Just Out: A piece on Mitchell Wade's early connections to Dick Cheney:

From 1991 to 1993, a young lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve was working as a program manager in a Pentagon intelligence office. His name was Mitchell John Wade. His boss, the assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications and intelligence, was Duane P. Andrews. Andrews's job at the Pentagon was essentially to serve as intelligence advisor to the secretary of defense. The secretary of defense at the time was someone that Andrews knew well and respected immensely: Dick Cheney.

Back during the Reagan administration, Andrews had served as a professional staff member to the House Intelligence Committee, of which Cheney, then a Wyoming Republican congressman, was a prominent member. In a recent interview with a federal technology magazine, Andrews lists Cheney as his personal, lifelong hero.

In 1993, at the end of George H.W. Bush's presidency, Cheney went on to become CEO of the oil services giant Halliburton; Andrews joined the massive government contractor SAIC, where he would rise to become CIO; and Wade ... moved to form his own defense contracting firm, MZM, Inc. But it wasn't until 2002 that MZM would get its first federal government contract: a peculiar one-month, $140,000 contract from the White House, later revealed to be for providing computers, office furniture, and specialized computer programming services to the Office of the Vice President.

Go read.

McClatchy's Warren Strobel: The Bush administration steps up its campaign against Syria.

The WSJ reports today, "The wife of Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons was hired as a consultant to a defense contractor at the same time that her husband, who was then a member of Congress, helped the company get funding for a no-bid federal contract. Dawn Gibbons got about $35,000 in consulting fees in 2004 from Sierra Nevada Corp., of Sparks, Nev., the company said. Mr. Gibbons, a five-term Republican who served on the armed services and intelligence committees, sought funding that year for Sierra Nevada for a $4 million contract to develop a helicopter radar-landing system. ... One of the military contracts that Sierra Nevada got in 2004 was $2 million for research on a 'helicopter autonomous landing system,' to help pilots land in 'brownouts' of blowing sand, a technology several firms were seeking to develop for the Pentagon. House records indicate that Mr. Gibbons asked for $4 million, and got $2 million in the final bill. In a June 22, 2004, news release, he hailed the project and a separate $3 million for eTreppid as 'cutting-edge technology being developed in Nevada to improve our defense systems.'

Also worth figuring out, who is Paul Haraldsen? And why did this Air Force investigator urge the FBI to raid an adversary of Gibbons' patron, eTreppid chief Warren Trepp? As the Las Vegas Sun earlier reported:

One important figure mentioned in [Judge] Cooke's ruling is Special Agent Paul Haraldsen of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations at the Pentagon.

As Cooke notes, [FBI agent] West relied on Haraldsen for information regarding eTreppid's "facility clearance" as well as the "secret hard drives." The information turned out to be untrue.

Who is Haraldsen? And, why did he supply West with incorrect information?

These questions were beyond [Judge] Cooke's judicial purview.

Gibbons, it's worth remembering, before becoming Nevada governor, served on the House intelligence and armed services committees.

Why the Iranian seizure of the British soldiers? This theory makes a lot of sense.

San Diego Union-Trib: "Chastized head of local FBI office anounces retirement."

San Diego FBI chief Dan Dzwilewski, who was rebuked by superiors for publicly defending ousted U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, has announced his retirement.

Dzwilewski, who has been at the helm of the San Diego office since July 2003, sent an e-mail to his agents and staff Wednesday saying he planned to take a post as director of security at Sempra Energy. His last day at the bureau is to be April 30.

Some colleagues found the timing of the announcement curious. On Tuesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that one of his subordinates, John Pistole, told Dzwilewski that his statements on Lam were inappropriate and that he should keep quiet.

Dzwilewski had said Lam's firing was political and would adversely affect ongoing corruption cases.

Indeed, Kyle Sampson admitted in questioning this morning by Sen. Feinstein that he personally made a call to an FBI liaison complaining about Dzwilewski's comments that Lam's firing was political.

Someone might want to mention this development to Sen. Feinstein.

Ranking Judiciary committee Republican Sen. Arlen Specter references Sampson using the words "bad faith" to describe how the Department planned to use the Patriot Act provision to replace US attorneys without Senate confirmation. A provision added by Specter. Specter: Doesn't your email of November 15 to Ms. Miers and specifying her role in the evaluation of selection of interim candidates raise a pretty clear inference that it was more than just a staff recommendation; that there had been at a minimum acquiescence in this process to use the Patriot Act to circumvent the Senate?

...
Sampson: That email is in reference to the eastern district of Arkansas. I did have that idea and I did recommend it [to use the Patriot Act provision to circumvent Senate conformation] but it was not adopted by the AG and it was not adopted or rejected by Ms. Miers, according to my recollection.

Follow up. Check out Jeff Lomonaco's post on the art of effective Congressional questioning of witnesses:

Feinstein asked Sampson today, "And are you aware that on May 10 Carol Lam sent a notice to the Department of Justice saying she would be seeking a search warrant -- of the CIA investigation into Dusto Foggo and Brent Wilkes?" And Sampson carefully responded, "I don't remember ever seeing such a notice." The obvious follow-up: "Are you saying you specifically remember that you never saw such a notice? Or are you saying it is possible you saw it and now you just don't remember?"

This Q&A raises another technique legislators rarely seem to pursue, which is surprising given that politicians are themselves probably the most practiced abusers of casuistry in our society today. Sampson says he doesn't remember ever seeing such a notice. "Well," Sampson should be asked, "did you ever learn of the substance of the notice? That is, did you ever learn, in any way or form, of the fact that Lam intended to have search warrants executed in the investigation involving Foggo and Wilkes?"

Sampson suggested firing Patrick Fitzgerald to Harriet Miers and Bill Kelley. Later thought it was an inappropriate idea. More here.

Later: Hatch: did the Cunningham case have anything to do with Lam's removal?

Sampson: "To my knowledge it did not."

Again, notice how legally cautious that answer is.

Editor & Publisher:

Specter asked about Attorney General Gonzales' "candor" in saying earlier this month that he was not a part of any discussions on the firings. He asked about the November 27, 2006 meeting "where there were discussions" and Gonzales allegedly attended. Was Gonzales' statement about taking part in no discussions accurate?

"I don't think it's accurate," Sampson said. "He recently clarified it. But he was present at the November 27 meeting."

"So he was involved in discussions in contrast to his statement" this month? Specter asked.

"Yes." Sampson replied.

Sen. Charles Schumer then asked about Gonzales also claiming that he saw no documents on this matter.

Sampson replied: "I don't think it's entirely accurate."

Schumer: "There was repeated discussions??

Sampson: "Yes...at least five."

Schumer then asked if Gonzales was truthful in saying Sampson's information on the firings was not shared within the depaartment.

Sampson: "I shared information with whoever asked."

Schumer: "So the Attorney General's statement is false?"

Sampson: "I don't think it is accurate."

Via Atrios.

From the Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Focus yesterday:

A March 15 posting in the Tajdeed forum highlighted the difficulties that some jihadis are experiencing when trying to make their way to Iraq from Syria (http://tajdeed.org.uk). The user explained that upon reaching the border area, the "tyrants" of Syria were not allowing the migration to take place. In response, another user posted a more formal letter on the Tajdeed forum addressed to Sheikh Omar al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, urging him to assist the mujahideen in crossing the Syria-Iraq border. The formal letter reads, "we were distressed by the tyrant of Syria, Bashar al-Assad and his gang, who have arrested many of us…on the borders that separate us from you. We cannot find a way to reach you. Many of the journeys to you have been hindered, and many of the young men who were on their way to you have been taken prisoners." The letter then requested that al-Baghdadi send a "special brigade" with the "sole mission to be on the borders to receive the mujahideen." The user signed the letter with his e-mail address, listed as badee3ozzaman@yahoo.com. The posting has since been removed from the Tajdeed forum. Syria is an important transit point for jihadis going to Iraq, and there have been a number of operations conducted by the Syrian government to arrest militants crossing the border."

Hmm. Earlier this week State Department Iraq envoy David Satterfield raised just this point.

MC Rove. Surreal. Update: A friend in the government went and said it was hilarious. "I was there and it was a great time. The President was hilarious in poking fun at himself. Bob Woodruff got huge applause and a real outpouring of warmth, as did Tony Snow when his name was mentioned. The entertainment with the What’s My Line guys with Brian Williams on stage was pretty funny. When they pulled Rove on stage it was pretty stiff at first, but when they started to do the rap number it went off the chart as Rove started playing along and dancing. I haven’t seen all the hair let down like that in a long time. ..."

The Fixer. Check out Ari Berman's report on the alleged role of now deputy attorney general Paul McNulty in suppressing a DOJ report that would have been damaging to clients of Jack Abramoff:

... In May 2002 Abramoff used his influence to kill a risk-assessment report of Guam and the neighboring Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI), requested by Black, that called for federalizing immigration laws on the islands, a move that might have jeopardized the influx of cheap labor to CNMI and Abramoff's $1.6 million lobbying contract with its local government. Abramoff learned of the report from John Ashcroft's then-chief of staff, David Ayres, whom he hosted at a Washington Redskins game. "We'll hope that higher ups will take some time to squash this," Abramoff wrote. Sure enough, the report never came out, and the DOJ demoted its author, regional security specialist Robert Meissner.

At the time, Meissner's boss was then-US Attorney for Eastern Virginia, Paul McNulty, who has since risen to become Deputy Attorney General and a key player in Gonzales's embattled DOJ. A longtime Republican operative who served as spokesman for House Republicans during Bill Clinton's impeachment--and never tried a case before becoming US Attorney--McNulty now stands accused of misleading Congress about the reasons for the eight US Attorneys' dismissals.

Meissner discussed his risk-assessment report with McNulty on multiple occasions and told several colleagues he believed McNulty helped suppress the report and curtail his career. "Bob told me he thought McNulty had everything to do with it," says one colleague of Meissner's in the Bush Administration with knowledge on Guam matters. Says another colleague, "McNulty was kind of the fireman at Justice. He was the guy trying to run around and put a lid on things that could become political, especially with Abramoff."

Also interesting to note that Justice Department official Monica Goodling was prosecuting low level cases out of McNulty's US attorney's office in Alexandria VA in 2004. McNulty has reportedly in recent communications with Judiciary committee member Sen. Chuck Schumer blamed his false testimony to Congress on Goodling, who has invoked her Fifth Amendment rights to avoid testifying before the committee. McNulty's boss Gonzales is taking a similar tack, blaming any of his misstatements on his fired chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, set to testify Thursday. One wonders if the DAG has metaphorically fixed some parking tickets for some relevant folks on the Hill in his time, and if he's not owed some favors.

NYT: "King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia told Arab leaders on Wednesday that the American occupation of Iraq is 'illegal.' .. The king’s speech, at the opening of the Arab League summit meeting here, underscored growing differences between Saudi Arabia and the Bush administration as the Saudis take on a greater regional leadership role, partly at American urging. The Saudis seem to be emphasizing that they will not be beholden to the policies of their longtime ally. ... Some here said the king’s speech was in fact a response to comments made by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday calling on Arab governments to 'begin reaching out to Israel.' ...” Didn't the Saudis reportedly beg and threaten the White House not to withdraw US forces from Iraq just a couple months back?

Boston Globe: Bush pick to be US ambassador to Belgium financed Swift Boat Vets. Sam Fox's nomination hearing is today. Update: President Bush has withdrawn Fox's nomination.

Balkinization's Marty Lederman has posted the actual language of the Senate and House provisions on redeployment -- something, he notes, you'd think it would be easy to find on the Web but which no one has bothered to post.

The WP reports on the Senate Judiciary committee grilling FBI director Mueller over the abuses of the national security letters. But the account is also one of several that demonstrate why Mueller is so good at defusing Congressional anger by accepting responsibility right off the bat, and thereby likely blunting any remedies Congress might demand. Which may be more dangerous in the end for continuing to authorize a power that seems to lend itself so easily to abuse, and which will be implemented by agents working at some point for a new FBI director, one Congress and the public may trust less, and which seems to be being rampantly misused even under a director whose integrity and competence are hard to doubt.

