlozman, then interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, announced indictments of four voter-registration workers for a Democratic-leaning group on charges of submitting phony applications, despite a Justice Department policy discouraging such action close to an election.

-In an interview with conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt a couple of days before the election, Rove said he'd just visited Missouri and had met with Republican strategists who "are well aware of" the threat of voter fraud. He said the party had "a large number of lawyers that are standing by, trained and ready to intervene" to keep the election clean.

Missouri Republicans have railed about alleged voter fraud ever since President Bush narrowly won the White House in the chaotic 2000 election and Missouri Republican Sen. John Ashcroft lost to a dead man, the late Democratic Gov. Mel Carnahan, whose name stayed on the ballot weeks after he died in a plane crash.

Joining the push to contain "voter fraud" were Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., who charged that votes by dogs and dead people had defeated Ashcroft, Missouri Republican Gov. Matt Blunt, whose stinging allegations of fraud were later debunked, and St. Louis lawyer Mark "Thor" Hearne, national counsel to Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, who set up a nonprofit group to publicize allegations of voter fraud.

Many Democrats contend that the efforts amount to a voter-suppression campaign.

"The real problem has never been vote fraud," said Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-Mo. "It's access to the polls. In the last 50 years, no one in Missouri has been prosecuted for impersonating someone else at the polls. But thousands of eligible voters have been denied their constitutional rights. . . . It's sickening."

However, Jessica Robinson, a spokeswoman for Blunt, said a report he'd authored in 2001 as secretary of state "documented credible instances of fraud." She said Blunt wanted the legislature to take another shot at passing a photo ID bill as "a reasonable step . . . to help stamp out" such abuse.

The Republican-dominated legislature is considering the bill again this year, along with a resolution asking voters to pass a constitutional amendment so the measure can withstand court challenges.

In a separate assessment of alleged voter fraud in Missouri, Lorraine Minnite, a Barnard College professor, found scant evidence of it. The study was undertaken for the nonpartisan policy-research group Demos, which despite its name isn't affiliated with the Democratic Party.

Minnite, who's writing a book on the issue of voter fraud, said successful drives to register poor people and minorities in recent years had threatened to "tip the balance of power" to Democrats, so it was understandable that the Republican Party would seek restrictions that "disproportionately hinder the opposition."

It's difficult to capture the emotional debate over the issue of voter fraud in Missouri without considering the Election Day tumult in St. Louis on Nov. 7, 2000. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of voters were turned away because their names weren't on official lists, and many of them converged on the city's election board seeking assistance.

Responding to the bedlam, Democrats won an emergency court order that kept some polls open beyond their scheduled 7 p.m. closings. That outraged Republicans, and Hearne, the Bush campaign lawyer, in turn won an emergency appeals-court ruling that shut the polls within an hour.

In the ensuing days, Bond blamed Ashcroft's defeat on "a criminal enterprise."

The following summer, then-Secretary of State Blunt alleged in a 47-page investigative report that the use of affidavits to allow more than 1,000 "improper ballots . . . compels the conclusion that there was in St. Louis an organized and successful effort to generate improper votes in large numbers."

But an investigation by the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, launched before Ashcroft settled in as U.S. attorney general in 2001, found the reverse. In a 2002 court settlement with the department's Voting Rights Section, St. Louis election officials acknowledged that they'd improperly purged some 50,000 names from voter lists before the 2000 elections and had failed as required by federal law to notify those people properly that they'd been placed on inactive status. No one knows how many eligible voters were denied their right to cast ballots.

Missouri's Rep. Clay charged in a recent interview that Blunt's report was an attempt "to violate the voting rights of certain Missourians."

Things didn't heat up again until 2005, when Schlozman authorized a Justice Department suit naming the newly elected Missouri secretary of state - the daughter of the late governor - as the defendant. It alleged that her office had failed to make a "reasonable effort" to remove ineligible people from local voter-registration rolls.

A federal judge dismissed the suit last month, saying the government had provided no evidence of fraud.

Speaking on behalf of Schlozman, who's now with the Justice Department's Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, agency spokesman Dean Boyd said: "We are disappointed with the court ruling."

Separately, Hearne helped establish the nonprofit American Center for Voting Rights in February 2005, which issued lengthy reports alleging voter fraud in states across the country, including Missouri. One director of the supposedly nonpartisan group was Brian Lunde, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee who switched his allegiance in 2000 and headed Democrats for Bush in 2004....

.....Republican state Sen. Delbert Scott of Lowry, Mo., chief sponsor of the photo-ID bill last year, said Hearne had helped draft it and served as a key adviser.

Hearne didn't respond to several requests for comment. His organization closed down its Internet site in March and has disappeared from view.

