Working Thread on Warrantless Wiretapping IG Report

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Timed perfectly so al-Haramain can’t use it in its latest brief. Though I imagine Judge Walker will read it closely.

Here’s the report.

Consider this an working thread.

Update: The report admits how AGAG tried to avoid perjury: multiple programs were authorized with the same presidential finding, and he was just referring to one when he lied to Congress about any dissent on the program.

Update: The role of non-OLC, non-FBI parts of DOJ in the program:

DOJ’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review … worked with the FBI and the NSA to address the impact PSP-derived information had on proceedings under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). DOJ’s National Security Division also handled potential discovery issues that may have involved potential PSP-related information in international terrorism prosecutions.

All vague and non-dated…

Update: OPR hasn’t completed its review of OLC’s role in approving the program. Damn that’s taking some time.

Update: This is a load of crap designed to cover up for the March 2004 hospital scene and the fact that OLC was given primacy over AG in approving the program.

The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel reviewed this information to assess whether there was "a sufficient factual basis demonstrating a threat of terrorist attacks in the United States for it to continue to be reasonable under the standards of the Fourth Amendment for the President to [continue] to authorize the warrantless searches involved" in the program. The Office of Legal Counsel then advised the Attorney General on whether the constitutional standard of reasonableness had been met and whether the Presidential Authorization could be certified "as to form and legality."

[snip]

Although there was no legal requirement that the Authorization be certified by the Attorney General or other Department of Justice official, current and former DOJ officials told us that this certification added value by giving the program a sense of legitimacy. Former Attorney General Gonzales stated that the NSA was being asked to do something it had not done before, and it was important to assure the NSA that the Attorney General had approved the legality of the program.

Note, Gonzales was interviewedd for this, but Ashcroft refused. Yoo also refused. And it doesn’t even say whether they tried to interview Jim Comey or Jack Goldsmith!! (Mueller did agree to be interviewed.) Scratch that–Comey was interviewed.

Update:

Initially the analysts who prepared the threat assessments were not read into the PSP and did not know how the threat assessments would be Read more →

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Why Is Hampton Embarrassing “the Family”?

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Last night, Rachel did a superb job on a story we were the first to cover: Doug Hampton’s efforts to get "the Family" to get John Ensign to stop sleeping with Hampton’s wife (see Hampton’s full interview here).

Now, in Hampton’s description of "the Family," he emphasizes they’re good men. And when Hampton first spoke, he did not mention "the Family" directly–we figured that out based on Ensign roomie’s Tom Coburn’s involvement. 

But I wonder. Are Hampton’s now-extensive discussion of "the Family" and Sanford’s off-hand reference to it mistakes, or intentional efforts to expose the group?

For Hampton’s part, I suspect he may have appealed to "the Family" because he knew–or hoped–it would be a quick way to a pay-off. And, given Coburn’s statement that Ensign should have done as "the Family" told him to do, Hampton may have had good reason to believe so. That is, the reference that initially got me and Citizen92 looking at the circumstances of this confrontation closely …

In fact one of the confrontations took place in February 2008 at his home in Washington DC (sic) with a group of his peers. One of the attendee’s (sic) was Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma as well as several other men who are close to the Senator.

… May have been an implicit threat to expose the group, a reference explicit enough to communicate to Ensign and "the Family" that he’d describe the group’s involvement if he did not get the pay-off they had recommended last year. Which is what we’re seeing now, Hampton’s revenge for the failure of "the Family" to resolve it amicably.

Then what of Sanford’s weepy reference, coming just a week or so after Hampton’s partial exposure of "the Family"?

Did your wife and your family know about the affair before the trip to Argentina?

Yeah. We’ve been working through this thing for about the last five months. I’ve been to a lot of different–I was part of a group called C Street when I was in Washington, it was a Christian Bible study of some folks that ask Members of Congress hard questions that I think were very very important. I’ve been working with them. 

[snip]

It was discovered five months ago.

That’s a part of me that wonders whether Sanford–who appears to be discovering emotions usually first experienced during adolescence–just lost all filter in his confusion. But I’m not sure. Read more →

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Tom Coburn and “the Family” Tried to Buy Off Ensign’s Mistress

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Tom Coburn, the Senate’s resident morality shrill, has a weird idea of how to enforce "Family" values. He and other members of the cultish "Family" apparently tried to help Ensign buy off his mistress.

Hampton and Ensign were bonded by their conservative evangelical faith. Hampton said he reached out to intermediaries involved in a Christian fellowship home in Washington, D.C., where Ensign and several other powerful Washington figures live.

