As soon as the Bushies installed themselves in the White House in 2001, the Republican Party set up a second tier of electronic communications out of the political office run by Karl Rove.

On its surface, the new email domains were legal. In fact, their stated purpose was to avoid the criticism that they were doing GOP politics on the public dime — a charge Republicans had made against the Clinton White House without ever offering proof of it, of course.

According to the Presidential Records Act, a government “sunshine law,” all communication involving a member of the president’s staff are required to be preserved for scrutiny. If we learned nothing else over the six years when the GOP ran all three branches of government, conservatives view laws as only applying to “the little people” — meaning, of course, Democrats. It is only natural, therefore, that Rove and his network of operatives in the federal bureaucracy began using the alternative email servers to subvert the Act and conceal improper political operations inside the government.

Amid the thousands of documents dumped by the Dept. of Justice in response to congressional demands in the U.S. Attorney purge, investigators found emails to and fron Rove’s White House and DOJ political flunkies using the alternative email domains (including gwb43.com and rnchhq.com), apparently in an effort to circumvent the oversight and the sunshine law.

Rep. Henry Waxman, who chairs the House committee that investigates government operations, is demanding to see the GOP’s official emails sent to and from the White House related several investigatiosn – the prosecutor purge, the corrupt GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Rove’s use of the Government Services Administration (GSA) for political purposes:

White House staff arranging for the GSA briefing by a Rove deputy, Scott Jennings, used the gwb43.com e-mail domain name. That caught the attention of Waxman’s investigators, who had previously examined e-mails from Abramoff to Rove’s executive assistant, Susan B. Ralston, to object to an impending Interior Department decision. The decision, he wrote, was “anathema to all our supporters it’s important if possible to get some quiet message from the WH [White House] that this is absurd.”

Ralston used outside accounts — including at rnchq.org — to communicate with Abramoff and his partners. One e-mail from an Abramoff associate said that White House personnel had warned “it is better to not put this stuff in writing in [the White House] … e-mail system because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc.”

Abramoff’s response, according to a copy of his e-mail released by Waxman’s committee, was: “Dammit. It was sent to Susan on her rnc pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system.” Ralston later resigned in connection with the lobbying scandal…

In the U.S. attorney case, Rove deputy Jennings used the RNC e-mail system to write to D. Kyle Sampson, then Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales’ chief of staff, in August 2006 about replacing Arkansas U.S. Atty. H.E. “Bud” Cummins III with former Rove protege Tim Griffin.

“We’re a go for the U.S. atty plan. WH leg, political and communications have signed off and acknowledged that we have to be committed to following through once the pressure comes,” Jennings wrote in an e-mail from the gwb43.com domain name. Sampson noted in a related e-mail that “getting him appointed was important to” Rove, then-White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers and other officials.

While the White House may find it more difficult to claim executive privilege in preventing Congress from reviewing emails on the RNC system, Republicans aren’t too worried: the RNC purges emails from its servers after 30 days.

Another Friday night, another bad news dump by the Bush Dept. of Justice, which has just announced that Monica Goodling is “resigning” tomorrow.

Had she stayed on, Goodling would have been the first senior official in the Dept. of Justice to assert her Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination in United States history, according to many sources including Jonathan Turley on MSNBC’s Countdown last night. She has been called to testify before committees in both houses of Congress regarding the U.S. attorney firings in December, however her lawyer announced she would refuse to answer because she feared she might perjure herself.

Goodling is one of 150 graduates from the law school at a university operated by televangelist Pat Robertson.

One question: Why is her last day a Saturday?

I missed Kyle Sampson’s second session in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee today. In the morning session, Sampson, the recently resigned chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it clear he will not be Scooterized. He contradicted statements by his Gonzales, some of which were reportedly under oath. Some of Sampson’s answers were clearly half-truths but were probably sufficiently artful that he did not perjure himself.

[…]

The investigation into Pres. George Bush’s firing of eight U.S. Attorneys last December has prompted a second look at some questionable actions by federal prosecutors since Bush took office.

In 2003, a U.S. Attorney in western North Carolina was accused of deliberately failing to interrogate a powerful Republican congressman who was directly implicated in a bank fraud matter. The accuser also stated that the federal prosecutor, Robert Conrad Jr., excluded the congressman from being investigated at the behest of then-Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft. The record shows that within two years of the case in question, Conrad was appointed to the federal bench by Pres. Bush.

The congressman was Rep. Charles Taylor, who represented N.C. 11th for 16 years before his defeat last year by former pro-football player, Heath Shuler, a Democrat. Taylor was a member of the Appropriations Committee, and was listed as one of the 20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress. He was also the owner of Blue Ridge Savings, based in Asheville, which was the subject of a federal investigation in 2001 into fraudulent loans that produced guilty pleas from Taylor’s campaign manager and one of his biggest donors, although Taylor was never charged.

