I have a story out today at ABC.com about the Justice Department report on the firings of nine U.S. attorneys, which I co-wrote with my friend Justin Rood:

The Justice Department probe of the firings of nine U.S. attorneys was severely hampered by the refusal of former White House political aide Karl Rove and other White House officials to be interviewed by investigators, according to a report made public by investigators today.

Additionally, the White House refused to turn over to Justice Department investigators emails and other documents that investigators believed were crucial to uncovering the truth as to why the U.S. attorneys were fired, the report said.

Despite that lack of cooperation, investigators concluded the White House was more deeply involved in the firings of U.S. attorneys than administration officials had admitted.

Investigators found that in at least three removals, “the evidence indicates the White House was more involved than merely approving” the dismissals, as Bush administration officials “initially stated,” according to a report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General and its Office of Professional Responsibility released Monday.

Because Miers, Rove and others “refused to cooperate with our investigation, and because the White House declined to provide internal documents to us, we were unable to determine the role the White House played in these removals,” the report concluded.

Investigators said they found evidence indicating greater-than-known White House involvement in firings of U.S. attorneys in Arkansas, Missouri and New Mexico.

In Arkansas, investigators said, “the evidence shows that the White House sought to give former White House official [J. Timothy] Griffin a chance to serve as U.S. Attorney, and that both Rove and Miers supported Griffin’s appointment.”…

In Missouri, “we found evidence that the White House may have directed [former U.S. Attorney Todd P.] Graves’s removal,” the report said, over a conflict with between Graves and a U.S. senator’s office. White House lawyers had fielded complaints about Graves, and appear to have been involved in pushing his ouster, the report stated.

Rove and Miers also appear to have played a role in the firing of former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. “[B]oth [Rove and Miers] appear to have significant first-hand knowledge regarding Iglesias’ dismissal,” the report stated…

But investigators also said that they were stymied in getting to the bottom of Iglesias’ firing because both Rove and Miers, according to the report, “refused our request for an interview even though the White House Counsel’s office informed them both& that the Counsel’s office encouraged them to cooperate with our investigation and submit for an interview.”…

In part because Justice’s IG and OPR were unable to complete its work, Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed a federal prosecutor to continue the probe. The IG and OPR do not have prosecutorial powers and cannot compel witnesses other than Justice Department employees to cooperate with their investigators.

But Nora R. Dannehy, the acting U.S. attorney in Connecticut, who Mukasey appointed to lead the new probe, will have those powers. Mukasey said in a statement that Dannehy would have the authority to “ultimately determine whether any prosecutable offense was committed with regard to the removal of a U.S. Attorney” and whether administration officials might have broken the law by giving misleading Congress about the firings of the federal prosecutors.

It is unclear what might happen if Dannehy, like her predecessors, seeks records from the White House she believes pertinent to her probe, only to be rebuffed once again.

Some comments: Besides Rove and Meirs refusing to be interviewed by investigators, the White House deputy counsel and another White House attorney refused to talk to investigators as well. My post from last night before the report came out appears to be somewhat prescient– or perhaps my sources are just good.

A report to be made public tomorrow morning by the Justice Department detailing findings of its investigation into the firings of nine U.S. attorneys will say that the efforts of investigators were severely stymied in large part by the lack of cooperation by some Bush administration officials and others outside the Department, according to sources who have seen the report.

The investigation was conducted jointly by the Justice Department’s Inspector General (IG) and the Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR.) Both of those internal watchdogs have no potential prosecutorial power, but can make recommendations that career prosecutors take up their work after they finish their final report. It is unclear whether Attorney General Michael Mukasey will do so.

Despite the fact that its efforts were stymied in part by non-cooperation by witnesses, the report will say- not much of a surprise-that several of the firings were due to the politicization of the Justice Department by Bush administration appointees and that the White House played a role in some of them. Investigators did attempt to do as thorough job as possible in investigating the White House’s role in the firings and were assisted by being able to review some confidential White House emails that the White House had been withholding from Congress.

