Showing posts with label John Ashcroft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Ashcroft. Show all posts
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Cheney Involved In DOJ Mess....Big Time
Surprise, Surprise!
Is there any slimy, disgusting thing with which he is nnot involved?
Is there any down side to impeaching him?
Official: Cheney Urged WiretapsStand-In for Ashcroft Alleges Interference
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 7, 2007; A03
Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday.
The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey.
Comey's disclosures, made in response to written questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, indicate that Cheney and his aides were more closely involved than previously known in a fierce internal battle over the legality of the warrantless surveillance program. The program allowed the National Security Agency to monitor phone calls and e-mails between the United States and overseas.
Comey said that Cheney's office later blocked the promotion of a senior Justice Department lawyer, Patrick Philbin, because of his role in raising concerns about the surveillance.
The disclosures also provide further details about the role played by then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales. He visited Ashcroft in his hospital room and wrote an internal memorandum on the surveillance program shortly afterward, according to Comey's responses.
Gonzales is now the attorney general. He faces possible congressional votes of no-confidence because of his handling of the firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year.
"How are you, General?" Gonzales asked Ashcroft at the hospital, according to Comey.
"Not well," replied Ashcroft, who had just undergone gallbladder surgery and was battling pancreatitis.
The new details follow Comey's gripping testimony last month about the visit by Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., then President Bush's chief of staff, to Ashcroft's hospital bed on the night of March 10, 2004. The two Bush aides tried to persuade Ashcroft to renew the authorization of the NSA surveillance program, after Comey and other Justice Department officials had said they would not certify the legality of the effort, according to the testimony and other officials.
Ashcroft refused, noting that Comey had been designated as acting attorney general during his illness.
The episode prompted sharp criticism from Democrats and some Republicans, who questioned whether Gonzales and Card were attempting to take advantage of a sick man to get around legal objections from government lawyers. It is unclear who directed the two Bush aides to make the visit.
Democrats said yesterday that the new details from Comey raise further questions about the role of Cheney and other White House officials in the episode.
"Mr. Comey has confirmed what we suspected for a while -- that White House hands guided Justice Department business," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). "The vice president's fingerprints are all over the effort to strong-arm Justice on the NSA program, and the obvious next question is: Exactly what role did the president play?"
A White House spokesman declined to comment.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the surveillance program "was always subject to rigorous oversight and review. . . . We have acknowledged that there have been disagreements about other intelligence activities, as one would expect."
Democrats have criticized Gonzales for testifying last year that there were no "serious disagreements" about the program.
According to Comey, the hospital visit was preceded by a March 9, 2004, meeting at the White House on the Justice Department objections. It was attended by Cheney; Gonzales; Card; Cheney's counsel then, David S. Addington; and others, Comey said.
Comey also named eight Justice Department officials who were prepared to quit if the White House had not backed down, including FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, current U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg of Alexandria and Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel and led an internal legal review of the surveillance program.
Comey said that the review "focused on current operations during late 2003 and early 2004, and the legal basis for the program." He declined to answer detailed questions about the program or the review, citing restrictions on classified information.
Bush confirmed the existence of the surveillance effort after news reports in December 2005, saying it was authorized after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and was vital to protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. The program has since been put under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees clandestine eavesdropping in the United States.
Staff writer Amy Goldstein contributed to this report.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Bush's "Monica" Problem
A sordid tale of real abuse of power that affects all Americans........
By Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas
Newsweek
June 4, 2007 issue - The United States Department of Justice has not always been above politics. John F. Kennedy, after all, appointed his brother and consigliere Robert to be attorney general. But the Justice Department is supposed to stand for the rule of law—to be the enforcer of the laws of the United States, not the place presidents go to get around the law. Independence is an important tradition in the columned limestone building on Constitution Avenue. It is worth remembering that before Richard Nixon could find someone at the Justice Department willing to fire the Watergate special prosecutor in 1973, he had to accept the resignations of the attorney general, Elliot Richardson, and the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus. (Solicitor General Robert Bork finally did the deed.)
So consider these scenes from March 2004, described by two former top Justice officials who, like other ex-officials interviewed by NEWSWEEK, did not wish to be identified discussing sensitive internal matters. Attorney General John Ashcroft is really sick. About to give a press conference in Virginia, he is stricken with pain so severe he has to lie down on the floor. Taken to the hospital for an emergency gallbladder operation, he hallucinates under medication as he lies, near death, in intensive care. On the night after his operation, he has two visitors: White House chief of staff Andrew Card and presidential counsel Alberto Gonzales. As described in public testimony, they want Ashcroft to sign a document authorizing the government's top-secret eavesdropping program to go on. The attorney general, who thinks the program is illegal, refuses.
Back at the Justice Department, there is an equally extraordinary scene. Appalled by the White House's heavy-handed attempt to coerce the gravely ill attorney general, virtually the entire top leadership of the Justice Department is threatening to resign. The group includes the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum and the chief of the Criminal Division, Chris Wray. Some of them gather in the conference room of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who describes Ashcroft's bravely turning away the president's men from his hospital bed. The mood that night in the conference room was tense—and sober.
"This was a showdown," says a former senior Justice Department official who was there.
"Everybody understood the choice they were making and the gravity of the situation. Everybody knew what the stakes were." A different source estimated that as many as 30 top DOJ officials would have resigned.
The next day Comey is summoned to the White House to meet with President Bush. The details remain murky. But it takes two weeks before a compromise is reached—averting the spectacle of mass resignation by putting more legal controls on the eavesdropping program.
Gonzales, the president's lawyer and Texas buddy, went on to replace Ashcroft as attorney general. Today he is twisting slowly in the wind—a phrase from Watergate—facing a vote of no confidence from the U.S. Senate. Only the president's still unflagging support has kept him in office. Gonzales has been accused of politicizing the Justice Department by presiding over the firing of U.S. attorneys—apparently so they could be replaced by more dependably loyal partisans. While late-night comics have ridiculed Gonzales as clueless, congressional investigators and reporters have looked for more-sinister plots. For weeks, Washington awaited the testimony of Monica Goodling, who was described as the administration's enforcer of political purity inside the Justice Department.
