Kanadesaga

No Investigation of 2 Bush Aides
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 1, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey on Friday rejected referring the House’s contempt citations against President Bush’s chief of staff and former counsel to a federal grand jury. Mr. Mukasey said they had committed no crime.

Mr. Mukasey said the chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, and the former counsel, Harriet E. Miers, were right in refusing to provide Congress with White House documents or to testify about the firings of federal prosecutors.

“The department will not bring the Congressional contempt citations before a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute Mr. Bolten or Ms. Miers,” Mr. Mukasey wrote to the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi.
The House voted two weeks ago to cite Mr. Bolten and Ms. Miers for contempt and to seek a grand jury investigation.

Ms. Pelosi requested the grand jury investigation on Thursday. She said the House would file a civil suit seeking enforcement of the contempt citations if federal prosecutors declined to seek misdemeanor charges against Mr. Bolten and Ms. Miers

__________________________________________________ _______

Seems that Mukasey wants to service the shrub as well as Freddo did. they have the same moral compass.

Jonesy

The Bush people have mental problems... they're not truly guilty. Their brain-structure caused these crimes. The crimes were definitely committed, but not because Bush himself, as a spirit, is evil. He is a victim of his own malformed brain, like we all are. He actually seems to have a perfectly good spirit.

Hopefully, in the future, we can prevent these malformations from occurring; and in the unfortunate event they do occur, we will be able to deal with them efficiently.

Kanadesaga

Bush Aide Resigns After Admitting Plagiarism
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: March 1, 2008

A longtime aide to President Bush who wrote occasional guest columns for his hometown newspaper resigned on Friday evening after admitting that he had repeatedly plagiarized from other writers.

Carol T. Powers for The New York Times
Tim Goeglein in his office at the Executive Office Building in 2004. He was a liaison to social and religious conservatives.

The White House called his actions unacceptable.
The aide, Tim Goeglein, had worked for Mr. Bush since 2001, as a liaison to social and religious conservatives, an important component of the president’s political base. Mr. Goeglein was influential in decisions on a range of questions important to that constituency, including stem cell research, abortion and faith-based initiatives.
A blogger in Mr. Goeglein’s hometown, Fort Wayne, Ind., found the plagiarism.

“This is not acceptable, and we are disappointed in Tim’s actions,” a White House spokeswoman, Emily Lawrimore, said Friday morning, hours before Mr. Goeglein resigned. “He is offering no excuses, and he agrees it was wrong.”

Mr. Goeglein, 44, is little known outside Washington. He is a familiar figure to conservatives and evangelical Christians, who knew him as a spokesman for Gary L. Bauer, the conservative who ran for president in 2000.

When Mr. Bauer dropped out of the race, Mr. Goeglein signed on with Mr. Bush, eventually becoming a top aide to Karl Rove, the chief political strategist. He was the eyes and ears of the White House in the world of religious conservatives and an emissary to that world for Mr. Rove and the president.

Mr. Goeglein was often credited with turning out the evangelical vote that helped re-elect Mr. Bush in 2004.

With Mr. Bush traveling to his ranch in Crawford, Tex., for the weekend, the White House issued a statement late Friday saying that the president was disappointed and saddened for Mr. Goeglein and his family.

“He has long appreciated Tim’s service,” the statement said. “And he knows him to be a good person who is committed to his country.”
Mr. Goeglein had been publishing guest columns on the opinion page of The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne for more than a decade, according to the paper’s editor, Kerry Hubartt.

Nancy Nall, a former columnist for the paper, often used her Web site, nancynall.com, to poke fun at his writings, which she called “drippy and awful.”

Ms. Nall said she was struck by Mr. Goeglein’s most recent column, on Thursday, which included a reference to a “notable professor of philosophy at Dartmouth,” Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey. Curious, she searched the Internet, and found that Mr. Goeglein had lifted major chunks of the column from an article published 10 years ago in The Dartmouth Review.

“It is true,” Mr. Goeglein wrote in an e-mail message to another Fort Wayne newspaper, The Journal-Gazette. “I am entirely at fault. It was wrong of me. There are no excuses.”

