Category Archives: Politics: The Party of Sleaze

The New York Times promotes the Predatorgate cover-up to a full page one scandal.

Glenn Greenwald has excellent play-by-play of the more recent developments.

One unanswered question: What On Earth were these people thinking? When they decided to take the cover-up option rather than investigate, were they really so arrogant as to think they could sweep it all under the rug? So uncaring as to the possible consequences for Senate pages that they didn’t even want to find out if there was a serious problem? Or so clubby and confident in each other that they believed their colleague’s assurances that there was nothing to worry about?

Maybe. Then again, remember this important rule about the modern GOP: Even when you factor in that they are much worse than you think, they’re still much worse than you think.

In that spirit, I bring you this commentary from a shrewd if also cynical e-mail correspondent:

I think that the reason that the GOP leadership allowed Foley to hang around knowing that he was a sexual predator will soon become clear: in machine politics you have to know who to trust and the only people who you can put a great deal of trust in are people who you can blackmail.

Its not a coincidence that Foley, Ney, Cunningham have been convicted, DeLay is indicted and Doolittle and Burns are facing imminent indictments. Thats the way machine politics works, the only people who can be allowed into the inner circle are people who they have the goods on.

RICO claims could be built on less.

I don’t know who Digby (the proprietor of “Hullabaloo”) is, but s/he has a scary smart analysis of the next page of the Rove playbook at The Theme:

The Republicans have figured out something that the Democrats refuse to understand. All political messages can be useful, no matter which side has created it. You use them all situationally. The Republicans have been adopting our slogans and memes for years. They get that the way people hear this stuff often is not in a particularly partisan sense. They just hear it, in a sort of disembodied way. Over time thye become comfortable with it and it can be exploited for all sorts of different reasons.

In this instance, there has been a steady underground rumbling about stolen elections since 2000. Now we know that it’s the Republicans who have been doing the stealing —- and the complaining has been coming from our side. But all most people hear is “stolen election” and they are just as likely to paste that charge onto us as they are onto them. It’s like an ear worm. You don’t know the song its from, necessarily, but you can’t get it out of your head.

We have created an ear worm that the Republicans are going to appropriate — and they will use it much more aggressively and effectively than our side did. They are already gearing up for it. As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections.

See, they’re doing it with all those illegal immigrants they have invited here to take your jobs…

Forgive me for quoting myself, but it’s time to reprint Lest We Forget: Gonzales Appeared to Obstruct Justice in the Plame Affair, with a little extra commentary. First, the rerun:

Do not forget that Gonzales — nominated to be the nation’s top cop — is the guy who when the Plame investigation was bearing down on the White House ensured that the guilty parties had all the time they could want to shred everything incriminating:

Senator Harkin, quoted in the “Congressional Record” (emphasis added):

Let me give a quick recap of the timeline. It started with the President’s deception in his State of the Union Address in January. In his remarks, Mr. Bush stated Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. A few months later, in July, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s op-ed appears in the New York Times, questioning the President’s assertion.

Then in order to discredit Wilson and “seek revenge” on Wilson, senior administration officials leaked to the press the identity of Wilson’s wife and the fact she was a CIA operative, thereby undercutting our national security and clearly violating Federal law.

This happened in early July. Let’s see what happened since.

On July 24, Senator Schumer calls on the FBI Director to open a criminal investigation into the leak of a CIA operative based on that column.

In late July, the FBI notified Senator Schumer that they had done an inquiry into the CIA.

Then it appears nothing happened for 2 months.

On September 23, the Attorney General says he and CIA Director Tenet sent a memo to the FBI requesting an investigation.

On September 26, the Department of Justice officially launches its investigation.

Interestingly, it took 4 days after that “official” launch for the Justice Department to call White House Counsel Gonzales and notify him of the official investigation. Gonzalez then asked for an extra day before the Justice Department gave the White House the official notice, which means all documents and records must be preserved.

A recent letter was sent to the President from Senators Daschle, Schumer, Levin, and Biden which also expresses concern about this break from regular procedure.

They wrote:

Every former prosecutor with whom we have spoken has said that the first step in such an investigation would be to ensure all potentially relevant evidence is preserved, yet the Justice Department waited four days before making a formal request for documents.

Interestingly, the letter goes on:

When the Justice Department finally asked the White House to order employees to preserve documents, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales asked for permission to delay transmitting the order to preserve evidence until morning. The request for a delay was granted. Again, every former prosecutor with whom we have spoken has said that such a delay is a significant departure from standard practice.

That is what has been happening–departure from standard practice.

I am also troubled that the White House Counsel’s Office is serving
as “gatekeeper'” for all the documents the Justice Department has requested from the White House. Mr. Gonzales’ office said he would not rule out seeking to withhold documents under a claim of executive privilege or national security.

What kind of a zoo is this outfit?

What’s new is the fevered speculation about Rove either being indicted, or becoming a cooperating witness. The blogs are atwitter with the idea that this could be bad for Cheney, and I suppose in the highly unlikely event that Rove sings, this might be true.

But I can’t help but wonder if a good prosecutor like Fitzgerald might not have had his eye drawn to the chronology above, which certainly suggests the possibility of obstruction of justice. Enabled — intentionally? — by the now-Attorney General of the United States, our nation’s top law enforcement officer.

Further evidence of domestic subversion by our enemies: Moles in the White House killed a (probably) legal NSA data mining project with built-in privacy protections.

The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project — not because it failed to work — but because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency’s surveillance powers, according to several intelligence officials.

The agency opted instead to adopt only one component of the program, which produced a far less capable and rigorous program. It remains the backbone of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance efforts, tracking domestic and overseas communications from a vast databank of information, and monitoring selected calls.

It is a given that the inventiveness of our nation’s enemies surpasses human imagination. Even so, could anyone ever have imagined they’d come up with something as fiendish as this?