Tag: Scandals

Support for Libby Pardon Reveals New Depths of Rightwing Decay

Jon Ponder

In its surprisingly full-throated defense of Pres. Bush’s pardon of Scooter Libby, the rightwing has made clear what we on the left have long suspected: The conservative movement is rotting from the core.

Yesterday, Joe Wilson, Valerie Wilson’s husband, said about the Bush administration, “It‘s corrupt from top to bottom, and I think most Americans should understand that beyond a reasonable doubt now.” He could have been describing the entire conservative machine.

During the Clinton wars, when this same crowd was not draining the Treasury to launch one bogus investigation after another, all of which came up big juicy nothing-burgers, they were slobbering over the porn in the Starr report moaning, “What will we tell the children?”

They hated the Clintons as avatars of 1960s’ excess but then stole the 2000 election to install George W. Bush, who really did spend the anything-goes decade driving around drunk, doing coke and smoking pot. Under Bush, not surprisingly, the anything-goes political decadence that took root in the conservative ranks in the 1990s has come into full flower.

It was on vivid display this morning on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” in the nakedly bankrupt reasoning conservative callers used to justify the Libby pardon. The Dittohead spin was identical in call after call. Here’s my take:

Both Scooter Libby and Pres. Clinton were charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. However, Clinton did not go to jail, so Libby should not go to jail either. The fact that Pres. Clinton was acquitted whereas Libby was convicted his crimes, they insist, is completely irrelevant.

Here’s Digby:

That whole impeachment trial acquittal thing in the Senate and that whole guilty beyond a reasonable doubt thing in Walton’s courtroom are irrelevant because [rightwingers believe] Clinton committed perjury over a couple of furtive blow-jobs in a hallway which means Scooter Libby and his pals should be able to lie to federal prosecutors. If not, well then, life would just. not. be. fair

And:

[Even] though Libby was convicted in a court of law, he can’t serve even a day in jail, because Clinton was … acquitted.

From the outset, the Noise Machine has been in overdrive trying to minimize the importance of the CIA leak. In reality, the underlying issue was national security, in general, and the security of weapons of mass destruction, specifically. We’ll never know what assets were lost after Vice Pres. Dick Cheney directed his flying monkeys to reveal the identity of Valerie Wilson, who was a covert CIA specialist in weapons of mass destruction.

Because of Wilson’s outing by Richard Armitage, Karl Rove, Ari Fleischer, Scooter Libby and others, the lives and safety of her overseas contacts were put at risk, and, for all we know, terrorists may have acquired WMD she was tracking.

[…]

Fred Thompson Voted ‘Guilty’ on Clinton Obstruction Charges, Now Supports Libby’s Half-Pardon

Jon Ponder

Longtime K Street lobbyist Fred Thompson was serving in the U.S. Senate during the Clinton impeachment in 1999. He voted “not guilty” on the charge that Pres. Clinton committed perjury in testimony about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, and “guilty”* on related obstruction of justice charges. Back then, Sen. Thompson wrote:

[Because Pres. Clinton has been found to be not guilty, the] notion that anyone, no matter how powerless, can get equal justice will be seen by some as a farce. And our rule of law–the principle that many other countries still dream about–the principle that sets us apart, will have been severely damaged. If this does not constitute damage to our government and our society, I cannot imagine what does. And for that he should be convicted.

Thompson, now an television actor, has been a vocal supporter of a complete pardon for Scooter Libby, who was found guilty by a jury of perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation into the deliberate unmasking by Bush administration officials of a covert CIA specialist in weapons of mass destruction.

Here’s what Thompson had to say about the half-pardon Libby was awarded by Pres. Bush yesterday:

“While for a long time I have urged a pardon for Scooter, I respect the president’s decision. This will allow a good American, who has done a lot for his country, to resume his life.” — Former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn.

Thompson, who was a lobbyist for 18 years and a senator for nine years, will announce that he is running for president this month. (Some reports say he will announce this Friday.)

The final verdict from the Senate on Pres. Clinton’s impeachment was not guilty on all charges.

Libby will almost undoubtedly receive a full pardon at the end of Pres. Bush’s term.

Update: *In the original version of this story, I had Thompson’s votes backwards.

Despite Cancer Risk, Rumsfeld Rammed NutraSweet Through FDA in 1980s; New Study Appears to Confirm Cancer Connection

Jon Ponder

A study by a team of Italian scientists reportedly concludes that there is a link between the sweetner aspartame, which is sold under the brand NutraSweet, and cancer. According to a report in the Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal, the study found that aparstame is “particularly potent when animals are exposed in utero and during development. The rats were exposed to the sweetener at levels above and below the recommended daily maximums for people.”