He said he had apologized to the author of The Dartmouth Review article.

By day’s end, more examples of plagiarism had turned up, including a column about John Wayne copied in part from an article in The New York Sun and passages from a column that tracked, almost verbatim, an article by Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post.

A review by The News-Sentinel found that of the 38 columns Mr. Goeglein published since 2000, 19 included plagiarized material, according to Mr. Hubartt. He said the paper would no longer publish work by Mr. Goeglein, whom he described as “well respected here by a lot of people.”

“There was no reason for it that I can see,” Mr. Hubartt said, noting that Mr. Goeglein had submitted columns voluntarily and had no deadlines to meet. “He was not under any pressure.”

Kanadesaga

House Passes Contempt Resolution against White House Officials
By Paul Kiel - February 14, 2008, 2:26PM

Well, after all that -- after seven months, it's done. The House passed the contempt resolution against White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers, 223-32. Most Republicans, having staged their walk out, did not vote.

So now the ball's in Attorney General Michael Mukasey's court. He's expected to decline to enforce the citation of contempt, since both Bolten and Miers declined to testify as a result of an assertion of executive privilege.

The resolution included both a criminal contempt citation and the authorization for the House Judiciary Committee to sue the White House if Mukasey refuses to enforce the citation. You can read those here.

Kanadesaga

GOP sources cite lax controls at NRCC
By: John Bresnahan and Patrick O'Connor
Feb 26, 2008 05:55 AM EST
Updated: February 26, 2008 12:25 PM EST

The accounting scandal now haunting the National Republican Congressional Committee was preceded by a series of decisions over the past decade to relax internal financial controls at the committee, according to numerous Republican sources familiar with the NRCC’s operations during those years.

Under Virginia Rep. Tom Davis and New York Rep. Thomas Reynolds, who chaired the committee from 1999 until the end of 2006, the NRCC waived rules requiring the executive committee — made up of elected leaders and rank-and-file Republican lawmakers — to sign off on expenditures exceeding $10,000, merged the various department budgets into a single account and rolled back a prohibition on committee staff earning an income from outside companies.

These changes gave committee staffers more freedom to spend money quickly and react to a shifting political landscape during heated campaign battles, and House Republicans were able to claim larger majorities after the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections.

But the actions also may have contributed to a perceived lack of oversight within the NRCC, especially over financial records, a failure that outside observers blame for an accounting scandal that could go much deeper than the allegedly forged audit a former treasurer sent to the committee’s principal lender in January. NRCC officials contacted the FBI soon after discovering that the former employee, Christopher J. Ward, had submitted what they believe to be a fake internal audit to Wachovia as part of a loan application by the committee.

House Republicans are still awaiting the completion of an outside audit of the committee, since at this time they are unsure of the scale or nature of the financial problems at the committee. Current NRCC Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) has publicly stated that there were “accounting irregularities” at the committee that “may include fraud.”

Ward, who was doing outside work for the NRCC and numerous other campaigns and PACs at the time, has hired Ronald Machen, a white-collar criminal defense attorney with the law firm WilmerHale, to represent him during the FBI probe.

The NRCC has replaced its treasurer after discovering the apparent accounting irregularities, and most committee staffers with direct knowledge of the NRCC’s financial problems have been shifted to other positions, said Republican sources familiar with NRCC internal operations. Cole brought in Keith Davis, a veteran compliance expert based in Virginia, to handle the committee’s books, replacing Christopher Parana, who took over from Ward in 2007 and who remains with the committee in another capacity.

A pivotal moment for the NRCC occurred in spring 2003, shortly after Reynolds took over the panel, when he ousted Donna Anderson, a longtime committee staffer who oversaw the NRCC’s accounting.
Ward then moved up to the top accounting position within the committee, making him responsible for tracking tens of millions of dollars in political contributions and expenditures each cycle.

“Clearly, after the transition from Anderson to Ward, it was a different regime for what followed,” said one GOP insider with strong ties to the NRCC.