Goodling's testimony last week was a soft sell. She did not seem like a cold-blooded commissar. On her Regent Law School Web site (class of '99), she comes across as sweetly naive, hoping to make the world "a better place" and urging everyone to "smile." Under oath (and given immunity from prosecution), she seemed shy and a little overwhelmed, more Rosemary Woods than Madame Defarge, although she never got rattled or resorted to histrionics. Wringing her hands beneath the witness table, she acknowledged that she may have improperly used political considerations to choose career prosecutors. "I crossed the line," she said, taking a deep breath, a Christian girl who succumbed to temptation. Carefully prepared by a shrewd lawyer, John Dowd, she suggested, almost in passing, that Gonzales may have crossed another line by discussing with her his account of how the U.S. attorneys were fired. The implication was that Gonzales had been subtly trying to coach her testimony. "I just thought maybe we shouldn't have that conversation," she said.
If Goodling's testimony helps to bring down Gonzales, a distinct possibility, President Bush will be exposed to more questions and dragged into a messy confirmation battle over Gonzales's successor. And so Goodling, like Nixon's unfortunate secretary Rosemary Woods, may be destined to be a footnote in history—but an important one.
Goodling admitted checking the political donations of some job applicants before hiring them for jobs that are supposed to be apolitical. While crass, her actions did not threaten to bring down the republic. Still, they are part of a broader and more troubling picture—a slow and stealthy erosion of the independence of the Justice Department. President Bush's personal involvement remains uncertain, as does the precise role of his chief political adviser, Karl Rove. Nonetheless, the clearest evidence of legal subversion comes not from congressional Democrats, but from once loyal Bush conservatives who worked at the Justice Department.
The trouble began shortly after 9/11, when the administration began looking for tough measures to head off another terrorist attack. The Justice Department has a relatively obscure department known as the Office of Legal Counsel. Typically staffed by brilliant young lawyers, the OLC opines on the legality and constitutionality of administration policies. One of the stars of OLC was a cocky young lawyer named John Yoo. After 9/11, Yoo began writing opinions giving the administration exceptional latitude to fight terrorism. Yoo's memos were used to justify both the secret eavesdropping program, which for the first time allowed the government to listen in on American citizens without obtaining a court warrant, and aggressive interrogation methods, like water boarding.
While easygoing and congenial on the surface, Yoo was a fierce bureaucratic infighter with a penchant for circumventing his superiors. Though all the top officials at Justice were conservative Republicans, Yoo seemed to regard them as political dolts. "He had this calm, unruffled, almost 'devil may care' attitude when he talked about issues that were extraordinarily sensitive," recalled a former Justice Department official. "He would sort of come flying by your office and say things like, 'We've done a little analysis, it's no big deal'." Only later, the official said, would he discover that Yoo had sent the White House an opinion authorizing some sweeping new—and constitutionally dubious—program.
Yoo was increasingly seen as a rogue operator inside the Justice Department. Officials were suspicious of his ties to David Addington, counsel to Vice President Cheney. The vice president's office took a hard-line view that the executive branch should not be trammeled in the war on terror by legislators and bureaucrats. Yoo was "out of control," recalled a former Ashcroft aide. Almost without exception, this conflict stayed behind closed doors. (Yoo declined to respond on the record, but he has told others that Ashcroft was fully briefed by him and approved his memos, and that his critics are now engaged in creative "Monday-morning quarterbacking.")
The bad feelings seemed to come to a head in 2003, when there was a vacancy to head OLC. At the White House, Gonzales wanted Yoo, and was so insistent that he took the matter to Bush. According to the former Ashcroft aide who did not want to openly discuss matters involving the president, Bush was surprised to learn that Ashcroft opposed Yoo as a renegade. A compromise was reached: a conservative lawyer named Jack Goldsmith was put in charge of OLC.
But the fight was really just beginning. Carefully reviewing Yoo's carte blanche memos, Goldsmith became convinced that the Justice Department had been signing off on memos approving initiatives, like wiretapping and water boarding, that were not legally supportable. Goldsmith took the matter to Ashcroft's deputy, Comey, and to Patrick Philbin, Comey's No. 2. Philbin's sterling conservative legal résumé tracked Yoo's—they had both clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas at the U.S. Supreme Court. But Philbin and Goldsmith were adamant. The Justice Department could no longer sign off on the wiretapping program, which had been expanded to wiretap more U.S. residents. "This was not ideological," recalled a former Ashcroft aide. "This was about the difference between pushing the limits to the edge of the line and crossing the line."
Bush's role has remained shadowy throughout the controversy over the eavesdropping program. But there are strong suggestions that he was an active presence. On the night after Ashcroft's operation, as Ashcroft lay groggy in his bed, his wife, Janet, took a phone call. It was Andy Card, asking if he could come over with Gonzales to speak to the attorney general. Mrs. Ashcroft said no, her husband was too sick for visitors. The phone rang again, and this time Mrs. Ashcroft acquiesced to a visit from the White House officials.
Who was the second caller, one with enough power to persuade Mrs. Ashcroft to relent? The former Ashcroft aide who described this scene would not say, but senior DOJ officials had little doubt who it was—the president. (The White House would not comment on the president's role.)
Ashcroft's chief of staff, David Ayres, then called Comey, Ashcroft's deputy, to warn him that the White House duo was on the way. With an FBI escort, Comey raced to the hospital to try to stop them, but Ashcroft himself was strong enough to turn down his White House visitors' request.
The morning after the scene at Ashcroft's hospital bed, the president met with Comey. "We had a full and frank discussion, very informed. He was very focused," Comey later testified, choosing his words carefully. But it wasn't until Bush had met with Mueller that the president agreed to take steps (still unspecified, but probably involving more oversight) to bring the eavesdropping program back inside the boundaries of the law. Mueller has never said what he told the president, but it is a good bet that he said he would resign if the changes were not made. Bush could not afford to see Mueller go, nor could he risk losing the rest of the Justice Department leadership over a matter of principle in an election year.
