If the President has the Power to Hire and Fire the US Attorneys....

How come he and his lackeys have no recollection of anyone in the White House actually discussing the firing and replacement of the Eight Fired US (USA-8) Attorneys with their chosen political appointments?

Or doesn't the buck actually stop anywhere in this White House? The president doesn't recall any such discussions. But they all serve at his pleasure. And it's his choice. Yet he discussed it with no one. And he made no choices. How long will they continue to have it both ways?

The Big Question Remains: Where Did Cheney Find Out that Valerie Plame was a CIA Agent?

One of the Remaining Mysteries: Who Told Dick "Head-Guy, Oil-Can" Cheney that Valerie Plame Wilson was a Covert CIA Agent?

We know WHY Cheney wanted the info and how he intended to use it (via his right-hand loyalist, convicted felon Scooter Libby) — to smear Joe Wilson since Wilson had exposed that Bush-shrub, Cheney, Rummy & Co. were lying about WMD in Iraq. But we still don't know who the traitor was who gave up Plame in the first place to Cheney, who then set things in motion.

Sure Richard Armitage found out too — most likely also an intentional simultaneous leak instigated by the White House within the State Dept. by someone who knew of his famously derided penchant and inability to keep his gossipy mouth shut — (men are far worse than women according to research) — and forthwith Armitage started gossiping as was expected of him.

That was simultaneous and parallel to Cheney's intentional plan to out Plame and smear Wilson. Just because the two things happened simultaneously does not let Cheney, Libby, Rove, Bush et al off the hook for an intentional campaign designed to breach National Security and silence a critic who had exposed their lies — intentional lies designed to lead a reeling, cowered, scared nation into war against former allies who had nothing to do with September 11, 2001.

VALERIE PLAME TESTIMONY: Who Told Cheney, Rove She Was CIA?

We can't wait for that mystery to be solved once and for all to see and understand.

Why Democrats are raising a stink finally about something that matters

White House & Justice Department Indecisive: Reasons for / Genesis of Prosecutor Dismissals Keep Shifting

Accounts of Prosecutors' Dismissals Keep Shifting
By Dan Eggen, Washington Post

More than two weeks after a New Mexico U.S. attorney alleged he was fired for not prosecuting Democrats, the White House and the Justice Department are still struggling to explain the roles of President Bush, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and other key officials in the dismissals of eight federal prosecutors last year.

Yesterday, the White House retreated from its four-day-old claim that former counsel Harriet E. Miers started the process two years ago by proposing the firing of all 93 U.S. attorneys.

"It has been described as her idea . . . but I don't want to vouch for origination," press secretary Tony Snow said. "At this juncture, people have hazy memories."

In addition, D. Kyle Sampson, who resigned as Gonzales's chief of staff Monday, disputed the reasons given for his departure in a statement issued through his attorney last night.

"The fact that the White House and Justice Department had been discussing the subject for several years was well-known to a number of other senior officials at the department, including others who were involved in preparing the department's testimony to Congress," according to the statement by Sampson's lawyer, Bradford A. Berenson.

Snow's comments mark the latest revision of the administration's account of the firings, which has shifted repeatedly over the past week as new e-mails and other evidence have come to light in response to congressional demands for information. The precise roles of Gonzales, presidential adviser Karl Rove and the president himself remain unclear, even as calls for Gonzales's resignation continue to mount.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) yesterday became the third GOP lawmaker to call for Gonzales's ouster, saying that "it would benefit this administration if the attorney general was replaced with someone with a more professional focus rather than personal loyalty" to Bush.

The White House rebuffed demands yesterday from the House and Senate Judiciary committees for more information on the firings, saying the administration needs more time before turning over additional documents or deciding whether to allow key White House officials to testify. The Justice Department announced that it will provide new documents to the committees Monday.

The developments capped a tumultuous and difficult week for Gonzales and White House officials, who have attempted to play down the importance of more than 140 pages of documents and e-mails released so far that show the White House was closely involved in an effort to remove a group of federal prosecutors based, in part, on their loyalty to Bush. Officials had previously described the dismissals as "performance related" and handled within the Justice Department.

Seven U.S. attorneys were fired Dec. 7, and another was let go months earlier, with little explanation from Justice Department officials, who later told Congress that the dismissals were related to the attorneys' performance in office. Several former prosecutors have since alleged intimidation, including improper telephone calls from GOP lawmakers or their aides, and have alleged threats of retaliation by a Justice Department official.