Outside email at the White House. A reader who has a security role at a federal agency writes, "On the issue of using outside/unofficial e-mail address from official sites, the CIO at [redacted] has expressly forbade the practice for security reasons as it is all too easy to put sensitive information in an e-mail. ... Needless to say, hearing that the WH does not mandate that practice and lets [Rove] do 95% of his e-mailing from a blackberry, presumably with access to an unofficial address, is quite shocking. Still find it absolutely amazing that his clearance has not been revoked." If you watched the Waxman hearing with the White House security official on the Plame matter, one might have picked up that essentially that office was terrified of the White House political masters, and didn't dare consider holding them to the kind of security standards most everybody else in the government is held to, out of a desire perhaps for job security.

The Balt Sun's Siobhan Gorman reports on Congressional ire over NSA management of a new program, Turbulence, meant to continuously track global communications systems. The piece also recounts Senate Armed Services committee debate yesterday over the new nominee to serve as undersecretary of defense for intelligence, James Clapper. "Clapper, who at the time was director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in Bethesda, told Congress in 2004 that control over some of the Pentagon's intelligence agencies, including the NSA and NGA, should be given instead to a new national intelligence director. Rumsfeld, who opposed the changes, later fired Clapper, according to former government officials familiar with the matter, who attributed that move to Clapper's clashes with the Defense chief." Clapper, Gorman reports, is expected to be easily confirmed.

Yesterday I was wondering about New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer's reported enthusiasm for deputy attorney general Paul McNulty, something a bit unexpected I'd heard about from a colleague whose newspaper Schumer visited a couple years back, and that ABC noted in a report yesterday. Reader D writes, "I read your post on McNulty's time on the Hill and I wanted to pass this along... I have a friend who worked on Judiciary on the Hill back then and he had a very favorable opinion of McNulty. The Dems and Reps on that committee (both members and staffers) seemed to have genuine respect for each other back then, so it's not at all surprising that Schumer praised McNulty. And, by the way, I'm pretty sure that Will Moschella, worked on the House Judiciary Committee around the same time." This is interesting. If McNulty told Schumer privately his public testimony was wrong, as he apparently did, it could have contributed to the decision of another aide not to testify, or to believe the committee would be particularly hostile to her. As ABC noted, "Sources said Monica Goodling was informed that McNulty had tried to blame her for deficiencies in his testimony." It also could mean there's a constituency at DOJ and on the Judiciary committee that believes McNulty could succeed, or at least survive, a possible Gonzales departure.

So much for Washington's new best friend. Jim Hoagland reports the Saudis have snubbed the White House:

President Bush enjoys hosting formal state dinners about as much as having a root canal. Or proposing tax increases. So his decision to schedule a mid-April White House gala for Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah signified the president's high regard for an Arab monarch who is also a Bush family friend.

Now the White House ponders what Abdullah's sudden and sparsely explained cancellation of the dinner signifies. Nothing good -- especially for Condoleezza Rice's most important Middle East initiatives -- is the clearest available answer.

Abdullah's bowing out of the April 17 event is, in fact, one more warning sign that the Bush administration's downward spiral at home is undermining its ability to achieve its policy objectives abroad. Friends as well as foes see the need, or the chance, to distance themselves from the politically besieged Bush.

Official versions discount that possibility, of course. Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national security adviser, flew to Washington last week to explain to Bush that April 17 posed a scheduling problem. " 'It is not convenient' was the way it was put," says one official.

But administration sources report that Bush and his senior advisers were not convinced by Bandar's vagueness -- especially since it followed Saudi decisions to seek common ground with Iran and the radicals of Hezbollah and Hamas instead of confronting them as part of Rice's proposed "realignment" of the Middle East into moderates and extremists.

Abdullah's reluctance to be seen socializing at the White House this spring reflects two related dynamics: a scampering back by the Saudis to their traditional caution in trying to balance regional forces, and their displeasure with negative U.S. reaction to their decision to return to co-opting or placating foes.

Abdullah gave a warm welcome to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Riyadh in early March, not long after the Saudis pressured Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas into accepting a political accord that entrenches Hamas in an unwieldy coalition government with Abbas's Fatah movement.

A sympathetic profile of former Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson in Wednesday's Post Style section.

Washington's new best friend, Saudi Arabia, refuses visa to Washington-based Israeli journalist accompanying UN chief, alone among his press entourage.

Noah Shachtman dissects the new administration National Counterintelligence Strategy. "And there are a number of surprises in the spook-fighting game plan. First off, the document has a big-time emphasis on 'protect[ing] U.S. economic advantage, trade secrets and know how.' ... Second, the document highlights threats to the intelligence community from within -- and not just the usual worries, like turncoats and foreign 'moles.' 'Leaks' -- along with 'subversion' and 'treason' --'expose our vulnerabilities, our governmental and commercial secrets, and our intelligence sources and methods.'"

AP: US launches show of force in Persian Gulf. "U.S. Navy Cmdr. Kevin Aandahl said the U.S. maneuvers were not organized in response to the capture of the British sailors — nor were they meant to threaten the Islamic Republic, whose navy operates in the same waters. He declined to specify when the Navy planned the exercises."

This ABC piece on the US attorneys case mentions something I'd heard, that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has been an enthusiastic backer of deputy attorney general Paul McNulty, for instance, in meeting with editorial boards in 2005 when McNulty was nominated to the job. Why Schumer was reportedly so positive about McNulty, who served as a staff member of the House judiciary committee, would be interesting to understand. What was McNulty's reputation as a Hill staffer, and in what capacity would Schumer have had close dealings with him?

Update: Reader SC writes, "McNulty was Republican/majority counsel and spokesman on the House judiciary committee when Schumer was a high ranking minority Democrat on it, in the 90's ... Perhaps they were friendly/respectful adversaries."

WP: FBI Provided Inaccurate Data for Surveillance Warrants.

AP:

A Senate panel wants to know if the Patriot Act needs to be revised to keep the FBI from illegally or improperly gathering telephone, e-mail and financial records of Americans and foreigners while pursuing terrorists.

FBI Director Robert Mueller was to testify Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was the panel’s second hearing into a report earlier this month by the Justice Department inspector general that revealed abuses in the FBI’s use of documents called national security letters to gather data. [...]

In a review of headquarters files and a sampling of four of the FBI’s 56 field offices, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found 48 violations of law or presidential directives during 2003-2005. He estimates there may be as many as 3,000 violations throughout the FBI that have not been identified or reported. [...]

In 2001, the Patriot Act eliminated any requirement that the records belong to someone under suspicion. Now an innocent person’s records can be obtained if FBI field agents consider them relevant to an ongoing terrorism or spying investigation.

In 2000, the FBI issued an estimated 8,500 requests. That number peaked in 2004 with 56,000. Overall, the FBI reported issuing 143,074 requests in national security letters between 2003 and 2005. In 2005, 53 percent were for records of U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said Congress should revise the Patriot Act. “It is not enough to mandate that the FBI fix internal management problems and record keeping, because the statute itself authorizes the unchecked collection of information on innocent Americans,” Nadler said.

NYT: U.S. accused Iran on role in Iraq in 2005, before going public.

Whoops. The director of government relations at GCE, the company that runs the Federal Procurement database, called me, from home, tonight, and spent considerable time helping me find the contract I was looking for, which is above and beyond what I would have expected from anyplace. For whatever reason, I couldn't find it today after a few hours of trying on the Advanced Search tab (several readers have written they had the same problem, of the server timing out before the contract was found); and very helpful people at the Help Desk didn't see the contract either, perhaps our Internet connections were stretched, or some other electronic bug plagued us. In any case, thanks for all the help to the kind people at FPDS, and, contrary to my earlier post, the contract is there, unmolested.

Regarding the significance of the decision of an aide to Alberto Gonzales to take the fifth and refuse to testify to Congress, a Democratic lawyer correspondent writes, "It means that the Griles plea agreement has had its intended effect: letting Bush Administration officials know they can and will be prosecuted for lying to Congress. This means Gonzales' departure from Justice is getting closer ... Republican Senators aren't going to like the spectacle of a former Justice Department official invoking the Fifth - and Senator Leahy will make her appear and take the Fifth." Of the aide, Monica Goodling, who has served as the Justice Department's liaison to the White House, the lawyer notes, "She's a graduate of Regent University Law School in Virginia Beach - a law school that teaches law from a Christian perspective," accredited fairly recently, in 1996.

Stuart Taylor: "As for the U.S. attorneys, there is a world of difference between firing such a political appointee for 1) being a Democrat; 2) failing to press the president's law enforcement agenda; 3) overstaying his or her welcome in a job that the White House wants for a political favorite; 4) prosecuting Republican lawmakers; or 5) failing to bring election-fraud prosecutions against Democrats on a timetable designed to help Republicans at the polls.

"The first three are standard operating procedure. The last two -- if they happened -- would be unethical and arguably illegal. A minimally competent attorney general would instantly appreciate the difference. Did Gonzales? Perhaps. But the succession of misleading and contradictory statements from him and his aides -- which may further weaken the presidency by fueling congressional demands for testimony by White House officials -- inspire no confidence. ..."

GWB43.com. About that RNC email system in the White House, a knowledgeable reader writes, "On an entirely separate note from these scandals, you might want to consider the Karl Rove/gwb43.com/RNC matter under a slightly different lens. The National Journal had a story in Friday's issue that quoted sources saying 'Karl does 95% of his e-mailing through the RNC system.' Presidential Records and other legalities aside, consider that from an intel perspective. The White House is a huge electronic surveilllance target - and the story about the gwb43.com domain has been out for at least two weeks. Might you suspect that friendly and hostile foreign intel agencies might have picked up on this fact and become curious about the 95% of the government's business that Karl is lobbing outside the system. Maybe they've visited the RNC's servers? I think there could be national security implications here." Not that the office's information security precautions were ever in question. Oh wait. More here.

Update: A Congressional staffer correspondent writes, "While this is an option not open to White House staff, because their servers block such programs, other Executive Branch officials in the various Cabinet Departments are also known to use the various free email programs like Hotmail and Yahoo to email sensitive issues. This is not necessarily because they are doing anything wrong, but because folks are aware that emails sent on the formal servers are archived forever and they do not want their emails to be dredged up months or years later – as is the case today with the Justice Department."

The BBC reports on rallies for missing BBC reporter Alan Johnston, reportedly abducted in broad daylight in Gaza two weeks ago but with no groups claiming responsibility since. A colleague who knew him when Johnston was the BBC reporter in Kabul writes that he "is a great guy and a terrific journalist, just the sort of colleague you'd want in a war zone... indeed anywhere... level-headed, softspoken, funny and fair." Colleagues are particularly concerned that nothing has been heard from the presumed kidnappers for two weeks. Obviously, one hopes for his safe and speedy return. More from CPJ.

NYT: "Since November, the [Justice] department’s inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, has been conducting his own review of the department’s involvement with the National Security Agency program." And here's a profile of Fine. "Pressed during the hearings, Mr. Fine acknowledged that his investigation had not sought to establish individual culpability. He said that the F.B.I. was dispatching auditors to all its field offices to examine the problems in more detail." The LAT editorial page calls for Congress to reign in abuses of the Patriot Act and NSLs.

Newsweek's Mark Hosenball: The Pentagon is taking a hard look at its controversial counterspy agency, CIFA.

Go read Paul Kiel on the Blackberry defense.

Robert Novak: "But this is less a Gonzales problem than a Bush problem. With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress -- not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment. ... The I-word (incompetence) is also used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to cited a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI's misuse of the USA Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. 'We always have claimed that we were the party of better management,' one House leader told me. 'How can we claim that anymore?' ... "

Rumsfeldgate.

WP: GSA chief is accused of playing politics, potentially violating the Hatch Act:

Witnesses have told congressional investigators that the chief of the General Services Administration and a deputy in Karl Rove's political affairs office at the White House joined in a videoconference earlier this year with top GSA political appointees, who discussed ways to help Republican candidates.

With GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan and up to 40 regional administrators on hand, J. Scott Jennings, the White House's deputy director of political affairs, gave a PowerPoint presentation on Jan. 26 of polling data about the 2006 elections.

When Jennings concluded his presentation to the GSA political appointees, Doan allegedly asked them how they could "help 'our candidates' in the next elections," according to a March 6 letter to Doan from Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Waxman said in the letter that one method suggested was using "targeted public events, such as the opening of federal facilities around the country."