The confrontation over the eavesdropping program "seared" the relationship between the White House and Ashcroft's team at Justice, according to a former senior Justice official. Within months, many of the top officials had resigned or started making plans to do so. Solicitor General Ted Olson was the first to go that summer. On Election Day 2004, Ashcroft—sensing that he would not be asked to stay for a second term—personally wrote his letter of resignation, and Bush promptly tapped Gonzales to replace him. Comey announced his resignation the next summer.
In some ways, the squabbling over political appointments to the Justice Department seems small time, at least in comparison with the dramatic constitutional confrontations over wiretapping and torture. In her job as White House liaison to the Justice Department, Monica Goodling behaved more like a Chicago alderman than the usual Harvard- or Yale-trained legal scholars who fill those types of prestigious jobs for young lawyers. The Justice Department's inspector general is investigating whether Goodling broke civil-service laws, which require nonpartisan appointments for career prosecutors and immigration judges. Goodling is one of many recent graduates of conservative Christian schools like Regent Law School (founded by evangelist Pat Robertson) to come to Washington to work in the Bush administration. But she denied ever using a religious litmus test.
Goodling's only crime was her lack of subtlety, said Mark Corallo, the Justice Department's chief of public affairs under Ashcroft, and Goodling's onetime boss. "She probably was a little too overt about it," Corallo told NEWSWEEK. "But let's face it—the Democrats do this, too, they all do it. The idea that career employees are above politics is total crap. The so-called career employees are mostly liberal Democrats." He noted that in the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco, career employees refused for months to hang portraits of Bush, Cheney and Ashcroft.
Still, there were some former Justice officials who took a loftier view. One of them was Comey. Every day, he told the House Judiciary Committee, prosecutors must argue cases before juries of all political stripes; if they are seen as little more than political apparatchiks, it will be the death knell for many legitimate cases. To him, the charge that prosecutors were being picked for their politics was the "worst" allegation he had heard yet about the Justice Department. "If that's what was going on," he said, "that strikes at the core of what the Department of Justice is." Or was.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
By Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas
Newsweek
June 4, 2007 issue - The United States Department of Justice has not always been above politics. John F. Kennedy, after all, appointed his brother and consigliere Robert to be attorney general. But the Justice Department is supposed to stand for the rule of law—to be the enforcer of the laws of the United States, not the place presidents go to get around the law. Independence is an important tradition in the columned limestone building on Constitution Avenue. It is worth remembering that before Richard Nixon could find someone at the Justice Department willing to fire the Watergate special prosecutor in 1973, he had to accept the resignations of the attorney general, Elliot Richardson, and the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus. (Solicitor General Robert Bork finally did the deed.)
So consider these scenes from March 2004, described by two former top Justice officials who, like other ex-officials interviewed by NEWSWEEK, did not wish to be identified discussing sensitive internal matters. Attorney General John Ashcroft is really sick. About to give a press conference in Virginia, he is stricken with pain so severe he has to lie down on the floor. Taken to the hospital for an emergency gallbladder operation, he hallucinates under medication as he lies, near death, in intensive care. On the night after his operation, he has two visitors: White House chief of staff Andrew Card and presidential counsel Alberto Gonzales. As described in public testimony, they want Ashcroft to sign a document authorizing the government's top-secret eavesdropping program to go on. The attorney general, who thinks the program is illegal, refuses.
Back at the Justice Department, there is an equally extraordinary scene. Appalled by the White House's heavy-handed attempt to coerce the gravely ill attorney general, virtually the entire top leadership of the Justice Department is threatening to resign. The group includes the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum and the chief of the Criminal Division, Chris Wray. Some of them gather in the conference room of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who describes Ashcroft's bravely turning away the president's men from his hospital bed. The mood that night in the conference room was tense—and sober.
"This was a showdown," says a former senior Justice Department official who was there.
"Everybody understood the choice they were making and the gravity of the situation. Everybody knew what the stakes were." A different source estimated that as many as 30 top DOJ officials would have resigned.
The next day Comey is summoned to the White House to meet with President Bush. The details remain murky. But it takes two weeks before a compromise is reached—averting the spectacle of mass resignation by putting more legal controls on the eavesdropping program.
Gonzales, the president's lawyer and Texas buddy, went on to replace Ashcroft as attorney general. Today he is twisting slowly in the wind—a phrase from Watergate—facing a vote of no confidence from the U.S. Senate. Only the president's still unflagging support has kept him in office. Gonzales has been accused of politicizing the Justice Department by presiding over the firing of U.S. attorneys—apparently so they could be replaced by more dependably loyal partisans. While late-night comics have ridiculed Gonzales as clueless, congressional investigators and reporters have looked for more-sinister plots. For weeks, Washington awaited the testimony of Monica Goodling, who was described as the administration's enforcer of political purity inside the Justice Department.
Goodling's testimony last week was a soft sell. She did not seem like a cold-blooded commissar. On her Regent Law School Web site (class of '99), she comes across as sweetly naive, hoping to make the world "a better place" and urging everyone to "smile." Under oath (and given immunity from prosecution), she seemed shy and a little overwhelmed, more Rosemary Woods than Madame Defarge, although she never got rattled or resorted to histrionics. Wringing her hands beneath the witness table, she acknowledged that she may have improperly used political considerations to choose career prosecutors. "I crossed the line," she said, taking a deep breath, a Christian girl who succumbed to temptation. Carefully prepared by a shrewd lawyer, John Dowd, she suggested, almost in passing, that Gonzales may have crossed another line by discussing with her his account of how the U.S. attorneys were fired. The implication was that Gonzales had been subtly trying to coach her testimony. "I just thought maybe we shouldn't have that conversation," she said.
If Goodling's testimony helps to bring down Gonzales, a distinct possibility, President Bush will be exposed to more questions and dragged into a messy confirmation battle over Gonzales's successor. And so Goodling, like Nixon's unfortunate secretary Rosemary Woods, may be destined to be a footnote in history—but an important one.
Goodling admitted checking the political donations of some job applicants before hiring them for jobs that are supposed to be apolitical. While crass, her actions did not threaten to bring down the republic. Still, they are part of a broader and more troubling picture—a slow and stealthy erosion of the independence of the Justice Department. President Bush's personal involvement remains uncertain, as does the precise role of his chief political adviser, Karl Rove. Nonetheless, the clearest evidence of legal subversion comes not from congressional Democrats, but from once loyal Bush conservatives who worked at the Justice Department.
