Archive for category: Law

One last post on Clement. I wanted to call your attention to the way Clement pretends that the White House is protecting advice from outsiders that they solicited. Here’s Clement’s language justifying invoking privilege over communications between the White House and those outside of government.

Naturally, in order for the President and his advisers to make an informed decision, presidential aides must sometimes solicit information from individuals outside the White House and the Executive Branch. This need is particularly strong when the decision involved is whether to remove political appointees, such as U.S. Attorneys, who serve in local districts spread throughout the United States. In those situations, the President and his advisers will be fully informed only if they solicit and receive advice from a range of individuals. [my emphasis]

Clement would have you believe that Bush is protecting advise he went out and solicited. But let’s look at some of what we know he’s actually protecting:

• Calls made in November or December 2006 from Senator Domenici to Karl Rove and George Bush about David Iglesias. Domenici placed the call to Rove, at least, on his own initiative.
• Several contacts between Allen Weh and Pat Rogers and Rove, requesting him to fire Iglesias. At Read more →

Mimikatz already posted Rahm’s first response to Cheney’s wicked theories that he is a branch of government unto himself. And mcjoan has posted his second response.

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel issued the followingstatement regarding his amendment to cut funding for the Office of  theVice President from the bill that funds the executive branch. Thelegislation – the Financial Services and General GovernmentAppropriations bill — will be considered on the floor of the House ofRepresentatives next week.

"The Vice President has a choice to make. If he believes his legalcase, his office has no business being funded as part of the executivebranch. However, if he demands executive branch funding he cannotignore executive branch rules. At the very least, the Vice Presidentshould be consistent. This amendment will ensure that the VicePresident’s funding is consistent with his legal arguments. I haveworked closely with my colleagues on this amendment and will continueto pursue this measure in the coming days."

But I’d like to call attention to the recommendation Bill Leonard made last year when wrestling with these creeps.

Furthermore, if OVP is not to be considered an entity within the executive branch, I am concerned that this could possibly impede access to classified information by Read more →

Just a super quick comment about the new emails released today. These are all, AFAIK from a quick scan, emails listed on the list of documents not turned over. This trend has actually been true for a while–that DOJ has dribbled out documents that they said, no way, no how, they weren’t going to release. And then they release them.

What does that say about their standards for releasing documents?

And, as in the past, the release of these are tied to recent or impending events. We got a big dump of documents just before Monica Goodling testified, presumably, because she might discuss or release them herself.

So we might call this batch the Taylor, Griffin, McNulty batch. Many are emails where Taylor exhibits herself to be a big jerk among a clique of jerks. There is more detail on the Griffin nomination (it appears it came from DOJ, not Miers, as I thought, but I’ll return to this tomorrow). And there are a few comments where members of the clique attack McNulty for saying something that put DOJ in a tough spot. The release of these, then, seem to be tied to Taylor and Griffin’s recent departures and McNulty’s upcoming testimony.

And Read more →