Another day in lefty land and they are going absolutely apes&*t over the Gonzales "scandal". Take a look at this headline:
Or this one:
Of course they all gloss over the fact that nothing new, absolutely nothing, was found in the Aide’s testimony:
Contrary to his public statements, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was deeply involved in the firing of eight federal prosecutors, his former top aide said Thursday, adding that the final decision on who was to be dismissed was made by Gonzales and President Bush’s former counsel.
"I don’t think the attorney general’s statement that he was not involved in any discussions of U.S. attorney removals was accurate," Kyle Sampson, who quit this month as Gonzales’ chief of staff, told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I remember discussing with him this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign."
Hmmmmm, so Gonzales was involved in THE PROCESS, as Gonzales has already claimed he was, not on who to pick. (Course, if he was involved in picking out the attorneys it wouldn’t be a scandal either, that is the Administrations prerogative)
Get the first paragraph? "Deeply involved"…..nice. Discussing the process of asking certain attorneys to resign is now deeply involved. Only in our biased MSM will we find this kind of crapola.
Under questioning from Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, Mr. Sampson said he did not recall a single instance in which someone from the Bush administration suggested removing a United States attorney for “an improper reason.” But over all, the questions and answers cast Mr. Gonzales in an unflattering light.
Nothing improper but still unflattering. As usual, no crime but hey….lets burn the Republican at the stake. No crime in outing a CIA desk jockey? That’s ok, we will indict someone with a faulty memory for lying about the non-crime. No crime involved in firing politically appointed employee’s…that’s ok, we will indict the AG via our MSM.
Did Harry Reid’s land deals cast him in a unflattering light? How about Pelosi and her CordeValle Golf Course? Ted Kennedy and his love of estate taxes for everyone else but himself? Nope, according to our MSM and the left none of that casts these guys in a "unflattering" light.
Ah well, I suppose we’re all used to this hypocrisy nowadays. Dafydd put up a great timeline based on what and when we know at this point on the "scandal"
- Around the time of the 2004 election and for some time afterwards, President Bush, Alberto Gonzales, and others receive complaints about some U.S. Attorneys: They’ve got a different set of prosecutorial priorities than does the administration; they’re bad managers; they’re unresponsive.
- Bush tells Gonzales to do something about it. Such appointments aren’t eternal; some people should go, others should stay.
- Gonzales considers this a completely non-controversial issue (as it was and always had been), so he dumps it in the lap of his assisstant, Kyle Sampson.
- Sampson proposes firing them all, but Gonzales rejects that idea. It’s positively Clintonian.
- Sampson has some discussions with Gonzales about what process to use to figure out who to sack, how to select replacements, how to go about getting the new attorneys confirmed (or whether to use the USA Patriot Act to bypass Senate confirmation), and finally how to announce the sackings.
- Sampson and others in the Justice Department hold discussions, meetings, send e-mails back and forth, talk on the phone, pore over records, all about which attorneys stay and which are asked to leave. There is at this time no evidence that Gonzales was any part of this process.
- The Justice Department group draws up a final list of people they want to replace. The list is sent to the AG.
- Gonzales signs off on the final list and gets the president’s approval. He is still unaware that, notwithstanding all the other times U.S. Attorneys have been fired for similar reasons — and notwithstanding President Bill Clinton’s firing of all 93 U.S. Attorneys when he first took office in 1993 (one, Michael Chertoff, slopped over to 1994) — this time, it will be played by the press as a horrific and unprecedented abuse of power.
- Democrats get hold of the list and gin up a fake controversy by falsely alleging that U.S. Attorneys were fired to stop prosecutions of Republicans. There is no evidence of this, but the Democratic Party’s media wing promotes it as inarguable.
- Gonzales is asked whether he participated in discussions about the fired attorneys. He evidently interprets the question as asking whether he participated in the discussions about which attorneys, in particular, to fire; he says no, he left that to Sampson.
- Gonzales subsequently pours gasoline on the fire; when he is assailed in the press by nasty sound-bites from Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, Gonzales apologizes, clarifies, offers to testify, and showing other signs of weakness. Democrats scent blood in the water.
