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Not All the DOJ Missing Emails Are Missing
Hylas sends us to Democracy Now for a newscast on the missing emails, an interview with investigative journalist Greg Palast. Here's Palast talking about the fired US attorney from New Mexico, David Iglesias: "Iglesias believes the real reasons for the firings are in what are called the missing emails, emails sent by the [White House political advisor Karl] Rove team using Republican Party campaign computers, which Rove claims can't be retrieved. But not all the missing emails are missing. We have 500 of them. Apparently the Rove team misaddressed their emails, and late one night they all ended up in our inboxes in our offices in New York City." This story has had zero play in the US media; it's been being carried on the BBC.
A bit of history on Greg Palast; he's the guy who, on the BBC, broke the story about election irregularities in Florida before the 2000 election. Admittedly, a few days before, but it's still a bit of a scoop.
In the interview he claims to have sent them on to congress.
There is a link at the top of the page to listen to (or watch) the interview. You still might not like the style or production quality but they really do have to differ from written news.
That's part of the issue; that all these emails SHOULD have gone through government accounts, for precisely the reasons you mention. Instead they were using georgewbush.com. When people started asking questions, that was when they claimed hundreds of emails were "lost".
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
There is nothing weird about it if you know who owns the media and how they operate. Disney, Viacom, Timewarner, News Corp, Bertelsmann and GE own more than 90% of US media outlets. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_medi a_ownership for details. To get an inside view of how the media handle stories that are unwelcome to the establishment, I can recommend the following book: http://www.amazon.com/Into-Buzzsaw-Leading-Journal ists-Expose/dp/1591022304
It is much better than this!p alast+2000&search=Searchp alast&search=Search
He investigated the contract Jeb Bush gave to a company to filter out from the voter rolls the people who had no right to vote. He got their listings printed, and found out that they had prevented tens of thousands of african-americans from voting for no legal reason! As everyone knows african-americans almost always (95%) vote for the democrats. That is how the 2000 election really was stolen, and all US corporate media boycotted what he found, which only aired on the BBC.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=greg+
For more great videos by Palast about the 2004 election and more:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=greg+
Also do a serch on emule for other exclusive materials.
The article reads like a tongue-in-cheek joke with no facts. After reading that particular quote, with no text supporting it, I'm of the assumption that it was a joke. No national media is picking up on it just like no national media is picking up on the latest Doonesbury comic. Seriously, read the article. Does anyone else think that a mock play between Kevin Bacon and Tom Cruise can be considered a reputable source of news?
This article was written as a joke, and it appears that someone pulled out a choice quote and submitted it as news. What's next, The Onion?
Dekker Dreyer
Nice troll. Too bad it's not correct.
You are correct when you say the US Attorneys serve at the will of the President. Bill Clinton, when he came into office, fired all 83 US Attorneys and replaced them. So did Reagan and Bush, Sr.
Bush, however, not only did not do that, he waited until two years into his second term to fire eight attorneys which he had previously appointed!
Further, as is now becoming clear, the firings were not for performance reasons, but political reasons. In one case, the attorney was told he was being fired to make way for a former aide to Karl Rove. In another case, Iglesias, he was specificaly told his firing was not for performance reasons but political yet the White House and Gonzales kept saying, and still say to this day, that the firing was for performance issues.
As Iglesias said on Fox Noise, and as the transcript above shows, he asked for and was given permission to use the DOJ as a reference. If he was fired for performance reasons, why bother to give him a recommendation?
So what we have is an Attorney General who has been lying under oath about an incident which he apparently knew nothing about even though he heads the department. Let's see, lying under oath, can't recall information, doesn't know what's going on. Why does that sound familiar?
Keep up the trolling. We need the laughs.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Basically you don't want a certain block of people to be able to vote (be it, republicans, democrats but, historically black democrats in tight elections). You send registered mail to every person on the registered voting list that meets your criteria.
Some mail will be failed to be delivered because the person doesn't live there anymore, they refuse to sign for the mail, they weren't home during delivered, etc, etc.