Last fall, with Missouri's new voter-ID law thrown out by the court, allegations of fraud arose over registration drives among Democratic-leaning minorities in St. Louis and Kansas City by the Democratic-leaning Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN).

Brian Mellor, a Boston lawyer for ACORN, said many of the accusations surrounded the submission of duplicate or multiple registration forms for the same voters. Such duplication would be caught by election officials and wouldn't enable anyone to vote twice, he said.

But officials at St. Louis' Board of Elections took the unusual step of alerting the FBI to those and other irregularities, Mellor said, and he wound up turning over copies of 40,000 St. Louis-area registration forms to bureau agents.

Facing the FBI scrutiny, Mellor said, ACORN reviewed its forms in Kansas City and found several with similar handwriting, suggesting that they were bogus. He said the group turned over evidence involving four workers to a county prosecutor in mid-October.

That same month, at the initiative of a Republican appointee, the St. Louis Board of Elections sent letters warning 5,000 people who'd registered through ACORN that their voting status was in question. They were given one week to return signed copies of the letter and confirm personal identifying information or they'd lose their registration status.

ACORN attorneys charged that the notice "appears to be an unlawful attempt to suppress and intimidate voters of color." The board sent another mailing withdrawing the threat.

Meanwhile, the evidence against the four ACORN workers ended up with the FBI.

Five days before the election, U.S. Attorney Schlozman got another voter-fraud headline, announcing the indictments of the four workers. The indictments charged that six applications that ACORN had submitted were fraudulent.

"ACORN abhors fraud," Mellor said. He said the timing of the indictments seemed to be aimed at hurting Democrats.

Justice Department spokesman Boyd said the policy that prosecutors "refrain from any conduct which has the possibility of affecting the election" didn't bar pre-election indictments and was intended to ensure that investigators didn't intimidate voters during an election. Boyd said officials in the department’s Public Integrity Section approved the indictments.

But Joseph Rich, who headed the department's Voting Rights Section from 1999 to 2005, said the timing of the indictments "flies in the face of long-standing policy. . . . There was no need to bring cases on the eve of the election."

The chief attorney at Mark Hearnes' law firm has suddenly resigned:

Quote:

http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascit...ml?t=printable
Stewart resigns from Lathrop & Gage
Kansas City Business Journal - May 17, 2007
by Rob Roberts
Staff Writer

The longtime leader of Kansas City's third-largest law firm has resigned.

In early April, Tom Stewart announced that he would leave his position as chief executive at Lathrop & Gage LC to become chairman, effective July 1. Instead, he has left the firm altogether.....

Quote:

