Chaos at Justice: U.S. Attorney Scandal

Chaos at Justice: When Is An Investigation Just Another Roadblock?
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 3, 2007

Today we have another clear indicator of just how low public confidence stands with the Department of Justice. The department’s Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility announce they’re investigating a key figure in the U.S. attorneys scandal—and the move raises immediate suspicions that it’s just another effort to obstruct the Congressional investigation. Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein at the Washington Post report:

The Justice Department has launched an internal investigation into whether Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's former White House liaison illegally took party affiliation into account in hiring career federal prosecutors, officials said yesterday.

The allegations against Monica M. Goodling represent a potential violation of federal law and signal that a joint probe begun in March by the department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility has expanded beyond the controversial dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys last year.

Note to the investigators: taking party affiliations into account is hardly the most serious of the violations in play here, but I guess it’s unfair to expect you to have read the morning newspapers. Also, why Monica Goodling all alone? The evidence at hand puts a focus on Paul J. McNulty as the stage manager of the politicization effort within DOJ. Monica Goodling appears to be the enabler for Karl Rove within the department. Kyle Sampson has left a trail of a similar nature including a check list with entries like “Federalist Society?” According to the secret order, Goodling and Sampson's hatchet work required the sign-off of the Attorney General—did he have no duty of supervision in this regard? In sum: this obviously involved the top of the department from the start, so the minimalism of the approach is suspicious, and the narrow focus on Goodling is extremely suspicious.

Which brings us to the other question: is this all just another effort to obstruct a Congressional inquiry? That’s a difficult question to dodge. As Sandy Levinson wrote (catching the story, with his typical eagle eye, only minutes after it went up):

It is up to the DOJ to decide whether Congress will be able to give immunity to Ms. Goodling. Whom, if anyone, would “we” trust in the current DOJ to make that decision? I can imagine that the Inspector General would be reluctant to grant immunity, but why should his decision control? Even those of us who are rabidly partisan shouldn't really be consumed by a desire to see Ms. Goodling go to jail (unlike others I could name). It will be more than enough to see her testify, under oath, in public before the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, and to use her testimony to nail others who are for more important than the 33-year-old graduate of Regent '99.

Isn't it clear that an independent prosecutor should be appointed (but by whom and under what authority) since everyone in the DOJ is hopelessly conflicted out?

It really does come down to a question of trust. Is there any reason to trust the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility? I don’t, and I doubt many people who have been following its appearances in the news do, either. For instance, I studied the case of former OPR attorney Jesselyn Raddack a couple of years ago and was able to verify her account with a number of other DOJ staffers. It shows how OPR—the office designed to insure professionalism—succumbed to political hackery at a very early stage and since has operated as a whitewash operation. And the Inspector General’s office? I have taken a look at their work over the last several years and have less of a problem with it. The Justice IG has done solid, high quality investigative work. But the corruption of IG offices throughout the Bush Administration is well documented at this point, and on something as politically sensitive as this, I don’t have confidence in that office to perform a proper investigation and render a report.

Sandy’s answer is the obvious one. A person of unquestioned impartiality and integrity must be appointed to conduct a criminal investigation. There is no person in the senior reaches of main justice who can be trusted. Not one.



U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Guam
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 9, 2007

Now that the basic pattern has been established—the appointment of politically pliant United States attorneys, who understand that they are to use their powers to advance the interests of the Republican Party, and to follow the cue of the White House—it is time to go back and look at some of the early warning signs of this phenomenon. One thing is clear: this didn’t break on to the scene for the first time on December 7, 2006. It’s been there lurking in the recesses of the administration all along.

The force five scandal that marked the first five years of the Bush Administration swirled around the “Über-Republican” Jack Abramoff, a fundraising legend with tight access both to Karl Rove and Tom DeLay. Among the more lurid of the Abramoff schemes was his work for the operators of a Guam sweatshop that drew on immigrant slave labor.

When the U.S. attorney for the islands began to look into the operation and to Abramoff’s curious lobbying effort on its behalf, Abramoff had a simple response. He placed a couple of phone calls and had the prosecutor fired. The Boston Globe reports:

The transactions were the target of a grand jury subpoena issued Nov. 18, 2002, according to the subpoena. It demanded that Anthony Sanchez, administrative director of the Guam Superior Court, turn over all records involving the lobbying contract, including bills and payments. A day later, the chief prosecutor, US Attorney Frederick A. Black, who had launched the investigation, was demoted. A White House news release announced that Bush was replacing Black . . .