There've been several stories that suggest a pattern of federal institutions being used improperly for partisan ends, from alleged White House debates on federalizing the response to Katrina in Louisiana because the governor was Democratic, to the current Justice Department scandal, to this.

And Jennings' name may sounds familiar:

The committee's examination of the Jan. 26 videoconference could raise questions about the role of Jennings, the White House official who works for Rove.

Jennings's name has recently surfaced in investigations of the firing of eight U.S. attorneys around the country. He communicated with Justice Department officials concerning the appointment of Tim Griffin, a former Rove aide, as U.S. attorney in Little Rock, according to e-mails released this month. For that exchange, Jennings, although working at the White House, used an e-mail account registered to the Republican National Committee, where Griffin had worked as a political opposition researcher.

Jennings is a longtime political operative from Kentucky. He served as political director for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2002 before joining the White House.

After Jennings and Doan spoke during the videoconference, one regional GSA administrator offered the suggestion that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) could be excluded from the opening of an environmentally efficient federal courthouse in San Francisco, which Pelosi represents, according to Waxman's letter. GSA manages the nation's federal courthouses. ...

Jennings declined to comment Friday and referred questions to the White House media affairs office. White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said Jennings did not ask GSA officials to help Republican candidates and described Jennings's presentation as "a factual assessment of the political landscape."

Thursday will be busy on the Hill, with GSA chief Doan appearing before Waxman's committee, and fired Alberto Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson testifying before the Judiciary committee. And Sampson's attorney? A former associate White House counsel for GWB43. Who presumably worked closely with his boss, then White House counsel -- Alberto Gonzales, and of course, White House political chief, Karl Rove. "At the White House, Mr. Berenson’s responsibilities included work on judicial selection, executive privilege, and responses to congressional oversight efforts. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, he played a significant role in the executive branch’s counterterrorism response. He worked on the USA Patriot Act, the military order authorizing the use of military commissions, detainee policy and anti-terrorism litigation..." Worth keeping those affiliations in mind when Sampson testifies on Thursday. Interesting to note that Sampson's attorney also clerked for the man mentioned by Bill Kristol Sunday as a desirable Gonzales replacement, Laurence Silberman.

More: Sam Rosenfeld reminds readers that former GSA chief of staff David Safavian is currently facing an 18 month sentence for his involvement in the Abramoff scandal.

Nice Neely Tucker profile of Somali novelist and potential Nobel literature pick Nuruddin Farah, who lives in exile in Capetown.

NYC lawyers: the evidence on police spying would be damaging to us, would be convenient were it suppressed.

Kevin Drum further deconstructs 24's politics:

So sure: 24 is a conservative Disneyland. But there's another side to the 24 story that's surprisingly liberal: its politics. There are, after all, really two stars in 24: Jack Bauer (when the action is on the ground) and the president of the United States (when the action shifts to politics). In Jack's world, being a tough guy works. In the president's world, it's exactly the opposite.

In fact, plot developments in the Oval Office (or Air Force One or an underground bunker or whatever vacation home is being used that season) are enough to warm the cockles of any lefty's heart. Why? Because the almost universal theme is that hawks are always wrong. Let's roll the tape. ...

Season 6 (the current season) stars a cautious, liberal (Democratic) president determined to protect civil liberties in the face of terrorist threats. His reward? An assassination attempt by a cabal of hawkish White House aides that leaves him in a coma and allows the vice president to order an unjustified attack on an unnamed (as usual) Middle Eastern country. You can guess how this is going to turn out. ...

MSNBC: "Republican support for attorney general erodes. Senators question his truthfulness; firing of prosecutor in GOP case is eyed." Sen. Dianne Feinstein calls on Fox for Gonzales to step down. Via Atrios, Bush taped his "support Gonzales" radio address before the Friday document release.

The LAT reports on allegations of efforts to transform the DOJ civil rights and voting rights divisions into instruments for voter disenfranchisement, and GOP-engineered redistricting.

Worth reading: Frank Rich on Alberto Gonzales as discreet fix-it lawyer, and why his long utility for the president in that regard is over.

Arlen Parsa: "According to emails released by the Department of Justice late Friday evening, DoJ officials tried to manufacture public reasons for firing several US Attorneys late last year. Two-hundred and eighty-three pages of emails and other documents were released Friday that were not part of the Justice Department's initial 3,100 page document dump Monday. Among the sensitive new emails and other documents are discussions of how best to publicly spin the simultaneous firings of six US prosecutors." Kevin Drum has more.

Here's the link to the key emails, via McClatchy. It's hard to read these and not wonder how the US can have a head of the Justice Department who it is demonstrated so plainly misled Congress and intended to mislead Congress, whatever artful excuse and dissembling he and his dwindling clique of handlers come up with today for why what he said wasn't exactly a lie. Moschella too. Is that really a standard the Justice Department can afford to set?

Bloomberg:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he doesn't expect Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to survive the uproar over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys and predicted he will be gone in a month, ``one way or the other.''

Reid, a Nevada Democrat, also said he envisions the outlines of a compromise with the Bush administration about testimony of White House officials in a probe of the firings that would allow some administration officials to testify in private without sworn testimony, as long as the deal doesn't involve Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove.

``Certainly, Karl Rove, with his resume, would have to be under oath,'' Reid, 67, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV's ``Political Capital with Al Hunt,'' scheduled to air this weekend. ``He simply in my opinion, and I think the majority of the American people, is not trustworthy.''

The House and Senate judiciary panels voted this week to authorize subpoenas to compel testimony by Rove and other White House officials. The administration is insisting that the officials be permitted to talk in private with lawmakers and not under oath.

Reid stressed that he thinks a compromise is possible, and that not all officials need to give sworn statements. ``Well, I think that there could be some testimony taken in private'' and ``would be recorded,'' Reid said. ``We could do that.''

WP: Gonzales aide Monica Goodling on leave. "The Justice Department also said yesterday that Monica Goodling, a senior counselor to Gonzales who worked closely with Sampson on the firings, took an indefinite personal leave from her job last Monday. A Justice official said she is still employed there but it is not clear when she will return."

E-mails contradict Gonzales claims he wasn't closely involved with firings. "Attorney General Alberto Gonzales approved plans to fire several U.S. attorneys in a November meeting, according to documents released Friday that contradict earlier claims that he was not closely involved in the dismissals. The Nov. 27 meeting, in which the attorney general and at least five top Justice Department officials participated, focused on a five-step plan for carrying out the firings of the prosecutors, Justice Department officials said late Friday."

More from the Post:

The hour-long November meeting in the attorney general's conference room included Gonzales, his deputy and four other senior Justice officials, including the Gonzales aide who coordinated the firings, Chief of Staff D. Kyle Sampson, records show.

The previously undisclosed meeting appears to conflict with a statement by Gonzales on March 13, when he told reporters he "was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on" with the firings. He said all the details were left to Sampson, who has since resigned and who agreed yesterday to testify in the Senate.

Didn't another administration offiicial plead guilty today to lying to Congress? More from the NYT. "Department officials said that the participants at the only formal meeting known to have been held to discuss the firings included Mr. Gonzales; Paul J. McNulty, the deputy attorney general; Mr. Sampson; Monica Goodling, the department liaison to the White House; William Moschella, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs; and Michael A. Battle, then head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys. Mr. Battle has since resigned, and Ms. Goodling has taken a temporary leave of absence."

This from the WP interesting too: "The documents released last night include more details about the extent of White House involvement in the firings. They show, for example, that a public affairs officer at the White House knew about the imminent dismissals before Scolinos, the chief Justice public affairs officer, learned about them on Nov. 17."

John Doe in the Post: My National Security Letter Gag Order:

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Read the whole thing. Kafkaesque and un-American. As John Doe writes:

I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government's use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.

There've been 140,000 such gag orders in this country with almost no terrorism prosecutions to show for the abuses, and no probable cause established. That is just over one for every 30,000 Americans, man woman and child. Is the gag order so the FBI can avoid accountability? So the public is not the wiser for the abuses taking place? Where are the folks with honor inside the FBI raising concerns about the abuses? Is Congress going to mandate DOJ Inspector General Glenn Fine to establish whether such abuses were committed intentionally or not in the next round?

Update: It's against the law for the FBI to misuse NSLs and exigent circumstance letters as the DOJ IG has established it has, but a law to date violated by the law enforcers and therefore with no enforcement. What would be the result for "John Doe" to violate his seemingly unlawful gag order and appear say on 60 Minutes and blow this out of the water? For the ACLU to line up all of the recipients of NSLs it has been asked to represent? What would that be? A dozen? Twenty? A hundred? Five hundred? Or perhaps, that a TV news investigation program show them anonymously, in accordance with their gag orders, as various tools (voice disguise, etc.) would allow? Officials would be resigning and fired faster than you can say "Walter Reed," one can imagine. And let's just imagine that at some point in the next two years, not just the recipients of the unlawful NLSs, e.g. the Internet service providers, banks and telephone companies, but the targets of the illegal information requests, are identified? What will be their recourse to hold their government accountable? Most of all, how much of this will be determined to have been about issues unrelated to terrorism at all? How much of this was an excuse to spy on lots of people for whom it couldn't get warrants? 140,000 NSLs is a lot; is every one in 30,000 Americans really a legitimate subject in a terrorism investigation? That's kind of hard to believe.

The pattern to the US attorney firings? McClatchy: "Last April, while the Justice Department and the White House were planning the firings, Rove gave a speech in Washington to the Republican National Lawyers Association. He ticked off 11 states that he said could be pivotal in 2008. Bush has appointed new U.S. attorneys in nine of them since 2005: Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico. U.S. attorneys in the latter four were among those fired."

Ahmadinejad cancels his visit to NY.

AP: Total's CEO says he won't resign over corruption charges over 1997 Iran oil deal. "... De Margerie was forbidden from contacting certain people during the investigation, including former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani and his son Mehdi, judicial officials said Friday. Total is suspected of having indirectly paid commissions into two accounts of a Swiss citizen of Iranian origin acting as intermediary, according to judicial officials. Tens of millions of dollars allegedly moved through these accounts before ending up in an account of a Persian Gulf country, they said."

James Moore, the author of a book on Rove, writes about his possible testimony to Congress on the US attorneys matter, and his past artful dissembling under oath:

... Rove has testified under oath before investigative bodies twice, and in neither case was the truth well served. In 1991, he was sworn in before the Texas state Senate as a nominee to East Texas State University's board of regents. The state Senate's nominations committee, chaired by Democrat Bob Glasgow, was eager to have Rove explain his relationship with FBI agent Greg Rampton.

Rampton was a controversial figure in Texas, and Democrats suspected that he'd been consorting with Rove for years. During the 1986 gubernatorial race, when a listening device was discovered in Rove's office, it was Rampton who investigated. No one was ever charged — and Democrats suspected that Rove planted the bug himself to distract reporters from the faltering campaign of his client, Bill Clements (who won the election).

Then, in 1989, Rampton launched a series of devastating investigations into every statewide Democratic officeholder in Texas, including Agricultural Commissioner Jim Hightower. Rove (at the time running Republican Rick Perry's campaign for that job) often leaked things to reporters, such as whose names were on subpoenas before they were issued.

So when the Texas state Senate committee found nominee Rove before it in 1991, members thought they had the power to get at the truth.

"How long have you known an FBI agent by the name of Greg Rampton?" Glasgow asked.

Rove paused for a breath. "Ah, senator, it depends — would you define 'know' for me?"

Rove, who later vilified President Clinton's request for a definition of "is," clearly had his own linguistic issues.

But Glasgow pressed on: "What is your relationship with him?"

Rove said: "Ah, I know, I would not recognize Greg Rampton if he walked in the door. We have talked on the phone a var- — a number of times. Ah, and he has visited in my office once or twice, but we do not have a social or personal relationship whatsoever…."

Rove's famous memory, which recalls precinct results from 100-year-old presidential elections, often seems trained only to serve his political ends. In an interview with me after the 2000 presidential election, Rove said he did not remember meeting with Rampton at all. But in fact, Rove had met with Rampton — and he even disclosed it on a questionnaire after George H.W. Bush nominated him to the Board for International Broadcasting. In sworn documents, Rove stated that he met with Rampton in 1990 during the investigation of Hightower — an encounter that surely fits the definition of "know."

Rove's memory also made some creative leaps during a pretrial hearing in 1993 ...

.