The trouble began shortly after 9/11, when the administration began looking for tough measures to head off another terrorist attack. The Justice Department has a relatively obscure department known as the Office of Legal Counsel. Typically staffed by brilliant young lawyers, the OLC opines on the legality and constitutionality of administration policies. One of the stars of OLC was a cocky young lawyer named John Yoo. After 9/11, Yoo began writing opinions giving the administration exceptional latitude to fight terrorism. Yoo's memos were used to justify both the secret eavesdropping program, which for the first time allowed the government to listen in on American citizens without obtaining a court warrant, and aggressive interrogation methods, like water boarding.
While easygoing and congenial on the surface, Yoo was a fierce bureaucratic infighter with a penchant for circumventing his superiors. Though all the top officials at Justice were conservative Republicans, Yoo seemed to regard them as political dolts. "He had this calm, unruffled, almost 'devil may care' attitude when he talked about issues that were extraordinarily sensitive," recalled a former Justice Department official. "He would sort of come flying by your office and say things like, 'We've done a little analysis, it's no big deal'." Only later, the official said, would he discover that Yoo had sent the White House an opinion authorizing some sweeping new—and constitutionally dubious—program.
Yoo was increasingly seen as a rogue operator inside the Justice Department. Officials were suspicious of his ties to David Addington, counsel to Vice President Cheney. The vice president's office took a hard-line view that the executive branch should not be trammeled in the war on terror by legislators and bureaucrats. Yoo was "out of control," recalled a former Ashcroft aide. Almost without exception, this conflict stayed behind closed doors. (Yoo declined to respond on the record, but he has told others that Ashcroft was fully briefed by him and approved his memos, and that his critics are now engaged in creative "Monday-morning quarterbacking.")
The bad feelings seemed to come to a head in 2003, when there was a vacancy to head OLC. At the White House, Gonzales wanted Yoo, and was so insistent that he took the matter to Bush. According to the former Ashcroft aide who did not want to openly discuss matters involving the president, Bush was surprised to learn that Ashcroft opposed Yoo as a renegade. A compromise was reached: a conservative lawyer named Jack Goldsmith was put in charge of OLC.
But the fight was really just beginning. Carefully reviewing Yoo's carte blanche memos, Goldsmith became convinced that the Justice Department had been signing off on memos approving initiatives, like wiretapping and water boarding, that were not legally supportable. Goldsmith took the matter to Ashcroft's deputy, Comey, and to Patrick Philbin, Comey's No. 2. Philbin's sterling conservative legal résumé tracked Yoo's—they had both clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas at the U.S. Supreme Court. But Philbin and Goldsmith were adamant. The Justice Department could no longer sign off on the wiretapping program, which had been expanded to wiretap more U.S. residents. "This was not ideological," recalled a former Ashcroft aide. "This was about the difference between pushing the limits to the edge of the line and crossing the line."
Bush's role has remained shadowy throughout the controversy over the eavesdropping program. But there are strong suggestions that he was an active presence. On the night after Ashcroft's operation, as Ashcroft lay groggy in his bed, his wife, Janet, took a phone call. It was Andy Card, asking if he could come over with Gonzales to speak to the attorney general. Mrs. Ashcroft said no, her husband was too sick for visitors. The phone rang again, and this time Mrs. Ashcroft acquiesced to a visit from the White House officials.
Who was the second caller, one with enough power to persuade Mrs. Ashcroft to relent? The former Ashcroft aide who described this scene would not say, but senior DOJ officials had little doubt who it was—the president. (The White House would not comment on the president's role.)
Ashcroft's chief of staff, David Ayres, then called Comey, Ashcroft's deputy, to warn him that the White House duo was on the way. With an FBI escort, Comey raced to the hospital to try to stop them, but Ashcroft himself was strong enough to turn down his White House visitors' request.
The morning after the scene at Ashcroft's hospital bed, the president met with Comey. "We had a full and frank discussion, very informed. He was very focused," Comey later testified, choosing his words carefully. But it wasn't until Bush had met with Mueller that the president agreed to take steps (still unspecified, but probably involving more oversight) to bring the eavesdropping program back inside the boundaries of the law. Mueller has never said what he told the president, but it is a good bet that he said he would resign if the changes were not made. Bush could not afford to see Mueller go, nor could he risk losing the rest of the Justice Department leadership over a matter of principle in an election year.
The confrontation over the eavesdropping program "seared" the relationship between the White House and Ashcroft's team at Justice, according to a former senior Justice official. Within months, many of the top officials had resigned or started making plans to do so. Solicitor General Ted Olson was the first to go that summer. On Election Day 2004, Ashcroft—sensing that he would not be asked to stay for a second term—personally wrote his letter of resignation, and Bush promptly tapped Gonzales to replace him. Comey announced his resignation the next summer.
In some ways, the squabbling over political appointments to the Justice Department seems small time, at least in comparison with the dramatic constitutional confrontations over wiretapping and torture. In her job as White House liaison to the Justice Department, Monica Goodling behaved more like a Chicago alderman than the usual Harvard- or Yale-trained legal scholars who fill those types of prestigious jobs for young lawyers. The Justice Department's inspector general is investigating whether Goodling broke civil-service laws, which require nonpartisan appointments for career prosecutors and immigration judges. Goodling is one of many recent graduates of conservative Christian schools like Regent Law School (founded by evangelist Pat Robertson) to come to Washington to work in the Bush administration. But she denied ever using a religious litmus test.
Goodling's only crime was her lack of subtlety, said Mark Corallo, the Justice Department's chief of public affairs under Ashcroft, and Goodling's onetime boss. "She probably was a little too overt about it," Corallo told NEWSWEEK. "But let's face it—the Democrats do this, too, they all do it. The idea that career employees are above politics is total crap. The so-called career employees are mostly liberal Democrats." He noted that in the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco, career employees refused for months to hang portraits of Bush, Cheney and Ashcroft.