The group, including Coburn, a well-known conservative, confronted Ensign and suggested that the Hamptons needed to be given financial assistance — in the millions of dollars — to pay off their $1 million-plus mortgage and move them to a new life away from Ensign.

During the confrontation, Ensign agreed to write a letter to Cynthia Hampton expressing remorse, Hampton said.

The letter, which was authenticated by Ralston’s executive producer Dana Gentry, is filled with contrition: “I was completely self-centered and only thinking of myself. I used you for my own pleasure not letting thoughts of you, Doug, Brandon, Blake or Brittany come into my mind,” he wrote, referring to the Hampton children.

But after sending the letter, which bears the date “Feb. 2008,” Hampton said Ensign quickly disavowed it in a conversation with Cynthia Hampton and continued to pursue her.

Hampton said that on that same February weekend, Ensign told him, “I’m in love with your wife.”

Here’s the letter, which is even more juvenile than Sanford’s love emails to his mistress.

So I wonder. Is this a formal policy of "the Family," to buy off members’ mistresses? Did they try to buy off Sanford’s mistress (remember, Sanford was getting martial counseling from "the Family" just like Ensign). Was there an implicit understanding that after their mortgage got paid off by Ensign, they would have to be silent about it, even during Ensign’s potential 2012 Presidential run?

And who else’s mistresses has "the Family" bought off?

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Pride And Petulance

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Today is Victory In Iraq Day. For Iraqis. Well, actually, it is the day American troops (yes we are the only ones left; even our "special friends", the Brits, left long ago) officially marked their exit from urban areas to be concentrated in centralized bases in the countryside. From the New York Times:

With parades, fireworks and a national holiday, the Iraqi government celebrated the final withdrawal of American troops from the country’s cities on Tuesday, trying to exploit a political milestone to trumpet what the prime minister called sovereignty from foreign occupation.

Indeed, in spite of the still tenuous security situation in many areas, it is and should be a day of celebration of the return of another piece of sovereignty for the Iraqis. They will never truly stand until they stand on their own; it will be painful, fitful and slow, but it is a necessary process.

And how are neocons and some elements of the military (by no means all) taking the events of the day? Not well of course. The Dick, Cheney, is concern trolling that the U.S. troop withdrawal might “waste all the tremendous sacrifice that has gotten us to this point.”

The neocons and PNACs who ginned up this war, and lied us into it, are worried about the frailty of the situation because of the American sacrifice. There were no WMDs, no links to al-Qaida, no threat form Sadaam to the US or anybody in the region at the time, and the one real power in the region, Iran, has been strengthened. And Dick Cheney marks the occasion by whining about our sacrifice. The Iraqis must be thrilled to here those words.

As CNN’s Michael Ware reports in the attached video clip, no one, whether American, Iraqi or otherwise, should demean or devalue the efforts and lives lost by the American military, they did the job they were told to do, but the bigger picture on the Iraqi adventure is very ugly, and contrary to Dick Cheney, it is the sacrifice of the Iraqis that ought to be considered, because the American loss is insignificant to the hell we hath wrought upon Iraq. The US military and coalition forces have lost about 4,500 casualties (and nearly 1,400 contractor deaths which no one ever mentions).

The carnage on the Iraqi populous has been far more devastating however:

Thus, the best guess Read more →

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Jenny Sanford Lays The Wood To Lovey Govey

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Holy smoke Batman. You don’t tug on Superman’s cape; you don’t spit into the wind. And you don’t mess around with Jen.

AP’s Bruce Smith has, through Yahoo News, put up an interview with Jenny Sanford; and it is a doozy. Do go read the entire piece, it is totally deserving. Many key questions are addressed, and Jenny Sanford puts on a tour de force.

How did Jenny find out about her husband’s affair:

Sanford said she discovered her husband’s affair early this year after coming across a copy of a letter to the mistress in one of his files in the official governor’s mansion. He had asked her to find some financial information, she said, not an unusual request considering her heavy involvement in his career.

Fascinating, and it means Jenny was not the one who forwarded the salacious Romeo/Juliet emails to The State newspaper, because The State received them in December of 2008. I have a feeling that eliminates her father too, and militates in favor of someone in the South Carolina state government, probably around the Governor’s office.**

What does Jenny think of Mark having gone to Argentina to see Maria?

That he had dared to go to Argentina to see the other woman left her stunned. "He was told in no uncertain terms not to see her," she said in a strong, steady voice.