MSNBC: "Iranian naval vessels seized 15 British Navy personnel in Iraqi waters on Friday, the Ministry of Defense said. The British personnel were 'engaged in routine boarding operations of merchant shipping in Iraqi territorial waters,' and had completed their inspection of a merchant ship when they were accosted by Iranian vessels, the ministry said in a statement."

Update: Reader CS writes to ask, "Does this quotation from the AP story sound like it was spoken by an Iraqi fisherman?"

"Two boats, each with a crew of six to eight multinational forces, were searching Iraqi and Iranian boats Friday morning in Ras al-Beesha area in the northern entrance of the Arab Gulf, but big Iranian boats came and took the two boats with their crews to the Iranian waters," said the fisherman.

Smells a bit fishy, I would agree. Not even the Coast Guard would deliver such a quote.

WP: "E-mails show machinations to replace Arkansas prosecutor. Administration Worked for Months to Make Rove Aide U.S. Attorney in Arkansas."

NYT: New to Pentagon, Gates Argued for Closing Guantánamo Prison. "Mr. Gates’s arguments were rejected after Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and some other government lawyers expressed strong objections to moving detainees to the United States, a stance that was backed by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, administration officials said."

173,000 US troops in Iraq. Newsweek's Rod Norland in Baghdad: "There will soon be more American soldiers in Iraq than at any point in the war so far. The incoming surge of 21,500 troops is only part of that picture; in addition, the U.S. commander, Gen. David Petraeus, has asked for an additional Army aviation brigade, as well as a couple thousand military police. Other support troops will be coming in to Iraq as well, and they weren't all included in the original 21,500 estimate announced by President Bush last month. When all this is complete, sometime in July, the grand total of U.S. troops in Iraq will be 173,000, U.S. military officials here confirmed on background, apparently because of the sensitivity of these details. And it's likely that U.S. troop numbers will stay at that level for months more, perhaps even into 2008. That's only part of the picture, however; the total number of U.S. troops deployed into the war theater, that is, Iraq and neighboring countries, may be as much as 100,000 more than that."

The Hill: CRS Director moves to limit report distribution. More from Steve Aftergood, who reports that CRS analysts are describing the decision as "an act of 'managerial dementia.'"

Holbrooke deal with Karadzic? A friend sends this along, from the longtime Balkan analyst of a western NGO: "Two of Serbia's leading tabloids have picked up a report from a Banja Luka daily FOKUS that claims Richard Holbrook signed a deal with Radovan Karadzic on 5 May 1996 at 0330 that afforded Karadzic a lump sum along with protection/bodyguards and a place to live, in return for which Karadzic would withdraw from politics. The articles claim that witnesses present included Karadzic's brother Luka, Vladimir Nadazdin, then chief of staff for the Yugoslav Minister of Foreign Affairs, as well as Aleksa Buha. The deal allegedly gave Karadzic $600,000 and required him to live at a secret location either in RS or in Serbia. In its on-line version the newspaper PRESS published what it claims to be a photocopy of the document with Karadzic's and Holbrooke's signatures at the bottom."

http://www.pressonline.co.yu/vest.jsp?id=6803
http://www.kurir-info.co.yu/arhiva/2007/mart/22/V-04-22032007.shtml

Needless to say, it's still to be established if the "secret deal" is true or bogus. "Clearly the US went out of its way to avoid making arrests [of war crimes suspects] in the first year after Dayton," an American Balkans watcher writes. "Karadzic drove openly through US Army checkpoints, and he still roams free."

Friday Update: From the AFP:

The State Department on Friday denied the existence of a US document reportedly guaranteeing safety for indicted Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in exchange for his withdrawal from public life.

The Montenegrin daily Republika reported Thursday that Karadzic, wanted
by UN war crimes tribunal since 1995, agreed to withdraw from public life
in exchange for the assurance.

Republika also published what they said was a copy of the June 1996 agreement apparently bearing the signatures of Karadzic and Richard Holbrooke, the former US envoy to the Balkans.

The document is "absolutely false," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack on Friday.

Miami Herald: Feds seek a reduced sentence for Abramoff. "'Some of the information provided by the defendant to the government within one year of the [March 29, 2006, SunCruz] sentencing did not become useful to the government until recently because it concerns the investigation of others outside the Southern District of Florida,' prosecutor Paul Schwartz wrote in his filing."

Ahmed Rashid: Musharraf at the exit.

Novak: Was Valerie Plame covert?

David Brooks:

... What’s striking in reading through the Justice Department e-mail messages is that senior people in that agency seem never to have thought about the proper role of politics in their decision-making. They reacted like chickens with their heads cut off when this scandal broke because they could not articulate the differences between a proper political firing and an improper one.

Moreover, they had no coherent sense of honor. Alberto Gonzales apparently never communicated a code of conduct to guide them as they wrestled with various political pressures. That’s a grievous failure of leadership.

The bad behavior has not stopped there. The Democrats, apparently out of legislative ideas after only 11 weeks in the majority, have gone into full scandal mode, professing to be shocked because politics played a role in prosecutorial priorities. They and those on their media food chain have made wild accusations far in advance of the evidence, producing enough cacophonous demagoguery to make rational discussion nearly impossible.

And the White House, instead of trying to restore some proportion, has picked a fight over a transcript. The president says he will allow White House staff to appear before Congress, but not in public, not under oath and not with a transcript. The president apparently expects his supporters to rally behind the sacred cause of No Transcript. In time of war, he’s decided to expend political capital so that his staffers can lie to Congress without legal consequences. ...

Then columnist Tony Snow, circa 1998, as recounted by the Chicago Tribune:

"What kinds of conversations does executive privilege protect?…What are the limits on privilege?'' a newspaper columnist wrote in the spring of 1998 on a subject strangely familiar today.

"Evidently, Mr. Clinton wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration,'' the columnist wrote. "Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything.''

"Sounds like you're reading an old column of mine,'' Tony Snow, the Bush administration's press secretary, said today, readily recognizing his nine-year-old words read back to him at a morning press gaggle in which Snow was arguing for Bush's right to protect the internal deliberations of his White House staff.

In March 1998, Snow wrote for the Detroit News, in which this column about a president's over-reaching assertions of executive privilege appeared. Today, he is press secretary for another president confronting an aggressive Congress. It's a different situation, Snow insisted today.

With credit to Olivier Knox of Agence France-Presse for a deft piece of document research, here is a copy of the column that Snow published in the Detroit News on March 29, 1998...

Via Eschaton.

The Las Vegas Sun's Patrick Coolican reports on the FBI's strange intervention in support of a company connected to former Nevada congressman turned governor Jim Gibbons.

Ron Brownstein:

AT TIMES, President Bush's second term has resembled a laboratory test of what happens to a large institution when all mechanisms of accountability are disabled. ...

Hurricane Katrina, the chaotic occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, the breakdown at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the FBI's abuse of Patriot Act powers, the troubling dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys — everywhere, the administration has been plagued by an epidemic of incompetence. ...

The answer begins with Bush's management style. He combines a distaste for details with a tendency to prize loyalty over performance.

Shaped by those attitudes, Bush typically worries more about signaling resolve to his critics by denying failures inside his government than demanding excellence by punishing it. ...

Bush's instincts were dangerously reinforced by the Republican-controlled Congress, which viewed itself less as an independent branch of government than as a junior partner to the White House in the American equivalent of a parliamentary system.

The Republican majority so completely abdicated its responsibilities to conduct oversight on the executive branch that its governing motto might have been "don't ask, don't tell." ...

Many of the decisions now causing Bush grief could have been made only by a politician who did not believe anyone was looking over his shoulder. It's inconceivable that the administration would have been so cavalier about planning the postwar occupation of Iraq — or so dismissive of the Army warnings that it had not deployed enough troops to ensure order — if it knew that Congress would closely examine its plans. ...

Former US attorney in New Mexico David Iglesias writes in the NYT, "With this week’s release of more than 3,000 Justice Department e-mail messages about the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors, it seems clear that politics played a role in the ousters."

David Sanger on the departure of Robert Joseph from the top arms control job at the State Department:

Among the hawks in the Bush administration, Robert Joseph long occupied a special perch.

As the architect of much of the administration’s strategy for countering nuclear proliferation, he helped engineer the decision to exit the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, worked secretly to squeeze Libya to give up its nuclear weapons program, and created a loose consortium of nations, now numbering more than 80, committed to intercepting illicit weapons at sea, in the air or on land.

But last month Mr. Joseph quietly left the State Department, where he was under secretary for arms control and international security, telling colleagues that, as a matter of principle, he simply could not abide the new agreement with North Korea that the Bush administration struck in February.

President Bush and Karl Rove near Kansas City today. From the Kansas City Star:

... Besides his considerable security contingent, the chief executive was accompanied by Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and Press Secretary Tony Snow.

A reporter approached Rove to ask him what he thought of rumors that former Missouri Sen. Jack Danforth could replace embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. “How about you go over there and do your job,” Rove replied, pointed back to the media pool.

AP's George Jahn: Russia reportedly exits Iran nuclear site.

WP: FBI issues new rules for gathering phone records. Emergency requests for phone records can be made orally, without paper trail.

The Left Coaster's eRiposte sifts through the DOJ emails to analyze the firing of US attorney in western Michigan, Margaret Chiara.

US News' Chitra Ragavan:

U.S. News's Chitra Ragavan has learned that one day after Justice Department Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty testified on Capitol Hill about the reasons eight U.S. attorneys were summarily fired, a Justice Department spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse--who was traveling abroad with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in Argentina -- sent an E-mail to Gonzales' chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, and spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos saying Gonzales was unhappy with McNulty's testimony regarding why U.S. attorney Bud Cummins of Arkansas had been let go. That E-mail is what is causing the most concern at the Justice Department among the 2000 pages of documents about to be released on Capitol Hill in the next hour.

On February 6, McNulty acknowledged during contentious testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Cummins had been fired because the administration wanted to name Timothy Griffin, a former aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove, who had also worked for the Republican National Committee. But McNulty said the firings of the other prosecutors were related to their poor performance. ...

How did the DOJ rate CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald? "Not distinguished," the WP finds. "Justice department fired two with the same rating":

Mary Jo White, who supervised Fitzgerald when she served as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan and who has criticized the firings, said ranking Fitzgerald as a middling prosecutor "lacks total credibility across the board."

"He is probably the best prosecutor in the nation, certainly one of them," said White, who worked in the Clinton and Bush administrations. "It casts total doubt on the whole process. It's kind of the icing on the cake."

Fitzgerald has been widely recognized for his pursuit of criminal cases against al-Qaeda's terrorist network before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and he drew up the official U.S. indictment against Osama bin Laden. He was named as special counsel in the CIA leak case in December 2003 by then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who had recused himself.

Presumably, if the White House wanted to demonstrate that it wasn't going after prosecutors investigating Republicans, what better case study than a "not distinguished"-rated Fitzgerald who managed to keep his job?

The House Judiciary committee is putting the document dump from DOJ on its website.

Nick Kristof: Cheney, Iranian mole?

Politico's Mike Allen: White House seeking replacements for Gonzales, McNulty:

Republican officials operating at the behest of the White House have begun seeking a possible successor to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, whose support among GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill has collapsed, according to party sources familiar with the discussions.

Among the names floated Monday by administration officials are Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and White House anti-terrorism coordinator Frances Townsend. Former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson is a White House prospect. So is former solicitor general Theodore B. Olson, but sources were unsure if he would want the job.

Republican sources also disclosed that it is now a virtual certainty that Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, whose incomplete and inaccurate congressional testimony about the prosecutors helped precipitate the crisis, will also resign shortly. Officials were debating whether Gonzales and McNulty should depart at the same time or whether McNulty should go a day or two after Gonzales. Still known as "the Judge" for his service on the Texas Supreme Court, Gonzales is one of the few remaining original Texans who came to Washington with President Bush.

In a sign of Republican despair, GOP political strategists on Capitol Hill said that it is too late for Gonzales' departure to head off a full-scale Democratic investigation into the motives and timing behind the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. ...

More from McClatchy.