http://www.slate.com/id/2166589/
<body>jurisprudence The Fraudulent Fraud Squad The incredible, disappearing American Center for Voting Rights. By Richard L. Hasen Posted Friday, May 18, 2007, at 1:41 PM ET  <div style="clear:both"></div>Imagine the National Rifle Association's <a target="_blank" href="http://nra.org/">Web site</a> suddenly disappeared, along with all the data and reports the group had ever posted on gun issues. Imagine <a target="_blank" href="http://plannedparenthood.org/">Planned Parenthood</a> inexplicably closed its doors one day, without comment from its former leaders. The scenarios are unthinkable, given how established these organizations have become. But even if something did happen to the NRA or Planned Parenthood, no doubt other gun or abortion groups would quickly fill the vacuum and push the ideas they'd pushed for years.Not so for the American Center for Voting Rights, a group that has literally just disappeared as an organization, and for which it seems no replacement group will rise up. With no notice and little comment, ACVR—the only prominent nongovernmental organization claiming that voter fraud is a major problem, a problem warranting strict rules such as voter-ID laws—simply stopped appearing at government panels and conferences. Its <a target="_blank" href="http://electionlawblog.org/archives/008186.html">Web domain name has suddenly expired</a>, its reports are all gone (except where they have been <a target="_blank" href="http://truthaboutfraud.org/analysis_reports/">preserved by its opponents</a>), and its general counsel, <a target="_blank" href="http://lathropgage.com/people/detail.aspx?attorney=1584">Mark "Thor" Hearne</a>, has <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4556">cleansed his résumé</a> of affiliation with the group. Hearne <a target="_blank" href="http://electionlawblog.org/archives/008383.html">won't speak to the press </a>about ACVR's demise. No other group has taken up the "voter fraud" mantra.The death of ACVR says a lot about the Republican strategy of raising voter fraud as a crisis in American elections. Presidential adviser Karl Rove and his allies, who have been ghostbusting illusory dead and fictional voters since the contested 2000 election, apparently mounted a two-pronged attack. One part of that attack, at the heart of the current Justice Department scandals, involved getting the DoJ and various U.S. attorneys in battleground states <a target="_blank" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/13/AR2007051301106.html">to vigorously prosecute cases of voter fraud</a>. That prong has failed. After exhaustive effort, the Department of Justice discovered <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html?ei=5088&en=277feccfa099c7d0&ex=1334030400&pagewanted=all">virtually no polling-place voter fraud</a>, and its efforts to fire the U.S. attorneys in battleground states who did not push the voter-fraud line enough has backfired. Even if Attorney General Gonzales <a target="_blank" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2166557/">declines to resign his position</a>, his reputation has been irreparably damaged.But the second prong of this attack may have proven more successful. This involved using ACVR to give "think tank" academic cachet to the unproven idea that voter fraud is a major problem in elections. That cachet would be used to support the passage of onerous voter-identification laws that depress turnout among the poor, minorities, and the elderly—groups more likely to vote Democratic. Where the Bush administration may have failed to nail illegal voters, the effort to suppress minority voting has <a target="_blank" href="http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/comments/articles.php?ID=147">borne more fruit</a>, as more states pass these laws, and courts begin to uphold them in the name of beating back waves of largely imaginary voter fraud.Perhaps even with the demise of ACVR, the hard work—of giving credibility to a nonproblem—is done. The short organizational history of ACVR, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bradblog.com/?page_id=4418">chronicled indefatigably</a> by Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog, shows that the group was founded just days before its representatives testified before a congressional committee hearing on election-administration issues chaired by then-Rep. (and now federal inmate) Bob Ney. The group was headed by Hearne, national election counsel to Bush-Cheney '04, and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=21015">staffed with other Republican operatives</a>, including Jim Dyke, a former RNC communications director. Consisting of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.bradblog.com/?p=1283">little more than a post-office box</a> and some staffers who wrote reports and gave helpful quotes about the pervasive problems of voter fraud to the press, the group <a target="_blank" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20060210111249/www.ac4vr.com/reports/072005/letterofintroduction.html">identified Democratic cities as hot spots for voter fraud</a>, then pushed the line that "election integrity" required making it harder for people to vote. The group <a target="_blank" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20060209215847/http:/www.ac4vr.com/reports/032405/OhioElectionReport.pdf">issued reports</a> (PDF) on areas in the country of special concern, areas that coincidentally tended to be presidential battleground states. In many of these places, it now appears the White House was pressuring U.S. attorneys to bring more voter-fraud prosecutions.ACVR's method of argument followed a familiar line, first set out by Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund in his book, Stealing Elections. First, ACVR argued extensively by anecdote, pointing to instances of illegal conduct, such as someone, somewhere registering Mary Poppins to vote. Anecdote would then be coupled with statistics showing problems with voter rolls not being purged to remove voters who had died or moved, leaving open the potential for fraudulent voting at the polls. Finally, the group would claim that the amount of such voter fraud is hard to quantify, because it is after all illegal conduct, hidden from the public. Given this great potential for mischief, and without evidence of actual mischief, allegedly reasonable initiatives such as purging voter rolls and requiring ID seemed the natural solution.At least in hindsight, the ACVR line of argument is easily deconstructed. First, arguing by anecdote is dangerous business. <a target="_blank" href="http://projectvote.org/fileadmin/ProjectVote/Publications/Politics_of_Voter_Fraud_Final.pdf">A new report </a>(PDF) by Lorraine Minnite of Columbia University looks at these anecdotes and shows them to be, for the most part, wholly spurious. Almost always the allegations were followed by charges being dropped or allegations being unproven (and sometimes raised for apparently political purposes). Sure, one can find a rare case of someone voting in two jurisdictions, but nothing extensive or systematic has been unearthed or documented.Second, there's no question that there's a fair amount of registration fraud in this country, an artifact