On election day you wait for those who have their registered mail returned to cast a ballot at their polling place. The agent then formally contests the ballot which is legal.
--
Attached is the excel document with the returned mail from Douglas County.
Chris Jaarda
--
From 'Douglas County Voter Fraud Master Spreadsheet.xls' properties
Network & Online Services
Republican National Committee
davecb5620@gmail.com
Yes, but they are not saying Gonzales should resign because he acted politically. He lied about it. Further, a political act such as the firings can result in political consequences, and in this case the gross nature of the politics of the firings results in political calls for his resignation.
Simple.
FTFA I mean, he's not necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he and his guys were mistyping their email addresses, sent them to georgewbush.org, instead of dotcom, which is an email domain owned by friends of ours, who shot them right to us.
Tequila - drink of the gods.
This is an issue because the subtext of all the stories is this: if you are a Democrat up for election you WILL be investigated, if you are a Republican you WILL NOT be investigated, if you are a Democrat at the DoJ you will be fired, if you are a Republican you will be promoted. Do you understand? The Department of Justice is a supposed to be a non-political department because no citizen who cares about this country wants a Soviet style DoJ where criminal investigations are based on political affiliation.
If you don't care about this now, you better not be bitching when a Democrat is President and the tides turn...
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
I just need to voice my thoughts out loud. Feel free to correct me on anything.
.gov addresses (but instead were illegally sent from and to websites set up by Donatelli Group, the same organization that set up both the 2004 Bush re-election site, the Republican national Committee site, AND the Swift Boat 'independent' sites) certainly constitutes that. But this isn't my point. Although having emails like this one (that have the Trifecta of Jack Abramoff, using government facilities illegally for partisan reasons, and asking people to direct official emails illegally to a non-governmental email address for government business because "there could be lawsuits etc.") are certainly fun bedtime reading. If only because it makes you wonder what lawsuits Bush-Cheney were avoiding by leaving the email servers clean of incriminating evidence.
.000 in all major issues that have come to a head (sorry for that analogy ... for those non North American Scum, let's use a cricket analogy and say the reporter has hit six sixes in an inning against opponents that were all out for a duck when they were at bat). And the emails didn't just arrive in dribs and drabs, but landed like manna from heaven, all late one night as offices in Washington were dark, just as the story was starting to cool because of the lack of emails.
Title 18 (18 USC), Chapter 73 has a lot to say about what penalties someone will face for deleting anything that may be evidence in any Governmental department investigation (section 1519 makes for particularly good reading), and the 'deleting' of emails that were meant to be sent from
And the talking points now seems to be fogging the issue isn't my point either. Even though it's true that Gonzales could have said "I let 'em go because I can, end of story", and that would have been OK. But he didn't... under oath, he said all eight were fired for poor performance, and records later showed the fired people had (for the vast majority of them) excellent performance reviews. Not just 'meets expectations', but 'exceeds expectations'. It was just that one of them had managed to get people like Duke Cunningham convicted and palms were sweating, for example.
No, the fascinating thing for me is the scale, the person, and the timing of it all. Not just one email, but five-hundred. Not sent to an email address that bounced the emails back to sender as undelivered, but sent to a person that has so far batted 1.000 on his investigations of an Admin that has batted
Sounds to me like we have a Deep Throat type of leak at the White House. In years to come, the books written by people on the inside will talk of the air of paranoia in the Halls of Power as the top-feeders demanded to know who was where at the time the emails were sent.
That's the big story right now. I bet the air of paranoia setting in the Halls of Power right now has been cranked up to 11. That's the angle I want covered. In years to come, when someone writes the book on what happened, I want to know how much shouting there was (I'm guessing "a lot").
The article made repeated references to the movie because it was based on a true story about one of the fired US attorneys, Iglesias.
The Cruise/Bacon dialogue was there because it's a TV transcript. Obviously the BBC thought the viewer would be more "captivated" if they included shots of Tom Cruise playing one of the US attorneys who was fired.
