We haven’t heard too much from Alberto Gonzales since he resigned in disgrace as Attorney General. He was last seen struggling to find a job in his profession, and delivering a commencement address at a small high school in the Virgin Islands. (Seriously.)
I was surprised, then, to see Gonzales pop up in the LAT with an op-ed on “what Latinos want from their president.” The former AG, without a hint of irony, emphasized the importance of the next administration taking “racial equality” seriously.
[Latinos] want a society that recognizes and rewards us based on our hard work and ingenuity, not our skin color…. [A]lthough we know that America strives to be a fair country, the harsh reality is we are not one nation with liberty and justice for all. […]
As we move to the next phase of the presidential campaign, some people may try to discourage discussion about race relations in favor of issues they say are of greater importance…. However, we need leaders who appreciate — and who choose to confront — the crucial elements of racial inequality within these so-called bigger issues. Those are the leaders who are likely to be successful in finding effective solutions to our most important challenges.
Look, all of this is very nice. It’s a compelling sentiment about an issue I feel very strongly about.
But if Alberto Gonzales thinks he can speak with any authority — moral or otherwise — about combating “the crucial elements of racial inequality,” he must assume we have very short memories.
Maybe Gonzales can talk about his comfort level with the Bush administration’s approach to vote caging. Or maybe Gonzales can explore what happened to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during his tenure in the administration. Or perhaps Gonzales can explain why the Justice Department’s habit of violating employment law got worse after he became Attorney General.
I certainly agree that we do need leaders who “appreciate — and who choose to confront — the crucial elements of racial inequality,” but it would have been nice to have a chief law-enforcement officer who took these issues seriously, too.
I don’t want to alarm anyone, but it appears the Justice Department, throughout Bush’s two terms, flagrantly and repeatedly broke the law by politicizing the hiring process. Yes, I know we knew that before, but the DoJ’s Inspector General has made it official.
Justice Department officials over the last six years illegally used “political or ideological” factors to hire new lawyers into an elite recruitment program, tapping law school graduates with conservative credentials over those with liberal-sounding resumes, a new report found Tuesday.
The blistering report, prepared by the Justice Department’s inspector general, is the first in what will be a series of investigations growing out of last year’s scandal over the firings of nine United States attorneys. It appeared to confirm for the first time in an official examination many of the allegations from critics who charged that the Justice Department had become overly politicized during the Bush administration.
“Many qualified candidates” were rejected for the department’s honors program because of what was perceived as a liberal bias, the report found. Those practices, the report concluded, “constituted misconduct and also violated the department’s policies and civil service law that prohibit discrimination in hiring based on political or ideological affiliations.”
According to the investigation, the Justice Department began ignoring merit and making employment decisions based on politics in 2002, when then-Attorney General John Ashcroft restructured the honors program, taking decisions away from career officials in each section of the department, giving power to Bush appointees. When Alberto Gonzales took the reins, the illegalities expanded and were intensified.
If you were affiliated with the Federalist Society, you were practically a shoe-in. If Bush appointees saw certain buzz words in your c.v. — works like “environmental” and “social justice” — your application was rejected.
Leave it to Bush and his cohorts to transform the Justice Department into the Just Us Department.
June 6 (Bloomberg) — Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who was forced from his job amid a controversy over the firings of federal prosecutors, has been hired to provide assistance to a special master on a patent case.
Gonzales will help former U.S. District Judge Layn R. Phillips oversee settlement talks in the case of a Texas company which claims banks such as Wells Fargo & Co., Citigroup Inc.’s Citibank and Bank of America Corp. are violating its patents for taking and transmitting digital images of checks.
The judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge David Folsom in Marshall, Texas, “has no objection to Mr. Gonzales’s assistance in this case, and believes he can provide valuable assistance to the Special Master,” Phillips wrote in the order. Read on…
Times are tough, with the recession, mortgage foreclosure crisis and rising unemployment, but it appears former Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales has finally landed on his feet. Well, if you’re trying to find evidence of illegal activity, why not hire someone who has experience in breaking the law? Right? More from TPM…
LOS ANGELES - An Iraqi man sued two U.S. military contractors, claiming he was repeatedly tortured while being held at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison for more than 10 months.
Emad al-Janabi’s federal lawsuit, filed Monday in Los Angeles, claims that employees of CACI International Inc. and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. punched him, slammed him into walls, hung him from a bed frame and kept him naked and handcuffed in his cell beginning in September 2003.
Also named as a defendant is CACI interrogator Steven Stefanowicz, known as “Big Steve.” The suit claims he directed some of the torture tactics.