The acting US attorney was a controversial official in Guam. At the time he was replaced, Black was directing a long-term investigation into allegations of public corruption in the administration of then-Governor Carl Gutierrez. The probe produced numerous indictments, including some of the governor’s political associates and top aides. Black, 56, had served as acting US attorney for Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands since 1991, when he was named to the post by the president’s father, President George H. W. Bush.

The career prosecutor, who held a senior position as first assistant before accepting the acting US attorney job, was demoted to a staff post. Black’s demotion came after an intensive lobbying effort by supporters of Gutierrez, who had been publicly critical of Black and his investigative efforts . . .

His replacement, Leonardo Rapadas, was confirmed in May 2003 without any debate. Rapadas had been recommended for the job by the Guam Republican Party. Fred Radewagen, a lobbyist who had been under contract to the Gutierrez administration, said he carried that recommendation to top Bush aide Karl Rove in early 2003.

This story has it all—an important fundraising operation for the party comes under criminal scrutiny. The prosecutor is fired, and the White House makes the announcement. And his replacement is hand-picked by the local party boss and Karl Rove. And at the time, there was hardly a murmur in the American press about the whole affair.


U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Kansas City
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 9, 2007

Kansas City Star reporters David Helling and Steve Kraske come up with more information suggesting that former U.S. Attorney Tom Graves was fired and that there were two principal concerns leading to the firing: his links to a corruption scandal surrounding Missouri’s Republican governor, and his refusal to engage in voter suppression tactics which were being peddled by main Justice. The Star also linked Missouri Republican Senator Kit Bond to the scandal for the first time, documenting his intervention with Justice on behalf of Graves.

Graves said he doesn’t know why he would have been a target for removal, but he suggested his “independence” may have played a role.

“When I first interviewed (with the Department)…I was asked to give the panel one attribute that describes me,” Graves said. “I said independent. Apparently, that was the wrong attribute.”

Missouri Democrats have long argued that the state’s fee offices, under the Blunt administration, were closely linked to campaign contributions. Tuesday they said news that Bond’s office was worried about Graves’ link to the fee office system may add to their suspicions.

“It’s alarming that there is now a connection between Todd Graves being pushed out of his job as U.S. Attorney and his involvement in Matt Blunt’s fee office scheme,” said Jack Cardetti, spokesman for the Missouri Democratic Party.


==============

U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Albuquerque and Seattle
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 2, 2007

Of all the efforts in the crosshairs of the Karl Rove-led “vote fraud” fraud, one stands out. It’s the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which has run the nation’s largest and most effective voter registration drive focusing on the urban poor—which is to say principally Blacks and Hispanics. Truthdig reports:

What angers the Republicans are ACORN’s voter registration efforts, mostly in poor African-American and Latino neighborhoods. In the last few years, it has registered about 500,000 voters in poor communities.

ACORN members tend to be tough and focused. They organize poor families ignored by the politicians, the big contributors and the reporters and pundits who dominate today’s political dialogue. While political writers report on the so-called money primary—the contribution competition among the top contenders—ACORN is signing up voters in neighborhoods where the major candidates and journalists seldom venture.

So what, exactly, is the criminal offense that led to multiple criminal investigations against ACORN across the country? That’s simple. “They are registering voters who are likely to be Democrats.” But they did have some sloppy practices.

ACORN’s success woke up New Mexico State Republican Chairman Allen Weh and other state party officials. They accused ACORN of fraud in the 2004 drive that registered 35,000 potential voters, according to The Albuquerque Tribune.

U.S. Attorney Iglesias investigated the complaints. He formed a task force that took a close look at more than 300 of them. In fact, some ACORN workers, who were paid for each person they registered, weren’t too fussy about whom they signed up. ACORN fired a worker for registering a 13-year-old boy.

Iglesias concluded there was no basis for criminal prosecutions against ACORN. It appears to have cost him his job. An almost identical story played out in Seattle, justifying the sacking of John McKay. Note that in the same campaign, as part of a Rove-led effort, a group with close ties to the Republican National Committee was soliciting students to register and then consistently “misplacing” their registration materials. The students showed up at the polls and found they were unregistered. No criminal inquiries or action in those cases.
===================

U.S. Attorney Scandal—Montana
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 2, 2007