So the movie dialogue is there because of sensational TV editing.
If you read the article right through you'd find the official stats on 2004 election showed 3 million "challenged" (and over one million invalidated) votes. Not sure if that's the typical number under other governments, but it sure does sound like a huge number - using the government's own numbers.
U.S. Attorneys are usually all replaced at the beginning of an administration. They are not supposed to be replaced in the middle of a term in order to obstruct justice.
While they are political appointees they do not occupy political positions. Supreme Court judges are political appointees too. They can't simply be yanked off the court by the president if he or one of his friends loses a court decision.
To get on the Supreme Court, a nominee has to be approved by Congress. Ordinarily that applies to U.S. Attorney nominees as well. (Even though they serve "at the pleasure of the president".) Specter's little Patriot Act amendment put an end to that. So now the president can simply fire a prosecutor if he or one of his friends get prosecuted, replace him with whomever he likes, and nobody can say a thing.
Now we have people in the president's own party demanding that his prosecutors bring bogus charges against their political opponents, rushed in time for elections. (Historically prosecutors have usually waited until after elections to avoid tainting them.) We have people in the president's own party having the prosecutors investigating them fired. We have prosecutors being replaced by guys who compile lists of registered voters in minority districts for mass voter challenges. We have prosecutors being replaced for investigating real crimes instead of wasting their time harassing voters with imaginary "voter fraud" cases. We have a Department of Justice that launches more than six corruption investigations of local Democratic politicians for every single investigation of a Republican. If you think this is a "non-story" you're out of your mind.
> It is not playing in the US media because no law was broken when those attorneys were fired.
h tml?ex=1331956800&en=dfab854c91a51b4b&ei=5088&part ner=rssnyt&emc=rsst -greg-palast-reports-on-the-firing-of-new-mexico-a ttorney-david-iglesias/l l-of-pete-domenici_b_43006.html0 03699882_webmckayforum09m.html?syndication=rss/
1. pete domenici (r-nm) tried to force attorney generals to indict democrats for voter-fraud
2. alberto gonzales (ag) almost certainly lied under oath
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/opinion/19mon4.
http://www.gregpalast.com/investigative-journalis
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002677.php
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-kleiman/the-fa
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2
The only crime in the Lewinsky case was lying about it under oath. There is no federal law against oral sex or infidelity.
The underlying issue that were are hoping cracks some senior official heads (Gonzo and Rove would be a nice start) is voter fraud. The 8 who got fired, yeah, it's a bummer, but as you mentioned, not illegal. But, the ones who DIDN'T get fired, that is the problem. I live in Wisconsin, where one of the selected for replacement attorneys wound up keeping his job. He had a lowly admin official locked up for 4 months on trumped up corruption charges. And you can bet we got hammered by the "Doyle's aids are in prison due to corruption" adds in the build up the the election. Doyle still won the election, but it was much closer than it would have been otherwise. Fast forward to the actual court case for the accused, it lasted like 5 minutes, the Judge cleared her of any wrong doing, apologized to her, and admonished the attorney.
That case and many more like it, are the real issues. The things that will send people to jail. The hearings over the 8 that were fired have two goals: 1) a Perjury trap for Gonzo (who has done a remarkable job of avoiding them at the cost of all of his credibility) and 2) grounds to pull up more internal documentation (the missing emails). The theory being that the hearings over the purge is the crack in the Cadberry egg that will let us get to the gooey caramel middle.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Except he fired a life long republican because they didn't jump when Republican senator Senator Pete Domenici, asked him to file charges against a democrats for a non existent voter crimes.
t ain-iglesias-obstruction-of-justice-and-the-theft- of-2008/
http://www.gregpalast.com/an-army-of-rove-botscap
He did his job and resisted the political pressure.
The official reason given was 'absent from job' because he was 40 days away from his post. He's been called up to active duty, since he is a Navy reserve, and it's a crime to fire an reserve just because they've been called up to active duty.
So it's stinky. Very stinky, in Soviet Russia they arrest opposition politicians too for no good reason.
