I’m planning on spending this morning catching up on Attorneygate, particularly on the Senate hearing testimony of Gonzales’ sidekick and Rove mini-me Kyle Sampson, the baby-faced boy wonder who at first glance seems to be trying to take the fall for his boss for the politically motivated firings of US attorneys, if what he’s admitted so far is any guide.
But is that true? Is Kyle Sampson substantially to blame? Is he taking the fall, and why?
I love this stuff.
But that’s the point at which many eyes are beginning to glaze over. Not all of us are totally obsessed with the minutiae and the internecine rivalries of the administration of US justice.
However, most of us do give a damn when the government of a country that thinks of itself as the world’s policeman, and which has such a disproportionate effect on world culture, economy and politics, is being deliberately corrupted from within. It affects us all one way or another.
That is the big picture here, and why Attorneygate’s so important. But where can we go to find out more in language the casual yet interested observer rather than the political obsessive can understand?
For a list of the dramatis personae and a timeline of events you could do no better than than Talking Points Memo or TPM Muckraker, whose valiant efforts have pushed this story to the prominence it has now and whose readers have uncovered the story by sifting the reams of email evidence released by the White House in an attempt to bury the inquiry in paper.
For those who want the backstory the links are fascinating – it’s like lifting up a log and seeing crawly things scurrying panicky away from the light.
The story, grossly simplified and in short, as I understand it, is this:
Bushco got scared when California politician Randall ‘Duke Cunningham” was convicted of corruption over defence contracts, because a co-conspirator of his, one Dusty Foggo of the CIA, was also on the verge of being indicted for his involvement in the same shady doings.
Dusty Fuggo’s a friend, intimate and business associate of many, many senior Republican figures up to and including in the White House and is privy to all sorts of CIA shenanigans like, oh say, rendition, and torture, and misuse of funds, and bribery and prostitution – take your pick. he also knows where the bodies were buried, figuratively (though possibly actually) speaking, in Honduras during Reagan and Bush Sr.’s Central American adventures.. So the notion of his testifying anywhere, any time, simply would not do.
Foggo could’ve exposed everybody.
Not only was that little storm brewing for the White House, meanwhile there was that darned Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago, worrying away at Cheny aide Scotter Libby and about to expose the White House’s complicity in the media outing of yet another CIA agent, which would then expose their out and out lies over Iraq’s alleged attempted importation of yellowcake uranium from Niger and reveal their whole pretext for the war as a lie and a sham. (Not that we don’t know that already from other extrinsic evidence but it would’ve been nice to’ve seen it proved in court.)
Oh no, exposure! Whatever to do? It all got a bit panicky.
It got worse: previously loyal prosecutors started chafing when pressured politically by Bushco to push unfounded voter fraud cases against Democrats. They might have drunk some koolaid, but even they had limits. There was no evidence, they said.
Karl Rove, the wily old snake, had a brainwave. They could stop the Foggo prosecution and fix the next election too, plus the added extra of bringing the whole national prosecutorial wing of the Justice department entirely under their political control. All their problems solved at a stroke – all they had to do was fire all the lawyers and put unqualified partisans in their place. Of course! Easypeasy, lemon squeezy.
Th idea of being able to prosecute their political opponents on a whim was too tempting to resist. Why, Rove himself had a young padawan, a zealous devotee of the dark Rovian art of candidate smearing, who’d fit perfectly – and in Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s home state of Arkansas too. How very handy for the next presidential election.
The plan was all going well for the little group of alleged conspirators, Rove, Gonzales, Harriet Miers, (potentially Cheney and Bush too but that remains to be seen) – great theory, great plan. It all got discussed by email within and outside the White House (by whom is exactly what the hearings are about) then it was up to Gonzales to put it into action, which he did in the same half-assed way Bushco do everything.
He palmed it off to his deputy Kyle Sampson, the man who’s now sitting in the chair sweating before the committee. Because the US attorneys, quite understandably, didn’t take to being fired on flimsy pretexts like incompetence very well and started to talk to the media, and it all began to unravel. The Democrats took Congresss, the story came out, and here we are, Bushco and its evil lawyer minions on the stand, looking for all the world like the low-rent theives they are.
The big question is: how high up can this be proved to have gone? While it may be obvious to most of us that Bushco’re as rotten as a log full of woodlice, because of the virulence of the Right’s revisionist attack trops in the media it has to be shown in the clear light of judicial sunshine that the Democrats are not, in their turn, using the administration of justice for partisan purposes.
The proof of Bushco wrongdoing needs to be revealed in public.
Yes, there’re a lot of grounds for impeaching Bush and Cheney and Gonzales too for that matter, but without the actual, physical proof of a crime it’s all just conjecture and accusation. The evidence that’s coming to light as a result of the Attorneygate hearings may be that actual, physical proof – or at the very least, we may hear the testimony that will finally put the criminals in the White House in the dock, not for grand historical war crimes but for squalid hole-in-the-corner corruption and conspiracy.
How worried are Bushco about this? Worried enough to have made a futile attempt to stop the hearings yesterday on procedural grounds.. I shall continue to watch this one with interest, it has great potential to be the blow that finally brings the rotten edifice of modern-day Republicanism tumbling down.