One of the dead give-aways of the hastily manufactured rationalizations for the firing of U.S. attorneys was the claim that they are “absentee” figures because they spent too much time outside of their district attending to other business. This was used as a bullet against David Iglesias, who as a Navy JAG reservist was obligated to spend time in the service of his country in uniform. (In fact, the citation of a reserve officer’s service to undermine his career is also a violation of federal law, but that wouldn’t stop Alberto Gonzales and company for a second.) The documents emerging from Justice (such as they are—it is increasingly clear that a large-scale obstruction campaign is underway, and that documents may have been destroyed to avoid Congressional subpoenas) put the U.S. Attorney for Montana right at the heart of the scandal. Bill Mercer, who holds that office, doesn’t even live in Montana—he set up his household in suburban Washington and he hangs his hat at main Justice. In fact, this is a violation of the law, which required him to be a resident of Montana in order to hold the office of U.S. attorney there. A district court judge in Montana vented over his absenteeism and pointed out that his conduct was illegal. So what did Mercer do? He had the law changed, using the legislative legerdemain which is the telltale sign of the administration of justice in the era of Bush and Gonzales. And the figures involved once more include Brett Tollman, the mysteriously unfaithful aide to Arlen Specter who was rewarded for his services to the Department of Justice with a prompt appointment as the U.S. Attorney in Salt Lake City. The Washington Post reports this sordid tale in some detail this morning.

“It's a curious contrast that leaders in the Department of Justice would slip a change into law to allow one U.S. Attorney to spend only a few days a month in his district and keep his job, while at the same time claiming to fire another for spending a few days a month away from his district to serve his country,” Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said in a statement.

Of course, as Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us in his great essay “Self-Reliance,” “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” And the assumption that “loyal Bushies” are obligated to abide by the law which binds others is what Karl Rove would call a “foolish consistency.” Don’t miss Paul Kiel’s take on the whole affair in TPMMuckraker.
===================

U.S. Attorney Scandal—Montana
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 2, 2007

One of the dead give-aways of the hastily manufactured rationalizations for the firing of U.S. attorneys was the claim that they are “absentee” figures because they spent too much time outside of their district attending to other business. This was used as a bullet against David Iglesias, who as a Navy JAG reservist was obligated to spend time in the service of his country in uniform. (In fact, the citation of a reserve officer’s service to undermine his career is also a violation of federal law, but that wouldn’t stop Alberto Gonzales and company for a second.) The documents emerging from Justice (such as they are—it is increasingly clear that a large-scale obstruction campaign is underway, and that documents may have been destroyed to avoid Congressional subpoenas) put the U.S. Attorney for Montana right at the heart of the scandal. Bill Mercer, who holds that office, doesn’t even live in Montana—he set up his household in suburban Washington and he hangs his hat at main Justice. In fact, this is a violation of the law, which required him to be a resident of Montana in order to hold the office of U.S. attorney there. A district court judge in Montana vented over his absenteeism and pointed out that his conduct was illegal. So what did Mercer do? He had the law changed, using the legislative legerdemain which is the telltale sign of the administration of justice in the era of Bush and Gonzales. And the figures involved once more include Brett Tollman, the mysteriously unfaithful aide to Arlen Specter who was rewarded for his services to the Department of Justice with a prompt appointment as the U.S. Attorney in Salt Lake City. The Washington Post reports this sordid tale in some detail this morning.

“It's a curious contrast that leaders in the Department of Justice would slip a change into law to allow one U.S. Attorney to spend only a few days a month in his district and keep his job, while at the same time claiming to fire another for spending a few days a month away from his district to serve his country,” Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said in a statement.

Of course, as Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us in his great essay “Self-Reliance,” “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” And the assumption that “loyal Bushies” are obligated to abide by the law which binds others is what Karl Rove would call a “foolish consistency.” Don’t miss Paul Kiel’s take on the whole affair in TPMMuckraker.
==========================

U.S. Attorney Scandal—Pittsburgh
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 2, 2007

Calls for the resignation or criminal investigation of U.S. attorneys around the country are proliferating, with Kansas City, Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh being particular points of concern. This op-ed by a former assistant U.S. attorney published in today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette makes the now familiar points:

The Bush administration has politicized the Department of Justice, just as it has every federal agency. The solicitor general used to be known as "the 10th justice" for his presumed fairness and independence in presenting arguments to the Supreme Court; the current solicitor general is just a mouthpiece for the administration's far-right ideology. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his subordinates have disgraced their offices with the positions they've taken to justify torture and the administration's evasion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's restrictions, loose as they are, on wiretaps.

Ms. Buchanan has been a devotee of the administration's policies. She has aided the effort to inflate the law-enforcement successes in the war on terror by misclassifying routine immigration and false-document cases as "anti-terrorism cases." For a time, the Western Pennsylvania District topped the nation in the number of "anti-terrorism" prosecutions, largely because dozens of Iraqi immigrant truck-drivers were prosecuted for paying off a motor-vehicles official to obtain commercial-drivers licenses. All of them did it to get work; none had terroristic intentions; all received sentences of probation

The closer the look we get of Ms. Buchanan the more outlandish and disgraceful her conduct appears. At this point newspapers around the country should be reviewing the conduct of their U.S. attorneys to see if their conduct matches the Buchanan pattern. We’re probably going to find a great deal more misconduct before this is over.
===============================

U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Los Angeles
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 4, 2007

For the last two weeks, California Senator Diane Feinstein has been asking penetrating questions about the strange departure of the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles—Debra Wong Yang—in mid-October, at a time in which the plot against the U.S. attorneys was still in its gestation stage. Ms. Yang disappeared in the midst of a critical investigation targeting one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress—Rep. Jerry Lewis.