The report might also touch on efforts by senior Justice Department officials to intimidate several of the fired U.S. attorneys from talking to the press or testifying to Congress about their firings, according to five people interviewed by investigators– including three former U.S. attorneys. (Only one former U.S. attorney, Bud Cummins of Little Rock, would say this for the record. And I should aslo qualify what I just wrote regarding the intimidation issue that I am basing what I say in this one instance based on witnesses to the investigation, rather than to anyone who has read the report.)

The lack of cooperation by some former Bush administration officials with investigators probing the firings of nine U.S. attorneys is not the first time that former administration officials have thwarted investigators probing the politicization of the Justice Department by refusing to answer their questions.

As I first reported on the Huffington Post in August, several former political appointees of the Justice Department’s refused to answer questions posed to them by the Department’s Inspector General about the politicization of the Civil Rights Division.

As a result, a federal grand jury subpoenaed several of the former senior Justice Department attorneys to compel them to testify.

The grand jury had been investigating allegations that a former senior Bush administration appointee in the Civil Rights Division, Bradley Schlozman, gave false or misleading testimony on a variety of topics to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sources close to the investigation identified two former Justice Department attorneys, Hans von Spakovsky, who as a former counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights was a top aide to Schlozman, and Jason Torchinsky, who was also a Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Torchinsky was subpoenaed only as a witness in the case.

The non-cooperation by some Bush administration officials in the broader investigation into the firings of the U.S. attorneys might have thwarted some efforts by investigators to determine the entire truth about the firings. But because of that non-cooperation, according to attorneys closely following the matter, Attorney General Michael Mukasey is much more likely to allow career federal prosecutors to continue on with the work begun with the Inspector General.

Update: What to look for tomorrow: Apparently, the Inspector General and OPR want a prosecutor with subpoena authority to continue their investigation along. That is for two reasons: The Inspector General and OPR do not have prosecutorial authority. And they have been unable to compel testimony from witnesses outside the Justice Department.

This story posted online today by the Washington Post asserts that Mukasey is likely to name a career prosecutor to continue on with the investigation. However, the story appears to be a preemptive move by senior political appointees in the Department to close down discussion of appointing a special prosecutor instead.

If the report goes into a lot of detail about involvement by White House officials in the firings– or more importantly says that there are a number of important unresolved issues about the role of White House officials or politically connected officials with ties to the White House in the firings– then the case for naming a special prosecutor would be more compelling. This leak to the Post tonight appears to be an attempt to close down that debate before the issue before anyone has even read a single page of the report.

Second update: The NYT has also since posted online a story about the forthcoming report. But unlike the Post, they do not entirely take the spin that all will be well if a career prosecutor takes over the matter of continuing on with the probe instead of a special prosecutor being named. In particular, this excerpt from the Times story is especially pertinent :

One central question is the role officials at the White House, including Mr. Rove and Ms. Miers, played in the firings. But Paul K. Charlton, who was fired as United States attorney in Arizona after clashing with supervisors in Washington over a number of policies and investigations, said he was concerned that the inspector general’s limited jurisdiction and the White House’s refusal to turn over key records might have stymied the investigation.

The inspector general and the Office of Professional Responsibility, which conducted a joint investigation, have kept their findings under tight guard before the public release, declining to discuss any details with central players in the investigation or their lawyers. “It’s been a lockdown,” one defense lawyer said.

To look for tomorrow as the day progresses: What Rep. John Conyers (D-Mi.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have to say about Mukasey most likely not naming a special prosecutor.

According to the first tracking polls available since the presidential debate Friday evening, Barack Obama’s lead over John McCain continues to grow. According to TPM Election Central, Gallup has Obama up 50% to McCain’s 42%. Yesterday, Gallup had Obama ahead 49% to Obama’s 44%.

Rausmasse has Obama at 50% to McCain’s 44%– no change since yesterday.

