by Damozel | Political apppointees to the DoJ traditionally tender their resignations when a new administration comes in ---- but not these ladies. Well, Buchanan did say back in December that she wasn't going anywhere of her own volition. (BN-Politics) Guess she wasn't kidding.
At The Daily Beast (via Memeorandum), Scott Horton explains the "reason" why Buchanan and Bush administration pick Alice Martin are now refusing to leave: too many corrupt Dems need prosecuting!
Uh-huh.
This is all all quite hilarious coming---as it does--- on the heels Tuesday's internal Justice Department memo:
The report, issued Tuesday, found that a former top official in the department's Civil Rights Division regularly hired Republicans and Federalist Society members for nonpolitical posts, giving them high-profile assignments on civil rights cases, the New York Times reported.
"The report makes its case against [Bradley] Schlozman in his own words, drawn from e-mail and voice mail messages to colleagues and underlings, as he talked about reshaping the political makeup of the Civil Rights Division and doing away with “pinko” and “crazy lib” lawyers and others he did not consider 'real Americans,'" the Times wrote.
But although the report from the inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department said Schlozman gave false statements to Congress when he denied factoring politics into his hiring decisions, last week federal prosecutors declined to bring criminal charges against Schlozman, who left the department in 2007, the Times reported. (The Raw Story)
Horton again:
John Cole has written an open letter to Barack Obama:
Dear President-Elect Obama,
I know we all have our little pet issues that we care about, this is mine....
I know you hate confrontation, and that is commendable. However, there needs to be a complete and total wingnut purge at Justice, and these two need to be thrown out on their asses. No questions.
XOXOXOXO,
John Cole (Balloon Juice)
Back in March 2007, Thomas J. Farell ---who served as a US attorney during the Clinton administration --- wrote a piece at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette charging that Buchanan had relentlessly "pursued the partisan priorities of the Bush administration" and her own ambitions. In that piece, he called for her resignation:
Recent revelations about White House involvement in the firing of seven U.S. attorneys sickened me, as if I were the parent who had defended a teacher against vicious rumors only to hear him admit that he molested children. (Post-Gazette)
Which caused him to start paying close attention to Ms. Buchanan's performance of her office.
The Bush administration's efforts to use an obscure provision of the Patriot Act to replace U.S. attorneys it deemed too vigorous in investigating Republican officials, too slow in indicting Democratic public officials or too reluctant to investigate "voter fraud" -- a euphemism for attempting to suppress the minority vote -- caused me to re-think my opinion of the fairness of Western Pennsylvania's U.S. attorney, Mary Beth Buchanan. I began to wonder why all of the recent public-corruption investigations in our region have been of Democrats.....
Ms. Buchanan has been a devotee of the administration's policies. She has aided the effort to inflate the law-enforcement successes in the war on terror by misclassifying routine immigration and false-document cases as "anti-terrorism cases." For a time, the Western Pennsylvania District topped the nation in the number of "anti-terrorism" prosecutions, largely because dozens of Iraqi immigrant truck-drivers were prosecuted for paying off a motor-vehicles official to obtain commercial-drivers licenses. All of them did it to get work; none had terroristic intentions; all received sentences of probation.
Ms. Buchanan has cast herself as a champion of the Patriot Act by repeating in articles and public debates some of the administration's falsehoods. In an article in this newspaper, she asserted that until enactment of the Patriot Act, federal prosecutors could not obtain emergency wiretaps to prevent imminent terrorist attacks; to the contrary, a 1995 Justice Department bulletin instructed prosecutors like me and Ms. Buchanan how the pre-Patriot law could be used to do just that. She also argued that federal authorities could not share grand jury information about imminent threats with state police, a blatant misrepresentation of the federal rules. By advocating the administration's demand for increased law-enforcement power, she sacrificed her own credibility when the administration abused those powers, as was most recently evident in the inspector general's report on the FBI's misuse of national security letters....
Ms. Buchanan has spent considerable official time and taxpayer money to advance the administration's agenda and her own ambitions. (More...)
Want more? Scott Horton writes:
Last month, Buchanan released a letter stating that she had no intention of submitting her resignation. An ideologically committed Federalist Society member, Buchanan is close to former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who actively promoted her as U.S. attorney. Following her appointment in 2001, Buchanan quickly gained the favor and approval of the White House. In the key period of 2004-05, while groundwork was laid for what later became the U.S. attorney's scandal, Buchanan served as director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, the key position at Justice that oversaw all the 94 U.S. attorneys. A later internal Justice Department probe, in which Buchanan figures prominently, highlights the role played by that office in Karl Rove’s plan to sack U.S. attorneys.
Back in Pittsburgh, Buchanan made a name for herself with two prosecutions. One was Operation Pipedream, a $12 million program designed to criminalize and put out of business Internet vendors of water pipes.
