Year: 2007

Edwards Press Conference Set for Noon Thursday

Trish

This doesn’t sound too good:

JOHN and ELIZABETH EDWARDS have scheduled a press conference Thursday at noon ET in Chapel Hill. The campaign would not say what they would discuss, but observers have been awaiting an update on Elizabeth Edwards’ latest breast cancer checkup. According to a statement released Tuesday afternoon, she was expected to have a “follow-up medical appointment” Wednesday to a routine test she had on Monday. “She’s had similar follow-ups in the past, and they’ve all resulted in a clean bill of health, but Sen. Edwards has gone with her to these appointments, and he wanted to be with her tomorrow, too,” the statement said. Edwards, who was in Iowa Tuesday on the latest stop of his 2008 campaign, was scheduled to attend a house party in Indianola. He canceled the appearance to fly home and attend the follow-up appointment.

Nixon Waived Executive Privilege in Watergate, So Did Reagan in Iran-Contra

Jon Ponder

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.

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.

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.

Bush Calls Out Dems over Prosecutor Purge

Jon Ponder

Pres. Bush is most comfortable when he is attack mode, and at an impromptu news conference this afternoon, he was in the zone:

It will be regrettable if [the Democrats] choose to head down the partisan road of issuing subpoenas and demanding show trials when I have agreed to make key White House officials and documents available. I have proposed a reasonable way to avoid an impasse. I hope they don’t choose confrontation. I will oppose any attempts to subpoena White House officials….

It’s now my hope that the United States Congress will act appropriately. My administration has made a very reasonable proposal. It’s not too late for Democrats to drop the partisanship and work together. Democrats now have to choose whether they will waste time and provoke an unnecessary confrontation, or whether they will join us in working to do the people’s business…

My concern is, they would rather be involved with partisanship. They view this as an opportunity to score political points…

If the Democrats truly do want to move forward and find the right information, they ought to accept what I proposed. And the idea of dragging White House members up there to score political points, or to put the klieg lights out there — which will harm the President’s ability to get good information, Michael — is — I really do believe will show the true nature of this debate.

Was the Prosecutor Purge a Smokescreen for Obstructing Justice?

Jon Ponder

You have heard the White House talking point: “U.S. Attorneys work at the pleasure of the president.” This is irrelevant if the president or his minions fired the prosecutors to stop or impede an investigation. The law in question is 18 U.S.C. §§ 1501-1520, the federal obstruction of justice statute, which makes it illegal “[t]o corruptly obstruct, influence, or impede an official proceeding.”

The case in point is in the prosecutor fired from the San Diego office. Last March, Carol Lam nailed GOP Rep. Duke Cunningham, the chairman of the Defense Appropriations Committee, for taking bribes from defense contractors. Two months later, she was going after the contractors who allgedly bribed Cunningham, She sent a memo to her bosses in D.C. giving them a heads-up that search warrants were ready to go. The next day, Kyle Sampson, Gonzalez’ chief of staff, sent an email to White House lawyers:

“The real problem we have right now with Carol Lam … leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her four-year term expires.”

Lam appears to have been at least indirectly involved in an investigation into two powerful California Republicans out of the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney’s office:

Sampson … may also have been referring in the May 11 e-mail to a report that morning in the Los Angeles Times concerning a parallel investigation by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles into Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), then the chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, and Bill Lowery, a former GOP congressman from San Diego who after leaving Congress founded a successful lobbying firm — one of whose clients was [Brent Wilkes, one of the defense contractors alleged to have bribed Cunninghan].

So were eight prosecutors fired to create smokescreen for getting rid of Lam? It certainly sounds like something Busheviks would do.

Top Clinton Aides Testified in Congress 47 Times

Jon Ponder

What Is Bush Hiding?

The Bush White House is refusing to send Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to testify before Congress. The reason for this, they say, is that there is executive privilege and the fact that there is no precedent for it. This latter bit is, typically, a baldfaced lie:

According to the Congressional Research Service, under President Clinton, 31 of his top aides testified on 47 different occasions. The aides who testified included some of Clinton’s closest advisors.

Among the Clinton senior White House staffers who testified were Harold Ickes, assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff; George Stephanopolous, senior advisor to the president for policy and strategy; John Podesta, assistant to the president and staff secretary; Bruce Lindsey, assistant to the president and deputy counsel to the president; Sandy Berger, assistant to the president for national security affairs; and Beth Nolan, counsel to the president.

The Clinton administration could have fought these appearances all the way to the Supreme Court. The reason they did not was simple: They didn’t want there to be an appearance that they had something to hide.

The difference now is stark. The Busheviks a) do have something to hide and b) don’t give a damn what anybody thinks. They will take this all the way to the Supremes if for no other reason that to run out the clock.

Start of Iraq War Year Five — Where are the Bushes?