Do you think the Democrats will fare better on Slashdot when (if) they recover power?
Have you been submitting stories about IT biting Democrats in the ass, and getting your stories rejected?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Yeah, everyone knows the Justice Department was meant to be a campaign organization for the party running the executive.
(IANAL)
So he made a mistake, and changed course to fix the problem.... Exactly what Bush opponents accuse him of never doing, and you're bitching about that too?
This isn't in the American news because only the elite of the Bush-haters actually care about the story, and it's something to put on TV on slow news days. I can't wait until the day that this political charade comes back to bite a Democratic president in the ass. This partisan bullshit is exhausting.
Yes, the firings were for political reasons, and you should be OK with that.
The lying and the cover-up are another story. Those are despicable, and Gonzales should be fired (non of this "resigning" shit).
They've been in the past, under Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and for two years under Clinton. While that position did not exactly improve their character, they've never went on such an orgy of spending, power grabbing, and favor granting we saw from 2001-2006.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Your thinking on the matter concerns me:
n zales/ I don't know anything about the site, but it's a nice summary and should have been the story the media told following the hearing that day. It gets to why this matters in a hurry, because it's not about hiring/firing.
The reason this _should_ be an issue is the principal of separation of powers has been sodomized by the current administration.
During the Clinton administration, there were just four people in the White House -- the President, the Vice President, the White House Counsel, and the Deputy White House Counsel -- who could participate in discussions with the Justice Department "regarding pending criminal investigations and criminal cases." There were just three Justice Department officials authorized to talk with the White House. This arrangement was intended restrict political interference in the administration of justice.
Yesterday in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that it was important that the Justice Department "be independent from" the White House. But as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) pointed out, the firewalls that had existed during the Clinton administration have been ripped down. In the Bush administration, the rules have been rewritten so that 417 White House officials and 30 Justice Department officials are eligible to have discussions about criminal cases.
I copied this whole-cloth from http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/20/whitehouse-go
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
My question is this ? Why did the Duke Lacross case get MONTHS of airtime , and yet the Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom doube rape and murder hasnt been mentions on national TV. This poor Girl was forced to watch 5 Gangbangers rape her boyfriend, cut off his sexual orgins, then they raped him in bedding, set him on fire, shot him to death and dumped his body in a ditch. She wasnt as lucky as he was. She was gang raped for several days, and after forced oral sex she was forced to drink cleaning fluid to destoy the evidence. When they were done raping her, they cut both of her breasts off while she was still alive then took turns pissing on her. when the police finally found her she was in the kitchen in 5 seperate garbage bags. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channon_Christian_and _Christopher_Newsom_murder
This happened in Knoxville TN in Jan but there has been NOTHING about it on CNN CBS ect NADA
Ive even writen Nancy Grace several emails about this and NADA
The US Media Doesnt give a damn about anything BUT RATINGS and KISSING BIG GOVT ASS
You can't have it both ways. So which is it?
I'll tell you. You're pulling a "Choicepoint" by omitting things from the story. Yes, Ethel Baxter (D) created the felon list (and since you claim felons vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, she must have been thinking about her sworn election office duty instead of her party), but a very important change was made by the Republicans: the decision to allow false positives. Under Baxter's rules, doubt over the status of a voter removed them from the list. With the new Republican guidance, you could now stack the list. (Wikipedia has more.)
This isn't a partisan issue: either you're for fair elections, or you're not. We should attack every instance of fraud, regardless of who is skewing the system.
And when you're "debunking" the BBC of all sources, you should provide some of your own of similar stature.
Lies about crimes
Under Clinton, the top marginal tax bracket went from 31% @ $86,500, to 39.6 @ $288,350. Bush subsequently adjusted the top rate to 35% @ 311,950.
By comparison the top tax brack for most of the years of the "Reagan Boom" was 50% at around $170K or so, dropping to 28% at $32K under Bush.
These figures are not adjusted for inflation by the way.
