Political Prisoner Released

Remember this:

• Karl Rove had several of his political operatives placed in judicial positions - US Attorneys, Judges etc.
• They prosecuted Democrats on drummed up charges - made them political prisoners.
• One of the most obvious victims was Don Siegelman.

But we have the beginning of a happy ending:
Siegelman to be released from prison

MONTGOMERY -- A federal appellate court today ordered former Gov. Don Siegelman released from prison while he appeals his 2006 conviction, but denied co-defendant Richard Scrushy's request to be released.

[.....]

The judges wrote that Siegelman met both requirements for an appeal bond: He is not a flight risk and his appeal raises a substantial question of law or fact likely to result in reversal or an order for a new trial.

"After thorough review of this complex and protracted record, we conclude Siegelman has satisfied the criteria set out in the statute, and has specifically met his burden of showing that his appeal raises substantial questions of law or fact," the judges wrote.

For a truly happy ending Siegelman's conviction must be overturned and those who put him in jail tried and convicted.

Mukasey

Talking The Talk!
Mukasey Strives for Balance in Confirmation Testimony

Attorney general nominee Michael B. Mukasey pledged this morning to adhere to the law and protect the civil liberties of Americans if he is confirmed as the head of the Justice Department, subtly signaling a fresh start after the tumultuous tenure of Alberto R. Gonzales.

[....]

"Protecting civil liberties, and people's confidence that those liberties are protected, is part of protecting national security, just as is the gathering of intelligence to defend us from those who believe it is their duty to make war on us," Mukasey said in prepared remarks. "We have to succeed at both."

Mukasey also sharply criticized a Justice Department legal opinion issued early in the Bush administration, and since rescinded, that narrowly defined the acts that constitute torture and laid the legal groundwork for the use of harsh interrogation techniques on U.S. detainees.

Calling the memo "a mistake" and "unnecessary," Mukasey said that torture violates U.S. laws and pointed to the role of American troops in liberating Nazi concentration camps following World War II. "We didn't do that so we could then duplicate it ourselves," he said.

But Will He Walk The Walk?
We have a long history of Bush appointees saying what they think congress wants them to say and then doing the opposite. Think Alberto Gonzales, John Roberts and Antonin Scalia. Have we been had again? Time will tell.

Update
Spencer Ackerman has more on the TALK

That was, um, unexpected. Not only did Michael Mukasey repudiate the so-called 2002 "torture memo" signed by Office of Legal Counsel chief Jay Bybee -- which appears to have survived in spirit, if not in letter -- but he compared U.S. torture to the Holocaust.

Most significantly, Mukasey said that he is unaware of any inherent commander-in-chief authority to override legal restrictions on torture -- a huge repudiation of Dick Cheney, David Addington and John Yoo's perspective on broad constitutional powers possessed by the president in wartime -- or to immunize practitioners of torture from prosecution. That answer is sure to create anxiety inside the CIA, where many interrogators fear that they will be brought up on charges for carrying out interrogation methods earlier approved by the administration.

The Bybee memo is "worse than a sin, it's a mistake," Mukasey said. He referenced the photographs taken by U.S. troops who liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1945 to document the "barbarism" the U.S. opposed. "They didn't do that so we could duplicate what we oppose." Beyond legal restrictions barring torture clearly, torture is "antithetical to what this country stands for."

And still more of the right talk

Michael Mukasey, responding to questioning from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), endorsed the memoir -- and, implicitly, the legal perspective and bureaucratic predicament -- of Jack Goldsmith, the former Office of Legal Counsel chief, who fought Addington and Alberto Gonzales on interrogations, detentions and surveillance policy. "I thought it was superb. I couldn't put it down. In a way, I was sorry when it was finished," Mukasey said.

Among the largest legal disagreements between Goldsmith and Addington centered around presidential authority. Addington argued that power is a zero-sum game, where congressional power necessarily encroaches on executive authority; Goldsmith found it an enhancement, generating consensus for presidential decisions. Mukasey placed himself squarely in Goldsmith's camp. "I would certainly suggest going to Congress whenever we can. It always strengthens the hand of the president," Mukasey said. "Unilateralism, across the board, is a bad idea."