Vendors who have done business with the NRCC, former committee aides and Republicans on Capitol Hill have argued that lax committee operations paved the way for the current trouble. For instance, the committee has failed to conduct an independent internal audit since 2003. Rep. Mike Conaway (D-Texas) and other committee members have now called for a forensic audit to appraise the books, a call that came after Conaway discovered that a planned independent audit he thought had happened during the 2006 election cycle hadn’t happened at all.

In another decision that has become controversial, the NRCC began, during Davis’ chairmanship, to allow its staffers to earn outside income. Taking advantage of that change, Ward founded Political Compliance Services in 2001 with Susan Arceneaux, helping dozens of lawmakers and congressional candidates comply with Federal Election Commission laws. The two severed their ties earlier this year, a lawyer for Arceneaux said.

Ward wasn’t alone in seeking outside income. Don McGahn, the NRCC’s longtime counsel, was retained by numerous Republican campaigns and leadership PACs, helping those organizations comply with FEC disclosure requirements.

When Reynolds took over as chairman of the NRCC in 2002, he faced increasing challenges in retaining key staffers. Republicans controlled the White House and Congress, and lucrative jobs beckoned for well-connected Republicans on K Street and in corporate government relations shops.

And with the ban on “soft money” contributions that were in place following the 2002 elections, Reynolds also faced the prospect of paying staffers competitive salaries in a hard-money environment.

“They needed to attract and keep top people, and that cost a lot of money,” one senior GOP leadership aide noted. “Without soft money, it was harder to pay people well, so they let them take on outside clients.”

On the expenditures, it is unclear when the executive committee approval for smaller expenditures was lifted, although a source close to Davis said the executive committee was still reviewing small-scale contracts during his tenure at the NRCC.

Davis, however, was NRCC chairman during a controversial episode in 1999 in which the committee gave $500,000 in soft money to organizations linked to Ed Buckham, former chief of staff to Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas). The Federal Election Commission later ruled that the soft-money expenditure, which was spent in part on issue ads attacking House Democrats, was improper and fined the NRCC $280,000 for the episode. The $500,000 soft-money payment was not approved by the NRCC’s executive committee.

Davis, Reynolds and the NRCC declined to comment for this story.

GOP insiders also point out that the NRCC’s entire executive committee, which includes every member of the elected leadership, would need to sign off on any changes to the bylaws, so Davis and Reynolds were not solely responsible for any decisions to roll back pre-existing restrictions.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect that Don McGahn is still the NRCC general counsel.


GOP sources cite lax controls at NRCC - John Bresnahan and Patrick O'Connor - Politico.com

Kanadesaga

Bush Official Arrested in Corruption Probe

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, September 20, 2005; Page A01

The Bush administration's top federal procurement official resigned Friday and was arrested yesterday, accused of lying and obstructing a criminal investigation into Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff's dealings with the federal government. It was the first criminal complaint filed against a government official in the ongoing corruption probe related to Abramoff's activities in Washington.

The complaint, filed by the FBI, alleges that David H. Safavian, 38, a White House procurement official involved until last week in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, made repeated false statements to government officials and investigators about a golf trip with Abramoff to Scotland in 2002.

It also contends that he concealed his efforts to help Abramoff acquire control of two federally managed properties in the Washington area. Abramoff is the person identified as "Lobbyist A" in a 13-page affidavit unsealed in court, according to sources knowledgeable about the probe.

Until his resignation on the day the criminal complaint against him was signed, Safavian was the top administrator at the federal procurement office in the White House Office of Management and Budget, where he set purchasing policy for the entire government.

The arrest occurred at his home in Alexandria. A man who answered the phone there yesterday hung up when a reporter asked to speak to Safavian.

Abramoff was indicted by federal prosecutors in Miami last month on unrelated charges of wire fraud and conspiracy. He remains the linchpin of an 18-month probe by a federal task force that includes the Internal Revenue Service, the Interior Department and the Justice Department's fraud and public integrity units. His lawyer did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.

Abramoff's allegedly improper dealings with Indian tribes -- which netted him and an associate at least $82 million in fees -- prompted the federal probe. But investigators have found that his documents and e-mails contain a trove of information about his aggressive efforts to seek favors for clients from members of Congress and senior bureaucrats.

