THIS Is The Woman Who’s Going To Clean up Washington?
Mariah Carey meets Harriet Miers…
Pointless to ask why the US print and tv media aren’t fixing on the massively compromised role of Asst US Attorney General, Alice Fisher, in the Abramoff/DeLay affair.
We know why.
When any professional or personal pecadillo can be spied on with impunity by the US government, and if you put your head abve the parapet you’ll never work in Washington again, ever – then who but bloggers will rock the boat? You might as well have asked the 1970’s Pravda to print a naked picture of Brezhnev’s boil-afflicted butt as expect the WaPo or NYT to spot Fisher’s conflict of interest.
So thanks to Jane Hamsher of firedoglake who writes at the Huffington Post on Alice Fisher’s untenable position:
“I was more than a little tweaked to turn on CSPAN and see Alice Fisher giving the press conference on behalf of the Justice Department in the Abramoff case. Alice Fisher should have recused herself from this matter long ago.”
Oh? Why? Tell me more….
“With the Democrats neutered and the press sufficiently conscripted into the GOP cause, at a certain point the only functional check in the system over the administration became the career prosecutors within the Justice Department.
James Comey was a full-on disaster appointee for BushCo. who bucked them from the get over wiretapping, torture and Ashcroft’s oversight of the Plame investigation. When the wingy Ashcroft was not servile enough and refused to reign Comey in even he got the boot and was replaced by the much more morally pliant Abu Gonzales.
Last year BushCo. was trying to get Timothy “Tyco” Flanigan through Senate confirmation to replace Comey as the number two in the Justice Department, but Flanigan got cute at his hearings and Specter hated him. There was much speculation that Flanigan would get a recess appointment last summer and as Bush’s old Skull-and-Bones crony be in the perfect spot to oversee Patrick Fitzgerald, but that didn’t happen. Bush did give a recess appointment to Alice Fisher as Chief of the Criminal Division. On Wednesday, right smack in the middle of the Hurricane Katrina disaster when the country wasn’t looking. (Comey eventually shot them all the finger on his way out the door and appointed the ethical David Margolis to oversee Fitzgerald.)
Bush must’ve really wanted Alice Fisher in that spot.
Fisher had been having trouble with her confirmation too, and Carl Levin had blocked her nomination due to concerns over her position on torture. There was also worry about her connection to DeLay:
Leahy also expressed concerns about Fisher’s “views on checks of controversial provisions of the Patriot Act and her opposition to the Act’s sunset provision; her participation in meetings in which the FBI expressed its disagreement with harsh interrogation methods practiced by the military toward detainees held at Guantanamo, and her ideas about appropriate safeguards for the treatment of enemy combatants.” Leahy was also concerned about “reports that she has had ties to Congressman Tom DeLay’?s defense team” and “also to know what steps she to take to avoid a conflict of interest in the Department’s investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff and possibly Mr. DeLay.”
Fisher is a Republican who in her former job was registerd as a lobbyist for HCA, the healthcare company founded by Bill Frist’s father. Her appointment was also controversial due to the fact that like her boss Abu Gonzales, Fisher has no trial experience and with Comey gone there would be no senior member of the Justice Department who was an experienced criminal prosecutor. But Senatorial oversight was dispensed with and BushCo. continued on its Brownie-esque rampage to replace experience with cronyism. “
This story is starting to look familiar, isn’t it?
“Said Newsweek:
For the Hammer, the involvement of the Department of Justice is bad news — but not as bad as it could be. The allegations are serious enough to have drawn the attention of the Feds — ?whose motives can’t be as easily dismissed as those of Ronnie Earle, a Texas state prosecutor and Democrat who’s been tracking DeLay with Javert-like intensity. The probe is being overseen by Noel Hillman, a hard-charging career prosecutor who heads the Public Integrity Section and who has a long track record of nailing politicians of all stripes. But politics almost certainly will creep into the equation. Hillman’s new boss will soon be Alice Fisher, who is widely respected but also a loyal Republican socially close to DeLay’s defense team. The larger question is whether Justice — run by Bush’s buddy Alberto Gonzales — will aggressively seek evidence that could lead to DeLay or to other Republicans in Congress. “I just don’t know that they have the stomach for it,” said a lawyer close to the probe.
You can say that again.
Staring down the twin barrels of the Abramoff and DeLay investigations, Bush’s urgent insistence on having Fisher in there does not bode well. Imagine the shock and horror of BushCo. after James Comey testified that “I don’t care about politics. I don’t care about expediency. I care about doing the right thing” and it turned out the guy actually meant it. I really have a hard time imagining that they took Fisher off the hot seat, bypassed the Senate approval process and then jammed her into a critical spot without feeling some comfort that she would not, indeed, turn into another Comey.
Maybe she is a total straight shooter who will do right by everybody involved. But if that’s the case she should step aside, recuse herself and let other people within the Justice Department who are not tainted by conflicts of interest handle this one.”