Still, there were some former Justice officials who took a loftier view. One of them was Comey. Every day, he told the House Judiciary Committee, prosecutors must argue cases before juries of all political stripes; if they are seen as little more than political apparatchiks, it will be the death knell for many legitimate cases. To him, the charge that prosecutors were being picked for their politics was the "worst" allegation he had heard yet about the Justice Department. "If that's what was going on," he said, "that strikes at the core of what the Department of Justice is." Or was.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Bush Acted To Prevent A Mass Exodus from Justice
Obviously to prevent the NSA spying program from becoming public long before it finally did, Bush intervened when John Ashcroft, Robert S. Mueller and James Comey threatened to resign, en masse, because of their concerns about the legality of the Bush/Cheney domectic spying/data mining program which had been set up at the NSA, after it was deep-sixed at the Pentagon.
At the Pentagon, it was known as "Total Information Awareness."
Our concern is that neither the public nor the Congress are aware of all of the programs in place at the moment.
A cursory review of Gonzales testimony before congressional committees, after the NSA program was revealed in December 2005, makes it apparent that Alberto was choosing his words carefully, always aluding to "the program about which I am am testifying" in his cautious, lawyerly responses.
It seems that Senator Dianne Feinstein, D. Ca. picked up on Alberto's game and attempted to question him regarding any programs the president "may have" authorized. Alberto stammered, asked her to repeat the question, then gave her the same scripted answer. Of course, it made no sense, but it shut down the senator's limited time.
Lil' Alberto is really good at the rope-a-dope thing. It may work at congressional hearings but it won't work in a court of law.
Gonzales is a political hack with a law degree.
We don't have any great love lost for John Ashcroft around here, but the way he was treated by Bush's hit men, while he was very ill in the hospital, makes us all sick, and his strength in the situation does get him our respect.
President Intervened in Dispute Over Eavesdropping
By DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, May 15 — President Bush intervened in March 2004 to avert a crisis over the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program after Attorney General John Ashcroft, Director Robert S. Mueller III of the F.B.I. and other senior Justice Department aides all threatened to resign, a former deputy attorney general testified Tuesday.
Mr. Bush quelled the revolt over the program’s legality by allowing it to continue without Justice Department approval, also directing department officials to take the necessary steps to bring it into compliance with the law, according to Congressional testimony by the former deputy attorney general, James B. Comey.
Although a conflict over the program had been disclosed in The New York Times, Mr. Comey provided a fuller account of the 48-hour drama, including, for the first time, Mr. Bush’s role, the threatened resignations and a race as Mr. Comey hurried to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital sickbed to intercept White House officials, who were pushing for approval of the N.S.A. program.
Describing the events as “the most difficult of my professional career,” Mr. Comey appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of its inquiry into the dismissal of federal prosecutors and the role of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. Several lawmakers wanted to examine Mr. Gonzales’s actions in the N.S.A. matter, when he was White House counsel, and cited them to buttress their case that he should resign.
Mr. Comey, the former No. 2 official in the Justice Department, said the crisis began when he refused to sign a presidential order reauthorizing the program, which allowed monitoring of international telephone calls and e-mail of people inside the United States who were suspected of having terrorist ties. He said he made his decision after the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, based on an extensive review, concluded that the program did not comply with the law. At the time, Mr. Comey was acting attorney general because Mr. Ashcroft had been hospitalized for emergency gall bladder surgery.
Mr. Comey would not describe the rationale for his refusal to approve the eavesdropping program, citing its classified nature. The N.S.A. program, which began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks and did not require court approval to listen in on the communications of Americans and others, provoked an outcry in Congress when it was disclosed in December 2005.
Mr. Comey said that on the evening of March 10, 2004, Mr. Gonzales and Andrew H. Card Jr., then Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, tried to bypass him by secretly visiting Mr. Ashcroft. Mr. Ashcroft was extremely ill and disoriented, Mr. Comey said, and his wife had forbidden any visitors.
Mr. Comey said that when a top aide to Mr. Ashcroft alerted him about the pending visit, he ordered his driver to rush him to George Washington University Hospital with emergency lights flashing and a siren blaring, to intercept the pair. They were seeking his signature because authority for the program was to expire the next day.
Mr. Comey said he phoned Mr. Mueller, who agreed to meet him at the hospital. Once there, Mr. Comey said he “literally ran up the stairs.” At his request, Mr. Mueller ordered the F.B.I. agents on Mr. Ashcroft’s security detail not to evict Mr. Comey from the room if Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card objected to his presence.
Mr. Comey said he arrived first in the darkened room, in time to brief Mr. Ashcroft, who he said seemed barely conscious. Before Mr. Ashcroft became ill, Mr. Comey said the two men had talked and agreed that the program should not be renewed.
When the White House officials appeared minutes later, Mr. Gonzales began to explain to Mr. Ashcroft why they were there. Mr. Comey said Mr. Ashcroft rose weakly from his hospital bed, but in strong and unequivocal terms, refused to approve the eavesdropping program.
“I was angry,” Mr. Comey told the committee. “ I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me. I thought he had conducted himself in a way that demonstrated a strength I had never seen before, but still I thought it was improper.”
Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card quickly departed, but Mr. Comey said he soon got an angry phone call from Mr. Card, demanding that he come to the White House. Mr. Comey said he replied: “After what I just witnessed, I will not meet with you without a witness, and I intend that witness to be the solicitor general of the United States.”
Mr. Comey said he reached Theodore B. Olson, the solicitor general, at a dinner party. At the White House session, which included Mr. Olson, Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Comey and Mr. Card, the four officials discussed the impasse. Mr. Comey knew that other top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, wanted to continue the program.
Mr. Card expressed concern about mass resignations at the Justice Department, Mr. Comey said. He told the Senate panel that he prepared a letter of resignation and that David Ayres, Mr. Ashcroft’s chief of staff, asked him to delay delivering it so that Mr. Ashcroft could join him. Mr. Comey said Mr. Mueller was also prepared to quit.
The next morning, March 11, Mr. Comey went to the White House for a terrorism briefing. Afterward, he said Mr. Bush took him aside for a private 15-minute meeting in the president’s study, which Mr. Comey described as a “full exchange.”
At Mr. Comey’s urging, Mr. Bush also met with Mr. Mueller, who emerged to inform Mr. Comey that the president had authorized the changes in the program sought by the Justice Department.
