Blog
Tuesday April 3rd, 2007
"There's not a shred of evidence that a crime was committed."
That's the Republican talking point intended to marginalize the firings of US Attorneys during the run-up to the 2006 congressional elections. But it's just not true.
Granted, nothing has been proved yet, but anyone who believes that this does not at least warrant an investigation is simply un-American. In the hope that I can help elucidate the story for the naysayers, here are the facts:
Each of the canned attorneys were given performance as the reason for their dismissal, yet not a single one of them was ever told as much prior to their firing.
In each case, the attorney in question was either:
1 - nose-deep in an investigation of REPUBLICAN corruption, or
2 - were sent on a wild goose chase against claims of Democratic voter fraud, which have ALL turned out to be bogus.
Carol Lam, who was fired in November, shortly before the elections, had been investigating the Duke Cunningham case, one of the highest profile federal investigations being undertaken at the Department. Cunningham, you may recall, resigned from the House on November 28, 2005 after pleading guilty to accepting at least $2.4 million in bribes and underreporting his income for 2004. He pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud, wire fraud, and tax evasion. On March 3, 2006, he received a sentence of eight years and four months in prison and an order to pay $1.8 million in restitution. That investigation turned over several other smelly rocks, all of which happened to point to Republican corruption. Again.
In New Mexico, David Iglesias was fired, again with the stated reason being that he did not work hard enough to prosecute illegal border-crossing cases. A little digging turned up some interesting facts. Rep. Heather Wilson and Sen. Domenici both made a point of calling Iglesias and threatening to fire him if he didn't speed up his investigation into bogus allegations of Democratic voter fraud. This was in October, again, very shortly before the November elections. The idea was to get the story in the news that Democrats were being investigated, and not just Republicans, even though the investigation had no basis in fact.
These are just two of the biggest examples. So, no crime has been PROVEN. But clearly, the implication is huge. It would be extremely obtuse for someone, armed with this knowledge, to continue to claim that "no crime has been committed, let's move on." We're looking at a lot of crimes here, and they are felony-level, federal crimes. This story's got everything -- from simple perjury (the White House and AG Gonzales have all changed their story several times now. Gonzales' own version of the story has been debunked by testimony from his aide, Kyle Sampson) to Obstruction of Justice (Wilson and Domenici making threats, DOJ officials taking attorneys off cases). And I don't need to point out that Bill Clinton was impeached for committing perjury -- he lied about A BLOW JOB, for God's sake, and most Republicans feel that was justified. This, methinks, is a bit more serious than that. What it boils down to is that the White House and the Department of Justice, under the diabolical direction of Karl Rove, have come together to force the vote to tip in their favor. Is there ANYTHING more un-American and anti-democratic than that?
Sources:
TPMmuckraker.com
NYTimes.com
WashingtonPost.com
wikipedia.com
Further reading:
Lam Timeline
solongjohn.blogspot.com
Comprehensive PurgeGate timeline:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/usa-timeline.php
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Posted by Jamie
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