On the 6th floor of the Department of Justice, there used to be what employees called the “hall of shame,” where hung the official portraits of the likes of John Mitchell, Richard Kleindienst and Ramsey Clark.  I don’t know if a portrait of Alberto Gonzales was commissioned before his departure, but if so, this is where it belongs.

This week’s release of the report by Justice’s two internal watchdogs, the Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility, concluded that Gonzales “bears primary responsibility for the flawed U.S. Attorney removal process and the resulting turmoil that it created.”  Both Gonzales and his deputy, Paul McNulty, “abdicated their responsibility to safeguard the integrity and independence of the Department.”  Even worse, they and other senior officials gave reasons for the removals that were “inconsistent, misleading, or inaccurate.”

In concluding that several of the US Attorneys were forced out for political considerations, the report’s authors admitted their investigation remains incomplete because a number of crucial witnesses declined to cooperate.  Further, the White House refused to turn over critically important records, including a chronology drafted during March 2007 when the uproar over the firings was cresting.  The two watchdogs recommended that “a counsel specially appointed by the Attorney General” continue their probe and assess whether any criminal offense was committed. Read the rest of this entry »

I think it’s a sad day for our country, where members of the administration are afraid to appear before a Congressional Committee for Oversight. This is an Oversight hearing, this is to have an assessment of where we are in regards to environmental legislation and they’re afraid to appear– that’s just offensive, it’s wrong, and it’s just a sad day for our country.

The record has been clear the Environmental Protection Agency has withheld scientific information from the public that should have been made public. They have not followed their professional scientific information and so it’s part of a track record which is very, very disturbing.
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As the president of the union which represents more than 600,000 workers in the federal and DC governments – 40% of whom are veterans – we are well aware of the role the Bush Administration has had in minimizing and politicizing the role of public service in government. From Hurricane Katrina to Walter Reed to the United States Justice Department the results have been catastrophic. Our members, who are on the front lines of 75 agencies including Social Security, the VA, and the Department of Homeland Security, realize and know first-hand, the devastating impact of the Bush Administration’s efforts to quell our ability to provide quality service for all Americans.

The Administration’s mantra of privatization and outright animosity toward federal workers has resulted in wreaking havoc throughout the federal government.  And sadly, the most insidious of these government abuses has come at the expense of America’s heroes, our veterans. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard to imagine that we have reached a point where the word of a known drug-smuggler is given more weight by the Bush Administration than that of two Border Patrol agents – but that’s exactly what has happened. As Osvaldo Aldrete Davila received his 9 ½ years prison sentence yesterday, two Border Patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, remained in jail. The fact that this drug smuggler received a lighter sentence than the two border agents is in itself mystifying. But when you consider the circumstances that led to this debacle, it defies conventional wisdom for the President to stand idly by while these two agents remain in jail. Read the rest of this entry »

Unlike numerous other government scandals, Special Counsel Scott Bloch has been allowed to continue lording it over his employees who have been subjected to intimidation, retaliation and politicization of their office. The longer the OPM IG puts off issuing its report on their investigation, the longer whistleblowers will have to wait for an effective agency that protects them.

Yet another court admonished one of the Bush administration’s many executive power grabs yesterday, this time ruling that senior administration officials are not necessarily immune from congressional subpoenas.  Less than two months after the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision, which said that the Bush administration did not have unfettered authority to shape detainee policy, D.C. District Court Judge John Bates said that the president and his advisors are also not above congressional oversight.

As we wrote on our Justice Watch blog yesterday, Judge Bates agreed with House Democrats that general invocations of executive privilege do not relieve administration officials from having to answer congressional inquiries, particularly subpoenas.  Appointed by President Bush in 2001 and selected by Chief Justice John Roberts to serve on the clandestine FISA court in 2004, Judge Bates is certainly no liberal, but even he recognizes the importance of congressional oversight in our system of checks and balances, noting that “[t]he Executive’s current claim of absolute immunity…for senior presidential aides is without any support in the case law.” Read the rest of this entry »

The National Association of Mortgage Brokers (NAMB) praises both Congress for passing H.R. 3221, the “Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008,” and the President for signing it into law. NAMB believes this bill will provide necessary reforms to strengthen the housing finance system while assisting at-risk homeowners through the FHA program.

In addition, H.R. 3221 establishes a nationwide loan originator licensing and registration system that will set minimum standards for loan originator licensing. This section will help provide effective consumer safeguards by requiring background investigations, testing, and continuing education for all originators. Since 2002, NAMB has called for the licensure and registration of all mortgage originators. This section of the bill will help protect consumer’s financial information and rid all mortgage origination channels - banks, lenders, credit unions and mortgage brokers - of bad actors.

The Department of Justice, which is run by a president’s political appointees, is and always will be “politicized.”  Internal rules and laws are designed to minimize undue politicization, often without success.  During the Clinton administration, we saw the wholesale firing of all US attorneys.  Then we saw Janet Reno, a local politician plucked out of elected office in Florida, allow the Justice Department to be pushed around by the White House.  Under Reno, the Justice Department became an arm of the White House Counsel’s office, guided by associates of Hillary Clinton, such as the disgraced Webster Hubbell.  Read the rest of this entry »

It is no surprise to me that the Justice Department systematically and illegally inserted politics into its hiring process.  This was glaringly obvious to me when I was forced out of the DOJ upon blowing the whistle on DOJ violations in the case of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh in 2002.

In my 2006 book, The Canary in the Coalmine, I wrote about how the Attorney General’s Honors Program, founded by President Eisenhower’s first AG and long overseen by career attorneys, was first hijacked by Attorney General John Ashcroft.  When I started at Justice after graduating from Yale Law School, the Honors Program was highly-competitive, well-regarded, and had the laudable distinction of being apolitical.  Ashcroft decided in 2002 that the program would benefit from more direct participation by him and other political appointees.  This continued during the tenure of his successor, Alberto Gonzales, and extended beyond the Honors Program into political hiring for the Department’s most senior career positions, which were soon populated by graduates of the likes of Regents University and Bob Jones University.  It eventually climaxed in what I refer to as the 2007 “U.S. Attorney Massacre,” when nine United States attorneys were fired, according to the Justice Department, for their “poor performance” despite stellar records. Read the rest of this entry »

What I detect is a growing groundswell of support for holding this administration accountable for its misdeeds across the board - not just in misleading this country to war in Iraq, but also in the fear that this administration secretly is planning to invade or attack Iran.

And to look at all of the other incidences of administration misconduct with respect to the separation of powers, with respect to false executive claims of executive privilege, cover-ups, secrecy, surveillance of Americans, detention and torture of foreign citizens, use of presidential signing statements - there’s so many areas of fertile ground that seem to cause this groundswell.

The American people are starting to understand that that this is bigger than just personalities. This is for the protection of the basic foundation that our country is based on and that is adherence to our Constitution.