of the ability in many states to pay bounty hunters by the head for each new registrant. Some unscrupulous people being paid $3 to $5 for each card turned in will falsify registration information, registering pets or dead people or comic-book characters—none of whom will show up to vote on Election Day (with or without an ID). (I, for one, would turn the whole business of voter registration over to the government and couple a universal voter-registration program with a national voter-ID card paid for by the government—<a target="_blank" href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=698201">but that's another story</a>.)Third, and perhaps most importantly, the idea of massive polling-place fraud (through the use of inflated voter rolls) is inherently incredible. Suppose I want to swing the Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead, or missing people on the registration rolls are, and then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be Mary Poppins or Old Dead Bob, without any return guarantee—thanks to the secret ballot—that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate. Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected ("You're not my neighbor Bob who passed away last year!") and charged with a felony. And for what—$10? As someone who's thought about this a lot, if I really wanted to buy votes in an enforceable and safe way, I'd find eligible voters who would allow me to watch as they cast their absentee ballots for the candidate of my choice. Then, I would pay them. (Notably, ACVR and supporters of voter-ID laws have <a target="_blank" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/21/AR2005082100972.html">generally supported exemptions</a> from ID requirements for voters who use absentee ballots.) Or, I might find an election official to change the votes. Polling-place fraud, in short, makes no sense.Finally, on the issue of lack of detection: State and local officials have uncovered a fair amount of the absentee-ballot vote-buying I've just described, even though that behavior, too, is illegal and likely hidden from public view. The DoJ devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out polling-place fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country. The <a target="_blank" href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/20070411voters_draft_report.pdf">major bipartisan draft fraud report</a> (PDF) (recently <a target="_blank" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2166287/entry/0/">posted </a>by Slate and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/washington/11voters.html">suppressed</a> by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission [TimesSelect subscription required]) concluded that there is very little polling-place fraud in the United States. Of the many experts the commission consulted, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2166287/entry/0/">the only dissenter</a> from that position was a representative of the now-evaporated ACVR.Perhaps it is not surprising that ACVR has collapsed as an organization. In what appears to be one of Hearne's last public appearances (where he <a target="_blank" href="http://www.eac.gov/docs/Hearne-Testimony-EAC-2006-Election.pdf">identifies himself</a> [PDF] as having served—note past tense—as counsel to ACVR) before the EAC in December of 2006, Hearne offered the usual arguments. In support of his position that voter-ID laws did not unconstitutionally suppress the votes of poor and minority voters, Hearne cited the decision of the DoJ to approve the pre-clearance of Georgia's voter-ID law, and a law review article supporting such laws, written under the pseudonym Publius. Hearne didn't reveal that the decision on Georgia <a target="_blank" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/16/AR2005111602504.html">was made by political appointees of the DoJ over the strong objections of career attorneys</a> there who believed the law was indeed discriminatory. Nor did he explain that (<a target="_blank" href="http://electionlawblog.org/archives/005295.html">as I discovered and blogged about </a>a few years earlier) <a target="_blank" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/12/AR2006041201950.html">Publius was none other than Hans von Spakovsky</a>, then serving as one of the political DoJ officials who approved the Georgia voter-ID law. (President Bush later gave <a target="_blank" href="http://www.fec.gov/members/von_Spakovsky/von_Spakovsky.shtml">von Spakovsky</a> a recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission.) The arguments against vote fraud were built on a house of cards, a house that is collapsing as quickly as the U.S. attorney investigation moves forward. So Hearne let the organization collapse, and in a bit of irony, a Washington lawyer who bought the <a target="_blank" href="http://americancenterforvotingrights.com/">ACVR domain name</a> has set it <a target="_blank" href="http://electionlawblog.org/archives/008380.html">to redirect</a> to the Brennan Center's <a target="_blank" href="http://truthaboutfraud.org/analysis_reports/">Truth About Fraud</a> Web site, which debunks ACVR's claims of polling-place voter fraud. But despite the collapse of ACVR, the idea that there is massive polling-place voter fraud has, perhaps irrevocably, entered the public consciousness. It has <a target="_blank" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2152116/">infected even the Supreme Court's thinking about voter-ID laws</a>. And it has provided intellectual cover <a target="_blank" href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=976701">for the continued partisan pursuit</a> of voter-ID laws that may suppress minority votes. Just this week, Republican members of the Texas state Senate are trying to push through a voter-ID law over a threatened Democratic filibuster. Their political machinations have already required a Democratic state senator <a target="_blank" href="http://electionlawblog.org/archives/008406.html">recovering from a liver transplant</a> to show up to vote—and they almost passed the bill when another Democratic senator <a target="_blank" href="http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/4806873.html">came down with the stomach flu</a>. Texas legislators should be ashamed. All of this effort to enact a law that would stop a nonexistent problem. If only there were a way to ensure that <a target="_blank" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2136776/">spurious claims of polling-place voter fraud</a> could have disappeared with ACVR.<a target="_blank" href="http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/hasen.html">Richard L. Hasen</a>, the William H. Hannon distinguished professor at Loyola Law School, writes the <a target="_blank" href="http://electionlawblog.org/">Election Law Blog</a>. Article URL: <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2166589/" target="_blank">http://www.slate.com/id/2166589/</a><script language="JavaScript1.1" src="/revsci/dm_client.js"></script><script language="JavaScript">rs = PStax; DM_addToLoc("thisNode", rs); DM_tag();</script><noscript><img src="http://pix01.revsci.net/J05531/a3/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/noscript.gif" /></noscript></div></body>