“We had the president’s direction to do what we believed, what the Justice Department believed, was necessary to put this on a footing where we could certify to its legality,” Mr. Comey said. “And so we set out to do that and we did that.”
Mr. Comey said he signed the reauthorization in “two or three weeks.” It was unclear from his testimony what authority existed for the program while the changes were being made. Mr. Comey said he shelved his resignation plans that day when terrorists set off bombs on commuter trains in Madrid.
Mr. Comey left the Justice Department in August 2006, saying publicly that he had never intended to serve through the end of Mr. Bush’s second term. Privately, he has told friends that he grew weary of what he felt was increasing White House influence on the agency.
Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, deflected questions about Mr. Comey’s testimony, but defended the N.S.A. program. Mr. Snow also noted that the Justice Department placed the program under the supervision of a special intelligence court earlier this year, which department officials said placed the program on an even firmer legal footing.
“Jim Comey can talk about whatever reservations he may have had, but the fact is that there were strong protections in there,” Mr. Snow said. “This is a program that saved lives, that is vital for national security, and furthermore has been reformed in a bipartisan way that is in keeping with everybody.”
Spokesmen for Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Mueller, and the Justice Department declined to comment. Mr. Card did not respond to a reporter’s inquiries.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Sunday, April 22, 2007
A 6 Year Project of Election Theft
This kind of voter suppression nd intimidation should be crime, if it isn't already.
We have to wonder how many Democrats lost because of these practices, even in 2006, where they seem not to have worked, with Democratic majorities being in the House and Senate.
Every election from 2000 on needs to be investigated for voter suppression and mainipulation by e-voting machines!
The legal penalty for such actions should be no lese than 20 years
WASHINGTON - For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.
The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.
Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.
Questions about the administration's campaign against alleged voter fraud have helped fuel the political tempest over the firings last year of eight U.S. attorneys, several of whom were ousted in part because they failed to bring voter fraud cases important to Republican politicians. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales could shed more light on the reasons for those firings when he appears Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Civil rights advocates charge that the administration's policies were intended to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority voters who tend to support Democrats, and by filing state and federal lawsuits, civil rights groups have won court rulings blocking some of its actions.
Justice Department spokesperson Cynthia Magnuson called any allegation that the department has rolled back minority voting rights "fundamentally flawed."
She said the department has "a completely robust record when it comes to enforcing federal voting rights laws," citing its support last year for reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the filing of at least 20 suits to ensure that language services are available to non-English speaking voters.
The administration, however, has repeatedly invoked allegations of widespread voter fraud to justify tougher voter ID measures and other steps to restrict access to the ballot, even though research suggests that voter fraud is rare.
Since President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, a former Republican senator from Missouri, launched a "Ballot Access and Voter Integrity Initiative" in 2001, Justice Department political appointees have exhorted U.S. attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases, and the department's Civil Rights Division has sought to roll back policies to protect minority voting rights.
On virtually every significant decision affecting election balloting since 2001, the division's Voting Rights Section has come down on the side of Republicans, notably in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Washington and other states where recent elections have been decided by narrow margins.
Joseph Rich, who left his job as chief of the section in 2005, said these events formed an unmistakable pattern.
"As more information becomes available about the administration's priority on combating alleged, but not well substantiated, voter fraud, the more apparent it is that its actions concerning voter ID laws are part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens," he said.
Former department lawyers, public records and other documents show that since Bush took office, political appointees in the Civil Rights Division have:
-Approved Georgia and Arizona laws that tightened voter ID requirements. A federal judge tossed out the Georgia law as an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of poor voters, and a federal appeals court signaled its objections to the Arizona law on similar grounds last fall, but that litigation was delayed by the U.S. Supreme Court until after the election.
-Issued advisory opinions that overstated a 2002 federal election law by asserting that it required states to disqualify new voting registrants if their identification didn't match that in computer databases, prompting at least three states to reject tens of thousands of applicants mistakenly.
-Done little to enforce a provision of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act that requires state public assistance agencies to register voters. The inaction has contributed to a 50 percent decline in annual registrations at those agencies, to 1 million from 2 million.
-Sued at least six states on grounds that they had too many people on their voter rolls. Some eligible voters were removed in the resulting purges.
The administration's presence was felt last year in at least one state legislative battle over voter identification.
In Missouri, where Republican Sen. Jim Talent was fighting to hang onto his seat and hold the U.S. Senate for the GOP, a Republican-backed photo ID requirement cleared the state House of Representatives by one vote in May 2006 after an intense lobbying effort in which backers alleged voter fraud in heavily Democratic St. Louis and Kansas City.
"The White House was heavily involved" in the effort to win passage, state Rep. Bryan Stevenson, the Republican floor leader, said in a telephone interview. Stevenson said he wasn't privy to the details of the White House efforts.
In late 2001, Ashcroft also hired three Republican political operatives to work in a secretive new unit in the division's Voting Rights Section. Rich said the unit, headed by unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate Mark Metcalf of Kentucky, bird-dogged the progress of the administration's Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and reviewed voting legislation in the states.
One member of the three-person political unit, former Georgia elections official and Republican activist Hans von Spakovsky, eventually took de facto control of the Voting Rights Section and used his position to advocate tougher voter ID laws, said former department lawyers who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals.
Those former employees said that Spakovsky helped state officials interpret the Help America Vote Act's confusing new minimum voter identification requirements. He also weighed in when the Voting Rights Act required department approval for any new ID law in 13 states with histories of racial discrimination.
In November 2004, Arizona residents passed Proposition 200, the toughest state voter ID law to date, which requires applicants to provide proof of citizenship and voters to produce a photo ID on Election Day. The Voting Rights Act state requires states to show that such laws wouldn't impede minorities from voting and gives the Justice Department 60 days to approve or oppose them.
Career voting rights specialists in the Justice Department soon discovered that more than 2,000 elderly Indians in Arizona lacked birth certificates, and they sought their superiors' approval to request more information from the state about other potential impacts on voters' rights. Spakovsky and Sheldon Bradshaw, the division's top deputy and a close friend of top Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson, a former Bush White House lawyer, denied the request, said one of the former department attorneys.