Buck Banks

Decline and fall: When I was in gradual school I took an advanced literature seminar titled, “the Southern Family Saga.” The professor teaching the course had sussed out a recurring theme in Southern literature that he actually traced back to the Bible and the book of Genesis.

The typical Southern family saga began with a pioneering patriarch who worked hard, cheated some and accumulated wealth and prominence at the cost of some soul substance. Subsequent generations were born with progressively less intelligence, gumption and drive, and existed merely to squander the family’s good name and fortune.

Faulkner made a career out of the saga, and it has been a useful literary conceit for many Southern authors. Kitty Kelley, unauthorized biographer of the Bush clan, has detected a similar pattern in George W. Bush’s progeny. In her op-ed piece, “Why Aren’t the Bush Daughters in Iraq?” she notes that the entire Bush family, from daughters to sibs to cousins and uncles, are absent from Iraq — when they’re not making a profit on it, that is.

WHEN I WAS a little girl in a convent school, the nuns impressed on me the power of setting a good example. These beloved teachers are no longer around to instruct the president and his family, so I recommend that the Bushes learn from Mark Twain, who said: “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

The only member of the Bush family to show the strains of our ‘troubled world’ is former President George H.W. Bush.

My suggestion comes after the White House announcement earlier this month that Jenna Bush, one of the president’s twin daughters, is writing a book on her all-expenses-paid trip to Panama, where she worked for a few weeks as an intern for UNICEF. Jenna Bush is quoted as saying she will donate her earnings from her book to UNICEF, a commendable gesture, considering her father’s net worth of $20 million. But while the 25-year-old makes the rounds of TV talk shows this fall in a White House limousine, dozens of her contemporaries will be arriving home from Iraq in wooden boxes. In Britain, Prince Harry is insisting on going off to Iraq — even as his country is reducing its troop commitment.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed how the power of good example could also be powerfully good politics. When he led the country to sacrifice in World War II, his children enlisted and his wife traveled to military bases to counsel and comfort the families of soldiers. Newsreels showed the president’s four sons fighting with the Marines in the Pacific, flying with the Army Air Forces in North Africa and landing with the Navy at Normandy. Soon other public figures followed suit — movie stars (James Stewart and Clark Gable) enlisted and sports heroes (Joe DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg) went off to war.

The contrast between FDR’s good example during wartime and that of George W. Bush is stark and sad. The Bush family rallies to the political campaigns of its scions and spends months on the road raising money and shaking hands to put their men into public office. In fact, the public image of their cohesive family — the pearl-choked matriarch surrounded by progeny and springer spaniels — helped cinch more than one presidency for the Bushes. Yet now, when its legacy is most in peril, the family seems to be squandering its good will on a mess of celebridreck.
[…]

Where the Candidates Stand on the Fate of AG Gonzalez

Buck Banks

Predictably mixed bag: According to Congressional Quarterly, the 2008 presidential candidates’ positions on what should be done with Attorney General Alberto ‘The Judge” Gonzalez range from “hang him high” to “no comment.”

‘[Gonzalez has] clearly forgotten the difference between his current job as America’s top law enforcement officer and his old job as President Bush’s personal attorney.’
— Hillary Clinton

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, called for Gonzales’ resignation in a March 13 statement in which he accused Gonzales of having “betrayed his public trust by playing politics when his job is to enforce and uphold the law.”

“Attorney General Gonzales should certainly resign now,” Edwards said.

Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York called for Gonzales’ resignation during an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America” and sent an e-mail to supporters March 14 urging them to sign an online petition calling for Gonzales’ resignation.

Clinton wrote that “it is time for the attorney general — who repeatedly and falsely claimed the firings were based on performance — to step down.” She accused Gonzales, a former White House counsel, of having “clearly forgotten the difference between his current job as America’s top law enforcement officer and his old job as President Bush’s personal attorney.”

Connecticut Sen. Christopher J. Dodd called for Gonzales’ dismissal if the allegations were found to be true — according to a statement his campaign released Friday to CQPolitics.com.

“Anyone found responsible for these egregious lapses in judgment — up to and including Alberto Gonzales — should be immediately dismissed,” Dodd said.

Republican candidates, on the other hand, have taken a more cautious approach — either by saying calls for Gonzales’ resignation are overhasty, or by declining comment on the matter altogether.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, in a March 15 interview on CNN’s Larry King Live, said it was too soon to make a pronouncement about Gonzales’ future.

“We collect facts and interview witnesses before we convict. And we don’t have that information yet,” Romney said.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, during a campaign trip in Iowa last week, did not call for Gonzales’ resignation — but said, according to the Des Moines Register, that “congressional hearings are warranted and will take place. And there’s a lot of explaining to do.”

Several other Republican candidates or their campaigns — including that of former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani — have declined to say whether or not Gonzales should resign.