In his testimony, Kyle Sampson specifically recalls a discussion with the White House about Yang, which was coupled with one about Bud Cummins. Cummins, as we know, was involved in an investigation of powerful figures surrounding Missouri’s Republican governor just as Yang was looking at Lewis. The White House was, in the last weeks before a difficult election, concerned about both of them.

But the White House had a dilemma with Yang, starting with the fact that Gonzales had publicly praised her as one of the best U.S. attorneys in the country. How to address the situation? Suddenly, like deus ex machina, Yang received an irresistible job offer from one of the nation’s most prestigious law firms, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Adam Cohen at the New York Times takes us through the next steps:

The new job that Ms. Yang landed raised more red flags. Press reports say she got a $1.5 million signing bonus to become a partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a firm with strong Republican ties. She was hired to be co-leader of the Crisis Management Practice Group with Theodore Olson, who was President Bush’s solicitor general and his Supreme Court lawyer in Bush v. Gore. Gibson, Dunn was defending Mr. Lewis in Ms. Yang’s investigation.

Several issues bear investigating. First, did Ms. Yang know or suspect that she might lose her job, and jump ship to avoid being fired? That is not hard to believe because Ms. Miers and Mr. Sampson were exchanging e-mail about dismissing her in mid-September, and she announced her departure in October. Ms. Yang served on the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee, which Mr. Gonzales has called “a small group of U.S. attorneys that I consult on policy matters.” That may have put her in a position to be tipped off in advance.

A second possibility is that Gibson, Dunn dangled a rich financial package before Ms. Yang to get her out, and to disrupt the investigation of Mr. Lewis. Ms. Yang, who says she left her job purely for personal reasons, may not have known she was being lured away by people with close ties to Mr. Lewis and the White House, who were hoping to replace her with a more partisan prosecutor.

This could, of course, all be completely innocent. But the fact that it prominently involved Ted Olson—a former Solicitor General and perhaps the most tightly wired practitioner in the country to the Gonzales Justice Department—and an often mentioned candidate to replace Gonzales as attorney general significantly raises concerns about all these coincidences. At this point there is no reason to presume that this was innocent. There is too much smoke about it, and Congress needs to be asking some very pointed questions.
=========================

U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Seattle
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 4, 2007

Former Deputy Attorney General Comey’s testimony yesterday about cashiered Seattle U.S. Attorney John McKay brought out a number of very interesting details, particularly about how McKay sought funding for an investigation into the murder of an assistant U.S. attorney named Tom Wales. Josh Marshall has a fascinating note from another AUSA in the Seattle office who provides some vital detail:

Tom Wales was shot and killed in 2001. What nobody has talked about, and what you may not be aware of, is the fact that Tom Wales was extremely active in attempting to get tighter gun control laws passed here in Washington.

Think about that for a second. A pro-gun control federal prosecutor was shot and killed. John McKay was agitating for more resources to bring his killer to justice. That pissed off DOJ, who apparently thought that McKay should spend his time going after bogus voter fraud prosecutions rather than solve the murder of a guy who was in favor of gun control. If you don't think the fact that Tom Wales' political views weren't taken into consideration by the higher ups at DOJ when they decided to punish McKay for fighting to find his killer, you haven't been paying attention to the way these guys have operated for the last 6 years. Every single thing they do is about politics, and the political views of those they help or hurt.

The bottom line of this whole McKay firing could be summed up in this way: try to catch killers, you get fired. File BS charges of voter fraud, you keep your job.

It's a slap in the face to every prosecutor in the country. It's our job to seek justice for those that aren't able to seek it for themselves. None of us should give a damn what the political views are of the victims we try to protect. It's beyond reprehensible for them to punish McKay for doing this. But for this administration, it's par for the course.

It’s easy to understand why so many young prosecutors have been demoralized by the regime that Alberto Gonzales and Paul J. McNulty brought to Justice. And the most outrageous moment (of many) in Gonzales’s testimony was his invocation of the integrity of the prosecutors who work for him as a shield. This note sums up an attitude which is, I suspect, very common out in the field right now.