Later in 2005, career lawyers wrote a memo recommending that the department oppose a new Georgia law requiring voters to present a $20 photo ID. They argued that the requirement would discriminate against poor blacks, but that was quickly rejected.
Toby Moore, a political geographer who was one of five career civil rights specialists who reviewed the law, said the only dissenter to the recommendation was a newly hired lawyer, Joshua Rogers, a member of the National Republican Lawyers Association, a partisan organization interested in election issues.
Moore said that John Tanner, who'd just been appointed the new section chief, "doctored the memo ... reversing many of our findings," and used the occasion to change procedures so that he alone could make future recommendations.
A Georgia state judge, acting on a suit by civil rights groups, struck down the law as unconstitutional.
Moore, now the project manager for American University's Commission on Election Reform, said he believes that administration officials felt the Voting Rights Section was populated by "recalcitrant, embedded, liberal Democrats ... and they were determined to plant their DNA, change the institution and bring it to bear on behalf of Republican interests."
Spakovsky, who declined to be interviewed, also played a role in an expansive interpretation of the new federal election law.
The Help America Vote Act directed states to create central, computerized voter registration lists, to make a "reasonable effort" to remove ineligible names and to match new applicants' driver's licenses and Social Security numbers to those in state databases.
A failure to match wasn't grounds for rejection: Tiny variations such as the inclusion of a middle name or misplaced figure could prevent a match. But when confused state officials asked the Justice Department about the requirement, Spakovsky offered a harsh reading of the law.
In a letter on Sept. 8, 2003, he advised Judith Arnold, Maryland's counsel for election laws, that the application "must be denied" if an applicant's data failed to match that in driver's license and Social Security databases. He wrote that "the prudent course" would be to let those voters cast provisional ballots that would count only if their registration information were verified later.
His guidance was posted on the Voting Rights Section's Web site.
Some states, including California, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington, began to reject applicants whose credentials didn't match.
The rejections prompted a lawsuit and protests by civil rights groups, which halted the practice.
The practice was "a barrier to voting," said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, whose suit in Washington state led to a court injunction.
Catherine Blinn, Washington state's assistant elections director, said in a sworn statement last year that her state was merely following guidance from the Justice Department and cited Spakovsky's letter to Maryland.
Just before the 2006 election, the California Secretary of State's Office rejected more than 20,000 registration applications, including 43 percent of Los Angeles County's new applicants. Those rejections were reversed before Election Day amid a public clamor.
Former Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, a moderate Republican, said in a phone interview that Justice Department officials reviewed his office's regulations and okayed the rejections, but gave no hint that they exceeded federal law.
The Bush administration also has shifted enforcement priorities under the National Voter Registration Act, known as the "Motor Voter" law because it provides for registration at state vehicle licensing and public assistance agencies.
In the last six years, the number of voters registered at state government agencies that provide services to the poor and disabled has been cut in half, to 1 million.
Instead of forcing lax agencies to increase registrations, the Justice Department sued at least six states and sent threatening enforcement letters to others requiring them to scour their election rolls for potentially ineligible voters.
Deputy Director Michael Slater of Project Vote, a national voter registration group, called this "selective enforcement. ... They've focused on purging of voters from registration rolls at the expense of enforcing provisions that encourage registration."
He said that Kentucky eliminated 4,000 people from its list of voters, but "did it poorly, and took off people who lived there and tried to vote."
One of the Justice Department suits was filed against Missouri's Democratic Secretary of State Robin Carnahan. Last week, U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey in Jefferson City, the capital, threw out the suit, noting that the motor voter law was intended to increase voter participation and eliminate fraud.
The judge wrote that the Justice Department had offered no evidence that anyone had been denied his right to vote as a result of deficiencies in voter rolls, and "nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred."
For more information on the Georgia litigation, as well as other major election law litigation: http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/common-cause.php
....and the truth shall set us free.
We have to wonder how many Democrats lost because of these practices, even in 2006, where they seem not to have worked, with Democratic majorities being in the House and Senate.
Every election from 2000 on needs to be investigated for voter suppression and mainipulation by e-voting machines!
The legal penalty for such actions should be no lese than 20 years
WASHINGTON - For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.
The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.
Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.
Questions about the administration's campaign against alleged voter fraud have helped fuel the political tempest over the firings last year of eight U.S. attorneys, several of whom were ousted in part because they failed to bring voter fraud cases important to Republican politicians. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales could shed more light on the reasons for those firings when he appears Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Civil rights advocates charge that the administration's policies were intended to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority voters who tend to support Democrats, and by filing state and federal lawsuits, civil rights groups have won court rulings blocking some of its actions.
Justice Department spokesperson Cynthia Magnuson called any allegation that the department has rolled back minority voting rights "fundamentally flawed."
She said the department has "a completely robust record when it comes to enforcing federal voting rights laws," citing its support last year for reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the filing of at least 20 suits to ensure that language services are available to non-English speaking voters.
The administration, however, has repeatedly invoked allegations of widespread voter fraud to justify tougher voter ID measures and other steps to restrict access to the ballot, even though research suggests that voter fraud is rare.
Since President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, a former Republican senator from Missouri, launched a "Ballot Access and Voter Integrity Initiative" in 2001, Justice Department political appointees have exhorted U.S. attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases, and the department's Civil Rights Division has sought to roll back policies to protect minority voting rights.
On virtually every significant decision affecting election balloting since 2001, the division's Voting Rights Section has come down on the side of Republicans, notably in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Washington and other states where recent elections have been decided by narrow margins.
Joseph Rich, who left his job as chief of the section in 2005, said these events formed an unmistakable pattern.
"As more information becomes available about the administration's priority on combating alleged, but not well substantiated, voter fraud, the more apparent it is that its actions concerning voter ID laws are part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens," he said.
Former department lawyers, public records and other documents show that since Bush took office, political appointees in the Civil Rights Division have:
-Approved Georgia and Arizona laws that tightened voter ID requirements. A federal judge tossed out the Georgia law as an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of poor voters, and a federal appeals court signaled its objections to the Arizona law on similar grounds last fall, but that litigation was delayed by the U.S. Supreme Court until after the election.
-Issued advisory opinions that overstated a 2002 federal election law by asserting that it required states to disqualify new voting registrants if their identification didn't match that in computer databases, prompting at least three states to reject tens of thousands of applicants mistakenly.