WP:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a television appearance yesterday that [former San Diego US attorney] Lam "sent a notice to the Justice Department saying that there would be two search warrants" in a criminal investigation of defense contractor Brent R. Wilkes and Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who had just quit as the CIA's top administrator amid questions about his ties to disgraced former GOP congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

The next day, on May 11, D. Kyle Sampson, then chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, sent an e-mail message to William Kelley in the White House counsel's office saying that Lam should be removed as quickly as possible, according to documents turned over to Congress last week.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein on C-span today: As near as she can tell, it was Justice Department official William Moschella on the administration side who was responsible for slipping the provision into the Patriot Act in 2006 that apparently went unnoticed by many Senators, that enabled interim US attorneys to be appointed and serve without confirmation. What was the motive for that provision and how does that explanation fit with what Moschella and his colleagues have been testifying to before Congress? Was it their intention from the beginning to use the Patriot Act provision to make US attorney appointments that did not require confirmation, not for national security emergencies, but for political purposes such as promoting former Rove deputy Tim Griffin, as the Department soon moved to use it? Would be interesting to see the email traffic on that. It's also not hard to imagine how the FBI might have absorbed the wider apparent DOJ culture of permissiveness that it was okay to falsely claim "exigent" national security circumstances in order to avoid excessive bureaucratic hassles. As Gonzales' former chief of staff Kyle Sampson wrote in an email, "I think we should gum this to death. ... If [the Senators] ultimately say ‘no never’ (and the longer we can forestall that the better), then we can tell them we’ll look for other candidates, ask them for recommendations, interview their candidates, and otherwise run out the clock. All this should be done in ‘good faith’ of course.” Is it a stretch to wonder if the FBI misused national security letters and exigent letters on the same "good faith" terms?

AP: "Senate Judiciary Committee chairman [Pat Leahy] said today he intends to subpoena White House officials involved in ousting federal prosecutors and is dismissing anything short of their testimony in public. ... 'I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths on this,' Leahy said. 'I do not believe in this, we'll have a private briefing for you where we'll tell you everything, and they don't.'"

The LAT's Josh Meyer: In terrorism fight, diplomacy gets shortchanged.

LAT: "Battered Congress syndrome." More from Newsweek.

An Iranian contact sends this about his friend, Hossein Forodieh, an Iranian Azeri student activist:

Political Activist Hossein Forodieh May be Executed Today. The Revolutionary Court in the city of Oroumiey has sentenced Hossein Forohideh, a political activist to death and is planning to execute him ...

Four months ago Mr. Forohideh was arrested in the Kurdistan of Iran and was subjected to severe torture. ... Hossein Forohide's mother visited him on March 14, 2007 in Prison and spoke regarding her visit: "After months of not having any news from my son, I received a call from the Intelligence Services in the Oromiye Prison asking me to go and visit my son. They wanted me to tell him that if he did not cooperate with them, he would be executed. I asked my son to cooperate in order to save his life. As I was saying goodbye and leaving one of the prison officials told me to take my sons clothing with me because he had already been sentenced to death and the execution would be carried out in the next 48 hours."

The Student Committee for the Defence of Political Prisoners is asking the Security and Judiciary Officials to immediately stop the execution of Hossein Forohideh and to give reasons as to why he was sentenced to death. ... The reason for Mr. Forohidehs arrest was communication with Anti-Regime Political Organizations outside of Iran ...

Translation of the Statement by The Student Committee for the Defence of Political Prisoners. komitedefa@gmail.com

Must-read Anthony Shadid in the Post: Imagining otherwise in Egypt: Opposition campaign embodying Bush vision now lies in ruins.

Here's an excellent Michael Hirsh piece on foreign policy and Barack Obama in the new issue of the Washington Monthly, you will not want to miss. Subhed: the international system isn't broken:

For all his openness to rethinking first principles, there’s reason to believe that this is something Obama understands better than any other leading candidate. “I don’t oppose all wars,” he declared in 2002, while Hillary Clinton and John Edwards were triangulating their way toward authorizing the Iraq invasion. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” Perhaps, ultimately, this is his real value right now. Not as the perfect vessel for a shining new world order. Though, of course, he is just that: Who could better reassure a jittery and suspicious world that America is ready to resume global leadership than a new young president who is the son of a black African father and a white Kansan mother, with a Muslim middle name who grew up in Asia? Rather, Obama’s value is as someone with the courage, independence, and basic common sense to declare, without equivocation, that America’s loss of global leadership is a result not of the inevitable breakdown of the existing structure, but of the Bush administration’s radical and disastrous policy decisions. And that, with the right mix of patience, wisdom, and common sense, we’re not as far from reclaiming that leadership as it might appear.

Recommended.

Waxman Plame hearing up now.

The NYT profiles new and veteran White House counsel Fred Fielding, in the midst of navigating the US attorneys purge case.

ABC News: Newly discovered e-mails show Rove's role in U.S. attorney firings.

The e-mails directly contradict White House assertions that the notion originated with recently departed White House counsel Harriet Miers, and was her idea alone.

Two independent sources in a position to know have described the contents of the e-mail exchange, which could be released as early as Friday. They put Rove at the epicenter of the imbroglio and raise questions about Gonzales' explanations of the matter.

The e-mail exchange is dated early January 2005, more than a month before the White House acknowledged it was considering firing all the U.S. attorneys. On its face, the plan is not improper, inappropriate or even unusual: The president has the right to fire U.S. attorneys at any time, and presidents have done so when they took office.

What has made the issue a political firestorm is the White House's insistence that the idea came from Miers and was swiftly rejected.

White House press secretary Tony Snow told reporters Tuesday that Miers had suggested firing all 93, and that it was "her idea only." Snow said Miers' idea was quickly rejected by the Department of Justice.

The latest e-mails show that Gonzales and Rove were both involved in the discussion, and neither rejected it out of hand.

More here.

Just Out: "Condi's Conundrum," a current history-type account at the Washington Monthly on a year's worth of efforts by Condoleezza Rice's State Department to take control of Iran policy.

Can the White House use RNC-provided email domains to avoid document requests? Check this out.

AP: Senate Judiciary committee votes to subpoena five DOJ officials, if Gonzales does not make them available. Holds off on WH subpoenas. Paul Kiel: "Why did the committee hold off on subpoenas to the White House? Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) says 'It is regrettable that members of the minority blocked subpoenas for some of the White House players. They should be joining in our efforts to get to the bottom of this.'”

Also, a colleague notes, that deputy attorney general Paul McNulty used to be a staffer on the House Judiciary committee, and at least until recently, had a lot of bipartisan good will expressed towards him from the Hill, notably by Schumer. (Corrected).

Nat'l Journal's Murray Waas: Gonzales got Bush to shut down an internal DOJ investigation which would have looked at him:

Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews.

Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work.

It is unclear whether the president knew at the time of his decision that the Justice inquiry -- to be conducted by the department's internal ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility -- would almost certainly examine the conduct of his attorney general. ...

President Bush's shutting down of the Justice Department probe was disclosed in July. However, it has not been previously reported that investigators were about to question at least two crucial witnesses and examine documents that might have shed light on Gonzales's role in authorizing and overseeing the eavesdropping program.

Second Republican lawmaker calls for ouster of Gonzales. North County (Ca) Times:

U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa said Wednesday he was "outraged" that executive branch officials recently gave a congressional hearing misleading and inaccurate testimony based on information that both the Department of Justice and the White House knew to be untrue.

"We can soft-pedal it a lot of ways, but Congress was lied to," Issa, R-Vista, said in a Wednesday phone interview from his Washington office.

Issa's 49th District covers large parts of North San Diego County, including Oceanside and Vista, as well as portions of Southwest Riverside County.

He said that if Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had any role in false information being given to Congress, "he should not be able to continue in his job." [...]

"I am concerned that we have lost trust in the attorney general's office," Issa said. "Everybody who is part of us getting false testimony must go, up to and including the attorney general himself."

Update: California reader C writes, "Wonder just how involved Issa was in the atty firings. I think he is in CYA mode and is trying to distance himself from the issue. In this article of the North County Times, Issa admits to having many one-on-one conversations with Lam. Hmmm....did he call her? How many times? ... I find it odd that Congressfolk would call and discuss anything other than whether they have all the manpower and resources they need. Somehow I think Issa was on the WH team to keep the US Attys prosecuting the right stuff. Also, I heard on a news show that the budgets of both Carol Lam's office and the Los Angeles attys office were cut after Lam started prosecuting Cunningham. What other offices were cut I wonder and was that purely political?"

WP: Are the administration's top law enforcement officials going to be prosecuted for misleading Congress? Unlikely, then again, one might observe that it would not be any more of a stretch than some of their own hyper politicized rigging and application of laws to suppress oversight and civil liberties in this country, from warrantless domestic spying to torture to the latest documented abuses of the Patriot Act. It seems likely they will lose their jobs, and soon. Who's Fred Fielding shortlisting to replace the AG?

McClatchy:

...The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to vote Thursday on subpoenas to force testimony from Rove and other White House officials if they refuse to submit to voluntary interviews about their roles in the firings. White House counsel Fred Fielding met with lawmakers behind closed doors Wednesday to try to avoid a legal showdown, with no conclusive outcome.

Fielding said he hopes to decide by Friday what documents to turn over to Congress and whether the White House will assert executive privilege to try to shield Bush's advisers from answering questions.

"Frankly, I don't care whether he says he's going to allow people (to testify) or not. We'll subpoena the people we want," Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told CNN.

Leahy, a former Vermont prosecutor, scoffed at Bush's assurances that politics played no role in the firings.

"We're finding more and more evidence of political manipulation of prosecutors," he said. "Everybody knows there's politics involved."

In an interview Wednesday, Cummins questioned whether the Justice Department seriously evaluated any of the other U.S. attorneys who they insisted were removed for performance reasons.

"If they had serious questions, where are the memos proving there was a real performance review?" he asked. "They released all of these embarrassing memos, don't you think they would have released the paper trail?"

Cummins also said that e-mails released by the White House earlier this week demonstrated that performance wasn't the issue. "It's clear that, in at least some instances, politics played a significant part," he said. ...

Ted Koppel on NPR: Watch out for governments that worry more about political loyalty than competence.

NYT:

...Time and again, President Bush and his team have assured Americans that they needed new powers to prevent another attack by an implacable enemy. Time and again, Americans have discovered that these powers were not being used to make them safer, but in the service of Vice President Dick Cheney’s vision of a presidency so powerful that Congress and the courts are irrelevant, or Karl Rove’s fantasy of a permanent Republican majority.

In firing the prosecutors and replacing them without Senate approval, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales took advantage of a little-noticed provision that the administration and its Republican enablers in Congress had slipped into the 2006 expansion of the Patriot Act. The ostensible purpose was to allow the swift interim replacement of a United States attorney who was, for instance, killed by terrorism.

But these firings had nothing to do with national security — or officials’ claims that the attorneys were fired for poor performance. This looks like a political purge, pure and simple, and President Bush and his White House are in the thick of it. ...

Mr. Gonzales, who has shown why he was such an awful choice for this job in the first place, should be called under oath to resolve the contradictions and inconsistencies in his story. Mr. Gonzales is willing to peddle almost any nonsense to the public (witness his astonishingly maladroit use of the Nixonian “mistakes were made” dodge yesterday). But lying to Congress under oath is another matter. ...

Dana Milbank:

For Gonzales, the bad news conferences were only beginning. Sen. John Ensign (Nev.), the man in charge of Senate Republicans' 2008 campaigns, went before the cameras with tough words for the attorney general. "I want to see if he's willing to make the changes that are necessary at the Department of Justice because things have been handled poorly up to this point," he warned.

Even. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the administration's most faithful legislator, said "the appearances are troubling" for Gonzales. "I'm concerned," Cornyn said with Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) at his side. "This has not been handled well." The best Cornyn could offer Gonzales: "In Texas, we believe in having a fair trial and then we have the hanging."

The WP's Ruth Marcus: Time to Go, Mr. Gonzales. "The precise non-mistake mistake that Gonzales copped to yesterday was sharing 'incomplete' -- this is Gonzales-speak for wrong -- information with Congress. Think about this: Gonzales first testified about the U.S. attorney firings on Jan. 19. His No. 2, Paul McNulty, testified on Feb. 6. Assistant Attorney General William Moschella testified March 6. And it wasn't until this week that Justice finally figured out it hadn't figured out the whole story? If that's true -- and I'm not sure which would be worse -- why should anyone believe this crowd is capable of getting its congressional story straight in the future?"