Let me pay tribute once more to the team at Talking Points Memo, whose tenacious attention to this affair pushed it into the open. They reveal, I think, the very best that opinion journalism on the web has to offer, and their fame is really sinking in. In a discussion I had with a network news executive a short while ago Josh Marshall’s name came up. “What a phenomenal investigator,” the executive said, “I don’t understand how he does it.” Neither do I.
==================

U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Little Rock
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 5, 2007
The first of the new “loyal Bushie” U.S. attorneys—Rove protégé Tim Griffin in Little Rock—is now identified as the subject of a pending criminal investigation involving voter fraud.
===================

U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Kansas City
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 6, 2007

Pulitzer Prize winner Charlie Savage is back firing on all pistons today with a thorough portrait of one of the crudest political hacks to surface in the Purgegate scandal so far: former deputy head of the Civil Rights Division at main Justice, and U.S. Attorney in Kansas City, Bradley Schlozman.

Savage bores into Schlozman’s violation of standing DOJ policies about commencing voting rights actions on the eve of an election.

That summer, the liberal activist group ACORN paid workers $8 an hour to sign up new voters in poor neighborhoods around the country. Later, ACORN’s Kansas City chapter discovered that several workers filled out registration forms fraudulently instead of finding real people to sign up. ACORN fired the workers and alerted law enforcement.

Schlozman moved fast, so fast that his office got one of the names on the indictments wrong. He announced the indictments of four former ACORN workers on Nov. 1, 2006, warning that “this national investigation is very much ongoing.” Missouri Republicans seized on the indictments to blast Democrats in the campaign endgame.

Critics later accused Schlozman of violating the Justice Department’s own rules. A 1995 Justice election crime manual says “federal prosecutors . . . should be extremely careful not to conduct overt investigations during the preelection period” to avoid “chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities” and causing “the investigation itself to become a campaign issue.”

“In investigating election fraud matters, the Justice Department must refrain from any conduct which has the possibility of affecting the election itself,” the manual states, adding in underlining that “most, if not all, investigation of alleged election crime must await the end of the election to which the allegation relates.”

The department said Schlozman’s office got permission from headquarters for the election-eve indictments. It added that the department interprets the policy as having an unwritten exception for voter registration fraud, because investigators need not interview voters for such cases.

Of course, the written policies don’t matter when you have an “unwritten exception,” freely crafted retrospectively whenever the need serves. This is how the Gonzales Justice Department works. It comes more and more to resemble George Orwell’s Animal Farm. To be specific, the point midway through the novel when the animals witness with their own eyes the first clear violation of the Seven Commandments. “But somehow or other, the last two words had slipped out of the animals’ memory. But they saw now that the Commandment had not been violated; for clearly there was good reason for killing the traitors who had leagued themselves with Snowball.” The Commandment said “No animal shall kill any other animal.” But the “unwritten exception” came with the addition of the words “without cause.”

Even more revealing is how Schlozman took a sledgehammer to the Civil Rights Division, a section which was first organized in the Eisenhower administration by my old mentor, Harold R. Tyler, and which was – pre-Schlozman – often considered a shining citadel of professionalism and integrity.

Schlozman also moved to take control of hiring for the voting rights section, taking advantage of a new policy that gave political appointees more control. Under Schlozman, the profile of the career attorneys hired by the section underwent a dramatic transformation.

Half of the 14 career lawyers hired under Schlozman were members of the conservative Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, up from none among the eight career hires in the previous two years, according to a review of resumes. The average US News & World Report ranking of the law school attended by new career lawyers plunged from 15 to 65.

In other words, good-bye to the graduates of Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley and Texas, and welcome to the graduates of Pat Robertson’s Regent University and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, provided they have appropriate Republican party credentials, of course. This is an exercise in the making of a hackocracy, or, in the closest historical parallel, Gleichschaltung.

So where is Bradley Schlozman today? Well, he’s been recalled from Kansas City. He now is in the Executive Office of the U.S. Attorneys, where he can manipulate prosecutorial conduct all over the country. Reassuring, isn’t it?



U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Guam
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 9, 2007

Now that the basic pattern has been established—the appointment of politically pliant United States attorneys, who understand that they are to use their powers to advance the interests of the Republican Party, and to follow the cue of the White House—it is time to go back and look at some of the early warning signs of this phenomenon. One thing is clear: this didn’t break on to the scene for the first time on December 7, 2006. It’s been there lurking in the recesses of the administration all along.

The force five scandal that marked the first five years of the Bush Administration swirled around the “Über-Republican” Jack Abramoff, a fundraising legend with tight access both to Karl Rove and Tom DeLay. Among the more lurid of the Abramoff schemes was his work for the operators of a Guam sweatshop that drew on immigrant slave labor.