Accompanying Safavian and Abramoff on the 2002 trip to Scotland, for example, were Rep. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Administration Committee, lobbyist and former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed and Neil Volz, a lobbyist with Abramoff at the Washington office of Greenburg Traurig.

Like Abramoff, Safavian is a veteran Washington player. He is a former lobbying partner of anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist and previously worked with Abramoff at another firm. Both he and Abramoff have represented gambling clients and Indian tribes with gambling interests.

At the time of the golf trip, Safavian was chief of staff at the General Services Administration, where ethics rules flatly prohibited the receipt of a gift from any person seeking an official action by the agency. When Safavian asked GSA ethics officers for permission to go on the trip, he assured them in writing that Abramoff "has no business before GSA," according to the affidavit signed by FBI special agent Jeffrey A. Reising.

Reising alleged, however, that Abramoff had by then already secretly enlisted Safavian in an effort to buy 40 acres of land that GSA managed in Silver Spring for use as the campus of a Hebrew school Abramoff founded. Safavian also allegedly tried to help Abramoff lease space for Abramoff's clients in an old post office building downtown.

On July 22, 2002, Abramoff sent Safavian an e-mail with a proposed draft letter that "at least two members of Congress" could send to GSA supporting the lease, according to the affidavit. "Does this work, or do you want it to be longer?" Abramoff asked.

Three days later, Safavian forwarded Abramoff an e-mail describing how an employee at OMB was resisting Abramoff's plan to lease space at the post office. "I suspect we'll end up having to bring some Hill pressure to bear on OMB," Safavian messaged Abramoff.

On the same day Safavian discussed the golf trip with the ethics office, he sent an e-mail to Abramoff from his home computer, advising him how to "lay out a case for this lease." Abramoff subsequently wrote in an e-mail to his wife and two officials of the school that Safavian had shown him a map of the property at his GSA office but had cautioned that Abramoff should not visit again "given my high profile politically."

Safavian nonetheless arranged a meeting for Abramoff's wife and business partner with officials at GSA on the day before he departed for Scotland aboard Abramoff's chartered jet. The trip cost more than $120,000 and was paid for mostly by a charity founded and run by Abramoff, the Capital Athletic Foundation.

When Safavian was questioned by The Washington Post about the trip in January, he said he paid his share of the expenses and took unpaid leave. "The trip was exclusively personal; I did no business there. . . . Jack is an old friend of mine," Safavian said.

But the complaint alleges that Safavian lied about his contacts with Abramoff on three occasions after his initial false pledge to the GSA ethics officer. The first was during a 2003 investigation by GSA's inspector general, who was responding to an anonymous tipster's hotline complaint; the second was in a March 17, 2005, letter to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs; and the third was during an FBI interview on May 26, 2005.

Kanadesaga

Ex-Bush aide convicted in D.C. corruption case
Safavian found guilty on 4 counts of obstruction, making false statements

Haraz N. Ghanbari / AP file


In the Safavian case, prosecutors highlighted the name of Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio. They introduced a photograph of the congressman and Abramoff standing in front of a private jet that whisked them and other members of a golfing party for a five-day trip to the storied St Andrews Old Course in Scotland, and a second leg of the journey to London.

On the fifth day

The trial consumed eight days of testimony about Safavian’s assistance to Abramoff regarding government-owned real estate and the weeklong golfing excursion to Scotland that the lobbyist organized.

Safavian went on the trans-Atlantic trip while he was chief of staff at the General Services Administration, and other participants besides Ney included two of the congressman’s aides and Christian Coalition founder Ralph Reed.

The verdict came on the fifth day of jury deliberations.

Safavian sat impassively as the judge read the verdict and showed no expression when the judge announced the guilty verdicts on each of four counts. Sentencing was scheduled for Oct. 12.

“The task force will say how this was a great day in the war on corruption,” said Barbara van Gelder, Safavian’s lawyer, referring to the Justice Department task force investigating the Abramoff scandal. “I find they made a mountain out of a molehill and now they’re going to plant the flag on top of the molehill.”

Kanadesaga

The McCain/Bush Corruption Cover-Up
by dengre
Sun May 13, 2007 at 10:49:38 PM PST

It’s a Washington truism:
The cover-up is always worse than the crime.

