oversight

Right before speaking with the Senate today, Mukasey sent a lawyerly letter to Judiciary Chair Pat Leahy saying essentially, 'You're going to ask me about torture and I'm not going to answer your questions.' ("There are policy initiatives that the department supports that some members of this committee vigorously oppose, and vice versa. There also are situations where the interests of the executive branch and the legislature will be in some tension.")

Which is to say, 'as a member of the executive branch, now, my opinion about laws, as "top law enforcement officer in the land" is not as important as... well, providing cover for the executive branch, which is now my job. btw thanks for that sweet ass confirmation, clowns.'

Leahy reponded, "Attorney General Mukasey knows that this will not end the matter and expects to be asked serious questions at the hearing tomorrow." Oh my stars! Whatsoever shall happen?!

First up, Chuck Schumer who helped Michael Mukasey become Attorney General because Mukasey is from New York, and also because Chuck Schumer is a moron.

Schumer told Mukasey that he is disappointed in him because now that Mukasey is in the Cabinet, he won't stand up to the Bushists when it comes to telling the rest of the Administration that waterboarding is torture and it's "repugnant" and "cruel" (as Mukasey himself called the torture technique in his confirmation hearings where Schumer bounced in his chair and clapped, oh so impressed).

Schumer pouted and said "You have an opportunity here to be something of a leader, and you are going to be asked whether we should pass a law," Schumer begged of Mukasey. In response, Mukasey shrugged and told him that it's not his job as Attorney General to do anything on his own accord.

SCHUMER: I need to tell you how profoundly, in this particular situation, I disagree with you.

MUKASEY: I'm happy to hear that I lived up to expectations. I'm very sorry to hear that I lived down to them.

And with that, Schumer stopped the pursuit. Because Schumer is a moron and a coward. Come on! Asking a former judge to render a legal opinion based on a policy/political preference is a stupid line of questioning.

Waterboarding isn't repugnant, it's torture. A better line of questioning would hew to establishing that illegality. Based not on public policy--the province of the legislative branch, not the enforcement powers of the executive---but on legal precedent.

Biden fucked up in the same way, drilling down into the Nichomachean ethics of torture. Like anybody cares that Biden when to Catholic school and learned latin. To Biden's stupid questions, Mukasey said the DOJ would have to "balance the value of doing something (torture) against the cost of doing it." Cost? "I mean the heinousness of doing it, the cruelty of doing it, balanced against the value.... balanced against the information you might get."  Information "that couldn't be used to save lives," he explained, would be of less value.

What this reveals is that Bush's DOJ has concluded that waterboarding is necessary and therefore must be not considered torture, so also it must not be termed 'cruel treatment' under the Consitution, Common Article 3... even though Mukasey admitted that it was "cruel" when he asked to be confirmed.

Biden responded, "You're the first I've ever heard to say what you just said.... It shocks my conscience a little bit."

Schumer is disappointed. Biden is shocked.  Big surprise, idiots.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who was a United States Attorney, on the other hand understood where all of the previous back and forths failed, he saw the endgame of the argument the Bush Administration was sticking to, and he wouldn't lay off.

WHITEHOUSE: You are the top law enforcement officer of the United States and prosecutors do look back. Prosecutors do investigate things that have happened in the past. They do dredge up the past in order to do justice...Now the president has said that we will investigate, prosecute all acts of torture and you've just said today, "if someone is guilty of violating the laws of the United States," they get prosecuted...There is jurisdiction over the activity prohibited if the alleged offender is a national of the United States and a person who conspires to commit an offense under this section is subject to the same penalties other than the penalty of death..." So, we have a statute on point, you are, I believe, the sole prosecuting authority for that statute, correct?

MUKASEY: I am as the top of the Department of Justice, which is the sole prosecuting authority. [...]

When it comes to past conduct, one of the many questions involved in past conduct in addition to what was done, is, what authorizations were given, what authorizations were reasonably relied on. My current evaluation of the statute, if there is one, has only tangentially to do with that because if it has directly to do with that, then the message is, your authorization, you who did whatever you did, your authorization is good only for so long as the tenure of the person who gave it and maybe not even for that long...

WHITEHOUSE The message you send otherwise is that 'I was only following orders' is a fine response.

MUKASEY: It's not a fine response. It was a response at Nuremberg that was found unlawful, we both know. Ummm...

WHITEHOUSE: And yet it's the one that you're crediting right now. 'I had authorization and therefore I'm immune from prosecution.'" Isn't that where that analysis leads?

MUKASEY: No, it's, I had authorization and let's take a look at the authorization. If the circumstances under which it was given and what was done have a whole wide range of variables that I don't have before me.