Thanks to other journalists and bloggers, we are now learning additional details to my story posted online at the Atlantic that it was President Bush who personally directed Alberto Gonzales and then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card to make their now famous visit to then-Attorney General John Ashcrooft’s hospital room in an attempt to have Ashcroft overrule his own deputy attorney general’s conclusion that the Bush administration’s warantless surveillance program was being conducted outside the law.

Via Emptywheel, aka Marcy Wheeler, we learn of an AP report that Gonzales continues to attack Comey for saying that he believed that Gonzales’ and Card’s hospital visit was highly inappropriate.

Via Marcy, we learn that the AP reported on Sept. 2 that Gonzales lawyer, George TerwilligerIII, made public a memo defending Gonzales against charges by Comey that when Gonzales and Card visited Ashcroft’s hospital room, they were “trying to take advantage of a six man.” Ashcroft was in fact in intensive care at the time, heavily medicated, and recovering from surgery in which his gall bladder had been removed.

According to Terwilliger, such criticism by Comey was “demonstrably hyper-inflated rhetoric without basis in fact.” As to Comey’s own presence in Ashcroft’s hospital room, Terwilliger claims that Comey was inappropriately “seeking to interpose himself between the president and a high-level official communication to his attorney general on a vital of national security.”

The allegations by Terwilliger appear to be baseless in that Comey did nothing to stop either Gonzales or Card from saying their piece. Moreover, after refusing to do what Card and Gonzales wanted him to do, Ashcroft made it clear that due to his still being hospitalized, he considered Comey for all intents and purposes as acting Attorny General to have assumed all the responsibilities and duties of the Attorney General. Instead of being in way of Card and Gonzales making their case to the Attorney General, James Comey was on that particular day, in fact as designated by Ashcroft, the Attorney General of the United States– the very person that Terwilliger says Comey was attempting to prevent Gonzales from making make his case to.

Interestingly, Terwilliger’s comments are a reversal of what his client has previously said. According to Barton Gellman’s book on Cheney, The Angler, “[W]hen John Ashcroft returned to health… Ashcroft and Comey paid a call to the White House counsel [Gonzales at the time].. Gonzales apologized for the hospital visit, `I never should have done that,’ he reportedly told the attorney general, `I’m very sorry.’” If Gellman’s account is correct, it appears that that apology has been withdrawn.

He “always wore his fame lightly, his beauty too.”

It’s good to finally shed some light on the issue.  Thanks to Zachary Roth of TPM and Johanna Neumann of the LAT for the video. 

New story out today at the Atlantic:

The Justice Department is investigating whether former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales created a set of fictitious notes so that President Bush would have a rationale for reauthorizing his warrantless eavesdropping program, according to sources close to the investigation.

 

Related story:

What Did Bush Tell Gonzales?

Sources say Alberto Gonzales now claims that President Bush personally directed him to John Ashcroft’s hospital room in the infamous wiretap renewal incident. By Murray Waas

President Bush reauthorized the surveillance program on March 11, 2004, one day after the hospitalized Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to sign a certification saying that the program was legal and could therefore continue.

In reauthorizing the surveillance program over the objections of his own Justice Department, President Bush later claimed to have relied on notes made by Gonzales about a meeting that had taken place the day before (March 10), in which Gonzales and Vice President Cheney had met with eight congressional leaders—also known as the “Gang of Eight”—who receive briefings about covert intelligence programs. According to Gonzales’s notes, the congressional leaders had said in the meeting that they wanted the surveillance program to continue despite the attorney general’s refusal to certify that it was legal.

But four of the congressional leaders present at the meeting say that’s not true; they never encouraged the White House to sidestep the objections of the attorney general and continue the program without his approval.

Investigators are skeptical of the notes because Gonzales did not write them until days after the meeting with the congressional leaders, and he wrote them after both Bush and Gonzales had together signed a reauthorization of the surveillance program.