Bottomline:

May, 2006: Report that Bud Cummins, US Attorney in Arkansas, is investigating Missouri Gov., Matt Blunt, son on US House leader, Roy Blunt.
Matt Blunt has given wife of Missouri US Attorney, Todd Graves, a "perk"..a lucrative franchise in Missouri DMV licensing office, operateed by Mark Hearnes' law firm....

WSJ reports in Jan., 2007, that a month after the May, 2006 reporting about Cummins investigation of Blunt....in June of 2006, Cummins is asked to resign to make way for Karl Roves' "Timothy Griffin". DOJ sends Brad Schlozman, the man who dismantled the DOJ's civil right's section, to replace Todd Graves as US Attorney in Missouri....

Friends....more and more, it's looking certain that the repubs stole both the 2000 and the 2004 presidential elections, and a bunch of other state and federal election races, too !....with the help of the lawyers who worked for Bush/Cheney 2000 in the Florida recount, and then in the Bush administration, or in aligned law firms, ever since. The DOJ has been transformed into a branch of this partisan republican, criminal conspiracy!

dc_dux · 05-22-2007, 05:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

There appears to be a common denominator between the Abramoff corrupted and now jailed, former Ohio congressman, Bob Ney (R-OH), Bush-Cheney 2004, Karl Rove, and the fired US Attorney investigation?
...
Friends....more and more, it's looking certain that the repubs stole both the 2000 and the 2004 presidential elections, and a bunch of other state and federal election races, too !....with the help of the lawyers who worked for Bush/Cheney 2000 in the Florida recount, and then in the Bush administration, or in aligned law firms, ever since. The DOJ has been transformed into a branch of this partisan republican, criminal conspiracy!

Its really not that complicated. The evidence is becoming quite clear that the plan was to suppress minority voting in key states under the cover of investigating voter fraud.

A chief architect at DoJ was Hans von Spakovsky:

Quote:

During four years as a Justice Department civil rights lawyer, Hans von Spakovsky went so far in a crusade against voter fraud as to warn of its dangers under a pseudonym in a law journal article.

Writing as "Publius," von Spakovsky contended that every voter should be required to produce a photo-identification card and that there was "no evidence" that such restrictions burden minority voters disproportionately.

Now, amid a scandal over politicization of the Justice Department, Congress is beginning to examine allegations that von Spakovsky was a key player in a Republican campaign to hang onto power in Washington by suppressing the votes of minority voters.

"Mr. von Spakovsky was central to the administration's pursuit of strategies that had the effect of suppressing the minority vote," charged Joseph Rich, a former Justice Department voting rights chief who worked under him.

He and other former career department lawyers say that von Spakovsky steered the agency toward voting rights policies not seen before, pushing to curb minor instances of election fraud by imposing sweeping restrictions that would make it harder, not easier, for Democratic-leaning poor and minority voters to cast ballots

In interviews, current and former federal officials and civil rights leaders told McClatchy Newspapers that von Spakovsky:

-Sped approval of tougher voter ID laws in Georgia and Arizona in 2005, joining decisions to override career lawyers who believed that Georgia's law would restrict voting by poor blacks and who felt that more analysis was needed on the Arizona law's impact on Native Americans and Latinos.

-Tried to influence the federal Election Assistance Commission's research into the dimensions of voter fraud nationally and the impact of restrictive voter ID laws - research that could undermine a vote-suppression agenda.

-Allegedly engineered the ouster of the commission's chairman, Paul DeGregorio, whom von Spakovsky considered insufficiently partisan.

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwash...hington_nation

Von Spakovsky, who was recess-appointed to the Federal Election Commission in December 2005, will finally be questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee next month.

host · 07-01-2007, 11:13 AM

Remember the fake Mark "Thor" Hearne, "American Center for Voting Rights", detailed in my last post above? Here's a new report on how this white house linked, viote suppression "sham", that has now disappeared....was behind the firing of US Attorney Iglesias, in New Mexico.

....and you'll see a lot more from McClatchy, I predict. They are the news service that resulted from the multi billion dollare purchase of Knight Ridder by the smaller McClatchey, last year. They have a new masthead on every webpage:
<h2>"Truth to Power"</h2>

and they run this report every day:
<a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/212/story/17534.html">Iraq: · Roundup of daily violence, 30 June 2007</a>

...they expose the lies:
<a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/iraq/story/17471.html"> Bush plays al Qaida card to bolster support for Iraq policy</a>

<a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/iraq/story/17530.html">· No evidence ties al Qaida to recent bombing of a Shiite shrine</a>

<a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/iraq/story/17431.html">Report: Iraqi soldiers hard to track, unready to take over</a>

They were the first in the US, last week, to report on the US Military cover up of it's mistaken helicopter attack on an Iraqi village that killed 17, "Good Guys"

Quote:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/212/story/17403.html
....- Governmental and political parties’ sources in Khalis disputed a U.S. military statement that was issued few days ago; the statement said that a U.S. helicopter killed 17 terrorists but these sources say these men were protecting their own town from terrorist attacks.......