The fact that Donald Rumsfeld’s fingerprints are all over the approval of this chemical additive, may cause regular users — especially diabetics — to give it a second look.

Results of the study were published this month in Environmental Health Perspectives, a U.S. government sponsored, peer-reviewed journal.

Studies linking aspartame and cancer are not new. In fact, a connection was detected in testing soon after the chemical additive was discovered by a chemist working for G.D. Searle & Company, in 1965. As a result of the early studies, the FDA refused to approve aspartame as a food additive throughout the 1970s.

That changed in 1981 when Ronald Reagan won the White House and his Republican appointees took control of the FDA:

The head of the FDA, Jere E. Goyan, who had not approved legalization of aspartame, due to the brain cancer in rats issue, was fired on the first day Ronald Reagan was president… Reagan hired Arthur Hayes MD [a former defense contractor], who legalized aspartame a year later.

According to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now:

[Aspartame] was approved in the early 1980s after intense lobbying efforts by Donald Rumsfeld when he worked as CEO for the pharmaceutical company GD Searle. Rumsfeld is said to have engineered the firing of [Jere Goyan] the FDA commissioner who had held up aspartame’s release following studies showing possible links to brain cancer.

This source says Hayes manipulated FDA findings on the additive:

The new commissioner of the FDA, a Reagan Rumsfeld appointee named Arthur Hayes Hull, Jr. [sic], named a five-person Scientific Committee to review the earlier findings. When the vote went 3-2 against approval of aspartame, Hayes did what any fair-minded citizen might do, and appointed a sixth committee member. The committee voted 3-3, leaving Hull to cast the deciding vote, approving aspartame for use in dry products. Aspartame was then approved for use in soft drinks in 1983.

Hayes was later rewarded for approving the drug with a job at Searle:

In November 1983 Hayes was under fire for accepting corporate gifts. He quit [and was appointed dean of the New York Medical College and then in 1986] joined Searle’s public-relations firm as senior medical advisor.

Before it was over Rumsfeld also took a bonus for his role in aspartame’s approval:

Searle lawyer Robert B. Shapiro, renamed aspartame NutraSweet. Monsanto purchased Searle. Rumsfeld received a $12 million bonus. Shapiro later became Monsanto president.

The fact that Donald Rumsfeld’s fingerprints are all over the approval of this chemical additive, may cause regular users — especially diabetics — to give it a second look.

Video: Tim Griffin Cryin’ and Denyin’ He ‘Caged’ Votes for Bush-Cheney ’04

Jon Ponder
Cryin’ Denyin’

And lyin’: Former White House communications deputy Tim Griffin was caught on tape earlier this month crying about the sudden collapse of his career and then, with all faux outrage he could muster, denying he suppressed votes in the 2004 presidential election of African-American troops serving overseas — despite hard-copy evidence to the contrary.

Corporate media is ignoring the scandal despite the fact that the BBC has emails from Griffin that contain caging lists in attachments.

Griffin’s remarks were made at the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas soon after he’d stepped down as U.S. Attorney (USA) in Little Rock. The tears came as he thanked everyone who’d ever been nice to him along his career route from RNC operative to White House Communications deputy to Republican operative posing as a federal prosecutor.

The denial came in an answer to a question from the audience about reports of his involvement in caging activities in 2004. Griffin rambled a bit as he responded to charges made by BBC investigator Greg Palast dating back to October 2004, just days before the presidential elections, that Griffin and others had used “caging” to suppress Democratic votes in Florida.


Despite the fact that Palast has possession of emails sent by Griffin for which the subject was “Re. caging,” and that have caging lists — names of voters targeted for suppression — attached to them, Griffin said:

First of all, the allegations that are on the Internet and have spread through the tabloids are completely and absolutely false, number one. And ridiculous. Caging, as you may know, I had it looked up, is a direct-mail term for basically organizing returned mail. … And I’ll just say that it’s so untrue. … This is all made up and faux pas. I didn’t cage votes, I didn’t cage mail, I didn’t cage animals, I’m not a zookeeper.