-Done little to enforce a provision of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act that requires state public assistance agencies to register voters. The inaction has contributed to a 50 percent decline in annual registrations at those agencies, to 1 million from 2 million.
-Sued at least six states on grounds that they had too many people on their voter rolls. Some eligible voters were removed in the resulting purges.
The administration's presence was felt last year in at least one state legislative battle over voter identification.
In Missouri, where Republican Sen. Jim Talent was fighting to hang onto his seat and hold the U.S. Senate for the GOP, a Republican-backed photo ID requirement cleared the state House of Representatives by one vote in May 2006 after an intense lobbying effort in which backers alleged voter fraud in heavily Democratic St. Louis and Kansas City.
"The White House was heavily involved" in the effort to win passage, state Rep. Bryan Stevenson, the Republican floor leader, said in a telephone interview. Stevenson said he wasn't privy to the details of the White House efforts.
In late 2001, Ashcroft also hired three Republican political operatives to work in a secretive new unit in the division's Voting Rights Section. Rich said the unit, headed by unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate Mark Metcalf of Kentucky, bird-dogged the progress of the administration's Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and reviewed voting legislation in the states.
One member of the three-person political unit, former Georgia elections official and Republican activist Hans von Spakovsky, eventually took de facto control of the Voting Rights Section and used his position to advocate tougher voter ID laws, said former department lawyers who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals.
Those former employees said that Spakovsky helped state officials interpret the Help America Vote Act's confusing new minimum voter identification requirements. He also weighed in when the Voting Rights Act required department approval for any new ID law in 13 states with histories of racial discrimination.
In November 2004, Arizona residents passed Proposition 200, the toughest state voter ID law to date, which requires applicants to provide proof of citizenship and voters to produce a photo ID on Election Day. The Voting Rights Act state requires states to show that such laws wouldn't impede minorities from voting and gives the Justice Department 60 days to approve or oppose them.
Career voting rights specialists in the Justice Department soon discovered that more than 2,000 elderly Indians in Arizona lacked birth certificates, and they sought their superiors' approval to request more information from the state about other potential impacts on voters' rights. Spakovsky and Sheldon Bradshaw, the division's top deputy and a close friend of top Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson, a former Bush White House lawyer, denied the request, said one of the former department attorneys.
Later in 2005, career lawyers wrote a memo recommending that the department oppose a new Georgia law requiring voters to present a $20 photo ID. They argued that the requirement would discriminate against poor blacks, but that was quickly rejected.
Toby Moore, a political geographer who was one of five career civil rights specialists who reviewed the law, said the only dissenter to the recommendation was a newly hired lawyer, Joshua Rogers, a member of the National Republican Lawyers Association, a partisan organization interested in election issues.
Moore said that John Tanner, who'd just been appointed the new section chief, "doctored the memo ... reversing many of our findings," and used the occasion to change procedures so that he alone could make future recommendations.
A Georgia state judge, acting on a suit by civil rights groups, struck down the law as unconstitutional.
Moore, now the project manager for American University's Commission on Election Reform, said he believes that administration officials felt the Voting Rights Section was populated by "recalcitrant, embedded, liberal Democrats ... and they were determined to plant their DNA, change the institution and bring it to bear on behalf of Republican interests."
Spakovsky, who declined to be interviewed, also played a role in an expansive interpretation of the new federal election law.
The Help America Vote Act directed states to create central, computerized voter registration lists, to make a "reasonable effort" to remove ineligible names and to match new applicants' driver's licenses and Social Security numbers to those in state databases.
A failure to match wasn't grounds for rejection: Tiny variations such as the inclusion of a middle name or misplaced figure could prevent a match. But when confused state officials asked the Justice Department about the requirement, Spakovsky offered a harsh reading of the law.
In a letter on Sept. 8, 2003, he advised Judith Arnold, Maryland's counsel for election laws, that the application "must be denied" if an applicant's data failed to match that in driver's license and Social Security databases. He wrote that "the prudent course" would be to let those voters cast provisional ballots that would count only if their registration information were verified later.
His guidance was posted on the Voting Rights Section's Web site.
Some states, including California, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington, began to reject applicants whose credentials didn't match.
The rejections prompted a lawsuit and protests by civil rights groups, which halted the practice.
The practice was "a barrier to voting," said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, whose suit in Washington state led to a court injunction.
Catherine Blinn, Washington state's assistant elections director, said in a sworn statement last year that her state was merely following guidance from the Justice Department and cited Spakovsky's letter to Maryland.
Just before the 2006 election, the California Secretary of State's Office rejected more than 20,000 registration applications, including 43 percent of Los Angeles County's new applicants. Those rejections were reversed before Election Day amid a public clamor.
Former Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, a moderate Republican, said in a phone interview that Justice Department officials reviewed his office's regulations and okayed the rejections, but gave no hint that they exceeded federal law.
The Bush administration also has shifted enforcement priorities under the National Voter Registration Act, known as the "Motor Voter" law because it provides for registration at state vehicle licensing and public assistance agencies.
In the last six years, the number of voters registered at state government agencies that provide services to the poor and disabled has been cut in half, to 1 million.
Instead of forcing lax agencies to increase registrations, the Justice Department sued at least six states and sent threatening enforcement letters to others requiring them to scour their election rolls for potentially ineligible voters.
Deputy Director Michael Slater of Project Vote, a national voter registration group, called this "selective enforcement. ... They've focused on purging of voters from registration rolls at the expense of enforcing provisions that encourage registration."
He said that Kentucky eliminated 4,000 people from its list of voters, but "did it poorly, and took off people who lived there and tried to vote."
One of the Justice Department suits was filed against Missouri's Democratic Secretary of State Robin Carnahan. Last week, U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey in Jefferson City, the capital, threw out the suit, noting that the motor voter law was intended to increase voter participation and eliminate fraud.
The judge wrote that the Justice Department had offered no evidence that anyone had been denied his right to vote as a result of deficiencies in voter rolls, and "nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred."
For more information on the Georgia litigation, as well as other major election law litigation: http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/common-cause.php
....and the truth shall set us free.
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