Gonzales, who was White House counsel at the time he met with the congressional leaders, has told investigators working for the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General that President Bush personally directed him to write the notes so that he could “memorialize” what the legislators had told him, according to a report made public by the Inspector General’s Office on September 2 and sources close to the investigation.

It is unclear whether it was before the March 10 meeting that Bush directed Gonzales to write the notes, or after the meeting occurred. The White House declined to comment for this story. An attorney for Gonzales, George J. Terwilliger III, himself a former deputy attorney general, declined to comment as well.

The timing of when Bush directed Gonzales to write the notes is important: investigators say the fact that they were written after both the meeting and the reauthorization of the program might indicate that they were written in order to provide an after-the-fact justification for the signing of the reauthorization—and that that timing might have given Gonzales a motive to lie in the notes.

Stanley Brand, a Washington attorney who specializes in representing executive branch officials under investigation, said in an interview: “Why would you want someone to take notes of a meeting days after the fact? If you wanted your notes to stand up, they are going to be more credible if you took them at the meeting itself or shortly after it occurred. Any reputable lawyer would want to write them as soon as possible.”

When the notes were written and when the president directed Gonzales to write them is “extraordinarily relevant and would allow a person to draw a reasonable inference … that something funny was going on.” An investigating body, or a jury, Brand said, might “infer there was a conspiracy afoot to obstruct with or without the participation of the president.”…

To read the whole thing, click here. More later…

Newspaper reporters sue their readers.

Alternative newspaper to become blog. It apparently has already long been a blog– or rather a chat room anyway.

And on top of everything else, just what we need: even less oversight.

National Review Online: Are We Living Through A Liberal Realignment?  

Opening statements from the Ted Stevens bribery trial:

WASHINGTON — The corruption trial of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens began Thursday with sharply divergent portraits of the long-serving Republican.

In opening statements in the highly anticipated case, prosecutors accused Stevens of using his experience in the ways of Washington to “fly under the radar screen” and flout Senate rules requiring the disclosure of gifts and favors.

“This is a simple case about a public official who took hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free financial benefits, and then took away the public right to know that information,” Brenda Morris, the lead Justice Department attorney on the case, told jurors.

But a lawyer for Stevens described a lawmaker who was so focused on his duties that he paid scant attention to financial matters and often deferred to his wife and others. The so-called gifts he got were often unwanted and gratuitous, and if they were never disclosed, it was only because he considered them a nuisance or worthless, the lawyer, Brendan V. Sullivan Jr., argued.

“Why all of a sudden, in his 75th year, did he decide to go out and become a criminal?” Sullivan asked. “The evidence will show that he did not file false statements.”…

Stevens, who was seated among a battery of lawyers at the counsel table in court, is accused of knowingly and repeatedly filing financial reports with the Senate between 2000 and 2006 that understated or omitted gifts or other benefits that he got from an oil executive and others.

Among the unreported benefits: an overhaul on his residence in Girdwood, Alaska; freebies including a sled dog and a $2,700 massage chair; and a sweetheart deal on a $44,000 Land Rover.

The government contends that Stevens never paid for more than $200,000 in labor and materials for the remodel supplied by a now-defunct oil field services firm, VECO Corp. VECO’s former chief executive, Bill J. Allen, allegedly showered Stevens with other perks.

“VECO acted as his own personal handyman service,” Morris said. “If the defendant needed an electrician, he would contact VECO. If he needed a plumber, he would contact VECO.”

“We reach for the Yellow Pages,” Morris told the jury. “He reached for VECO.”

Sullivan, Stevens’ lawyer, countered that the lawmaker and his wife paid every invoice they received for work on the house, and that the total amount they paid was in line with the current assessed value of the property.

While acknowledging that some bills may have gone unpaid, he offered two explanations that seemed intended to distance Stevens from the transaction, and raised the possibility that Stevens’ wife, Catherine, may have known more than her husband about the situation.

