Attorney-Gate
MichaelW on Mar 19 2007 at 9:43 pm | Filed under: Domestic Politics, Law, Media, MichaelW's Page
Despite the title of this post, I’m not so sure there is any meat to the alleged scandal concerning the firing of seven U.S. Attorney Generals and the non-rehiring of another, Carol Lam. In fact, as I argue below, there does not seem to be anything at all the Carol Lam allegations. But for the sake of brevity, I’ll go along with the current MSM mindset that this was an insidious plot by the White House to derail investigations of Republicans, and call it “Attorney-Gate.”
[ed. -- Purely as an aside, is anyone else looking forward to sometime next summer when the current SecDef is scrutinized by the media and Congress for presumptuously trying to "win the war"? This will, of course, be dubbed "Gates-Gate" and will finally bring full circle the rather meaningless and arbitrary appending of "Gate" to what ever allegations the MSM is then using to sell newspapers and airtime. I know I am.]
While I have not delved too deeply into the intricacies of the latest brouhaha, I have been following with some interest the attempts by the media to tar the White House by connecting Carol Lam’s termination as USAG for San Diego with the ramping up of the case against the now-infamous Randy “Duke” Cunningham. Patterico, quite reliably, has been all over this story from the get-go. He took the L.A. Times to task for implying that Carol Lam was targeted because of her conducting of the Cunningham investigation (which eventually led to Duke’s imprisonment) by misrepresenting the timing of email communications from Kyle Sampson, Chief of Staff for Roberto Gonzalez.
The L.A. Times has the unmitigated gall to write an entire story about the timing of an e-mail regarding Carol Lam, without telling its readers that Lam was on a list of targeted prosecutors well before the Randy “Duke†Cunningham scandal ever broke. Worse, the paper misstates the facts to its readers to support its position.
On March 2, 2005, Kyle Sampson sent Harriet Miers a list (dated February 24) of prosecutors. The names of those targeted were struck out. Lam’s name was stricken out, meaning she had been targeted.
As I told you earlier this morning, the Cunningham investigation broke months later in June 2005, with the publication of this story. Even the lefty TPM Muckraker admits that Lam was targeted before that date. TPM Muckraker also admits that Carol Lam was not investigating Cunningham until the scandal was broken by a newspaper in June 2005, after Lam had been targeted.
The primary email in question, dated May 11, 2006, has been the topic of much consternation amongst the media scandal-mongers. According to the L.A. Times, and now the Washington Post, that email proves that Carol Lam was fired for political reasons. From the WaPo:
The U.S. attorney in San Diego notified the Justice Department of search warrants in a Republican bribery scandal last May 10, one day before the attorney general’s chief of staff warned the White House of a “real problem” with her, a Democratic senator said yesterday.
[...]
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a television appearance yesterday that 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, 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.
“Please call me at your convenience to discuss the following,” Sampson wrote, referring to “[t]he real problem we have right now with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires.”
The prosecutor, Carol S. Lam, was dismissed seven months later as part of an effort by the Justice Department and the White House to fire eight U.S. attorneys.
There are several problems with the WaPo (see Cap’n Ed for some good analysis) and the good Senator’s reasoning on this, not the least of which is readily apparent when one reads the whole email (emphasis added):
From: Kyle Sampson
Sent: May 11, 2006 11:36 AM
To: “[email protected]”
Subject: FW: Removal and Replacement of U.S. Attorneys Whose 4-year Terms Have ExpiredSensitivity:
Yes Please![ed. - Heh; just kidding] ConfidentialPer your inquiry yesterday after JSC, this is the e-mail I sent Dabney last month at Harriet’s request. Please call me at your convenience to discuss the following:
* [REDACTED]
* Tim Griffin for E.D. Ark.; and
* The real problem we have right now with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires.
Obviously, since this was a forwarded email from a month prior to May 11, 2006, Sampson could not possibly have been responding to Lam’s May 10, 2006 notice that she would be issuing the Wilkes and Foggo search warrants in her investigation of Cunningham. Moreover, if the reason she was such a “problem” was because of these search warrants, why wait more than six months to get rid of her? For Senator Feinstein to “suggest” that Lam’s subsequent termination (when her term ended in November, and well after Randy “Duke” Cunningham had been convicted and sentenced) was because of the Cunningham probe, and for the news media to actually print such unmitigated garbage, is a serious travesty. Not because it unfairly smears Gonzalez and Sampson (which it does), and not because it brings unwarranted scrutiny on the White House (which I don’t really care about), but because it badly misinforms the public.
The only, and I do mean ONLY job of the press is to shed light on the goings on in the country and the world for the benefit of the public. That’s what they are in the business of doing. When they indulge the outright lies and slander of public officials, as in this case, and in the process badly misinform the public about the facts of the situation being reported, the press is not doing its job. Although you can’t fire the press, you can stop renewing its contract. Cancel your subscriptions, stop watching the legacy news broadcasts, and tell them why you’re doing it. Let them know that you’ve had enough of the distortions, bias and outright lies, and that if you wanted to pay for that stuff you’ll throw some money in a hat the next time you sit down for a sewing circle. Otherwise, just stop paying attention to them, because we are being treated like fools and dunces.
I for one am pretty darn sick of it. How about you?
Technorati Tags: Roberto Gonzalez, Kyle Sampson, Carol Lam, Sen. Diane Feinstein, U.S. Attorney firings, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, media bias
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