At one point after passing out, al-Janabi said, he was told by an L-3 translator “welcome to Guantanamo.” He said he even asked a cellmate whether he could see the ocean from a window. Read on…
Senator John McCain may look the other way when it comes to torture, but we won’t. These atrocities were committed in our name. I hope “Big Steve” and all the rest of these war criminals are punished to the fullest extent — but we live in Bushworld and it is unlikely any of these thugs will ever be held accountable. Senator Barack Obama has said that if elected he will investigate crimes committed by the Bush regime…we intend to hold him to that.
About a year ago, we learned in jaw-dropping detail about the questions asked of those seeking employment at Bush’s Justice Department. Thanks to Alberto Gonzales and Monica Goodling — remember them? — job applicants for civil service jobs were quizzed with all kind of personal questions that the DoJ couldn’t legally ask.
But what about all of those Justice Department employees who were already on staff when Goodling & Co. got there? It was too late to ask them personal questions during their interviews. How, then, could they ensure that DoJ employees were pure by conservative Republican standards?
The Justice Department’s inspector general is investigating whether a career attorney in the department was dismissed from her job because of rumors that she is a lesbian. The case grew out of a larger inquiry into the firings of U.S. attorneys and politicization at Justice under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Several people interviewed by the inspector general’s staff described the case to NPR and said they came away with the impression that the Attorney General’s office decided not to renew Leslie Hagen’s contract because of the talk about her sexual orientation. Hagen received the highest possible ratings for her work as liaison between the Justice Department and the U.S. attorneys’ committee on Native American issues. Her final job evaluation lists five categories for supervisors to rank her performance. For each category, a neat X fills the box marked, “Outstanding.” And at the bottom of the page, under “overall rating level,” she also got the top mark: Outstanding.
The form is dated February 1, 2007. Several months before that evaluation, Hagen was told her contract would not be renewed.
After Hagen won awards for her work as a federal prosecutor, former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger recruited her to DC for her job, because, as he put it, she was “the best qualified person in the nation.” Everyone Hagen worked with raved about her amazing work and her supervisors were anxious to renew her contract.
But as we know all too well, in the Bush administration, qualifications and outstanding on-the-job performance hardly matter.
It looks like people didn’t appreciate the ABA naming Gonzales Lawyer of the Year, even if they did try to associate it with Time naming Hitler Person of the Year:
The ABA Journal posted an article titled “Lawyers of the Year 2007 & 2008” on ABA Journal.com, on Dec. 12, 2007. The article defined that term as the year’s biggest legal newsmaker, identifying former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as the major newsmaker of 2007. The Journal regrets that we did not make this theme clear.
We appreciate the feedback we’ve received, and we’re acting on it. So that there can be no confusion, the term “Lawyers of the Year” has been changed in the headline and story to “Newsmakers of the Year.” The story is otherwise unchanged from its original version.
By reading the ABA’s statement, it appears a lot of attorneys around the country didn’t appreciate that title going to Gonzo. I can’t say I really blame them for being upset over it - the lawyers I know don’t like to even associate Gonzales as being in the same profession as them.
One of seven Miami men accused of plotting to join forces with al-Qaida to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower was acquitted Thursday, and a mistrial was declared for the six others after the federal jury deadlocked.
The Bush administration had seized on the case to illustrate the dangers of homegrown terrorism and trumpet the government’s post-Sept. 11 success in infiltrating and smashing terrorism plots in their earliest stages.
The group never actually made contact with al-Qaida and never acquired any weapons or explosives. Prosecutors said no attack was imminent, acknowledging that the alleged terror cell was “more aspirational than operational.”Read on…
Raw Story documented the fairly weak case the Feds went to court with last year. Talk Left has more…
Dan Abrams continues his series on how the Bush administration (in particular, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove) has wreaked havoc on the Department of Justice with a look today at how corrupted and nastily partisan prosecutions have become, with the DoJ going after more than five times the number of Democrats as Republicans and using party and Bush loyalty as the overriding criteria for hiring attorneys.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse:
The Bush administration forgot that the sign outside says “United States Department of Justice” not “Bush Administration Department of Justice”. And the cost to us has been as a country and the cost to the department in particular has been terribly high.
Negative news coverage may have cost former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales his job, but it won him a dubious honor Wednesday from a magazine published by the American Bar Association: Lawyer of the Year.
Additionally, the ABA Journal named Gonzales’ successor, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, as its top lawyer for 2008 — mostly in anticipation of how often he’ll be in the media spotlight for trying to repair the beleaguered Justice Department.
I wish I could say this is a joke, but I would be lying.
Alberto’s first speaking engagement didn’t go quite the way he would have liked, but it’s not surprising that students protested the man who gave the President (his pal) a blank check when it comes to our civil liberties while also installing “torture” as an approved method of interrogation. Alberto is getting paid a boatload of cash (40K) to speak after disgracing his post as AG. Being a “movement conservative” is always a very profitable venture. And he took no questions from the audience.