Heh, well maybe not that stunned because:

…her husband repeatedly asked permission to visit his lover in the months after she discovered his affair.

Oh. My. That’s gonna leave a mark. It is not the kind of thing you put out on the record unless you are leaving a serious marker to own the narrative, and boy is Jenny Sanford doing that. And Jenny is not blind to anything going on here either; she has a grip.

On her philandering husband’s pelotas.

Think Jenny has any illusions about the extended stroll Mark just took through Buenos Aires? Nuh uh. Asked whether she thinks he has ended the tryst with Maria:

"I guess that’s what we will have to see. I believe he has," she said. "But he was down there for five days. I saw him yesterday and he is not staying here. We’ll just see what kind of spirit of reconciliation he has himself."

As Marcy emailed a bit ago:

The State Read more →

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WaPo Discovers C Street

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Kudos to Citizen92 who first asked where Tom Coburn and John Ensign lived together, which led me to figure out that it was at "the Family’s" C Street residence. Because, now that TPMM and I keep posting on the connection between a shady Christian group and the latest Republican affairs, the WaPo has decided to cover it (or at least the house, without much discussion of "the Family," and certainly no link to the blog that first covered it).

Mostly, though, the WaPo catches people trying to disassociate from the hypocritical adulterers.

First, at least one resident learned of both the Sanford and Ensign affairs and tried to talk each politician into ending his philandering, a source close to the congressman said. Then the house drama escalated. It was then that Doug Hampton, the husband of Ensign’s mistress, endured an emotional meeting with  Sen. Tom Coburn, who lives there, according to the source. The topic was forgiveness.

"He was trying to be a peacemaker," the source said of Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma.

Although Sanford visited the house, there is no indication that he was ever a resident; when he was in Congress from 1995 to 2000, the parsimonious lawmaker was famous for forgoing his housing allowance and bunking in his Capitol Hill office. But it is not uncommon for residents to invite fellow congressmen to the home for spiritual bonding. There, Sanford enjoyed a kind of alumnus status. Richard Carver, president of the Fellowship Foundation, said, "I don’t think it’s intended to have someone from South Carolina get counseling there." But he posited that Sanford turned to C Street "because he built a relationship with people who live in the house."

People familiar with the house say the downstairs is generally used for meals and prayer meetings. Volunteers help facilitate prayer meetings, they said. Residents include  Reps. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.),  Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), Ensign and Coburn. None of the congressmen agreed to be interviewed for this article. But associates of some of Ensign’s housemates privately worried that the other residents would be tarred by the scandals.

"That two fell doesn’t prove that the house — which has seen many members of Congress pass through and engage in Bible studies — doesn’t mean that the house has failed," Read more →

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Monica Conyers Pleads Guilty

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My biggest question for months was not whether or when Monica Conyers would accept a plea deal in a pay to play bribery scandal–as she did today. But whether or not her legal problems would make her husband, John Conyers, timid in his role as House Judiciary Chair.

Monica Ann Conyers beginning on a date unknown and continuing until or about December 2007, did knowingly and voluntarily conspire and agree with an aide and others to corruptly solicit and demand for the benefit of herself and others and to accept and agree to accept things of value from persons while an agent of the City of Detroit, an entity that received more than $10,000 in federal funding during the calendar year of 2007, with intent that Conyers would be influenced and rewarded in connection with any business transaction or series of transactions of a value of $5,000 or more with the City of Detroit.

Overt acts: On Nov. 20, 2007, at approximately 3:15 p.m., Conyers met with an individual sent by Rayford Jackson in the parking lot at Butzel Family Center and received an envelope containing cash. On Dec. 4, 2007, at approximately 2:30 p.m., an individual sent by Rayford Jackson met Conyers and her aide in a McDonald’s parking lot in Detroit at which time the individual delivered an envelope containing cash.

The two bribes admittedly accepted by Conyers – on Nov. 20 and Dec. 4 2007 – bookended the Synagro vote, which was on Nov. 28 of that year.

The charging document reads: “The payments were made and received as part of an agreement and understanding between defendant and Rayford Jackson … to influence defendant to support the Synagro contract.”

After all, Monica Conyer’s crimes are more damning than Kwame’s mistress scandal was (though Kwame and his father are implicated in this as well). And it’s rather remarkable to have the Chair of the House committee overseeing justice to have his wife convicted of bribery.

So while I’ve never been a fan of Monica Conyers, I’ve been wondering how this impacts John Conyers. I’ve been wondering, for example, whether he’d step down or back off of his typical aggressiveness on corruption.