The case involving questionable practices by U.S. Attorney Conrad was tried in 2003, and resulted in the conviction of Thomas Jones for attempting to defraud Blue Ridge Savings with bad loans:

Testimony in the trial, along with FBI interviews that were introduced as evidence, raised questions about [Rep.] Taylor as well. Jones and other defendants testified that Taylor knew about and even encouraged the fraudulent loans… In Asheville, investigators never interrogated Taylor…

“My information was that [Attorney General John Ashcroft] prohibited the U.S. Attorney’s Office in North Carolina from interrogating Charles Taylor,” [Jone’s attorney, Forrest Ferrell,] recalled last week. He’d give no other details. “My information was confidential,” he said…

The U.S. attorney for the Western District of North Carolina at the time, Robert J. Conrad Jr., filed a vigorous response, saying the claims of interference weren’t true.

“The premise of the defendant’s motion is simply wrong,” Conrad wrote…

In 2005, Conrad was appointed a U.S. district judge. He couldn’t be reached for comment.

Revelations in the investigation so far show that staffers in Attorney General Abu Gonzalez’ office rated U.S. Attorneys based on their loyalty to Pres. Bush. The USAs rated most loyal to Dear Leader were referred to as “Bushies.” Conrad was not on the DOJ list of federal attorneys because he’d already been promoted, so we don’t know whether Gonzalez’ people thought of him as a loyal Bushie.

Still, on the face of it appears that powerful Republicans obstructed justice in the Blue Ridge S&L fraud case. How will we know unless Ashcroft, Taylor and Conrad are interrogated about it under oath?

Big H/t to GBacon

Yesterday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy suggested that if the White House stalls on sending top aides Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to testify under oath, they risk the wrath of career employees at the Department of Justice who are unhappy about political interference from the Bush political office.

It appears Leahy was right. Sharon Eubanks, the former leader of the DOJ team that prosecuted the tobacco companies on racketeering charges said yesterday that Bush political hacks inside the department forced her to pull her punches at the last moment, including dropping the companies’ fines from $130 billion to $10 billion

[Eubanks said] that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government’s racketeering case.[She also said that] Bush loyalists in Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales’ office began micromanaging the team’s strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government’s claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.

She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop arguments that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim from a closing argument they rewrote for her, she said.

“The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said. And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public,” she said.

Eubanks, who served for 22 years as a lawyer at Justice, said three political appointees were responsible for the last-minute shifts in the government’s tobacco case in June 2005: then-Associate Atty. Gen. Robert McCallum; then-Assistant Atty. Gen. Peter D. Keisler; and his deputy at the time, Dan Meron.

This story was buried on page A13 of the Los Angeles Times today. If it gains traction, Sharon Eubanks can expect to be the target of a devasting campaign of smears and lies from the West Wing.

Let’s hope that there are other courageous people inside Justice Dept. who will come forward to tell the truth about Bush political hackery at DOJ. The American people need to know the truth about full extent of George W. Bush’s defiling of the United States justice system.

What Is Bush Hiding?

If you think Bush’s prosecutor purge is a minor imbroglio compared with presidential scandals like Watergate and Iran-Contra, consider the fact that in both those scandals the presidents who were under fire waived executive privilege and allowed their top aides to testify before Congress.

President Bush dismissed his predecessors’ waiving of privilege during his news conference yesterday (“some have, some haven’t”). The spin from White House spokesman Tony Snow was this nugget of truthiness:

[It] has been traditional in all White Houses not to have staffers testify on Capitol Hill.

Not lately, Tony. Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton all waived the privilege:

At the height of the Watergate scandal, in 1973, Richard M. Nixon allowed his closest advisers H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman and their aides to testify. President Gerald Ford testified before Congress to explain his pardon of Nixon. And President Bill Clinton’s National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger testified in 1997 before a House investigation of Clinton’s 1996 campaign fund-raising.

[In fact, 31 of Clinton’s top aides testified before Congress on 47 occasions.]

“The most dramatic was Ronald Reagan, who waived executive privilege for his entire staff during Iran-Contra,” said Louis Fisher, senior specialist in the separation of powers at the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. Congress had created a special committee to investigate allegations that Reagan had authorized the sale of weapons to Iran in return for cash for the Contra guerrilla war effort in Nicaragua.

Reagan’s waiver was sweeping:

Ronald Reagan waived all executive privilege at the start of the Iran-contra investigation, which arguably dealt with the very matters of national security and diplomacy in which executive privilege is most legitimate. He turned over his documents and diaries; he told everyone, including White House lawyers, to do likewise, because he said he wanted the facts to come out.

Pres. Bush does not want the facts to come out, from which we can infer he has something to hide. It must be something serious — perhaps a conspiracy in the White House to shut down corruption investigations by fired U.S. Attorney Carol Lam into powerful California Republicans, particularly Rep. Jerry Lewis, the former chairman of the Appropriations Committee.