While the firings themselves initially prompted questions from Congress, a major issue for lawmakers has since become whether they were misled in testimony by Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, and subsequently in public explanations by Justice and the White House.

Administration officials have acknowledged in recent days that, in Gonzales's words, "mistakes were made," but have defended the dismissals as justified by the prosecutors' performance and management issues. They have denied partisan motives in any of the firings.

The e-mails released this week show that the Justice Department had advocated ousting up to 20 percent of the U.S. attorneys in early 2005 and that Gonzales had discussed the idea of the firings even before he became attorney general. Rove also expressed an interest in the status of the effort in January 2005.

One January 2006 memo written by Sampson attributed the initial idea to Miers. "Harriet, you have asked whether President Bush should remove and replace U.S. attorneys . . . " he wrote.

Many of the documents released over the past week were sent or received by Sampson, whose resignation, Gonzales and other Justice officials said, was prompted by his failure to tell others in the department about his contacts with the White House, leading to testimony by McNulty and others that may have been misleading.

Sampson disputed that version of events in his statement last night, saying he "felt he had let the attorney general down in failing to . . . organize a more effective political response to the unfounded accusations of impropriety in the replacement process."

Sampson's statement also suggested that his contacts with the White House were well known within Justice. If the contacts were not brought to the attention of McNulty and others, the statement said, it was "because no one focused on it or deemed it important at the time."

The Justice Department had no immediate comment last night.

The department announced earlier that Sampson would be replaced by Chuck Rosenberg, the U.S. attorney in Alexandria, who previously served in similar roles for former attorney general John D. Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.

Snow and other administration officials previously said that Miers first suggested firing all U.S. attorneys after the 2004 elections, citing e-mails from Sampson and Rove's recollection of events.

Officials have said that Gonzales and Rove opposed that idea and that Justice embarked on a more limited effort that led to the firings of the eight U.S. attorneys.

Snow was asked yesterday whether Bush might have suggested the firings.

"Anything's possible . . . but I don't think so," he said, adding that Bush "certainly has no recollection of any such thing. . . . I want you to be clear here: Don't be dropping it at the president's door."

Democrats pounced on the latest shift in events.

"The story keeps changing, which neither does them or the public any good," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). "They ought to gather all the facts and tell the public the truth."

Democrats also criticized the White House for saying it needed more time to turn over records and decide whether senior aides, including Rove, should be allowed to submit to interviews with congressional investigators.

"The White House is playing a dangerous game of chicken," said Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), chairman of a Judiciary subcommittee leading an investigation into the firings.

Washington Post staff writers Michael Abramowitz and Jerry Markon and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

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From the LA Times

Why Democrats are raising a stink
Congressional investigations into the firing of U.S. attorneys are about checks and balances, not politics, says Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

By Dianne Feinstein

DIANNE FEINSTEIN is California's senior U.S. senator.
March 17, 2007

A FIRESTORM has been ignited over the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, with new revelations about the Bush administration's abuses exposed on a daily basis. We now know that this isn't about some partisan "conspiracy theory" concocted by administration critics, as a Times editorial claimed on Jan. 26.

The record shows that this was a premeditated plan to remove U.S. attorneys and replace them indefinitely with others — who might not be qualified — without Senate confirmation. The means to accomplish this was a provision slipped into the 2006 reauthorization of the Patriot Act with no notice. The end result is a clear abuse of power that reaches into the highest offices of the Department of Justice and the White House, touching Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, former White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers and presidential advisor Karl Rove.

The way to curb this abuse is to return to our nation's basic principle that checks and balances on power are necessary and desirable.

That's why I have proposed legislation to restore the process that was in place before 2006, which would require Senate approval of every U.S. attorney. This legislation would allow the attorney general to appoint an interim U.S. attorney for 120 days when vacancies occur. If, after that time, the president has not sent a nominee to the Senate and had that nominee confirmed, the authority to appoint an interim U.S. attorney would fall to a local district court. This was the process put in place under the Reagan administration.

This legislation was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last month with bipartisan support and will be debated in the Senate next week. Times editorials have called this legislation "misguided," but had it been in place, it would have prevented the abuses.

Let's review the facts:

• In early 2005, Miers, then the White House counsel, and Rove asked about the desirability of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys . They were told by Gonzales' staff that this would result in an unacceptable shock to the system.

• Nonetheless, top officials at the White House and the Justice Department hatched a plan to remove a smaller number of U.S. attorneys. One of the keys in the evaluation was whether the prosecutor showed loyalty to the administration.