It is true only in terms of being caught. Convictions associated with a cover-up stem from the effort to block justice and not the original crimes. The sad truth is that elected officials, lobbyists and their financial backers can and do get away with high crimes and misdemeanors.

Sometimes they get caught, but you would be shocked to see what they get away with.

Since 1999 I have been researching a crime wave behind an organized effort to fund the establishment of One-Party-Rule in the USA.

In the 1970s a small group of folks decided to take over America and they did. In 2000 they installed a weak, incurious and self-important man as President. In the years leading up to that coup d'état and in the years after the takeover, a great many crimes were committed against Americans and the world.

Most of those crimes will never be punished. Some will never be discussed.

In 2004 a window on this criminal enterprise was exposed. Then the cover-ups began.

Now it is all unraveling.

To the jump...
 dengre's diary :: ::
 As those who have been following my Diaries know, I have been writing about the Republican Culture of Corruption and the Jack Abramoff Scandal for some time now.

I was pulled into this research eight years ago as part of my job at Co-op America, a nonprofit dedicated to harnessing our collective economic power to build a socially just and environmentally sound planet.

Back then we were working on ways we could use that economic power—as consumers, investors, workers and business leaders—to stop sweatshops and end the chronic labor abuse fueling much of Global trade.

In the course of that work I learned about the organized abuse of tens of thousands of Guest Workers on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a US Territory in the Western Pacific some 40 miles North of Guam. It was abuse protected by the Government of the CNMI and the US Congress.

I asked myself how that could happen.

I spent time researching the supply chain, the companies involved, the laws that made it possible and the history of the CNMI.
I was appalled. This was very close to modern slavery.

The workers came from many impoverished countries and they were being used as expendable commodities to increase profits of the greedy. They effectively had no rights. Economic pressure and consumer/shareholder demand for corporate accountability could (and did) help end some sweatshops around the globe, but to solve the abuse on this rogue US Territory it would require action from the Federal government.

It seemed that 1999 would be the year when Congressional action would end the abuse. Bills had passed the Senate and had more than enough sponsors to pass the House. Media reports about sweatshops and the abuse on the Mariana Islands seemed to be everywhere. I felt that a major victory was about to happen.

It didn’t.

The effort died in the House of Representatives. It never came up for a vote.

I wondered why. I wanted to know how this happen. I found out.
I found Jack Abramoff.

As I dug into his background, clients, donations and connections to the leadership of the Republican Party and the larger conservative movement, I became amazed at the depth and breadth of, what to me, was a massive scandal.

I didn’t know the half of it.

Abramoff was just a window on a massive scandal. It was corruption on steroids.

The crimes committed on the CNMI were and are horrible (and they continue even as I write this tonight), but they are only a side show in a much larger scandal—a much larger criminal conspiracy to place "Party" above Country and establish One-Party-Rule in America.
It is a scheme that almost worked, but now it is unraveling.

In February 2004, the Washington Post began their Abramoff coverage. This was very bad news for the Republican power structure in and out of Washington DC, because for more than 25 years, Abramoff had been a bag man for the GOP. As Jack told Vanity Fair last year:

"Any important Republican who comes out and says they didn’t know me is almost certainly lying," he says. Such lies are not just, well, lies, but dumb to boot, he adds, for, as his own humiliations suggest, old e-mails never die; they just sit on hard drives, waiting to be subpoenaed and then to be leaked to the press. "This is not an age when you can run away from facts," he declares. "I had to deal with my records, and others will have to deal with theirs."

Jack knows where and how many, many crimes were committed. And he is talking.

His specialty was finding off-the-books financing to fund the effort to establish One-Party-Rule in America. In the eighties he converted the College Republicans into a farm club and training camp for Conservative shock troops. Then he had a hand in Iran-Contra and other shadow efforts to fund and support the covert Wars of the Reagan era. That effort took him to South Africa where he worked to protect Apartheid and create bonds with networks of "anti-communists" working across the globe.

By the early 1990s his "cover" was a Hollywood producer, his job was to raise money for the cause. In 1994, he helped collect over $700,000 for GOP candidates. The money was passed through DeLay, who then won over Gingrich’s candidate for GOP Whip. From the beginning of the Gingrich revolution Jack was there and he was a key player.