NYT:

The dismissal of the seven prosecutors was preceded the previous summer by the removal of Mr. Cummins in Arkansas. He was succeeded by J. Timothy Griffin, a former prosecutor who had once worked with Mr. Rove. In a Dec. 19 e-mail message, Mr. Sampson wrote: “Getting him appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, etc.,” a reference to Ms. Miers and Mr. Rove.

Mr. Sampson’s e-mail message, sent to the White House and Justice Department colleagues, suggested he was hoping to stall efforts by the state’s two Democratic senators to pick their own candidates as permanent successors for Mr. Cummins.

“I think we should gum this to death,” Mr. Sampson wrote. “Ask the senators to give Tim a chance, meet with him, give him some time in office to see how he performs, etc. If they ultimately say ‘no never’ (and the longer we can forestall that the better), then we can tell them we’ll look for other candidates, ask them for recommendations, interview their candidates, and otherwise run out the clock. All this should be done in ‘good faith’ of course.”

"Good faith" -- geez.

WP: Iraqi government intensifies efforts to expel MEK. "[MEK] leaders say they are a main source of intelligence on Iran and question why the United States keeps the group on its terrorist list. 'All the important things that are talked about are things revealed by us,' said Mohammad Mohaddessin chairman of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the MEK's political arm, referring to information about Iran's nuclear ambitions and, more recently, the roadside bombs the United States says Iran has made available to insurgents in Iraq."

ABC News finds that Iraqi fabricator "Curveball" has been resettled "in a small town near the Munich headquarters of the German intelligence service" protecting him.

McClatchy: Renditions in Africa. "A network of U.S. allies in East Africa secretly have transferred to prisons in Somalia and Ethiopia as many as 150 people who were captured in Kenya while fleeing the recent war in Somalia, according to human rights advocates here. Kenyan authorities made the arrests as part of a U.S.-backed, four-nation military campaign in December and January against Somalia's Islamist militias, which Bush administration officials have linked to al-Qaida. The prisoners, who included men and women of 17 nationalities and children as young as 7 months, were held in Kenya for several weeks before most of them were transferred covertly to Somalia and Ethiopia, where they're being held incommunicado, the groups charge."

Gonzales live on MSNBC, tries to save his job. Learns from his mistakes, accepts responsibility. In organization with 110,000 people, he is not aware of everything that goes on in the Justice Department. Two years ago, there was an idea to replace all US attorneys. He rejected it. Intends to continue to do his job to serve the American people. Obviously I am concerned about the fact that incomplete information may have been communicated to Congress. Very dismayed that may not have occurred here. Mr. Sampson was charged with directing the process to ascertain who were weak performers in districts around the country. That is responsibility he had during the transition. He worked with attorneys when at the White House, in the counsel's office, when worked for Ashcroft. ... He was the driver of that effort. The mistake that occurred here was that information he had was not shared with individuals in the department who were going to provide information to the Congress. I never saw documents. I stand by the decision. Again, all political appointees can be removed by the President for any reason. I stand by the decision. Thank you very much.

CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen:

Are you surprised by today’s front-page news that the White House was “deeply involved” in the firing of federal prosecutors and that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales appears to have obediently complied with a request by the President to get rid of U.S. Attorneys who had come under criticism from Republican politicians? You shouldn’t be.

This sorry episode is just the latest in a long string of developments wherein the Justice Department, under Gonzales’ leadership, is unwilling or unable to exercise any sort of independence from the White House. This morning I spoke with Stanley Kutler, an eminent legal historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He told me that today’s news “typifies” a long-running problem that has tainted many an attorney general during the course of the nation’s history. When an attorney general is politically or personally beholden to a President, Kutler told me, and when the Justice Department is run from out of the White House, you’ve got trouble.

We’ve indeed got trouble. Few attorneys general in recent history have been more beholden to their President than Gonzales is to President George W. Bush. ...

NYT: Zimbabwe democracy activists including opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai beaten and jailed.

MSNBC/AP: AG Gonzales to discuss US attorneys firings at 2pm. Cancels trips to NY.

This is the graph from the above AP piece that stands out as suspect: "Sampson resigned Monday after acknowledging that he did not tell other Justice officials who testified to Congress about the extent of his communications with the White House, leading them to provide incomplete information in their testimony, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because Sampson has not announced his departure." Awfully convenient the White House just discovered Sampson's back channel dealings with the White House lawyer, he confessed full and exclusive responsibility (according to them), they got rid of the culprit responsible, and though he turned out to work as chief of staff for the attorney general, the AG somehow hadn't been aware of Sampson's communications with his successor. Among the troubling questions not quite put to rest by Sampson's departure: did Justice Department officials intentionally deceive Congress about the reasons for the US attorney dismissals? Secondly, what actions did US attorneys need to take to pass muster in this administration; was their loyalty measured by whether they were willing to use the power of their office to go after Democrats? It's one thing to serve at the pleasure of the president; it's another to be expected to use the US attorney's office to selectively apply the law for partisan ends.

FT: "The saga of Ali-Reza Asgari, the missing former Iranian deputy defence minister, took a further twist yesterday as his family gave a press conference to selected reporters in Tehran." Some earlier reports claimed his family had gotten out too.

NYT: "The idea of dismissing federal prosecutors originated in the White House more than a year earlier, White House and Justice officials said Monday." And apparently Gonzales's chief of staff Kyle Sampson resigned today. More from the Post. "The Gonzales aide in charge of the dismissals -- his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson -- resigned yesterday, officials said, after acknowledging that he did not tell Justice officials about the extent of his communications with the White House, leading them to provide incomplete information to Congress." Amazing how everyone most in the know seems to have recently resigned, including Sampson and Harriet Miers. "Administration officials say they are braced for a new round of criticism today from lawmakers who may feel misled by testimony in recent weeks from Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and William E. Moschella, principal associate deputy attorney general. ... The documents show that Sampson sent an e-mail to Miers in March 2005 ranking all 93 U.S. attorneys. Strong performers 'exhibited loyalty' to the administration; low performers were 'weak U.S. attorneys who have been ineffectual managers and prosecutors, chafed against Administration initiatives, etc.' A third group merited no opinion. At least a dozen prosecutors were on a 'target list' to be fired at one time or another, the e-mails show." And the Patriot Act was employed to make replacements confirmation free. "Sampson also strongly urged bypassing Congress in naming replacements, using a little-known power slipped into the renewal of the USA Patriot Act in March 2006 that allows the attorney general to name interim replacements without Senate confirmation. ... 'I strongly recommend that as a matter of administration, we utilize the new statutory provisions [of the Patriot Act] that authorize the AG to make USA appointments.' By avoiding Senate confirmation, Sampson added, '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 costs to the White House.'"

Update: Paul Kiel has a nice timeline. More. Are there betting pools for who gets thrown under the bus next? McNulty's chief of staff Elston?

Cheney at AIPAC. "Opposing Iran, pacifying Iraq go together," JTA reports his message, adding, "His message was not received enthusiastically: Only about one-third to one-half of the audience in the cavernous Washington Convention Center hall applauded politely." More here.

Radar interviews a former Iraq translator for disgraced defense contractor MZM implicated in the Cunningham corruption scandal:

[MZM translator]: One of the guys who was hired didn't speak Arabic at all.

[Radar]: What happened to him?

[Translator]: They did not send him home. MZM had given orders to keep him in place because the [Defense Department] contract worked as such that there were 22 slots, so we had to provide a piece of paper with 22 names on it, and we had to prove that these were 22 people around somewhere doing something. And there were no questions asked. There was no review. They didn't want to pull him out of there because he was a body. ...

Chronicle of Higher Ed on late muckraker Jack Anderson's archives, and his kids playing cat and mice with the CIA officers assigned to spy on him:

... Being the Anderson kids meant having an unusual childhood, they say. In 1972, when the CIA opened Operation Mudhen, its illegal mission to dig up Anderson's skeletons and sources, Laurie and Kevin, then teenagers, responded by tormenting the agents staked outside their home. Laurie dressed up in her father's hat and coat, walked out to the car, and led agents on pointless drives around town. Kevin and his friends tried sneaking up on agents' cars and letting the air out of the tires. (Not long before that time, young Kevin found a direct phone number for the Oval Office among his father's notes. He made the ultimate prank call. "I said, 'Is your refrigerator running?' That kind of thing," he says. On the other end of the line, "I think it was Rose Mary Woods," Nixon's dutiful secretary.)

The file for Operation Mudhen, probably named for the way a chicken scratches in the dirt, is also part of the collection. It shows that an army of secret agents managed to capture only mundane details about the journalist's life: "13:30: [Anderson] walked to Farragut Square, sat alone having lunch" and "Subject and spouse enter Renwick ... Spouse goes to a newspaper dispensing machine. She apparently has trouble and spouse assists."

Mr. Feldstein reads some of the logs aloud and shakes his head. "Talk about the banality of evil," he says. ...

ABC: Army surgeon general resigns.

The Guardian: "Tony Blair and his government 'exercised spin' in exaggerating the case for the war in Iraq, the former United Nations chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said in an interview broadcast today."

LAT: Fall back option for Iraq, the Salvador model.

WP's Anthony Shadid: The Bookseller's Story.

Al Kamen on continued trouble filling US government jobs in Iraq.

The WP: Alberto Gonzales' terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.

Halliburton moving its corporate headquarters from Houston to Dubai.

The AP: The administration is unraveling.

... It is too soon to tell whether Gonzales will be forced to leave, but his ouster would do little to change a perception that the Bush administration is unraveling amid declining public support and trust. Some heads have already rolled.

Donald H. Rumsfeld was forced to resign after Democrats seized control of Congress in fall elections that were a repudiation of Bush's policies on Iraq.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a powerful adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, left the White House to face perjury charges in the investigation of the exposure of a CIA official. He was convicted Tuesday in a trial that also revealed that top Bush aide Karl Rove and a State Department official played roles in the CIA leak, part of a White House strategy to undermine a critic of the Iraq war.

Jim Nicholson, secretary of Veterans Affairs, is clinging to his job amid revelations of shoddy treatment for wounded troops from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The latest events are more heavy baggage for a president who's already close to his limit. Re-elected by a comfortable margin in 2004, Bush watched his job approval rating plummet in 2005 with the rise of violence in Iraq and the government's weak response and follow-up to Hurricane Katrina.

With a rating of just 35 percent, Bush's standing is the weakest of any second-term president at this point in 56 years. ...

"The president is dealing with Iraq, Afghanistan and a new Congress, and the last thing in the world he needs is this," said Joseph diGenova, who served as U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia in the Reagan administration. "At some point, he throws up his hands and says 'Get somebody new.' I don't know when that is."

Wonder what new White House legal advisor Fred Fielding is advising.

NYT: The failed attorney general. More here.

BBC: 'Russian arms' journalist buried. Kommersant's Ivan "Safronov, a military affairs writer, fell from a fifth-floor window on Friday at the Moscow apartment block where he lived. His newspaper said at the time of his death he was investigating reports of alleged Russian plans to sell sophisticated missiles to Iran and fighter jets to Syria, via Belarus." More here and here.

AP: "President Bush said Saturday the FBI has addressed the problems that led to illegal prying into personal information on people in the U.S., but 'there’s more work to be done.' ... He expressed confidence in FBI Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. 'Those problems will be addressed as quickly as possible,' Bush said.” His team continues to do a heckuva job.

AP:

A videotape showing Pentagon officials' final interrogation of al-Qaida suspect Jose Padilla is missing, raising questions about whether federal prosecutors have lost other recordings and evidence in the case.

The tape is classified, but Padilla's attorneys said they believe something happened during that interrogation that could explain why Padilla does not trust them and suspects they are government agents.

Padilla attorney Anthony Natale said in court papers that the March 2, 2004, interrogation at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., could contain information the government conveyed to Padilla that "directly impacts upon his relationship with his attorneys."

Prosecutors and the Pentagon have said they cannot find the tape despite an intensive search.

WP: "Members of Congress vowed today to conduct investigative hearings -- and consider reining in parts of the Patriot Act -- following revelations of pervasive problems in the FBI's use of national security letters to secretly obtain telephone, e-mail and financial records in terrorism cases. Amid a growing furor on Capitol Hill over the disclosures in a Justice Department inspector general's report, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III publicly took responsibility for the lapses but defended the use of national security letters as a vital tool in the war on terrorism."

