The US Attorney thing/Andrew Sullivan

[billydkid]

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/

Scroll down the the video under the title "We make the bullets"
I thought this was funny from Andrew's commentary "Gonzales, in my view, is not the real culprit here. He is now and always has been a tool." I'm not sure Andrew meant it the way I took it, but it made me smile. I sort of think Bush and Rove are "tools" too.

 

[hgc]

I guess it goes without saying that I was never a fan of John Ashcroft. But now I want to know more about the circumstances of his leaving the AG job after the first term. Was he not a tool?

David Iglasias has said that Ashcroft was very strong on the impartiality and blind justice aspect of how the US Attorneys were to operate, and that changed with Gonzo.

 

[Mephisto]

Very interesting video and I'm not surprised that Griffin has no shame for the "ammunition" he's making. It's amazing how someone so apparently intelligent can euphemize mud-slinging to the point that he believes he's actually doing a service to the country.

It's also fairly noteworthy that Andrew Sullivan himself was, at the start of all this, a staunch Bush supporter. I agree that it's Rove that the Senate needs to investigate (and get under oath) and not any of the small fish they're currently trying to net.

Thanks for the link.

 

[Darth Rotor]

I guess it goes without saying that I was never a fan of John Ashcroft. But now I want to know more about the circumstances of his leaving the AG job after the first term. Was he not a tool?

David Iglasias has said that Ashcroft was very strong on the impartiality and blind justice aspect of how the US Attorneys were to operate, and that changed with Gonzo.

Ashcroft suddenly looks good? That's a droll moment in time. Isn't John Ashcroft one of those Patriot Act proponents? Wasn't he the AG who found FISA too much trouble to work with, and so was in on the varoius designs of how to get around it?

DR

 

[hgc]

Ashcroft suddenly looks good? That's a droll moment in time. Isn't John Ashcroft one of those Patriot Act proponents? Wasn't he the AG who found FISA too much trouble to work with, and so was in on the varoius designs of how to get around it?

DR

Yeah, that guy. It's akin to how I reminisce fondly about Ronald Reagan. W has thrown my whole worldview into a tizzy. He makes previous, very bad people look good. And no, it's not all in my head.

 

[rikzilla]

Ashcroft suddenly looks good? That's a droll moment in time. Isn't John Ashcroft one of those Patriot Act proponents? Wasn't he the AG who found FISA too much trouble to work with, and so was in on the varoius designs of how to get around it?

DR

Conspiracy theorists need not be internally or ideologically consistent. After all, they're "just asking questions man!"

-z

 

[davefoc]

For somebody that hasn't looked at the video, it's now well below the top of the page.

For somebody that is somewhat familiar with this situation there is no new information in the video.

It appears that H.E. Cummins was fired to make room for an attorney that had spent most of his career as a Republican operative. There is no appearance here that Cummins was replaced for other than a straightforward political purpose, although it might be argued that Griffen would have had a better understanding of the administrations priorities than Cummins and thus replacing Cummins was just the legitimate effort by the administration to see their legitimate priorities emphasized by the US Attorney.

The problem I see for the administration is that in this particular case there seems to be strong evidence that the administration intended to use the patriot act to make a US Attorney appointment without Senate approval. Sampson, yesterday, testified that while he thought the administration should do that, Gonzales among others thought it was a bad idea and that they wouldn't and didn't do it.

But it looks like that is exactly what they did here. Certainly Griffen thought that was what they were doing. Certainly the administration knew that Griffen wouldn't win approval for a US Attorney job.

Right now, despite how scummy the replacement of Cummins looks for the administration, if there is any prosecutable misconduct with the attorney firings, it probably isn't with this case. The firing of Lam and Iglesias may have been done to obstruct justice and to unduly influence US prosecutors for political purposes. I think it is very likely that this was done, but I think those charges are a very long way from being proved.