WHITEHOUSE: Has that been done? Has there been a thorough, independent analysis under your administration of whether or not any national of the United States is potentially in violation of Section 23-40A as the result of...

MUKASEY: I don't, I don't start investigations out of curiosity. I start investigations out of some indication that somebody might have had an improper authorization. I have no such indication now. [...]

WHITEHOUSE I don't see how that resolves the Nuremberg defense problem. If the reason that you're giving us for investigating the destruction of the tapes, but not investigating the underlying interrogation, is that it appears that the interrogators were following orders and it appears that the destroyers were not, isn't that the Nuremberg defense?

MUKASEY: No, because you're assuming what was on the tapes, you're assuming that the interrogation was unlawful...

WHITEHOUSE: I'm not assuming any such thing, anymore than you'd be assuming that the destruction was unlawful. What I'm suggesting is that you should investigate it and there should be at least somebody who at least takes a look at this in a principled, thoughtful way, and if the answer that comes back is, no, there was not a crime and here's why, then we can lay the question to rest. But if you're telling me that this hasn't even been investigated although the destruction of the tapes is being investigated, it strikes me that there is a split standard there and I'm trying to understand why.

War crimes trials, anyone?

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued the White House for a peek at the records they are legally required to keep.

Lo and behold, there were gaps in White House e-mail archives that just happened to coincide with KEY DATES in the period when the administration was struggling to deal with the CIA leak investigation a congressional probe into Iraq intelligence manipulation. And even more damaging weeks of legal defense work.

They are being sued for destroying as many as 10 million White House e-mails, in violation of the Presidential Records Act, and are in court arguing that they can't be sued because the Presidential Records Act doesn't apply to... the President.

Bush spokesman Tony Fratto denied that the White House had lost millions of emails today:

Q: Tony, on the subject, could you address the missing White House emails and the law suit? It is a subject of reports this morning. Are there in fact the emails missing? What's the likelihood of their recovery versus the --

MR. FRATTO: I think our review of this, and you saw the court filing on this, and our declaration in response to the judge's questions -- I think to the best of what all the analysis we've been able to do, we have absolutely no reason to believe that any emails are missing; there's no evidence of that. There's no -- we tried to reconstruct some of the work that went into a chart that was entered into court records and could not replicate that or could not authenticate the correctness of the data in that chart. And from everything that we can tell, our analysis of our backup systems, we have no reason to believe that any email at all are missing.

Q So where are they?

MR. FRATTO: Where are what?

Q Where are part of --

MR. FRATTO: Which email? Look, no one will tell you categorically about any system -- any system, whether it's your system at Bloomberg or our system here at the White House, past and present, categorically that data cannot be missing. All of our review of it and all of the our understanding of the way that the backup system works, it's a backup system that captures existing data, it captures things that are stored and archived. We have no reason to believe that there's any data missing at all -- and we've certainly found no evidence of any data missing.

Q So that would mean that if you were asked, you would be in a position to comply with a request to produce those documents?

MR. FRATTO: Yes, which documents? I mean, if someone has a specific request for documents and they would like us to search for particular emails, of course we could search for emails -- and we have. And we have been responsive to requests in the past.

Q And they have been produced? They do exist?

MR. FRATTO: We have produced emails upon request, either for our own internal review or sometimes in response to investigations that have taken place on the Hill. I mean, we have been able to go back and find email. The question is, have we been able to find a large mass of missing email? No, we have not located somewhere in the system the absence of something. We have not been able to note the absence of anything in our databases.*

Q You're saying they're there, you just haven't located them yet?

MR. FRATTO: No, I'm saying we have no evidence that shows that anything at all is missing. And you're saying, well, have you found the missing emails -- and we say we have no evidence that anything is missing.

Bad liars often say too much with too much certainty. This exchange was just such a case. The White House has previously told people, including Justice Department investigator Patrick Fitzgerald, that they had lost emails.

That's how they kept Jenny Mayfield and Cathie Martin out of jail for not turning over what appears to be email responsive to subpoena. So if you now say that there are no emails missing, it means all that legal testimony the White House has given--some of it under oath--is incorrect. It leaves the door open for response. Swooping in to find the truth came America's intrepid investigative journalists like Bill O'Reilly... I'm kidding. America's media was clutching their pearls about Britney Spears. But Democrat Henry Waxman did swoop in. With a letter.

Dear Mr. Fielding:

At today’s White House press briefing, Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto was asked about allegations that White House e-mails have been lost from White House servers. He stated in response: “we have absolutely no reason to believe that any e-mails are missing.”