From 1994 to 1999 there was a GOP crime wave. An incurious national media would often report on the crimes being committed, but never follow-up on the links to the Congressional Leadership. Every now and then a story would start to get traction, but the well organized, funded and unopposed Right Wing Noise Machine could always shut it down or distract the press with a story about Bill Clinton's penis.
Most of the crimes committed in this time period are now past the statute of limitations for prosecution, but not for political exposure. These stories should be exposed and told.

These stories are especially important because they put the players in place for the next crime wave: the 2000 election and its aftermath.
Al Gore won the election.

It took a massive criminal effort to suppress, steal and manufacture votes to put the loser of the election into the White House. It was an effort that needed tons of off-the-books walking around money, especially in Florida.

Jack was in the thick of it and so were many of his fellow travelers. Most, but not all of these crimes are also past the statute of limitations, but the stakes were high in 2000 and more Republicans engaged in activity that even today they feel compelled to cover-up.
After Bush was installed in the White House the graft began to accelerate, but there were problems. Bush was a weak leader with a prissy sense of entitlement. By the spring of 2001 his Party had lost control of the Senate. By the late summer his poll numbers were dropping like a stone and the Senate, NGOs and the press were digging into the crimes and irregularities of the 2000 election.

Then came 9-11.

A Patriot would have used that moment to unite the Country and the World. Instead, Bush and the GOP Gang used to moment to seize power, silence critics and push their dream of One-Party-Rule in the USA.

There was a lot of rhetoric about hunting down those who attacked America, but Republicans focused their fire at political critics and Democrats more than they focused on Al-Queda. Max Cleland, Tom Daschle, Michael Moore, Phil Donahue, the Dixie Chicks, and others had to be stopped, but Bin Laden could get away.

Bush, Rove and the Republican Party politicized the tragedy. It was working. By the 2002 midterms many Democrats were defeated because they asked questions and were portrayed by a newly compliant press as not supporting the newly re-branded George W. Bush—a media creation of conviction and resolve. Behind this narrative was another crime spree.

Once 9-11 insulated Bush from criticism, all bets were off. Thieves, crooks and robbers were placed in charge of one agency after another in the Government. Lobbyists had a free hand: they could write bills; give and receive favors; and they were an important part of the way Bush and the Republican Congress governed Washington. From September 2001 through January 2004 an amazing number of crimes were committed (only a small fraction has been revealed).
During this time, it seemed that the dream of establishing a One-Party-Rule in the USA was happening. That it was already a permanent reality. Democrats were weak and disorganized. Most of those who remained in Congress after 2002 seemed to be on auto-capitulation to Bush and the Republicans.

There was as sense among many in the GOP that nothing would ever stop them. The schemes became more and more blatant. Tom DeLay broke laws to redistrict Texas. Other laws were broken in Georgia, Colorado and many other States. In the 2002 election millions of dollars flowed to fund dirty tricks, voter suppression efforts and out right fraud. And these contributions were rewarded with Legislation and/or favors from the White House to benefit the donors. These were well hidden crimes committed within a system protected by layer upon layer of denial, a Congress allergic to over-sight and a media addicted to being spoon fed their daily narrative from Drudge or the White House.

At the center of these crimes were Jack Abramoff and a network of other GOP money launderers. These were the mules that moved the cash and kept the crimes and the players hidden from view.
These crimes, especially those committed between 2002 and 2004, are subject to prosecution. And that should have many Republicans worried.

The pace of the crime spree picked up again with the Iraq War. Billions are missing and I’m sure that more than a few dollars were washed to find their way back to fund election fraud to keep Bush in office back in 2004. Many more dollars enriched the patrons of the effort to take over America.

When the Washington Post started their Abramoff coverage in early 2004, a window on this massive criminal conspiracy was opened. It had to be managed. It had to be contained.

Fortunately, George W. Bush could count on John McCain.
As news of the Abramoff scandal broke, it was McCain who led the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee’s investigation of Jack Abramoff.
Did I say investigation, sorry my bad, I meant cover-up.
From the start, McCain worked overtime to keep a lid on the most damaging aspects of the Abramoff scandal and slow-walk the investigation.