“The most important thing to know is that Catherine ran the financial part of the renovation,” Sullivan said. “She was the person who opened the account. She was the person who viewed the bills. She was the person who wrote the check.”

Sullivan also said that Allen, who oversaw the work and billed the Stevenses, withheld bills, not necessarily out of an attempt to enrich Stevens, but possibly because the bills were excessive or for work that was not done properly.

“You cannot report what you don’t know,” Sullivan said. “You can’t fill out a form and say what’s been kept from you by the deviousness of someone like Bill Allen.”

Stevens paid $160,000 for the renovation, “which is exactly or close to what it should have been,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan also attempted to explain away other items his client received, including a Viking gas grill, $20,000 in decorative lighting outside the Girdwood chalet, and the Land Rover, which Stevens got for his daughter in exchange for his 34-year-old Mustang and $5,000.

Sullivan said the gas grill arrived at the house for a charity function, was rarely used afterward, and was kept under padlock because it struck Stevens’ wife as dangerous. “Catherine was frightened to death of it,” Sullivan said. “She thought it would blow up the house, blow up the grandchildren.”

When the senator asked Allen to put up his Christmas lights, Sullivan said, Stevens came home to find an elaborate and gaudy new lighting system set up.

“Catherine hated the lights. It made the house look like Joe’s Bar & Grill,” Sullivan said.

“I suppose Ted Stevens, the senator, should go home and get some climbing shoes on, go up and take them down, and send them back to Bill Allen?” Sullivan asked.

Sullivan also said the Mustang-Land Rover swap “was absolutely fair.”

“You don’t have to report a trade that you believe is fair,” and Stevens “certainly had no intent to violate the law,” Sullivan said.

The trial before U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan is expected to last a month. Stevens asked for a speedy trial in the hope that the proceedings would be completed by the time Alaskans vote Nov. 4 on whether to return him to the Senate for the seventh time.

Extraordinary gambit by Stevens in demanding a speedy trial by jury– so that the verdict would be in before he ran for re-election. Brandan Sullivan largely got Iran-contra figure Oliver North off; he is about as good a defense counsel one could retain if charged with federal bribery. Would it be totally out of the question for Stevens to beat the rap– and even win reelction. The corruption reeks– but whether the Senator will be convicted of the charges is yet to be seen.

The gambit aside, however, and Sullivan’s skills also set aside, the Justice Department appears to have a strong case.

As to Stevens’ blame his wife defense, one wonders not only how well that one will go over with the jury but also at home.

I’m going to try and get over to the Stevens’ trial next week for myself– just a few subway stops away from home.

Paul Krugman on what to do next:

Many people on both the right and the left are outraged at the idea of using taxpayer money to bail out America’s financial system. They’re right to be outraged, but doing nothing isn’t a serious option. Right now, players throughout the system are refusing to lend and hoarding cash — and this collapse of credit reminds many economists of the run on the banks that brought on the Great Depression.

It’s true that we don’t know for sure that the parallel is a fair one. Maybe we can let Wall Street implode and Main Street would escape largely unscathed. But that’s not a chance we want to take.

So the grown-up thing is to do something to rescue the financial system. The big question is, are there any grown-ups around — and will they be able to take charge?

Earlier this week, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, tried to convince Congress that he was the grown-up in the room, come to protect us from danger. And he demanded total authority over the rescue: $700 billion to be used at his discretion, with immunity for future review.

Congress balked. No government official should be entrusted with that kind of monarchical privilege, least of all an official belonging to the administration that misled America into war. Furthermore, Mr. Paulson’s track record is anything but reassuring: he was way behind the curve in appreciating the depth of the nation’s financial woes, and it’s partly his fault that we’ve reached the current moment of meltdown.

Read the entire column here.

And as the government goes broke and the rest of us go broke, ear marks are doing just fine. 

Meanwhile, Paul Kiel does the best work on Sarah Palin and the Bridge to Nowhere.