...in comparison, WaPo didn't report on it's mistake "reporting" until two days later...parroting US Military propaganda for a week, while <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6239896.stm">BBC, on the 26th</a> actually investigated:

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...062800447.html
Residents Say 17 Killed by US Were Not Insurgents 

......A U.S. military statement on the day of the incident called the dead men "al-Qaeda gunmen" and said they were killed after trying to sneak into Khalis.

But, I digress....the <h2>Big Story</h2>, behind the firing of nine US Attorneys and the subsequent inability of the administration to give coherent reasons why....is about a vote suppression conspiracy:

Quote:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/17532.html
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Print This Article Print This Article

Posted on Sun, Jul. 01, 2007
<h3>Was campaigning against voter fraud a Republican ploy?</h3>
Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: June 30, 2007 11:34:55 PM

WASHINGTON - A New Mexico lawyer who pressed to oust U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was an officer of a nonprofit group that aided Republican candidates in 2006 by pressing for tougher voter identification laws.

Iglesias, who was one of nine U.S. attorneys the administration fired last year, said that Albuquerque lawyer Patrick Rogers pressured him several times to bring voter fraud prosecutions where little evidence existed. Iglesias believes that he was fired in part because he failed to pursue such cases.

He described Rogers, who declined to discuss the exchanges, as “obsessed . . . convinced there was massive voter fraud going on in this state, and I needed to do something to stop it."

<h3>Iglesias said he only recently learned of Rogers’ involvement as secretary of the non-profit American Center for Voting Rights Legislative Fund </h3>- an activist group that defended tighter voter identification requirements in court against charges that they were designed to hamper voting by poor minorities.

Rogers, a former general counsel to the New Mexico Republican Party and a candidate to replace Iglesias, is among a number of well-connected GOP partisans whose work with the legislative fund and a sister group played a significant role in the party’s effort to retain control of Congress in the 2006 election.

That strategy, which presidential adviser Karl Rove alluded to in an April 2006 speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association, sought to scrutinize voter registration records, win passage of tougher ID laws and challenge the legitimacy of voters considered likely to vote Democratic.

McClatchy Newspapers has found that this election strategy was active on at least three fronts:

- Tax-exempt groups such as the American Center and the Lawyers Association were deployed in battleground states to press for restrictive ID laws and oversee balloting.

- The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division turned traditional voting rights enforcement upside down with legal policies that narrowed rather than protected the rights of minorities.

- The White House and the Justice Department encouraged selected U.S. attorneys to bring voter fraud prosecutions, despite studies showing that election fraud isn't a widespread problem.

Nowhere was the breadth of these actions more obvious than at the American Center for Voting Rights and its legislative fund.

Public records show that the two nonprofits were active in at least nine states. They hired high-priced lawyers to write court briefs, issued news releases declaring key cities "hot spots" for voter fraud and hired lobbyists in Missouri and Pennsylvania to win support for photo ID laws. In each of those states, the center released polls that it claimed found that minorities prefer tougher ID laws.

Armed with $1.5 million in combined funding, the two nonprofits attracted some powerful volunteers and a cadre of high-priced lawyers.

Of the 15 individuals affiliated with the two groups, at least seven are members of the Republican National Lawyers Association, and half a dozen have worked for either one Bush election campaign or for the Republican National Committee.

Alex Vogel, a former RNC lawyer whose consulting firm was paid $75,000 for several months' service as the center’s executive director, said the funding came from private donors, not from the Republican Party.

One target of the American Center was the liberal-leaning voter registration group called Project Vote, a GOP nemesis that registered 1.5 million voters in 2004 and 2006. The center trumpeted allegations that Project Vote’s main contractor, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), submitted phony registration forms to boost Democratic voting.

In a controversial move, the interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City announced indictments against four ACORN workers five days before the 2006 election, despite the fact that Justice Department policy discourages such action close to an election. Acorn officials had notified the federal officials when they noticed the doctored forms.

"Their job was to confuse the public about voter fraud and offer bogus solutions to the problem," said Michael Slater, the deputy director of Project Vote, "And like the Tobacco Institute, they relied on deception and faulty research to advance the interests of their clients."

<h3>Mark “Thor” Hearne, a St. Louis lawyer and former national counsel for President Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign</h3>, is widely considered the driving force behind the organizations. Vogel described him as "clearly the one in charge."

Hearne, who also was a vice president and director of election operations for the Republican Lawyers Association, said he couldn't discuss the organizations because they're former clients.