He shaped the narrative. Abramoff became a rogue lobbyist who took advantage of his GOP pals to rip off some casinos.

McCain converted the scandal into Hollywood "heist/caper" film, knowing that American prejudices against Native Americans and tribal casinos would help hide the damning details of the Abramoff scandal:

 Jack’s role as a 25-year bagman for the GOP: hidden.

 Jack’s close working relationship with the Bush White House: hidden.

 Jack’s close working relationship with the Republican Congressional Leadership: hidden.

 Jack’s role in dirty tricks and off-the-books money for the GOP: hidden.

 Jack’s role in Medicare reform: hidden.

 Jack’s role energy policy: hidden.

McCain actively controlled the story and he put the investigation into slow motion. He ensured that it was a not a factor in the 2004 election. Then he ensured that voters would not know about how closely Abramoff, Rove and Bush worked together. The work of McCain limited the damage the Abramoff scandal had on the GOP in the 2006 election.

He also has suppressed a literal mountain of evidence—over 750,000 pages of documents related to Jack Abramoff, his work and his connections in and out of government.

There are a lot of crimes embedded in the documents McCain suppressed. I hope that the Democrats in the 110th Congress are correcting McCain’s error and are actually reviewing the massive pile of documents. More than that, I hope they will release them to the public.

Bush and the GOP could not rely on John McCain alone to slow-walk the Abramoff investigation. Sure, the man from Arizonia went beyond the call of duty to obstruct justice, but the scandal was just too big. Crimes were leaking out.

And it was far more than Abramoff. Jack was not an exception to the way the Republican Party governed, he was the rule. He only acted the way they all acted. He was the status quo. By 2005 more scandals emerged. The number of Republicans under investigation increased again in 2006. A pattern was taking shape that connected these many scandals to the larger criminal conspiracy to convert America into a Kleptocracy.

The Bush/McCain cover-up was leaking.

They needed team players in the Justice Department to slow down the wheels of justice. They needed loyal Bushies to stand in the gap and protect the Party.

They found them.

That is what is at the heart of the firings the US Attorneys—an effort to obstruct justice.

Some players are already known like Monica Goodling and some like Robert E. Coughlin are just starting to be exposed for their crimes.
It is not a coincidence that moves by Alberto Gonzales and the Bush White House have had the effect of slow-walking dozens of investigations—after all they have thousands of crimes to cover-up. If they can run out the clock, the crimes will become like the crimes they committed in the 1990s and in the 2000 election. They will move pass legal jeopardy. If they can keep the lid on it, the cover-up just might work.

Not this time. We need to blow the lid off this scandal.

We need to expose this Culture of Corruption and demand change.
We need to extract a political price for the crimes past the Statute of Limitations.

We need to speed things up.

2007 is a year for gathering facts and holding their feet to the fire.

2008 is a year to defeat these scoundrels at the ballot box and put a Democrat in the White House. That will give us a Department of Justice that believes in the law again.

Get involved.

 Write letters, contact the press, call talk shows, post comments, and otherwise promote this effort. Demand the release of these 750,000 pages of documents. Make it clear that you are concerned about the widespread evidence of criminal activity in the Republican Party and the cover-ups of these crimes.

 Research. Follow the money. Find the quid pro quos. Dig into the ties of the GOP to CNMI and Guam, or to Cunningham, or to ripping off Native Americans, or to any of the entry points into the web of scandal. Grab a mask and a shovel and start digging into the many aspects of this cesspool of corruption.

 Get out the truth and hold the GOP accountable in 2007 and 2008. Perhaps Republican candidates will want to explain to voters why they wanted to kill the Abramoff and other corruption investigation. We should force the question.

Let’s push this hard.

Cheers!

Noob920

leaves the pushing to his "partner"

__________________
Originally Posted by BillCosby

I am usually a nice easy going person........ Although ever time I drive by that bar my Xwife cheated on me @ I get a bit troubled.........

But I am sure that is not the reason I kick that damn dog after........

Seems like he deserves it when I take that route home......