But I’m guessing, however, that Monica’s guilty plea gives Conyers the room to continue to target corruption. Which might explain yesterday’s HJC hearing on Deferred Prosecution Agreements–which targeted the Republican’s candidate for governor in NJ, Chris Christie. Yesterday’s hearing–which Read more →

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Old Friends

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Was hanging out with my old friend Amy Speace until late last night early this morning not long ago.

If you’re in Chicago or Grand Rapids, check her out this weekend.

Posting will resume later.

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A Ten-Day Nookie Run Turned Break Up?

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I gotta say this for Mark Sanford. For a guy who–at least until recently–has a pretty serious Sugar Momma, he travels frugally. According to Ben Smith, the ten day trip to Buenos Aires he booked on June 10 appears to have been done with frequent flier miles.

On or around the day his wife asked him to move out, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford booked a ten-day trip to Buenos Aires, a person familiar with the governor’s travel plans told POLITICO.

Sanford booked the trip on Delta Air Lines on June 10, using the company’s SkyMiles program, the source said. He bought a ticket for June 18, returning June 28.

Though maybe he was thinking the whole Sugar Momma thing might be coming to an end soon…

But here’s the thing. As much as you don’t book a five day trip to do a painful break up with your mistress, you definitely don’t book a ten day trip to break up with your mistress. 

Which sorta suggests that when he went down there, he wasn’t going to break up with her. And at least according to reports, while Sanford’s father-in-law and wife knew of his affair–as well as "the Family"–the State had not yet verified his emails with his former staffer or office. So the affair wasn’t, necessarily, going to get beyond his immediate family and the Christian Conservatives counseling him on this.

Here’s the updated "Family Affair" timeline:

June 10: Sanford books flight to Buenos Aires, gets kicked out by wife

June 11: Doug Hampton sends letter to Fox, via FedEx

June 12: Fox News receives Hampton’s letter 

June 15: Doug Hampton emails letter to Fox

June 16: Ensign admits affair

June 18: Sanford disappears to Buenos Aires (telling his staff he might be hiking in the Appalachian trail)

June 19: Publication of letter suggests ties to the Family

June 24: Actual return date

June 28: Planned return date for Sanford

Now, frankly, seeing the timeline today, I’m less convinced than I was yesterday there’s a link between the timing of the two. Most likely (as Smith suggests) either Sanford booking the flight led to getting kicked out by his wife, or vice versa. And the latter scenario–that she kicked him out and said, "don’t come back till you’ve broken it off," at which point he booked the flight. (But ten days!?!?!?)

In any case, Sanford’s back with his wife today. So I guess the Read more →

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“God’s Law” and Mark Sanford’s DIY Consequences

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Eric Erickson tries to recover from Blue Texan’s sound thumping of him yesterday by excusing Mark Sanford’s adultery and lying because he has no Bible Study group:

We live in a fallen world and we ourselves are fallen. I am disappointed in Sanford, but not angry. The default for politicians seems to be unchaste. All we can do is work for ideas and try to find men of good character to fight for those ideas.

I think one thing I have noticed in the past five years is that Democrats and Republicans tend to elevate politicians to such a level that there is no accountability. It is insular. There is no support group, no small group of friends, and no authority that can guide, admonish, and correct politicians privately.

We have each other. I’m off in a bit to hang out with friends from my Bible Study. Sanford probably has none of that. I’m sure John Edwards did not. Nor Bill Clinton. Nor John Ensign. [my emphasis]

What he appears to have missed–even from Sanford’s own press conference–is that Sanford does have a Bible Study group.

Did your wife and your family know about the affair before the trip to Argentina?

Yeah. We’ve been working through this thing for about the last five months. I’ve been to a lot of different–I was part of a group called C Street when I was in Washington, it was a Christian Bible study of some folks that ask Members of Congress hard questions that I think were very very important. I’ve been working with them.

Problem is, it is populated with a bunch of other sanctimonious Conservatives who believe that their power matters more than the empty vows they mobilize to wield that power. I’m just waiting to see who’s the next member of "the Family" to tearfully confess to being a complete moral hypocrite while condemning others. Who will it be? Sam Brownback? Tom Coburn? Jim DeMint?

Which brings me to–far and away–the most annoying part of Sanford’s press conference: his attempt to validate his moral absolutism even while confessing he fell afoul of it.

But I am — I am here because if you were to look at God’s laws, there are in every instance designed to protect people from themselves. Read more →

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