The question remains - will he walk the walk?

The latest on Gonzo

I was going to do a most on William W. Mercer's decision to spend more time at his other job and what it meant to Abu Gonzales and his "Justice" Department but my friend The Gun Toting Liberal did it for me. Check it out!

Running out of delegees

Judging from the testimony of "AG" Alberto Gonzales he had delegated the entire job to others and really didn't have a clue as to what was going on in the Justice Department. Well another one of the delegees quit today.
Official close to attorney firings quits

WASHINGTON — A senior Justice Department official who helped carry out the dismissals of federal prosecutors said Friday he is resigning. Mike Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, is the fifth Justice official to leave after being linked to the dismissals of the prosecutors.

Elston was accused of threatening at least four of the eight fired U.S. attorneys to keep quiet about their ousters. In a statement Friday, the Justice Department said Elston was leaving voluntarily to take a job with an unnamed Washington-area law firm.

The firings have led to congressional investigations, an internal Justice Department inquiry and calls on Capitol Hill for the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

He probably needed to make more money to pay for all those attorneys he thinks he might need.

Since no one in their right mind would go to work for the Gonzales Justice Department it may become necessary for Gonzo to do the job himself soon. Maybe that will be enough to convince him to quit so he can continue to spend time with his family.

To hell with a no-confidence vote......

.....just impeach the lying bastard.
Dems Seek No-Confidence Vote on Gonzales

WASHINGTON (AP) - Two Senate Democrats said Thursday they will seek a no-confidence vote on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales over accusations that he carried out President Bush's political agenda at the expense of the Justice Department's independence.
Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California, who have led the investigation into the conduct of White House officials and Gonzales, said the attorney general has been too weakened to run the department.

You are damned right he "has been too weakened to run the department" which is why he needs to go now. The fact that he is an incompetent lying bastard is probably also a good enough reason. So why bother with a no confidence vote? Just make it clear to Gonzo and Bozo in the White House that he resigns or he gets fired by the congress. Is that really all that difficult?

Update
Steve Soto agrees and has more:

The problem for Gonzales is that he and Bush already have a credibility problem with Congress on the federal attorney sackings, where Hagel, Pat Roberts and other GOP senators now want Gonzales gone or predict he will resign for misleading them on the scope of the sackings originally planned, many of course in political battleground states. Beyond that though, as Jonathan Turley noted, the revelations from Comey confirm that the president condoned an unauthorized and illegal domestic spying program, which is an impeachable offense. The White House knows they are on very shaky ground now, as evidenced by Bush’s tap dance today. Glenn Greenwald states clearly that what we have here is a president who condoned an illegal domestic spying program for over two years that was so egregious that his own Justice Department hierarchy and FBI director threatened to resign over it. Yet Bush went ahead with it anyway, and then dumped Ashcroft after the election and solved his problem by appointing Gonzales to bury any threats of such illegality seeing the light of day while Bush was in office in the hope that they could ride it out for 4 years.

And then came the unforeseen 2006 midterm result. The Bush Administration may have finally hit the rocks this week, especially when both the Bush-enabling Post and the NYT now want to know what illegal activity Bush authorized for those 2 ½ years that we are just now finding out about.

The lowest of the low

When the Indie 500, now the PBRC, came into being to fight the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be Attorney General I don't think any of us realized what an Un-American immoral low life he was. He has succeeded in making John Ashcroft look like a good guy. Other than the White House and the WSJ editorial board he has few supporters. My own somewhat right leaning local paper, The Oregonian, has a good editorial today where they join the chorus demanding that Gonzales be replaced.
Gonzales and the character issue

Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., told reporters recently "it would be helpful" if Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned.

That was two months ago. Today, his resignation would be even more helpful.

Whatever remaining shred of credibility Gonzales still possessed essentially vanished April 19 during his pathetic appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. More than 70 times that day he testified that he couldn't remember details about important decisions in the Justice Department, including last year's controversial purge of federal prosecutors.

Gonzales was worse than just incompetent. He was evasive -- unacceptable in the nation's top law enforcement officer.