The MEDIAN household taxation rates during
the Reagan budgets (1982-1989): 17.9,17.5,18.0,18.1,18.0,17.6,17.9,17.9
Bush HW (1990 - 1994): 17.9, 17.6, 17.4, 17.3,17.3
Clinton (1994-2001): 17.3, 17.3, 17.3, 17.4, 16.8, 16.9 16.6,15.3
Bush (2002-2003): 14.8, 13.8, 13.9
Note that each president's first year in office is under the prior president's budget.
Overall taxation rates dropped slightly during the Clinton years while the median taxation rate went down consistently and the top quintile rose significantly. Under the Bush administratio, there has been a substantial drop in effective taxation at the median income, but curiously only a slight drop is seen in the top quintile. The big tax breaks go to a tiny, tiny sliver of the top quintile.
This basically paints Clinton as overall a slight tax cutter who shifted the burden to the top quintile. Bush is a dramatic tax cutter who cut median and ultra-high income tax rates.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think the real problem is that people on both sides are using the courts as an end run around the legislative process in order to advance their agenda.
No, the problem is legislation, legislative agendas, and use of government powers, that violate the Constitution.
The very purpose of the court system is to uphold the law of the land, and the highest law of the land is the Constitution. Congress does not have the power to pass a bill into valid law if that bill is contrary to the Constitution. They can vote it through, they can call it a law, but it is not law. It is null and void. The very duty of the courts is to state that it is null and void, to state that it is not law, and that it never was law. That Congress could have voted for it unanimously, but that they had no power to actually establish such a law. And that does not just apply to legislators... government employees may not exercise their legislatively granted powers and force of government in a manner contrary to the the Constitution.
Of the three branches of government, I hold the courts by far in the highest regard. The other two branches far far too often the instigators of agenda pushing and the puppets of agenda activists. The courts are not perfect, but they are by far the most immune to agendas and agendizing. I have read many controversial court rulings, and from looking at the actual details of the cases I have found almost without exception good reason that the ruling was at minimum "reasonable", and usually that it was absolutely correct.
People who complain about "activist courts" usually simply do not happen to LIKE the outcome of some particular ruling. They generally simply want what they want, and they don't know and don't care how or why it violates the Constitution. It is extremely easy to misunderstand to or misrepresent a court ruling if you simply look at the yes/no result without looking at the details of a case and exactly why the ruling went as it did. It is extremely easy for some group with an agenda to issue a press release attacking a court ruling by leaving critically important aspects of the case out of the explanation and make the ruling look unreasonable, easy for them to whip people up into a frenzy against the ruling by deliberately or inadvertently misrepresenting the case.
I have no idea what issue(s) you had in mind with your comment, but I would like to cite one pet peeve issue of mine to show exactly what I mean.
One of the most controversial issues of our day, one of the most commonly cited examples of "agenda pushing through the courts", is School Prayer. There have been a number of high profile cases on the subject, and to the best of my knowledge they have all turned on a single critical point. A single critical point that is virtually always left out of activist press releases on the subject, if not downright misrepresented by press releases on the subject. press releases that misunderstand or misrepresent the subject to such an extent that they (perhaps inadvertently) outright lie.
The critical point by which such cases are almost always decided, the critical point that gets left out or misrepresented in coverage of the cases, is the use of government force and powers.
Students have a right to religious freedom.
Students have a personal right to pray, including in school.
Teachers and principals have a right to religious freedom.
Teachers and principals have a personal right to pray, including in school.
Freedom of Speech is a right against the force of government being used to silence you. If a private newspaper does not want to carry your speech, that is not a violation of your Freedom of Speech.
Equally, the right to Religious Freedom is also a right against the the force of government being used against you.
Students have a right to pray in school. Teachers, principals, or other government employees acting as an official agent of the government itself cannot abuse their go
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Your point would be well taken except that the DOJ is run by Bush Appointees.
Consider this from a Paul Krugman column dated, 3/9/2007:
"Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny."
Then consider that with such intense scrutiny by Attoney Generals who "played ball" and didn't get fired, there was found only a handful of 'vote fraud' cases.