But in an e-mail exchange, he defended the need for photo IDs.

"Requiring a government-issued photo ID in order to vote as a safeguard against vote fraud and as a measure to increase public confidence in the fairness and honesty of our elections is not some Republican voter suppression effort," Hearne said.

Hearne called photo IDs "an important voice in election reform."

Hearne and Rogers appeared at separate hearings before the House Administration Committee last year in Ohio and New Mexico. They cited reports of thousands of dead people on voter registration rolls, fraudulent registrations and other election fraud schemes.

As proof, Hearne, offered a 28-page "investigative report" on Ohio events in the 2004 election, and then publicly sent a copy to the Justice Department, citing "substantial evidence to suggest potential criminal wrongdoing."

So far, no charges have been filed.

Earlier, in August 2005, the Legislative Fund issued a string of press releases naming five cities as the nation’s top "hot spots" for voter fraud. Philadelphia was tagged as No. 1, followed by Milwaukee, Seattle, St. Louis and Cleveland.

With a push from the center’s lobbyists, legislatures in Missouri and Pennsylvania passed photo ID laws last year. Missouri’s law was thrown out by the state Supreme Court, and Democratic Gov. Edward Rendell vetoed the Pennsylvania bill.

In an interview with the federal Election Assistance Commission last year, two Pennsylvania officials said they knew of no instances of voter identity fraud or voter registration fraud in the state.

Amid the controversy, the American Center for Voting Rights shuttered its Internet site on St. Patrick’s Day, and the two nonprofits appear to have vanished.

But their influence could linger.

One of the directors of the American Center, Cameron Quinn, who lists her membership in the Republican National Lawyers Association on her resume, was appointed last year as the voting counsel for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

The division is charged with policing elections and guarding against discrimination against minorities.

(Researcher Tish Wells contributed to this article.)

jorgelito · 07-01-2007, 03:52 PM

This entire..."period", has been a debacle and a mockery of our system. I am willing to agree that it is "broken". The 3 branches are a complete mess (in my opinion) and the 4th estate has failed miserably in its duties.

The firing of the 9 attorneys is only the latest in a long line of offenses this administration has committed against the American people. It feels like blatant tampering to me that has no benefit or concern for the welfare of the American people. Not to mention the Plame disaster, handling of Katrina... the list is just too long.

As a conservative, I am appalled and disheartened at the lack of oversight, blatant corruption and disregard for our principles and institutions.

I think the scope is just too large. How can we indict an entire system or administration? Would we then become a failed state? I feel that we are "broken" in too many areas that I wouldn't even know where to start trying to fix things.

Maybe it is time to impeach Bush and Cheney (you would have to do both). Although the thought of Nancy Pelosi as the Chief Executive doesn't exactly thrill me either but I am willing to giver her a chance. I don't think we can wait until 2008. Our country's reputation and integrity are on the line.

reconmike · 07-01-2007, 05:24 PM

OMG!!!!!!! my scroll wheel is on fire!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah yeah yeah hang em all.

Willravel · 07-01-2007, 05:27 PM

Translation: I don't care enough about my country to read this.

reconmike · 07-01-2007, 08:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by willravel

Translation: I don't care enough about my country to read this.

Sorry Will your traslation skills leave something to be desired, these are the same posts or very simular ones as in 40 other cut and pastes that I have read.

And Will weren't you the one who said something about voting and smarties people and them being democrats? So what does thiis say about the people who were allegedly suppresed? If they were well within their rights to vote how could they not be smart enough to know this and vote anyway?

Just for the record I care plenty about my country, enough to don its uniform for over 20 years, now I pay my taxes so crack whores can spit puppies out and get more of it, I volunteer as a pop warner football head coach, and I vote, even though my vote on the national level is waste because I live in the most corrupt democratic state in the nation.

Willravel · 07-01-2007, 09:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by reconmike

Sorry Will your traslation skills leave something to be desired, these are the same posts or very simular ones as in 40 other cut and pastes that I have read.

So what are the points host is trying to make?

Quote:

Originally Posted by reconmike

And Will weren't you the one who said something about voting and smarties people and them being democrats? So what does thiis say about the people who were allegedly suppresed? If they were well within their rights to vote how could they not be smart enough to know this and vote anyway?

People are responsible for educating themselves, but that hardly means that they do.

Quote:

Originally Posted by reconmike

Just for the record I care plenty about my country, enough to don its uniform for over 20 years, now I pay my taxes so crack whores can spit puppies out and get more of it, I volunteer as a pop warner football head coach, and I vote, even though my vote on the national level is waste because I live in the most corrupt democratic state in the nation.

