More lies from the people that made it an art form

[Mucho]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-usattys24mar24,0,3773935,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Files put Gonzales at meeting before prosecutors' firing
By Richard B. Schmitt, Tom Hamburger and Richard A. Serrano
Times Staff Writers

March 24, 2007

WASHINGTON — Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales convened a meeting to discuss firing a group of U.S. attorneys 10 days before they were terminated, according to Justice Department documents released Friday night that could indicate Gonzales was more involved in the process than he has said previously.

The documents show that Gonzales and a group of senior aides, including Deputy Atty. Gen. Paul J. McNulty, met Nov. 27, to review a plan for firing the prosecutors. The dismissals were carried out Dec. 7.

The materials were among 283 new documents the Justice Department turned over Friday to congressional investigators looking into the ouster of eight U.S. attorneys amid allegations that the dismissals were politically motivated.

Justice Department officials also announced Friday night that the agency's inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility had launched a joint investigation into the dismissals, including an examination of whether they were improper and whether any Justice Department officials misled Congress about the matter.

Gonzales has previously said that he was far removed from the dismissals, and that he had assigned his then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, with identifying and replacing U.S. attorneys across the country who were viewed as performing poorly.

"But that is in essence what I knew about the process; was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on. That's basically what I knew as the attorney general," Gonzales said at a briefing with reporters March 13.

"I accept responsibility for everything that happens here within this department. But when you have 110,000 people working in the department, obviously there are going to be decisions that I'm not aware of in real time. Many decisions are delegated," he said at the time.

Justice Department officials said Friday that the fact that Gonzales attended the Nov. 27 meeting was not inconsistent with his prior statements. Whether or not he was involved in the process of selecting individual prosecutors to be replaced, he would have been involved in signing off on a final plan, they said.

The meeting Gonzales attended took place in the conference room adjacent to his office at the Justice Department and lasted about an hour, according to calendar entries and e-mails released Friday.

"The meeting concerned the rollout of the plan," said Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse. "The information available to us does not indicate there is a discussion at this meeting about which [U.S. attorneys] should or should not be included on that list."

Though officials said they could not be sure that Gonzales approved the plan at the meeting, they said it was likely he either did so at that time or in an oral conversation with Sampson sometime later.

They said they could find no other written record of Gonzales attending meetings about the firings.

Democrats pounced on the new disclosures, saying they were evidence that the administration was misleading Congress about the firings.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) said the documents "put the attorney general front and center in these matters, contrary to information that had previously been provided to the public and the Congress."

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is heading a Senate investigation into the firings, said: "If the facts bear out that Atty. Gen. Gonzales knew much more about the plan than he has previously admitted, then he can no longer serve as attorney general."

The documents surfaced just hours after Sampson, through his lawyer, reached an agreement to testify about the firings before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week. He resigned from the department last week.

The administration has also been under pressure from some Republican lawmakers to quickly disclose the facts about the case in the hope of limiting the political fallout. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) met with White House Counsel Fred Fielding on Capitol Hill earlier Friday to impress on him that message.

The documents also helped fill what some bloggers and Democratic congressional staffers portrayed as a mysterious gap in the 3,000 pages released to the public last week. The Nov. 27 meeting fell squarely in the middle of a period between Nov. 16 and Dec. 5 in which few if any documents were disclosed. The Justice Department said the belated disclosures reflected the sheer volume of material involved and the time-consuming business of producing it all.

The documents also offered new insight into how the White House anticipated a backlash from the firings, and the hope of one Justice Department official that the prosecutors might leave quietly.

On Nov. 17, Deputy White House Counsel William Kelley e-mailed his colleagues in the administration, alerting them about the Justice Department idea of jettisoning a group of U.S. attorneys and seeking their views on the "political fallout" from such a move.

He noted that by statute prosecutors serve for a four-year term, and "are commonly (but not always) extended by inaction — in practice, they serve until replaced."

He added, "They serve at the pleasure of the president, but often have very strong home-state political juice, including with their senators.

"Before executing this plan, we wanted to give your offices a heads up and seek input on changes that might reduce the profile or political fallout."

Later that day, Tasia Scolinos, the chief Justice spokeswoman, e-mailed Catherine J. Martin, a top White House aide, trying to downplay the significance of the terminations. She also expressed hope the fired prosecutors would leave without making a fuss.