From the outset in 2004, corporate media has ignored Palast’s findings on the GOP’s voter suppression activities. In May, however, their studied ambivalence was challenged — but not broached, apparently — when another White House operative, Monica Goodling, mentioned Griffin’s involvement in the caging enterprise during sworn testimony before the House Justice committee:

Despite my and others’ best efforts, [Deputy Attorney General, Paul McNulty]’s public testimony was incomplete or inaccurate in a number of respects. … I believe that the Deputy was not fully candid about his knowledge of White House involvement in the replacement decision … and failed to disclose that he had some knowledge of allegations that Tim Griffin had been involved in vote “caging” during his work on the President’s 2004 campaign.

(During the 2000 election, Goodling and Griffin worked together as opposition researchers at the Republican National Committee.)

After Goodling’s testimony, big media’s efforts to avoid this story were challenged again when Palast granted House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers’ request to see Griffin’s emails about the caging lists. The meeting between Palast and Conyers on May 31 did not go unnoticed by Griffin, however — nor perhaps did Conyer’s statement, “We’re not through with Griffin by any means.” Within hours of the meeting, Griffin resigned as the Arkansas USA.

The particulars of Griffin’s appointment last December came to light during the investigation into the unprecedented firing of USAs by the Bush Dept. of Justice when it was revealed that his predecessor, Bud Cummins, had been fired in order to install Griffin in Little Rock, apparently as a plant to oversee voter suppression in Arkansas.

Compounding the scandal, it was also revealed that Griffin was put in place under a provision the Bushies slipped into the Patriot Act that allowed the president to appoint federal prosecutors with Senate approval. (The provision has since been over-ridden.)

Was Bush Too Hung Over to Work at G8 Summit?

Jon Ponder

The AP has a story online with the title “Illness Sidelines Bush at G8 Summit,” running alongside a photo of Pres. Bush relaxing yesterday with an amber-colored German beverage.

As is usual with our liberal media, we are left to put two and two together and draw our own conclusions, so here goes:

The president was already dressed when he began feeling ill in the morning, White House counselor Dan Bartlett said. He said doctors are keeping an eye on him but that Bush’s illness — whether a stomach virus, a light touch of food poisoning or something else — is “not serious.”

He stayed in bed to try to rest and recuperate, missing the morning session of the summit being held here of eight industrialized democracies.

Hey, it’s happened to the best of us — except most of us don’t officially claim to have been alcohol-free for the past 20 years old when we are afflicted by a hangover.

[…]

Libby Shouldn’t Have Asked Judge to ‘Consider His Whole Life’

Trish

Just before the judge sentenced I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for his role in the revenge exposure of a CIA agent by the Bush administration, Libby asked him to look at the big picture.

Libby did not admit to any mistakes, but said, “I ask that you consider my whole life.”

And maybe the judge did, which is why Libby is now facing a total of 30 months in jail and a $250,000 fine.

John Dean, in his book, “Conservatives Without Conscience” uses Libby as an illustration of an “uberneoconservative” and an “exemplary authoritarian.” He points to an American Progress backgrounder that does in fact, consider Libby’s whole life.

Dean: Libby was outraged and believed that by claiming Wilson’s wife had been involved in sending her husband to Niger, the trip would be perceived as some kind of boondoggle. In fact, she was not involved, but Libby leaked her covert identity to members of the news media anyway

It was Libby – along with Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and a handful of other top aides at the Pentagon and White House – who convinced the president that the U.S. should go to war in Iraq. It was Libby who pushed Cheney to publicly argue that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and 9/11.

It was also Libby who prodded former Secretary of State Colin Powell to include specious reports about an alleged meeting between 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official in Powell’s February 2003 speech to the United Nations. Libby and his staff reportedly badgered Powell’s speech writers for weeks, culminating in a meeting where Libby presented information in a manner that, according to those who were there, was aggressive and over the top…

Within the Bush administration, what has touched Cheney has also reached Libby and vice versa. Libby’s role in the awarding of at least one no-bid, multi-million dollar contract to Halliburton is a case in point.

For months, the vice president’s office denied that it played any role in the selection of the company once headed by Cheney to repair Iraq’s oil fields. But, as the Washington Post reported [in 2004], it turns out that Libby had been briefed by Pentagon officials before the contract was awarded – raising questions of impropriety at best, and corruption at worst.

So much for the big picture. Libby is dirty, and Dean has no trouble keeping the facts straight.