When the U.S. attorney for the islands began to look into the operation and to Abramoff’s curious lobbying effort on its behalf, Abramoff had a simple response. He placed a couple of phone calls and had the prosecutor fired. The Boston Globe reports:

The transactions were the target of a grand jury subpoena issued Nov. 18, 2002, according to the subpoena. It demanded that Anthony Sanchez, administrative director of the Guam Superior Court, turn over all records involving the lobbying contract, including bills and payments. A day later, the chief prosecutor, US Attorney Frederick A. Black, who had launched the investigation, was demoted. A White House news release announced that Bush was replacing Black . . .

The acting US attorney was a controversial official in Guam. At the time he was replaced, Black was directing a long-term investigation into allegations of public corruption in the administration of then-Governor Carl Gutierrez. The probe produced numerous indictments, including some of the governor’s political associates and top aides. Black, 56, had served as acting US attorney for Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands since 1991, when he was named to the post by the president’s father, President George H. W. Bush.

The career prosecutor, who held a senior position as first assistant before accepting the acting US attorney job, was demoted to a staff post. Black’s demotion came after an intensive lobbying effort by supporters of Gutierrez, who had been publicly critical of Black and his investigative efforts . . .

His replacement, Leonardo Rapadas, was confirmed in May 2003 without any debate. Rapadas had been recommended for the job by the Guam Republican Party. Fred Radewagen, a lobbyist who had been under contract to the Gutierrez administration, said he carried that recommendation to top Bush aide Karl Rove in early 2003.

This story has it all—an important fundraising operation for the party comes under criminal scrutiny. The prosecutor is fired, and the White House makes the announcement. And his replacement is hand-picked by the local party boss and Karl Rove. And at the time, there was hardly a murmur in the American press about the whole affair.


U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Kansas City
DEPARTMENT No Comment
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED May 9, 2007

Kansas City Star reporters David Helling and Steve Kraske come up with more information suggesting that former U.S. Attorney Tom Graves was fired and that there were two principal concerns leading to the firing: his links to a corruption scandal surrounding Missouri’s Republican governor, and his refusal to engage in voter suppression tactics which were being peddled by main Justice. The Star also linked Missouri Republican Senator Kit Bond to the scandal for the first time, documenting his intervention with Justice on behalf of Graves.

Graves said he doesn’t know why he would have been a target for removal, but he suggested his “independence” may have played a role.

“When I first interviewed (with the Department)…I was asked to give the panel one attribute that describes me,” Graves said. “I said independent. Apparently, that was the wrong attribute.”

Missouri Democrats have long argued that the state’s fee offices, under the Blunt administration, were closely linked to campaign contributions. Tuesday they said news that Bond’s office was worried about Graves’ link to the fee office system may add to their suspicions.

“It’s alarming that there is now a connection between Todd Graves being pushed out of his job as U.S. Attorney and his involvement in Matt Blunt’s fee office scheme,” said Jack Cardetti, spokesman for the Missouri Democratic Party.

Netanyahu's White House Visit
DEPARTMENT Washington Babylon
BY Ken Silverstein
PUBLISHED April 6, 2007

It's never pleasant to favorably cite Robert Novak. “Beneath the asshole,” Michael Kinsley once said of him, “is a very decent guy, and beneath the very decent guy is an asshole.” But Novak had a particularly good column on the Middle East in yesterday's Washington Post. “The aphorism . . . that Arabs 'never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity'”, he wrote in the piece, “now can be applied to Israel.” Novak was referring to Israel's reaction to last week's Riyadh declaration, which showed a definite willingness on the part of Arab states to find a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert quickly responded to the declaration by saying that preconditions for any talks included the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas last June. He also made clear that Israel would reject the right of return for Palestinian refugees or a withdrawal by Israel to its pre-1967 borders. “Negotiating those points does not mean they will be conceded,” Novak wrote. “But setting conditions for talks is a classic mechanism for escaping talks altogether.”

Novak said there would be no prospect of progress on a peace deal without serious White House pressure on the Israeli government, which is clearly not in the cards under George W. Bush--and not likely under his successor, based on the last month's AIPAC conference in Washington. Vice President Dick Cheney and various administration officials attended, as did many prominent Democrats, including presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

A well-placed source told me that Benjamin Netanyahu, the hard-line former prime minister and head of the Likud Party, had a private meeting with Cheney when he was in town for the conference. I ran that by Cheney's spokeswoman, Megan McGinn, who confirmed the meeting, and said it was held at the White House on March 12th. Several Israeli officials also were at the meeting, including the country's U.S. ambassador, McGinn added.