National Journal's Bara Vaida:

Deciding not to pursue their individual agendas, about a dozen liberal groups that united at the beginning of the year to help House Democrats pass their first-100-hours legislative agenda are continuing to work together, this time on a campaign opposing President Bush's troop surge in Iraq.

The groups are using the same grassroots strategy that proved successful in the previous Congress in helping Democrats to block GOP proposals for Social Security reform and budget cuts. These left-of-center organizations have traditionally worked only on domestic issues, but they are now fully engaged in pushing Congress to impose limits on the country's future involvement in Iraq.

Led by three large organizations -- the Campaign for America's Future, MoveOn.org, and USAction -- the groups have formed Americans Against Escalation in Iraq and have agreed to spend a combined $9.4 million on an electoral-style effort that includes canvassing and field operations, media advertising, phone banks, polling, and a press strategy.

"Though we don't work on Iraq as an issue, the debate on the war was crowding out our domestic agenda," says Alan Charney, program director at USAction, a progressive economic advocacy group with field operations in 30 states. "Until Iraq is solved, we know it will be difficult to push the progressive agenda, so we decided that it was time to fight for a responsible redeployment of the troops."

Such willingness to temporarily put aside parochial interests for the good of a broader agenda may signal that liberal interest groups have made significant progress in building a cohesive infrastructure after years of infighting. ...

(subscription only).

Here's the DOJ IG report on the FBI's use of national security letters (.pdf).

Rep. Pete Hoekstra: "I am angered by the fact that Congress was not properly notified of almost 4,600 NSL requests. I fear that Justice's failure to keep appropriate oversight authorities informed is part of a larger, ongoing pattern of notification failures by executive branch agencies. I was forced to send a letter last year on behalf of the Intelligence Committee because of such failures, and I am dismayed that the problem persists. Because of these repeated failures, I have asked Chairman Reyes to convene a Committee hearing on the 'Accountability of the Administration to Congress under the Law,' with Attorney General Gonzalez among the witnesses. I am hopeful we can convene a hearing soon given the urgent nature of this matter."

Wilkes' foreign bank accounts in Belize.

Shane Harris: Rolling back Pentagon spies.

All these stories the past few weeks exposing the politicization, misuse of the law and Patriot Act, and truly clumsy cover ups at the Justice Department and the FBI ... what does it say about this administration that its justice arm is exposed to be so deeply mired in such misuses and politicization? That it behaved so sloppily and carelessly in carrying out the laws and following its own rules? Hopefully the return of divided government can begin to restore some of what's been lost. Whether Americans will ever trust their public institutions again is hard to know, but the Justice Department's reputation under the current leadership has been gravely harmed. And given what we've learned, it seems we're marching awfully close to the doorstep of the warrantless domestic spying issue and the question of whether it was ever applied for political ends. We already have several examples of political appointees at federal agencies behaving arrogantly, and often in a kind of almost thoughtlessly, automatically highly politicized manner when they believed they could get away with it. The CIA's Porter Goss and Dusty Foggo. Rumsfeld and deputies at the Pentagon, the folks at the Pentagon domestic spying arm CIFA, now resigned and apparently under investigation in the wider Cunningham probe. Hiring at the CPA, where Pentagon appointees reportedly quizzed applicants on their views on abortion and who they would be voting for. Now Gonzales and his deputies at the Justice Department. They bumbled about in a reckless, politicized manner, running slipshod over the law, citing national security and state secrets at every turn, often as not to avoid accountability and reporting requirements, and to serve political ends apparently when they thought they could get away with it. A Justice Department official calling to lean on a US attorney, threatening him just a bit should he complain about being dismissed? Under the current leadership at the DOJ, apparently no one was the wiser that that was a bad move. Nor that they tried to replace said US attorney with Rove's former deputy, a former RNC opposition researcher. Now they seem like deer caught in the headlights, amazed that what they've been doing by almost rote seems to have been a violation of the spirit of the law and the mission of such public institutions. Like it had never occurred to them. Extraordinary example of group think, and no one challenging them on it until now. Like the firing of the head of the Army over the Walter Read scandal, getting rid of Gonzales would not begin to fix the problem. It would just be a symbolic fix for something much more deeply and systemically wrong, the lack of a moral compass throughout.

Paul Krugman:

... For now, the nation’s focus is on the eight federal prosecutors fired by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In January, Mr. Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that he “would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney for political reasons.” But it’s already clear that he did indeed dismiss all eight prosecutors for political reasons — some because they wouldn’t use their offices to provide electoral help to the G.O.P., and the others probably because they refused to soft-pedal investigations of corrupt Republicans.

In the last few days we’ve also learned that Republican members of Congress called prosecutors to pressure them on politically charged cases, even though doing so seems unethical and possibly illegal.

The bigger scandal, however, almost surely involves prosecutors still in office. The Gonzales Eight were fired because they wouldn’t go along with the Bush administration’s politicization of justice. But statistical evidence suggests that many other prosecutors decided to protect their jobs or further their careers by doing what the administration wanted them to do: harass Democrats while turning a blind eye to Republican malfeasance.

Donald Shields and John Cragan, two professors of communication, have compiled a database of investigations and/or indictments of candidates and elected officials by U.S. attorneys since the Bush administration came to power. Of the 375 cases they identified, 10 involved independents, 67 involved Republicans, and 298 involved Democrats. The main source of this partisan tilt was a huge disparity in investigations of local politicians, in which Democrats were seven times as likely as Republicans to face Justice Department scrutiny.

How can this have been happening without a national uproar? The authors explain: “We believe that this tremendous disparity is politically motivated and it occurs because the local (non-statewide and non-Congressional) investigations occur under the radar of a diligent national press. Each instance is treated by a local beat reporter as an isolated case that is only of local interest.” ...

Will Congress hold hearings on the US attorneys who pleased their political masters and escaped dismissal? And what they did to please them?

Now we know Gingrich is running. This is surely a calculated effort to get this out now to see if he can still be viable.

Former Congressman Pete McCloskey (R-CA): "When politics infects justice."

... One of the tragic moments in American history occurred in November 1973. This was the famous "Saturday Night Massacre," when President Richard Nixon, faced with the demand for incriminating tapes and documents by Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, took an action that would lead to his resignation from the presidency in disgrace less than a year later. Nixon ordered U.S. Attorney General Elliott Richardson to fire Cox. When Richardson refused and instead resigned, as did his second in command, William Ruckelshaus, U.S. Solicitor General Robert Bork stepped up to fire Cox.

That action triggered a tough inquiry into the Watergate scandal by the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by U.S. Rep. Peter Rodino, a mild-mannered congressman from New Jersey. In July 1974, after seven months of public hearings, the committee in a bipartisan vote adopted several articles of impeachment, the chief of which was for obstruction of justice. Nixon had ordered the FBI to cease its inquiry into the money trail the CIA had discovered, leading from the president's personal lawyer, Herb Kalmbach, through various hands to pay off the Watergate burglary's mastermind, E. Howard Hunt. Hunt had threatened to reveal the details of the burglary to U.S. District Court Judge John Sirica, who presided over the Watergate case, unless he was paid.

One of the younger members of the Judiciary Committee at the time was Conyers, a man Nixon had put on his notorious "Enemies List" for whatever punishment federal agencies such as the IRS might devise.

As a result of the Judiciary Committee's inquiries and the work of several dedicated U.S. attorneys, not only was Nixon forced from office, but his attorney general, John Mitchell, was indicted and sent to jail for his part in the Watergate coverup.

Now, 32 years later, another Republican attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, faces questioning by both the Senate and House Judiciary committees, on grounds that he has used his high office for political purposes to remove eight U.S. attorneys, several of whom had been involved in investigations of Republican congressmen, such as Randy "Duke" Cunningham of San Diego, Robert Ney of Ohio and John Doolittle of Rocklin (Placer County).

And who chairs the Judiciary Committee today? None other than Nixon's old enemy, John Conyers.

Among the reasons many Americans have lost faith in their government, the perceived use of the U.S. attorney general's office for political purposes looms large. ...

The US's top law enforcement agency is breaking the law. Rampant misuse of the Patriot Act and underreporting of the use of national security letters, the Justice Department Inspector General finds, by the FBI:

A Justice Department investigation has found pervasive errors in the FBI's use of its power to secretly demand telephone, e-mail and financial records in national security cases, officials with access to the report said Thursday.

The inspector general's audit found 22 possible breaches of internal FBI and Justice Department regulations -- some of which were potential violations of law -- in a sampling of 293 "national security letters." The letters were used by the FBI to obtain the personal records of U.S. residents or visitors between 2003 and 2005. The FBI identified 26 potential violations in other cases.

Officials said they could not be sure of the scope of the violations but suggested they could be more widespread, though not deliberate. In nearly a quarter of the case files Inspector General Glenn A. Fine reviewed, he found previously unreported potential violations.

The use of national security letters has grown exponentially since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In 2005 alone, the audit found, the FBI issued more than 19,000 such letters, amounting to 47,000 separate requests for information. [...]

Fine's audit, which was limited to 77 case files in four FBI field offices, found that those offices did not even generate accurate counts of the national security letters they issued, omitting about one in five letters from the reports they sent to headquarters in Washington. Those inaccurate numbers, in turn, were used as the basis for required reports to Congress. ....

Officials tell the Post the reported problems may be "just the tip of the iceburg." FBI director Robert Mueller is scheduled to testify before Congress today.

Fox News:

A former Iranian deputy defense minister who disappeared from Turkey last month is not cooperating with Western intelligence agencies and his whereabouts remain a mystery, a U.S. official told FOX News Thursday.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that Ali Rez Asgari, who is credited with founding the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, was fully cooperating with and divulging information to U.S. and other intelligence services.

However, a senior U.S. official flatly denied the report.

U.S. intelligence agencies remain extremely interested in Asgari's case, the official said, but they do not know his current whereabouts.

The official did not rule out the possibility that Asgari, who once commanded Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards and served as the country's deputy defense minister, was conducting negotiations with an intelligence organization, but denied that there was any type of cooperation with the U.S.

Senate Republicans turning on Gonzales?

... Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested that Gonzales's status as the nation's leading law enforcement officer might not last through the remainder of President Bush's term, pointedly disputing the attorney general's public rationale for the mass firings.

"One day there will be a new attorney general, maybe sooner rather than later," Specter said at a committee hearing where a new round of subpoenas to the Justice Department was considered. [...]

Specter said that an op-ed article by Gonzales that appeared in USA Today yesterday, in which he said the firings were an "overblown personnel matter," only served to exacerbate the problem. "I hardly think it's a personnel matter, and I hardly think it's been overblown," he said.

More here.

Ha'aretz's Aluf Benn: "Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Winograd Commission that his decision to respond to the abduction of soldiers with a broad military operation was made as early as March 2006, four months before last summer's Lebanon war broke out. ... In a meeting in March, Olmert asked the army commanders whether operational plans existed for such a possibility, and they said yes. He asked to see the plans, and they asked why. He responded that he did not want to make a snap decision in the case of an abduction, and preferred to decide at that moment. Presented with the options, he selected a moderate plan that included air attacks accompanied by a limited ground operation. At the time, Shaul Mofaz was defense minister."

WP:

A former Iranian deputy defense minister who once commanded the Revolutionary Guard has left his country and is cooperating with Western intelligence agencies, providing information on Hezbollah and Iran's ties to the organization, according to a senior U.S. official.

Ali Rez Asgari disappeared last month during a visit to Turkey. Iranian officials suggested yesterday that he may have been kidnapped by Israel or the United States. The U.S. official said Asgari is willingly cooperating. He did not divulge Asgari's whereabouts or specify who is questioning him, but made clear that the information Asgari is offering is fully available to U.S. intelligence. [...]

• Full international coverage

Iran's official news agency, IRNA, quoted the country's top police chief, Brig. Gen. Esmaeil Ahmadi-Moqaddam, as saying that Asgari was probably kidnapped by agents working for Western intelligence agencies. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Asgari was in the United States. Another U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, denied that report and suggested that Asgari's disappearance was voluntary and orchestrated by the Israelis. A spokesman for President Bush's National Security Council did not return a call for comment. ...