"It's only six US attorneys (there are 94)," she wrote. "And I think most of them will resign quietly — they don't get anything out of making it public … in terms of future job prospects. I don't see it as being a national story — especially if it phases in over a few months."

On Nov. 21, Scolinos sent Martin a list of six of the prosecutors that were going to be fired; not included were Kevin Ryan of San Francisco and H.E. "Bud" Cummins III, who had already been told he was being replaced.

"The one common link here is that three of them are along the southern border," she said, "so you could make the connection that DOJ is unhappy with the immigration prosecution numbers in those districts."

rick.schmitt@latimes.com

tom.hamburger@latimes.com

richard.serrano@latimes.com

   

[Universe Prince]

Huh. The subject line made me think this was going to be a thread about drug war and gun control advocates. Oh well.

[sirs]

A shot in the arm for the GOP

By George Will

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | By striking down the District of Columbia's extraordinarily strict gun control law, which essentially bans guns, a federal appeals court may have revived gun control as a political issue. It has been mostly dormant since autumn 2000, when Al Gore decided he was less interested in it than in carrying states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania: "Gore Tables Gun Issue as He Courts Midwest" [New York Times, Sept. 20, 2000]. The appeals court ruling appalls advocates of gun control laws and should alarm the Democratic Party.

The court ruled 2 to 1 that the D.C. law, which allows only current and retired police officers to have handguns in their homes, violates the Constitution's Second Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

This ruling probably will be reviewed by the Supreme Court, which 68 years ago seemed to hold that the amendment's first 13 words circumscribe the force of the rest. That is, there is a constitutionally protected right to "keep and bear" guns only insofar as the keeping and bearing are pertinent to service in state-run militias.

In 2000, advocates of stringent gun control thought they had won their argument with historical evidence when an Emory University historian, Michael Bellesiles, published "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture." This book, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the most coveted honor for American history scholarship, argued that when the Second Amendment was written, guns were not widely owned or reliable enough to be important. Therefore the amendment was written to protect only the rights of states, not of individuals.

Before long, however, other scholars argued that much of Bellesiles's "research" consisted of meretricious uses of, fabrication of, or disregard of evidence, and the Bancroft Prize was rescinded. And in 1989, Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas Law School had written in a Yale Law Journal article, "The Embarrassing Second Amendment," that the amendment's language, properly read, is an embarrassment to those who favor whittling away the amendment's protection of the individual's right to own guns.
 
He noted that if James Madison, the foremost shaper of the Constitution, and his colleagues in the First Congress intended the Second Amendment to protect only the states' rights to maintain militias, the amendment could have simply said: "Congress shall have no power to prohibit state militias." Or as Virginia's George Mason, who opposed ratification of the Constitution because it lacked a Bill of Rights, said, "Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people."

When Madison and others fashioned the Bill of Rights, they did not merely constitutionalize — make fundamental — the right to bear arms. They made the Second Amendment second only to the First, which protects the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and worship. They did that because individual dignity and self-respect, which are essential to self-government, are related to a readiness for self-defense — the public's involvement in public safety. Indeed, 150 years ago this month, in the Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney said that one proof that blacks could not be citizens was the fact that the Founders did not envision them having the same rights that whites have, including the right to "keep and carry arms."

Increasingly, however, some constitutional scholars and judicial rulings argue that several restraints the Bill of Rights puts on government can be disregarded if the worthiness — as academics or judges assess that — of government's purposes justifies ignoring those restraints. Erwin Chemerinsky, professor of law and political science at Duke University, argued in The Post last week that even if the Second Amendment is construed as creating an individual right to gun ownership, the D.C. law should still be constitutional because the city had a defensible intent (reducing violence) when it annihilated that right.

Sound familiar?

Defenders of the McCain-Feingold law, which restricts the amount, timing and content of political campaign speech, say: Yes, yes, the First Amendment says there shall be "no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech." But that proscription can be disregarded because the legislators' (professed) intent — to prevent the "appearance" of corruption and to elevate political discourse — is admirable.

If the Supreme Court reverses the appeals court's ruling and upholds the D.C. gun law, states and localities will be empowered to treat the Second Amendment as the D.C. law does: as a nullity. This will bring the gun control issue — and millions of gun owners — back to a roiling boil. That is not in the interest of the Democratic Party, which is supported by most ardent supporters of gun control.

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