Of the meeting itself, my source said Cheney and Netanyahu discussed the need for heavy pressure on Iran over the next few months--the diplomatic equivalent of "overwhelming force" on the military front. They agreed that a military option should remain on the table, and Cheney left clear that the U.S. and Israel should continue to closely coordinate their policies on Iran.

I asked Augustus Richard Norton, an advisor to the Iraq Study Group and author of the new book Hezbollah: A Short History, for his opinion on the interplay between American and Israeli policy on Iran. His take:

The reason there is no light between the expressed U.S. position on the Iranian nuclear program and the Israeli position reflects:

a. a genuine concern about Iran's challenge to U.S. hegemony in the Middle East;

b. a fear that Iran, with a nuclear arsenal, might open the arsenal to non-state actors, including terrorists; and

c. the fact that Israel's politically influential supporters in the U.S. share deep Israeli concerns about the Iranian program.

C is certainly more important than B or A. Which is why the U.S. will not give the time day to any serious discussion of a nuclear free Middle East, which would put Israel's nuclear arsenal on the table. What serious presidential candidate, from either party, has done other than underline the "existential threat" posed by Iran to Israel? Is this the result of rigorous analytical thinking or is it because none of them dares to run the political risk of saying otherwise?

Sex and the C.I.A.
DEPARTMENT Washington Babylon
BY Ken Silverstein
PUBLISHED April 17, 2007

I recently received an advance copy of Seth Hettena's Feasting on the Spoils: The Life and Times of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, History's Most Corrupt Congressman, which will be published this July and which I highly recommend. In addition to being a terrific piece of political reporting, the book is filled with juicy details concerning the seamier side of the Cunningham affair, otherwise known as “Hookergate.”

I was particularly interested in stories Hettena unearthed about Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, whom former CIA director Porter Goss had named as executive director, the agency's number-three official. Foggo resigned last year not long after FBI agents raided his home and office. The Feds suspected that Foggo, who was later indicted, had funneled CIA contracts to his long-time friend Brent Wilkes, the defense contractor who is accused of bribing Cunningham with money and prostitutes.

Some of the more sensational stories in Hettena's book—and he has on-the-record sources—got me thinking. First, didn't Foggo's frequent indiscretions (for example, flashing his agency ID to jump the line at a strip club) raise red flags about his character? Second, wasn't Foggo's outlandish sexual behavior—like, say, publicly performing oral sex on a hooker (hired by Wilkes) at his own bachelor party—just the sort of thing that makes intelligence officials potentially vulnerable to blackmail by a hostile spy service? Third, might it be possible to cynically point to such revelations and use them as a hook for a blog item that combines sex and espionage?

You already know the answer to #3. As to #1 and #2, I spoke with a number of former CIA officers and asked them about the use of sex as a weapon of espionage and whether Foggo-scale misbehavior would typically be deemed a security risk or cause other problems.

The consensus among the officers was that general sexual promiscuity posed no problem, especially if the CIA employee was single. A pattern of continuous adultery might raise eyebrows and lead to a suggestion of counseling, but would not likely be seen as cause for dismissal. However, philandering that raised chain-of-command-issues was a big problem. For example, I was told of one case where a junior officer based in Europe discovered that his wife was sleeping with his station chief. “Everyone got sent home and reprimanded,” said the source.“It was a big mess, but this was seen as a character issue, not a security issue.”

So when does sex become a security problem? The CIA conducts background checks and administers periodic polygraph tests to try to ferret out anything that might make undercover officers vulnerable to blackmail. Until the mid-1990s, homosexuality was considered an immediate cause for dismissal. And “close and continuing contact with a foreign national,” a euphemism for a sexual relationship, was deemed to be another major vulnerability. Any such relationship had to be reported and failure to do so could also lead to dismissal. In fact, during the Cold War, the KGB (and allied services, including the East German Stasi under Markus Wolf, and Cuban intelligence) frequently sought to entrap CIA officers. The KGB believed that Americans were sex-obsessed materialists, and that U.S. spies could easily be lured with the prospect of an easy lay. CIA officers in Russia were strongly warned about “swallows,” the term for the beautiful women the KGB deployed to try to seduce Americans, which was a constant danger at Moscow station. (One former CIA official told me that he and his friends joked that they longed to be given the job of “sexual entrapment training officer.”)

The Russians did have some modest success with this strategy. Back in 1940, the FBI discovered that “single U.S. employees in Moscow frequented a prostitution ring linked to Soviet intelligence and that classified documents were handled improperly and may have been obtained by Soviet workers.” It's also been reported that the CIA's first Moscow station chief fell for a swallow—his maid—and returned home in disgrace.