- Democrats threaten to subpoena top presidential advisors, including Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, for political show trials — which would likely violate the constitutional separation of powers doctrine. Nevertheless, Sen. Pat "Leaky" Leahy (D-VT, 95%) obtains the authority to issue those subpoenas… on a party-line vote in the J-Com. But he seems to have quietly dropped the idea of issuing them.
- (Was it all a bluff, just blustering to make Leahy look stronger than he really is? We’ll know after a couple more weeks, I think.)
- Democrats release documents showing that Gonzales participated in some process meetings; the elite media takes the cue, running the story as if this "contradicts" Gonzales’ earlier statement.
- Numerous members of Congress — mostly Democrats but a few rancid Republicans, such as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA, 43%) — accuse Gonzales of "lying" and "misleading" Congress when he said he wasn’t involved in the attorney-firing discussions. Again, Democrats cast disagreement about the scope of the question as a federal felony, hoping to send the Attorney General of the United States to prison over political differences.
- (Not so) shockingly, several conservative commentators and bloggers ("I name no names…"), who never liked Gonzales in the first place, seize upon these accusations to join with Democrats in calling for Gonzales’ ouster… hoping, evidently, to ensure he won’t be named to the Supreme Court.
- Kyle Sampson voluntarily testifies before the J-Com, saying pretty much all of the above. The Democrats leap upon the table and perform the Grand Triumphal March from Aida, acting as if this proves everything they had alleged. (Academy awards are seriously being considered.)
This is the Waxman’s theory of a thousand papercuts coming to fruition. Investigate, investigate and investigate. Doesn’t matter there were no crimes involved, doesn’t matter that Clinton fired all 93 attorneys and a few more later. Doesn’t matter that Carter did the same thing, and was cast in a unflattering light about how much he knew about the firing, and how much he was involved in the firing:
Former President Jimmy Carter “lied then” about firing a U.S. attorney in 1978 investigating Democratic officials in Philadelphia and “lies now” in condemning the Bush Administration’s firing of eight U.S. attorneys and calling for Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales to go.
“All this Sunday school teaching does not seem to have the intended effect,” said the U.S. attorney removed by Carter, David Marston of Philadelphia, in a reference to the former President’s avocation as a Bible School teacher on Sundays.
[…]“I don’t see a comparison,” replied Carter, “I think — I think the issue that’s in the forefront of the news right now is not that those attorneys were fired, not even that they were fired because of some political purposes. The President has a right to do that. It was a lying about it that has precipitated the altercation.”
In response to Holt’s subsequent question about whether Gozales should have to step down, Carter said without explanation: “Yes, I do.”
What does Dave Marston think? “He’s trying to rewrite history,” was the response of the 64-year-old former prosecutor to the President who fired him. “Under the standard he has imposed on Gonzales, the President should have fired Atty. Gen. Griffin Bell in 1978.” Although it is so far unclear how much Gonzales knew about what the U.S. prosecutors were working on when they were forced out and what reasons were behind their exits, Marston pointed out that then-Rep. Joshua Eilberg (D.-Pa.) had actually called Carter on November 4, 1977 to demand Marston’s ouster and that the Prsident, in turn, called Bell and told him to “hurry up” in finding a new U.S. attorney in Philadelphia. Eilberg himself was the subject of a corruption probe by Marston’s office and, as Marston recalled to me, “the Justice Department was aware of this because I told Russell Baker [Bell’s top aide] that Eilberg was under investigation. And Russell Baker, who was a stand-up guy, confirmed this.”
[…]In reviewing the transcript of Carter’s “Today” interview, Marston pointed out that the opening segment featured a clip of Carter from a news conference on January 12, 1978 in which he is asked about the Marston sacking and says: “I’ve not interfered at all.”
“That was on January 12th,” the former prosecutor pointed out, “and yet the evidence shows that he had called his attorney general about replacing me two months earlier.
“That was a blatant lie then — and President Carter has had 30 years to think about it.”
But we’re only talking about the President of the United States, not the Attorney General. Why wasn’t Carter investigated back then? Congress was in the hands of the Democrats…..
Nope, no one cast in a unflattering light there.
It’s gonna be one big witch hunt after another fella’s….better get used to it.
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