Our country has a uniform? Is it a t-shirt and jeans? If that's the case, I'm donning that uniform right now.

ubertuber · 07-01-2007, 09:39 PM

Can we please keep to the topic at hand or keep silent?

reconmike · 07-01-2007, 11:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by willravel

So what are the points host is trying to make?

The same points he is always trying to make, with the same cut and pastes,
the DOJ fires 8 attorneys, because they didnt prove voter fraud, no I mean because they didn't try and prosecute more dems, no no wait I meant they didn't donate to the republican party, I mean I mean they went after republicans, oh hell I dont know what the fuck his point is.
Maybe just maybe they serve at the pleasure of the president and he did not like the job they were doing.

Quote:

People are responsible for educating themselves, but that hardly means that they do.

I dont know how hard it is to produce proper ID when going to vote, I am sure the uneducated are well coached on which levers to pull right before they get their pack of smokes.

Quote:

Our country has a uniform? Is it a t-shirt and jeans? If that's the case, I'm donning that uniform right now.

Thats mighty impressive, leave the uniform to the republicans because thats the way it is in real life.
Democrats dodge drafts, run to canada, or are mostly the protected.

tecoyah · 07-02-2007, 03:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by reconmike

The same points he is always trying to make, with the same cut and pastes,
the DOJ fires 8 attorneys, because they didnt prove voter fraud, no I mean because they didn't try and prosecute more dems, no no wait I meant they didn't donate to the republican party, I mean I mean they went after republicans, oh hell I dont know what the fuck his point is.
Maybe just maybe they serve at the pleasure of the president and he did not like the job they were doing.

Quote:

Thats just it....isn't it. No one really knows why they were let go, but indications point toward a political motivation in the DOJ which is quite illegal. As Gonzalez watches his high level staff resign continuously I am sure he isnt worried at all that his Dept. has been compromised, might have been much easier to actually remember a few things while testifying before congress.....don't you think? And, while you are correct in that they all serve at the pleasure of the POTUS, it seems he was not "the Decider" on this one.

I dont know how hard it is to produce proper ID when going to vote, I am sure the uneducated are well coached on which levers to pull right before they get their pack of smokes.

Quote:

One can only hope you have placed more thought into this issue than simple derogatory remarks indicate. Also, the insinuations of voter fraud ring rather hallow considering similar accusation coming from your opponents.

Thats mighty impressive, leave the uniform to the republicans because thats the way it is in real life.
Democrats dodge drafts, run to canada, or are mostly the protected.

Again, questioning the opinion of your opponent by debasing his party with pointless and obviously generalized insult does very little to make you seem correct....it smells of desperation to be honest.

ubertuber · 07-02-2007, 04:57 AM

Continued off-topic posts will garner warnings. I'm not going to close the thread because 1 person can't think of anything topical to say. NO MORE THREADJACKING.

07-01-2007, 05:24 PM	#8 (permalink)
reconmike Thank You Jesus Location: Twilight Zone	OMG!!!!!!! my scroll wheel is on fire!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yeah yeah yeah hang em all. __________________ Where is Darwin when ya need him?

07-01-2007, 09:39 PM	#12 (permalink)
ubertuber spudly Location: Ellay	Can we please keep to the topic at hand or keep silent? __________________ Cogito ergo spud -- I think, therefore I yam

07-02-2007, 04:57 AM	#15 (permalink)
ubertuber spudly Location: Ellay	Continued off-topic posts will garner warnings. I'm not going to close the thread because 1 person can't think of anything topical to say. NO MORE THREADJACKING. __________________ Cogito ergo spud -- I think, therefore I yam

07-01-2007, 03:52 PM	#7 (permalink)
jorgelito All important elusive independent swing voter... Location: People's Republic of KKKalifornia	This entire..."period", has been a debacle and a mockery of our system. I am willing to agree that it is "broken". The 3 branches are a complete mess (in my opinion) and the 4th estate has failed miserably in its duties. The firing of the 9 attorneys is only the latest in a long line of offenses this administration has committed against the American people. It feels like blatant tampering to me that has no benefit or concern for the welfare of the American people. Not to mention the Plame disaster, handling of Katrina... the list is just too long. As a conservative, I am appalled and disheartened at the lack of oversight, blatant corruption and disregard for our principles and institutions. I think the scope is just too large. How can we indict an entire system or administration? Would we then become a failed state? I feel that we are "broken" in too many areas that I wouldn't even know where to start trying to fix things. Maybe it is time to impeach Bush and Cheney (you would have to do both). Although the thought of Nancy Pelosi as the Chief Executive doesn't exactly thrill me either but I am willing to giver her a chance. I don't think we can wait until 2008. Our country's reputation and integrity are on the line.

07-01-2007, 05:27 PM	#9 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	Translation: I don't care enough about my country to read this.