(All emphasis mine)
Fisher does not have clean hands in the NSA spying scandal either. From an interview she did with PBS’ Frontline ‘Chasing The Sleeper Cell’ re the case of US citizens accused of materially supporting terrorism:
Has there ever been a FISA warrant that’s been denied?
I’m not aware of any.
So you can see the skepticism of attorneys out there who are saying, we can’t see the FISA warrant. We can’t review the FISA warrant. There’s no adversarial proceeding. You’ve never been denied a FISA warrant.
Well, I said I’m not aware of one, which is different. I mean, there may be one. I’m just not aware of it.Well, we couldn’t find one either. And so therefore, there’s concern that that is used to develop information and then that information can more easily be used, as you described it, in a criminal proceeding.
The developing of information under FISA warrants is so that we can better protect America, that we can gather intelligence for those who are agents of a foreign government or agents of a foreign terrorist organization, or who are spying on us, in espionage cases. And we need to gather that intelligence to both protect America and to the extent that it evidences criminal conduct. Then that information can and should be shared with prosecutors who can then go forward, if appropriate, with our criminal laws and incapacitate the individuals in that way.
I don’t think people are concerned with the use of this in a way to stop a terrorist attack. Definitely not. What they’re worried about is it can be abused, that it’s easier now to do it than ever before — that is, share this information. The wall is down, as you put it. Why should we trust you, is the question.
Well, you need to separate two things again. In obtaining the warrant there is a court of review that allows us to obtain the warrants. So there is another branch of the government, the judicial branch, that is a check on our obtaining of the warrants.
And on the sharing of information, it is absolutely imperative that in this day and age, when we know there are terrorist organizations and we know there are people in the U.S. that want to cause harm to Americans, that we share the information with the people that need that information and need to use it.
I’m asking you, though, you know, we have a Bill of Rights and it’s there because traditionally we don’t trust the government, a central government, in this country. Why should we trust you not to abuse the power you’ve been given?
Well, again, there are checks and balances in place on the power. But the implication of your question that somehow the Department of Justice would impinge on freedom, that is the exact thing that we’re trying to protect. We are trying to protect Americans against those terrorist organizations that will strike right at our freedom.
Okay. One judge who sat on the FISA Court wrote an opinion saying that the FBI lied 75 times in the documents that were presented to him. It sounds like we need a little bit of fresh air there.
Well, I will tell you without commenting on the opinion itself — that happened prior to Sept. 11, as you know, and I would say that at least in part because there was not sharing of information. So the agents that may have been working on the criminal side of things may have not known what the agents working on the intelligence side of things — they were not sharing that information that may have resulted in, in some–
Well, if I understand the judge’s opinion, it’s because he felt FISA was being used to get around getting a criminal investigation going because it was easier to get a FISA warrant. That’s the concern.
I don’t believe that to be the import of the opinion.
Well, you wouldn’t would you, Ms. Fisher, given your precarious position? Still, you’re getting really very good indeed at the ol’ Texas doublespeak do-si-do. I expect that’s how you got your job – that and your fanatical loyalty to the Pope Presnit.
All political hires at the Justice Department require the blessing of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. If an attorney is not seen as sufficiently supportive of the president and Republican ideology, he or she can be rejected regardless of other qualifications, say several Justice Department lawyers familiar with the process.
Justice Department jobs are viewed as particularly important, not because of the department’s traditional law enforcement activities, but because of the impact its policies have on issues central to the conservative agenda.
When President George W. Bush took office, his advisers considered the department a stronghold of liberal activism and set about trying to change its orientation. Among the most important positions are those in the Office of Legal Policy, where attorneys interpret the law for executive branch agencies.
While there is nothing necessarily nefarious, or unusual, about a president making appointments based on a candidate’s political connections, some good government advocates believe that stacking an administration with individuals who share such similar ideology and backgrounds can have a cost.
“It creates an echo chamber effect and weakens dissent,” says Paul Light, a professor of public policy at New York University.
“This administration seems to have decided that it doesn’t really want dissent,” Light says. “What it wants are people who are absolute loyalists.”
If anyone still thinks she’s going to ivestigate and prosecute even-handedly, consider these few facts:
In 2001, Michael Chertoff — now secretary of Homeland Security — picked Fisher to serve as his deputy assistant attorney general in DOJ’s Criminal Division. Fisher supervised about 160 prosecutors and employees, primarily guiding the counterterrorism and fraud sections.
After Sept. 11, her terrorism job became an all-consuming project. Fisher advised in many high-profile terrorist prosecutions, including the shoe-bomber Richard Reid and the American captured during the war in Afghanistan, John Walker Lindh.
Then came the corporate scandals. During her tenure, Fisher consulted with the Enron Task Force, helped coordinate the HealthSouth fraud case, and pursued identity theft and telemarketing cases. On the policy side, she helped corporations conform with new business restrictions and regulations that accompanied the USA Patriot Act.
Appointed by Bush, mentored by Chertoff, personal friend of Tom DeLay – no way this woman is not ethically compromised in the current Republican scandals.