She prosecuted famed actor Tommy Chong, one-half of the comedy duo of Cheech and Chong, because of his support of a company founded and run by his son. Chong had no criminal record, his activities were not (and are not) considered criminal by many legal experts, and Chong’s dealings had no connection to western Pennsylvania. But Buchanan used heavy-handed threats to compel Chong to agree to a guilty plea. In her sentencing memorandum, Buchanan insisted that Chong do prison time because he had starred in a number of films in which the use of marijuana was portrayed and prominent Republican political figures were ridiculed or mocked. The case is the subject of a popular documentary produced in 2005 entitled a/k/a Tommy Chong....
The second case is a corruption prosecution of one of the country’s most prominent medical examiners, Dr. Cyril Wecht, also not coincidentally a leading figure in Pittsburgh Democratic politics. The charges brought against Wecht involve a long list of petty accusations, including that he used his office telephone and fax machine for personal matters. These charges happen to bear remarkable similarity to accusations of petty improprieties that flew around Buchanan’s mentor Santorum in the two years before Pennsylvania voters retired him from public life in 2006. Buchanan, however, opted not to pursue any of the accusations surrounding Santorum....
Wecht’s defense counsel, former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, who served under George H.W. Bush and was governor of Pennsylvania, testified before a House Judiciary inquiry that Buchanan’s prosecution was improper and politically motivated.
"It is not the type of case normally constituting a federal 'corruption' case brought against a local official," said Thornburgh. "There is no allegation that Dr. Wecht ever solicited or received a bribe or kickback. There is no allegation that Dr. Wecht traded on a conflict of interest in conducting the affairs of his selected office." The case was originally tried before a judge appointed by George W. Bush who, though close to Buchanan, refused to recuse himself and forbade defense counsel in any way from referencing Buchanan’s political motivation. The trial ended in a hung jury, which divided sharply in favor of Wecht’s acquittal. Afterward, individual jurors harshly criticized Buchanan’s conduct and she responded by sending FBI agents to “interview” them....
Notwithstanding broad appeals from the Pennsylvania legal community for Buchanan to drop the case, she has pledged to continue it. The judge who originally oversaw the case, meanwhile, has been removed by order of an appeals court. Buchanan cites the supposedly unresolved Wecht case as a reason why she must stay on as U.S. attorney. (Daily Beast)
Horton calls Martin "Buchanan's "colleague in tenacity.""
Martin has a flair for drama. One of her targets is a 63-year-old retired social studies teacher from Huntsville named Sue Schmitz, who was taken from her home at the crack of dawn and manhandled by five FBI agents who tore her skin and left her bleeding as she was dragged out of her bathroom. Schmitz was accused of underperforming on a contract to teach underprivileged children for which she was to receive $50,000 per annum. Why was a retired social studies teacher suddenly the object of a massive multi-million dollar federal prosecution? Critics say the answer to that question is easy: she is a Democratic member of the state legislature and the Republicans want her seat. (More at Daily Beast)
Memeorandum has more.
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RE: the "reason" why Buchanan and Bush administration pick Alice Martin are now refusing to leave: too many corrupt Dems need prosecuting!
Could be true. To start with, there's Rangel, Blago, Rezko, Biden's son, Kwame Kilpatrick, Madoff, Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon, and those seven are just plucked from memory, sans research. And here's a bit of a history lesson:
You netnuts and the all-Democrat, print-and-broadcast media didn't care in 1993 about the Clinton administration's decision to ask for the resignation of all 93 U.S. attorneys. Yet you ululated like tribal Muslims over the Bush administration's replacing eight U.S. attorneys in late 2006 -- nearly two years after rejecting the idea of following the Clinton policy of replacing all the attorneys. Hard for me to take y'all seriously.
Posted by: flowerplough | January 18, 2009 at 02:42 AM
Oh, yeah, Treasury nominee Geithner failed to pay $34,000 in taxes from 2001 to 2004, too. And what can anyone tell me about New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson withdrawal from the Commerce nomination after questions surfaced about that ongoing federal investigation?
Posted by: flowerplough | January 18, 2009 at 02:50 AM
Hi Flowerplough,
Yes, Richardson should be fully investigated, and the Senate should think twice before approving Geithner.
It's NOT an either-or proposition, though: there are likely tons of corrupt Dems AND Republicans.
Finding names of potentially corrupt Dems doesn't erase the Cunninghams or Frists or Foggos or Stevens's or Doolittles or Renzis or or or....
The point is that the Justice Department is supposed to prosecute (or not) based on evidence, NOT based on political party.
The prosecutors that Damozel wrote about used political party as a deciding factor. That's wrong no matter who does it.
Posted by: Deb | January 18, 2009 at 11:42 AM