In his first appearance at a university since resigning in August, former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was met at UF on Monday with a mixture of cheers, boos and scattered interruptions by protesters, two of whom were arrested.
Gonzales, who resigned from his position after a controversial tenure, spoke to more than 800 people at the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. During his prepared speech, Gonzales largely avoided discussing the controversies he faced in office, including his dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys.
Instead, he focused on encouraging students to consider a career in public service while describing his own experiences in that field.—Later, he ignored scattered jeers from the crowd to answer questions about his dismissal of the attorneys, the Geneva Convention and torture.
An interesting exchange between Jack Cafferty and Rachel Marsden occurred on CNN yesterday while discussing Bush’s new AG pick, Mukasey. Cafferty blasted Alberto Gonzalez over his role in dismantling our rule of law, including torture/waterboarding–here’s what they said:
Cafferty: I think he’s trying to tread a minefield that was laid down for him by that sycophantic little yes-weasle Alberto Gonzalez. He, who wrote the memos in secret saying the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply to American when it came to enemy combatants, who wrote secret memos saying the President of the US didn’t have to obey the FISA court laws when it came to spying on Americans. That kind of subterfuge of the American rule of law is an entirely separate issue from whether or not waterboarding is torture or whether or nor surveillance under these conditions or those conditions is a good idea.
And now Mr Mukasey can’t say whether waterboarding is torture cause if he does, liability suddenly accrues for a whole lot of folks and who knows what the consequences are. Meanwhile, Gonzalez is wondering around happy as a clam. he out to be in jail for what he did. He didn’t answer questions on Capitol hill, he didn’t cooperate with the subpoenas, he couldn’t remember anything when he was asked. And then he’s allowed to resign and walk into the sunshine…
Mardsen: Well I think we do have to define torture. One man’s torture is another man’s CIA’s sponsored swim lesson.
A swim lesson? OK, I had to find out about this Republican talker because she’s obviously a bit off. And as we know, there is no such thing as a person being “too far right” in our media. Well. well. well…Why is CNN using a stalker? You see, as I googled Rachel Mardsen, I found some very interesting info on her. And here.
SECURITY officers hastily escorted “Red Eye” contributor Rachel Marsden out of Fox News Channel’s Midtown headquarters yesterday for bizarre and erratic behavior. “She’s out of her [bleeping] mind. She was doing crazy stuff,” a spy told us…
The 28–year–old woman who falsely accused a swim coach at Simon Fraser University of sexual harassment in the mid 1990s, now faces a charge of criminal harassment.
Rachel Marsden was arrested by Vancouver Police after a 52–year–old Vancouver man complained of being harassed by phone and e-mail. Police say the two had an intimate on–again, off–again relationship over the past 12 months.
But Constable Sarah Bloor says Marsden began making threatening phone calls and e-mails to the man between October 7 and November 12 of this year.
Marsden was held in custody overnight.
Rebecca Traister of Salon has a three page profile about her on Salon. From all the reports I’d have to deduce that she’s one crazy gal and I have to ask CNN once again–why was she on The Situation Room?
The U.S. Inspector General may recommend criminal prosecution of departed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at the conclusion of an investigation, possibly as early as next month, the fired former U.S. attorney for Western Washington told a Spokane audience (for the Federal Bar Association) Friday.[..]
(John) McKay said he was summoned to Washington, D.C., in June and questioned for eight hours about possible reasons for his firing by investigators with the Office of Inspector General, who will forward their final report to Congress.
“My best guess is it will be released sometime next month,” and likely will include recommendations for criminal prosecutions of Gonzales and maybe others, McKay said.
Gonzales “lied about” reasons for the firings when questioned under oath in July by the Senate Judiciary Committee and now has hired a lawyer and is refusing to answer questions from the Inspector General, McKay said.[..]
It was reported last week that Gonzales has now retained a high-profile defense lawyer, and apparently is refusing to answer questions from the Inspector General, which could signify the investigation is nearly complete, McKay said.
“When it lands … it is going to be an extremely negative report on President Bush’s Justice Department,” McKay told the packed conference room, which included federal prosecutors and judges.
Wow, Gonzo is refusing to cooperate with an investigation. Go figure. All I can say is I hope he is stupid enough to drag this out past next November. Nothing better than an election season trial to remind all voters what a corrupt bunch we’ve had sitting around D.C.
The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.
“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess.
”During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone,” said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. “We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”…read on
BushCo. and the Republican Congress will always be known as the “Party of Torture.” Their pundits as well are a disgrace to the American flag that they wrap themselves around in everyday…
We haven’t heard too much from Alberto Gonzales since he resigned in disgrace as Attorney General. He was last seen struggling to find a job in his profession, and delivering a commencement address at a small high school in the Virgin Islands. (Seriously.)