WP: "Senate Democrats said yesterday they are preparing to subpoena five senior Justice Department officials as part of a widening probe into whether eight U.S. attorneys were fired for political reasons."

Paul Kiel: Domenici lawyers up.

Worth reading: Jane Hamsher's glimpse of juror deliberations, and how they feel sorry for Libby, and felt that he was a fall guy.

Jury finds Libby guilty on four out of five counts. Here's CNN.

Update: CNN, via Kevin Drum, reports:

Guilty on count 1 (obstruction of justice).
Guilty on count 2 (false statement).
Not guilty on count 3 (false statement).
Guilty on count 4 (perjury)
Guilty on count 5 (perjury).

LAT: Risking it all to escape from Iraq.

AP: IAEA: Iran may have halted nuke program.

ABC: Top Iranian general disappears in Istanbul.

Samantha Power: How to avoid genocide in Iraq.

The hitman gets knocked off, so to speak. OK, he quit. More here.

Update: More from McClatchy:

A high-ranking Justice Department official told one of the U.S. attorneys fired by the Bush administration that if any of them continued to criticize the administration for their ousters, previously undisclosed details about the reasons they were fired might be released, two of the ousted prosecutors told McClatchy Newspapers.

While the U.S. attorney who got the call regarded the tone of the conversation as congenial, not intimidating, the prosecutor nonetheless passed the message on to five other fired U.S. attorneys. One of them interpreted the reported comments by Michael Elston, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, as a threat. ...

According to one of the fired U.S. attorneys, Elston made the comments during a telephone conversation after Democrats began questioning whether the administration was attempting to purge more independent-minded Republican appointees in order to replace them with more partisan candidates.

According to the former U.S. attorney, Elston made a “pointed comment that indicated that somehow anyone who talked might become more embarrassed if the story continued on.”

“The inference was that they were holding themselves back from saying more about why people were fired _ that it was likely the department was going to step up the defense of their actions,” the fired prosecutor said. “It could have been construed as friendly advice or a casual prediction. But I think it was expected that everyone would be told about the call.”

When conveying the message to the others, the prosecutor tried to make it clear that the meaning of the conversation shouldn’t be overdramatized. ...

“I took it to mean that negative, personal information would be released,” the prosecutor said. “That if we made public comments or if we were to testify in Congress, that the gloves would come off and the Department of Justice would make us regret that we were talking.” ...

Charming. Mob rules indeed.

More from Kevin Drum: " ... This administration is so dedicated to spin and deceit that they just couldn't leave it alone. They figured maybe they could avoid any criticism by claiming the firings were for performance-related reasons. That should shut everyone up! But of course it did just the opposite. The fired attorneys, who were originally willing to suck it up and accept their political fate, were unhappy over being called incompetent. Who wouldn't be? And so the whole thing unraveled. Now it's a case of U.S. Attorneys being fired because they were too zealous about prosecuting Republican corruption, and the Department of Justice is reduced to feebly arguing that it's just a coincidence that so many of the Pearl Harbor Eight were investigating corruption cases. ..."

NYT: "Senior government officials rallied today to support a High Court ruling forbidding the BBC, Britain’s public service broadcaster, from reporting news about a campaign finance scandal under investigation by the police. But the BBC nudged its reporting of the proscribed story a little further forward, saying it related to an e-mail between two close confidants of Prime Minister Tony Blair. The details of the e-mail, the BBC said on its Web site, 'could have been central to the investigation into an alleged Downing Street cover-up” over the financing scandal.'"

Former deputy attorney general James Comey moves to untie his reputation from current leadership of the Justice Department.

Check this out from the WP. And then, buy your meat from Whole Foods, I guess. Another Katrina in the making, this time, antibiotic resistant strains of disease, compliments of the FDA.

Update: I guess my solution wouldn't work unless everybody exclusively bought their meat untreated by such anbitiobics. Reader JB, "You won't get the antibiotic-resistant diseases by eating meat from cattle that get the antibiotics. Those bugs will breed in the large numbers of cattle that do get the antibiotics, and then they will spread to everyone, even vegans. So your suggestion to shop at Whole Foods doesn't help at all. Rather, we should ask Congress to take action. They could block this particular approval, or try to make rules to make it harder for the FDA to approve something their experts say is unsafe, or both."

NYT: Saudi King Abdullah gives state dinner to honor Iranian president Ahmadinejad, on his first visit to the Kingdom. "Mr. Ahmadinejad departed late Saturday night, the Saudi Press Agency reported, after about eight hours on the ground, despite initial plans for him to leave on Sunday."

WP:

Federal and local law enforcement authorities are investigating a shooting in Prince George's County that critically injured a prominent intelligence expert who specializes in the former Soviet Union.

Paul Joyal, 53, was shot Thursday, four days after he alleged in a television broadcast that the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin was involved in the fatal poisoning of a former KGB agent in London. ...

...Several sources confirmed that FBI investigators are looking into the incident because of Joyal's background as an intelligence expert and his comments about the Alexander Litvinenko case.

Joyal was shot by two men in the driveway of his house in the 2300 block of Lackawanna Street in Adelphi about 7:30 p.m. Thursday. ...

The identity of the shooters was unknown, and Prince George's police released few details about the incident. But sources close to the investigation and to Joyal said two men accosted Joyal as he stood in the driveway of his home, then shot him once in the groin.

WP: White House backed US Attorney firings. Even though this is an effort at damage control, it's hard to see how it dispells the impression that senior Justice Department officials knowingly misled Congress about the reasons for the coordinated dismissals, by implying that they were isolated and individuals cases of poor performance.

More from Slate's Dahlia Lithwick:

... The DOJ figured out a way to slip party loyalists into high office without having to answer for it, and they proceeded to do so with gusto, canning eight apparently competent U.S. attorneys—six in a single day!—and replacing them with folks more willing to dance to the White House pipes. Certainly the scandal has its delicious aspects: All of those ousted evidently had positive job reviews, despite Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty's testimony that they were fired for "performance" reasons. ...

What sort of colossal error in judgment led the DOJ to can a bunch of perfectly loyal and capable prosecutors, name permanent "interim" replacements under a sleazy legal loophole, then publicly impugn those who'd departed with the claim that they'd been fired for "performance-related" reasons? Did they really think nobody would notice? That nobody would care? Does some incredibly cunning long-term objective justify the short-term fallout? Or was this simply a case of bumbling incompetence? ...

The U.S. attorney purge probably exploded into a scandal as a result of a perfect storm that the White House never anticipated: Players at the highest levels were making strategic, ideological decisions to consolidate executive power and reward party loyalists while folks on the ground at the Justice Department bungled the firings with inflammatory comments and false ("performance-related") statements. Incumbent U.S. attorneys surprised the White House by punching back, just as a Congress under new Democratic control decided to exercise meaningful oversight.

Perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from the purge isn't that the Bush administration puts ideology above the rule of law. That isn't exactly news. The real point may be that between inexperienced fumblers at Justice, energized Democrats in Congress, and a public that seems finally to have awoken from its slumber, it's just become harder for the administration to get away with it.

WP: "Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has tapped Eliot A. Cohen, a prominent writer on national security strategy and an outspoken critic of the administration's postwar occupation of Iraq, as her counselor, State Department officials said yesterday."

Ha'aretz's Aluf Benn: Israel's liaison to its neighbors: Saudi Prince Bandar:

The key figure in Middle Eastern diplomacy is Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Arabian National Security Adviser. Bandar is the man behind the Mecca agreement between Fatah and Hamas for the establishment of a Palestinian unity government. He was also active in calming the rival parties in Lebanon, and has tried to mediate between Iran and the U.S. administration. Two weeks ago he brought President George W. Bush up to date on his efforts, and last week he participated in a meeting of intelligence chiefs from Arab states with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, which took place in Amman the day after the tripartite meeting between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Jerusalem.

There are many indications that the prince, who served 22 years as Saudi ambassador to Washington, is behind the quiet slide his country is making toward Israel since the end of the second Lebanon war. In September, Bandar met with Olmert in Jordan. The secret meeting was made public in Israel later.

Since their meeting, Olmert has on a number of occasions commended the Saudi peace initiative of 2002, to which Bandar contributed actively. [...]

Bandar's meeting with Olmert was not the first encounter of the Saudi prince with the Israeli establishment. According to statesmen, senior military officers and former intelligence officers, Bandar has had contact with Israel at least since 1990. Bandar was careful to keep his distance from Israeli ambassadors to Washington, and opted for links to Israel that did not operate along the diplomatic channels. The Saudi prince, who is celebrating his 58th birthday, had dedicated his career to furthering stability in the Middle East, which is in the interest of the Saudi kingdom.

His talks with Israelis focused on two subjects: blocking strategic threats from Iraq during the 1990s and from Iran today, and furthering the peace process between Israel, Syria and the Palestinians. Saudi Arabia is particularly sensitive to the Palestinian issue. The weekly cabinet meetings in Saudi Arabia, which take place every Monday and are led by King Abdullah, always begin with a long report on the "Palestine situation," and only then does the meeting move on to other governmental affairs. ...

San Diego Union Tribune: Lam called to testify about ouster.

Perhaps the most interesting recently departed US attorney to hear from would be one who left ostensibly voluntarily. Former Los Angeles US attorney Debra Wong Yang, who had been heading up the investigation into former Appropriations committee chairman Jerry Lewis. And where did Yang go on January 1st? To the law firm representing Lewis. The fact that Yang resigned her office November 10 -- just after the elections - is interesting. It's no secret that the decision to retire and a decision informed by knowledge one is going to be dismissed are sometimes the same thing. Is Yang the exception that proves the rule, or no exception at all? Among the powerful partners at Gibson Dunn, the firm that offered Yang a golden parachute, you will remember, is Theodore Olsen, the Bush White House former solicitor general. The Lewis investigation is of course the big enchilada, the one that would really hurt, and not just Lewis. Will Congress want to hear from Yang as well?

Recently dismissed New Mexico US attorney David Iglesias gives an interview to NPR. Apparently the offices of Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) told NPR "no comment" as to whether they pestered Iglesias to indict a Democrat in advance of the November elections. Iglesias said he plans to reveal which two legislators did call him at Congressional hearings on Tuesday.

Update: McClatchy's Marisa Taylor: "Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico pressured the U.S. attorney in their state to speed up indictments in a federal corruption investigation that involved at least one former Democratic state senator, according to two people familiar with the contacts. The alleged involvement of the two Republican lawmakers raises questions about possible violations of House of Representatives and Senate ethics rules and could taint the criminal investigation into the award of an $82 million courthouse contract. ... Wilson was curt after Iglesias was "non-responsive" to her questions about whether an indictment would be unsealed, said the two individuals, who asked not to be identified because they feared possible political repercussions. Rumors had spread throughout the New Mexico legal community that an indictment of at least one Democrat was sealed. Domenici, who wasn't up for re-election, called about a week and a half later and was more persistent than Wilson, the people said. When Iglesias said an indictment wouldn't be handed down until at least December, the line went dead."

NPR reported the latest on the recent reevaluation of US claims of a North Korea secret uranium program, and mentioned this 2004 Selig Harrison Foreign Affairs piece, summary: "Two years ago, Washington accused Pyongyang of running a secret nuclear weapons program. But how much evidence was there to back up the charge? A review of the facts shows that the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted the data--while ignoring the one real threat North Korea actually poses." As NPR's Mary Kay Magstead reported, Harrison was apparently emailing colleagues today, subject line, "Department of Sweet Vindictation."

Ahmadinejad to Saudi Arabia. A few issues they need to sort out.... More here.

The WP's Anne Hull and Dana Priest: Military officials knew of neglect at Walter Reed

... Last October, Joyce Rumsfeld, the wife of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, was taken to Walter Reed by a friend concerned about outpatient treatment. She attended a weekly meeting, called Girls Time Out, at which wives, girlfriends and mothers of soldiers exchange stories and offer support.

According to three people who attended the gathering, Rumsfeld listened quietly. Some of the women did not know who she was. At the end of the meeting, Rumsfeld asked one of the staff members whether she thought that the soldiers her husband was meeting on his visits had been handpicked to paint a rosy picture of their time there. The answer was yes.

When Walter Reed officials found out that Rumsfeld had visited, they told the friend who brought her -- a woman who had volunteered there many times -- that she was no longer welcome on the grounds.