The Russians and their allies also targeted American military personnel stationed abroad. The best-known case was Clayton Lonetree, a hard-drinking Marine stationed in Moscow who was seduced by a swallow named Violetta Seina, a translator at the U.S. Embassy. Seina hooked up Lonetree with “Uncle Sasha,” his KGB handler, whom he provided with valuable information. Lonetree continued to spy for the Russians after he was transferred to the American embassy in Vienna, but ultimately turned himself in. The only American Marine ever convicted of espionage, Lonetree was released after serving nine years of a 30-year sentence.

Sex wasn't just used by the Russians as a recruitment tool, but also as a means of compromising CIA officers. One source told me: “Let's say a guy has a girlfriend and he decides not to report it. The Russians take pictures of him but don't approach him right away. Five years later, though, when he's stationed in another country, a KGB officer shows him old pictures of him and the girlfriend, and newer pictures of the girl with a young kid. The guy doesn't know for sure if it's his kid or if the girl was working for the KGB, but he's dead, especially because he never revealed the relationship at the time. So he turns down the recruiting pitch but has to go back to the office and write the whole thing up, including what he didn't report five years earlier. He's probably of no further use in that country and he may not be of use anywhere else.”

I asked the former officials if the CIA used sex as a lure to entrap foreign intelligence officials. “Not often,” one told me. “Coercive recruitment generally didn't work. We found that offers of money and freedom worked better.” However, several of the sources said that if the CIA found that a KGB official had a girlfriend, they'd try to recruit her as an access agent who could then be used to turn the Russian. “There was a woman who was promiscuously involved with the Soviet community in Beirut and we put her on the payroll,” one former Middle East hand told me. “I'm not aware that it ever led to anything, but we paid her for quite a while.”

A similar case involved Alexander Ogorodnik, a married official who worked at the Soviet embassy in Bogota in the 1970s. The CIA learned Ogorodnik was having an affair with a local Spanish woman; the Bogota station chief recruited the woman, and she in turn convinced Ogorodnik, who was already deeply disillusioned with the Soviet system, to spy for the CIA. As recounted in The Main Enemy, co-authored by former CIA officer Milt Bearden and James Risen, Ogorodnik became a highly productive agent, especially after he returned to Moscow, where he provided the CIA with piles of diplomatic cables and top-secret documents until the late 1970s, when he was arrested and, before being interrogated, committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule he kept concealed in a modified Montblanc pen given to him by his CIA handler.

One former CIA officer said that while sexual entrapment wasn't generally a good tool to recruit a foreign official, it was sometimes employed successfully to solve short-term problems. For example, this officer was once stationed in a Middle Eastern country and wanted to shut down a known spy from a neighboring state who was also posted there. To make a long story short, the CIA obtained video footage of the man in intimate embrace with his local girlfriend. When the man turned down a recruiting pitch, the agency mailed the images to his wife. What happened next was never precisely clear, but the man was soon recalled to his home country.

This source also said the CIA routinely kept prostitutes on the payroll in Third World countries. “It might cost you $500 a month, which was nothing, and you'd get a wealth of information about who's who and who's doing what to who,” he said. “You were always looking for people like that who could give you visibility into the dark side of the city.”

Back to Dusty Foggo. In addition to stories in Hettena's new book, I've previously reported that Foggo had behaved very badly while based in Honduras in the early-1980s, when the CIA was using the country as a base for covert programs in Central America. He was said to be a regular at a Tegucigalpa bar named Gloria's and at a casino at the Maya Hotel, both places known at the time as hooker hotbeds.

Whether Foggo had official dealings with prostitutes in Honduras or not, this was clearly a big problem. “Dusty would have been the perfect target of a counter-intelligence operation,” said one official who worked in Honduras at the time. “He had access and knowledge, and was reckless and visible. You're only vulnerable if you make yourself vulnerable, and that's what Dusty did.”

This person, and several others, have told me that Foggo continued to display poor judgment throughout his career and had been reprimanded over his personal conduct--and that all of this was well known to Goss before he installed Foggo as executive director. “When we heard Dusty had been picked, we figured we were doomed,” he said. “And we were right.” All of which leads to one of the great, unanswered questions surrounding Foggo: why would Goss possibly have picked him for such a senior position at the agency?

I asked the CIA press office if Foggo's personal conduct had ever raised red flags at the agency. Spokesman Mark Mansfield replied by email, saying, “Given that legal proceedings are underway, it would not be appropriate to comment, other than to point out that Mr. Foggo left the CIA last year and the position he held, Executive Director, doesn't exist any more.”