• Gonzales' chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, advocated using the new Patriot Act powers and argued that the legislation would allow the Justice Department to bypass the checks inherent in the Senate confirmation process. He wrote that by avoiding the Senate, "we can give far less deference to home-state senators and thereby get (1) our preferred person appointed and (2) do it far faster and more efficiently, at less political cost to the White House."

• In June 2006, the first firing that we know of occurred, though it received little national notice. H.E. "Bud" Cummins III of Arkansas was forced to resign and was replaced with Timothy Griffin, special assistant to Rove.

• Finally, on Dec. 7, 2006, seven other U.S. attorneys were forced to resign by January. Five were involved in ongoing corruption probes. These prosecutors had received strong performance reviews by independent evaluators and some were originally judged — by the Justice Department's own subjective standards — to be among the top prosecutors who were loyal to the president and the attorney general.

Making a bad situation worse, the attorney general's justification for the firings has shifted over time.

At first, Gonzales flatly denied charges of wrongdoing when asked by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "I would never, ever make a change in the United States attorney position for political reasons," he said. It was later revealed that Cummins' removal was political.

Later, the administration's justification became "performance-related" issues, and finally, a "loss of confidence" in these U.S. attorneys.

It is absolutely critical for Congress to restore the approval process in place before 2006. This is the only way to ensure that another administration doesn't travel down the same path.

We also must determine the role played by key White House officials and Gonzales, who has "taken responsibility" for the matter but also said that he did not know what was going on. Five out of eight of the fired U.S. attorneys were involved in investigations into public corruption. What signal does it send to other U.S. attorneys about investigating matters of corruption involving public officials, particularly if those officials are of your own party? It creates a chilling effect.

I recognize that U.S. attorneys are political appointments, but their appointments should require Senate confirmation. And once these prosecutors take the oath of office, they are responsible to the people of the United States — not just the president — and they must be independent and objective.

Valerie Plame Wilson Testifies Before Congress

American Hero: CIA Agent Deliberately Outed by Bush Cheney Rove Libby Republican White House Valerie Plame Wilson a former covert CIA agent working on intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was the target of a systematic outing by — not a foreign terrorist jihadist entity or Al Qaeda or a hostile foreign government — but by our very own United States Government, specificially the Bush-Cheney White House in collaboration with right-wing pundit and apologist Bob Novak. Why? Because the republican administration did not like being criticized by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson for faking intelligence and lying about the reasons they misled the nation into the illegal Iraq War and invasion.


Proudly doing the devil's work:
Tom Davis of Virginia -- another republican right wing member of Congress working extremely hard to continue the White House and repugnacon smear of Valerie Plame -- protecting and covering for Rove, Bush, Cheney, Libby, Bob Novak and all those republicans and their hacks who outed covert, classified, undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. Davis and the other republican members continue to distort the facts of this troubling crime despite the facts and reality.

Congressmember Sarbanes:

"Administration of Bullies"

"Arrogance of Power run amok"

"Petulant behavior on their part"

"Orchestrated effort" to out a covert CIA agent

Chairman Waxman:

"Did Bob Novak or Karl Rove or Mr. Cheney or President Bush or anyone from the administration call and apologize to you for the damage done to your career and the danger to you and your family?

Valerie Plame Wilson:

"No, Mr. Chairman"

Meanwhile on Spit(Hard)ball with the preferred and highly superior David Gregory, (substituting for the stupidly rude, loud, bully, blowhard and sycophant in residence), Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times has finally and completely relinquished his 'official journalist press' card — he has shed any false or actual sense of responsibility as a fact-based journalist/analyst and has fervently donned his McCain-Republican Talking Points Toady Hat.

With a mostly straight face Brown-nose declared today's hearings in the House to not serve much purpose in scoring political points/advantage. He was concerned with crass political posturing versus history being corrected, facts being found and truth being told.

Thumbs Down, Jeers and Hall of Shame Award goes to Ron Brownstein; you can pretty much write him off and check the Right-wing Republican publicist column (in great cowardly company with Robert Novak) — he'll have to do something massively important to redeem himself if this is his new hack, no P.R, er wait .... writing/reporting path.

On the other hand, Matt Cooper, one of the journalists to whom Rove and the White House Traitors leaked Plame's identity/name seemed to understand the serious historical value of these hearings and to confirm the public's right to know about the smear tactics and mendacious antics of this Shrub-Loyalty-Above-the-Constitution White House/administration.