[…]

DeLay: My Adultery Was Less Immoral Than Newt’s

Jon Ponder

In his book, “No Retreat, No Surrender,” Tom DeLay, the indicted former House Majority Leader, admits that in the days when he was drinking as many as 10 martinis a day, he engaged in extramarital affairs:

“I was no longer committing adultery by that time, the impeachment trial. There’s a big difference.”
— Tom DeLay

In this period, he earned the nickname Hot Tub Tom. Then he found Jesus and, he said, stopped sinning. In the book, he freely confesses to committing adultery. “I had put my needs first,” he told me. “I was on the throne, not God. I had pushed God from His throne.”

In the book, DeLay attacked his former colleague, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for having an affair while he was leading the impeachment of Pres. Bill Clinton because he committed perjury when asked under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. DeLay says Gingrich’s adultery was worse than his — due to the implicit hypocrisy:

[Gingrich was] conducting an affair with a Capitol Hill employee during the 1998 impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. (The woman later became Gingrich’s third wife.) “Yes, I don’t think that Newt could set a high moral standard, a high moral tone, during that moment,” DeLay said. “You can’t do that if you’re keeping secrets about your own adulterous affairs.”

A reasonable person might see this as splitting hairs, but so-called Christians always have an “out” when it comes to accountability:

“I was no longer committing adultery by that time, the impeachment trial. There’s a big difference … Also, I had returned to Christ and repented my sins by that time.”

But what about “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” Tom?

It’s Official: Plame was Covert – So Federal Law Was Broken, But ‘Rule of Law’ Only Applies to Dems

Jon Ponder

From the beginning of the scandal around the outing of the CIA secret agent Valerie Plame by top White House officials, Bush’s spinners and GOP operatives have worked as hard as they could to create confusion about Wilson’s status as a covert agent. The desperation with which they have tried to muddy the waters about Wilson’s undercover status is a clue to how dangerous they consider this piece of information to be.

Now we see for certain what many of us have long suspected: For Republicans, the rule of law only applies to Democrats.

For starters, if the public believed Wilson was covert, the fact that her cover was blown by top White House officials, including Karl Rove and Scooter Libby — who was working under instructions from his boss, Vice Pres. Cheney — would be construed as unseemly, at the very least.

Of course, White House officials are restricted from revealing government secrets by their security clearances. But what had many top West Wingers concerned was the fact that there’s also a specific law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), that forbids government officials from revealing the identity of covert personnel. In fact, former White House spokesperson Ari Fletcher was so concerned that he may have run afoul of the IIPA that he sought, and was granted, immunity from prosecution before he testified.

When Valerie Wilson testified before a House committee in March, she said, under oath, that she was covert. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) also read a statement from Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, that stated that Wilson was covert at the time she was outed. And yet, the White House and GOP operatives have continued to lie about Wilson’s status.

While it is doubtful that anything can stop them, there is finally official confirmation now from the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald — writing in a recommendation for Scooter Libby’s sentencing for perjury related to the case — that Valerie Wilson was indeed covert:

The unclassified summary of Plame’s employment with the CIA at the time that syndicated columnist Robert Novak published her name on July 14, 2003 says, “Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for who the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.”

Former CIA agent Larry Johnson, who was a colleague of Wilson’s, says this confirmation of Wilson’s status bolsters the charge that Rove, Libby and others violated the IIPA when they revealed her identity to reporters:

Fitz makes the following points:
– Valerie Wilson was an operations officer working in the Counter Proliferation Division (CPD) of the Directorate of Operations and headed a unit that covered weapons proliferation issues concerning Iraq.
– While in CPD Valerie traveled overseas seven times to more than ten countries always, repeat always, undercover.
– Valerie was a covert officer on 14 July 2003, when Novak identified her as a CIA employee.
– The CIA was taking "affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States."

Despite this development, there remains little or no chance that these White House officials will be held accountable for revealing Wilson’s identity — which is egregiously compounded by the fact that Wilson was a specialist in tracking black-market sales of weapons of mass destruction. We will probably never know what sources and counter-proliferation activities were compromised by the treasonous actions of Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove.

At the very least, we are left to wonder why Karl Rove still has a security clearance for working at the White House.

It was just a decade ago that Republicans hounded the Clinton White House over every perceived and/or fabricated infraction.Their strategy was to hobble and render ineffective an American president proved unsuccessful, so they switched their focus to Pres. Clinton’s sex life, which led them to impeach him over a sex lie.

All the while they were leading the nation down the dangerous path toward overthrowing its duly and twice-elected government, they claimed they were only concerned with “the rule of law.” Now we see for certain what many of us have long suspected: For Republicans, the rule of law only applies to Democrats.