This statement is contrary to information that the White House provided to the Committee staff in a briefing on September 19, 2007. At this briefing, the White House showed staff a chart indicating that there were 473 days for which various entities in the Executive Office of the President had no archived e-mails. According to the chart, the days with no archived e-mails included:

For the White House Office: December 17, 2003, December 20, 2003, December 21, 2003, January 9, 2004, January 10, 2004, January 11, 2004, January 29, 2004, February 1, 2004, February 2, 2004, February 3, 2004, February 7, 2004, and February 8, 2004.

For the Office of the Vice President: September 12, 2003, October 1, 2003, October 2, 2003, October 3, 2003, October 5, 2003, January 29, 2004, January 30, 2004, January 31, 2004, February 7, 2004, February 8, 2004, February 15, 2005, February 16, 2005, February 17, 2005, May 21, 2005, May 22, 2005, May 23, 2005.

For the Council on Environmental Quality: 81 days, including the entire period between November 1, 2003 through January 11, 2004.

For the Council of Economic Advisers: 103 days, including the entire period between November 2, 2003 through January 11, 2004.

For the Office of Management and Budget: 59 days, including the entire period between November 1, 2003 through December 9, 2003.

For the U.S. Trade Representative: 73 days, including the entire period between February 11, 2004 through April 18, 2004.

The White House officials conducting the briefing took this chart with them. They also indicated that the White House was doing an additional analysis to determine whether the information in the chart was accurate. In a letter I sent to you on December 20, 2007, I asked for any new information or analyses about the problem of missing e-mails. I have not received a response to this letter.

Mr. Fratto’s statements have added to the considerable confusion that exists regarding the status of White House efforts to preserve e-mails. To help clarify the situation, I request your testimony and the testimony of Alan Swendiman, the Director of the Office of Administration, at a hearing on February 15, 2008, at 10:00 a.m. in 2154 Rayburn House Office Building.

Now, Fred Fielding, who survived Nixon's 18 minute gap, is going to have to come and testify about why all the legal representations the White House made in the past about missing emails are no longer operative.

"Administration": Nothings missing.
Waxman: What about what you admitted was missing?
"Administration": Like what?
Waxman: How about October 3, 2003?
"Administration": Oh, yeah, that's missing.
Waxman: Hm
"Administration": What're going to do?
Waxman: Tsk Tsk.
Country: (pause) Impeach the bastards!

Again, the Administration is being sued for destroying as many as 10 million White House e-mails, in violation of the Presidential Records Act, and are in court arguing that they can't be sued because the Presidential Records Act doesn't apply to... the President.

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) got a contempt citation passed in his House Judiciary Committee for both Miers and Bolten in late July, because, as the photo reminds us, when they were subpoena'd for testimony related to the U.S. attorney firings, they told Congress to go Cheney itself. They both, plus Rove to the Senate Judiciary Committee, claimed that executive privilege protected them from even having to appear in person to invoke executive privilege - hence the empty chair pictured above.

Conyers' contempt citation means exactly dick until it is passed by the full House. And as House leader Nancy Pelosi crowed, the most important thing about Democratic takeover in Washington D.C. was "subpoena power."

So it's no surprise then that as soon as Congress returned from summer recess, Nancy "subpoena power" Pelosi made sure nothing happened. Then a vote was supposedly imminent in November -- Conyers even issued a final warning to the White House. But the vote didn't come (it got pushed to December because Congress was busy caving to Bush on Iraq and FISA). Then it was supposed to come shortly after the winter recess. But, Nancy "subpoena power" Pelosi strikes again:

Senior Democrats have decided that holding a controversial vote on the contempt citations, which have already been approved by the House Judiciary Committee as part of its investigation into the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, would “step on their message” of bipartisan unity in the midst of the stimulus package talks....

“Right now, we’re focused on working in a bipartisan fashion on [the] stimulus,” said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), indicating that the contempt vote is not expected for weeks, depending on how quickly the stimulus package moves....

“When we have the votes, we’ll go ahead with this. Right now, the votes are just not there,” said one top House Democratic insider, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Ow, the stupid, it hurts. Firstly, the bipartisan "unity" of the stimulus package is simply this; on a bipartisan basis, Congress is passing 100% of the tax cuts that Bush wants.

So it's for that utter capitulation that James Madison's required checks and balances moves to the back burner.

And when will we pick "it" back up? Why, when the votes are there, of course!
What votes? GOP votes.

When exactly will Republicans vote to send fellow Republicans to prison?
Any day now! All that's needed is some more of that sweet bipartisanship.

Jesus Fucking Christ in a Chicken Bucket counting on these Democrats is like being forced to shave off your nipples... Which is merely to say that it's awful and painful, it mostly makes you want to vomit, and just the thought of it is infuriating, confusing and insulting.