Events this week did nothing to help him on the character issue. A former senior Justice Department official said Tuesday that Gonzales once tried to pressure a bedridden Attorney General John Ashcroft into approving a controversial Bush administration spying program.

The searing testimony came from James Comey, the former deputy attorney general who briefly assumed the No. 1 Justice Department job during Ashcroft's hospitalization for emergency gallbladder surgery in 2004. Comey told senators he was disgusted by what he witnessed that night: "an effort to take advantage of a very sick man" by Gonzales, at that time the White House counsel, and by Andrew Card, Bush's chief of staff.

To his credit, Ashcroft "lifted his head off the pillow" and flatly refused to support the domestic spying plan, Comey said. Bush later allowed the program to continue without the Justice Department signing off on its legality.

We were harsh critics of Ashcroft as attorney general, but in that late-night drama he appeared to be a giant compared with his unprincipled visitor. What Gonzales purportedly tried to do in that hospital room was reprehensible.

Should we be surprised, though, at the lengths he is willing to go to do the bidding of the White House? Hardly.

Remember, it was Gonzales who wrote a memo to Bush saying the war on terrorism "renders obsolete" the Geneva Conventions. He also had a key role in a Justice Department memo loosening the definition of what constitutes torture.

The Justice Department is crumbling under widespread reports of rock-bottom morale and an almost complete absence of confidence in Gonzales. He has brought it on through inept leadership and his stonewalling on the central unanswered question in the U.S. attorney firings: Were any of them the result of unethical and possibly unlawful political interference?

Another event this week might have moved the nation slightly closer to getting some answers. Gonzales' right-hand man, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, announced his resignation and now appears destined for another congressional grilling on the firings.

McNulty sparked the furor with his initial testimony in February that the White House had only a marginal role in the ousters. When the subsequent release of documents showed that to be untrue, and that the White House may have been deeply involved in targeting prosecutors who resisted political pressure, a full-blown scandal erupted.

McNulty's next testimony, the unconstrained version, should be well-worth waiting for.

There is plenty of evidence that would justify the impeachment of Alberto Gonzales and I can't help but think there would be plenty of Republican support to make it happen. The congress should make it clear to the White House that if they don't remove Gonzales the House will impeach and the Senate will convict. The Department of Justice can't survive another 18 months of Gonzales, that is reason enough to get rid of Gonzales.

More on Monica Goodling

So who does Monica Goodling's attorney, John M. Dowd, represent, Miss Goodling or the White House? The reason for invoking the fifth amendment is that she is afraid she will lie?
Justice Official Won’t Testify on Prosecutor Firings

WASHINGTON, March 26 — A lawyer for a Justice Department official involved in the controversial firings of eight United States attorneys said today that his client would not testify on Capitol Hill because she is convinced she would not be treated fairly.

The official, Monica Goodling, the Justice Department’s liaison to the White House, is invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and so will decline to answer “any and all questions regarding the firings,” her lawyer, John M. Dowd, said.

The legal logic of this is so bizarre it could have only come from the White House. That combined with Ms Goodling's sudden disappearance shortly after the story first broke would indicate the Justice Department and the White House are concerned about what she might say.

As Bill in DC noted yesterday the congress should simply grant her immunity for anything she might have done in the past. The Democrats should go easy on her. Beating up a nice Christian Girl is not good PR but make her tell what she knows. This is just one more indication that the White House has a lot more to hide than we know.

Update
TPM reader BK has a different take:

Monica Goodling does have a good faith basis for pleading the Fifth Amendment - just not the ones in her lawyer's letter that are getting all the attention.
Under the federal False Statements statute, 18 USC 1001, it is a felony to cause another person to make a false statement to Congress. Since McNulty has allegedly told Senator Schumer that he made a false statement to Congress based on information provided to him by Monica Goodling, Goodling could very well be prosecuted for a Section 1001 violation.

All the rest of the crap in her lawyer's letter is intended to sooth as much as possible WH anger at her for invoking the Fifth.

Related Posts
So Who is Monica Goodling?

If they didn't do anything wrong......