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.

Beltway types think they smell blood at DOJ. Granted, a normal president would have fired an attorney general as bad as Abu Gonzalez — especially in light of his role in the prosecutor purge last December. But whether Pres. Bush will fire his long-favored courtier has become a matter requiring intense speculation by bewigged millionaire pundits in the Capitol, when they are not speculating about the 2008 presidential campaign.

Six years into the Bush era, and despite daily evidence of the president’s rank incompetence at management and governance, the Old Media types still can’t believe he is as bad as his critics say he is. The Old Guard still clings hopefully to the notion that George W. Bush is “resolute” and that “he values loyalty,” while the record shows very clearly that he is simply a self-absorbed, dim-witted and stubborn aristocrat.

Why wouldn’t this president fire Gonzalez? He gave in to criticism on the two most controversial appointments of his presidency: Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the failed nomination of his secretary, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court. He screwed up in both cases — waiting to fire Rumsfeld until after the 2006 elections, when it was too late to help his party; and letting Miers, his “Miss Jane Hathaway,” twist in the wind agonizingly for days while his troglodyte base became increasingly lathered over her lack of ideologoical purity.

So, assuming Bush will fire Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, who would he nominate as a replacement? (If you just thought, “his dog, Barney” — get out of my head!) One obvious candidate is his brother Jeb, the former governor of Florida, who has been out of office for over two months, and is undoubtedly tanned and well-rested.

There is a famous precedent, of course. Pres. John F. Kennedy appointed his younger brother, Robert Kennedy, as AG. Yes, Bobby earned a law degree from the University of Virginia in 1951, whereas Jeb’s 1973 Bachelor degree from the University of Texas was in Latin American Studies. But really the main qualification George Bush demands from his attorney general, as both John Ashcroft and, especially, Gonzalez have proved, is a keen ability to keep his lips in near proximity to the president’s buttocks.

Could Jeb’s nomination muster the 60 votes it would require to pass in the Senate? It seems unlikely but if you look at every other important issue that the Senate has voted on since the Dems took their one-vote majority, the approval of Jeb’s nomination is as likely as not.

The scandal swirling around Pres. Bush’s firing of eight U.S. Attorneys last December could lead to the resignation of Sen. Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico — which could change the dynamics in the Senate by adding another Democrat to the majority.

David Iglesias, the fired prosecutor from New Mexico, testified to Congress last week that he believes that two New Mexico Republican members of Congress had him fired because he wouldn’t pursue their political opponent. One of the pols was Rep. Heather Wilson. The other was Sen. Domenici:

On the day of the Dec. 7 firings, Miers’s deputy, William Kelley, wrote that Domenici’s chief of staff “is happy as a clam” about Iglesias.

A week later, Sampson wrote: “Domenici is going to send over names tomorrow (not even waiting for Iglesias’s body to cool).”

If Domenici were to step down, his replacement would be named by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat, who is running for president in 2008. Assuming the governor would replace Domenici with a Democrat, the balance of power in the Senate would undergo a subtle shift toward the Dems.

The parties are evenly divided now, with 48 Democrats and 48 Republicans, with two independents who both vote with Democrats. But one of those independents, Joe Lieberman, has been leaning Republican lately, especially on the war. The implicit threat that he might switch sides at any moment gives him power over the Democrats that he did not earn.

Upping the ranks of the Dems even by one vote would tend to neutralize Lieberman on issues related to the war, and it would put the Democrats one vote closer to a supermajority of 60 votes on appointments and clotures.

If you are wondering why Bush’s mass firing of U.S. Attorneys in December has even Traditional Media types upset, here, in part is why:

Sampson also strongly urged bypassing Congress in naming replacements, using a little-known power slipped into the renewal of the USA Patriot Act in March 2006 that allows the attorney general to name interim replacements without Senate confirmation.

“I am only in favor of executing on a plan to push some USAs out if we really are ready and willing to put in the time necessary to select candidates and get them appointed,” Sampson wrote in a Sept. 17 memo to Miers. “It will be counterproductive to DOJ operations if we push USAs out and then don’t have replacements ready to roll immediately.

“I strongly recommend that as a matter of administration, we utilize the new statutory provisions that authorize the AG to make USA appointments,” he wrote.

By avoiding Senate confirmation, Sampson added, “we can give far less deference to home state senators and thereby get 1.) our preferred person appointed and 2.) do it far faster and more efficiently at less political costs to the White House.”

Must’ve sounded like a great plan — on paper.