Red State Renegade

Ashcroft’s deputy Attorney General:

“I have encountered just such an apocalyptic situation, where I and the Department of Justice have been asked to be part of something that is fundamentally wrong”

In May of last year, Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified to the U.S. Senate that three years earlier, on the eve of the 2004 election, ALL of the top Department of Justice officials (including Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller) told G.W. Bush they would resign immediately because George Bush was continuing the NSA wiretapping/surveillance program (which had been in place for at least three years) after his own Department of Justice had told him it was illegal.

The politically awkward resignation (imagine all these leaders telling the press that they needed more time with their families suddenly, all at once) was avoided because Bush agreed to change certain aspects of the program (to this day, unrevealed) in order for these officials to stay on and endorse it’s legality.

This all came about well before the N.Y. Times broke the politically charged story of the wiretapping program in 2005, which all of the above officials endorsed. So the program unveiled by the Times, as controversial as it was, was actually a compromise acceptable to the right wing nut-job ‘bushies’ working in these positions! And of course, the story was published only after the Times sat on it for a year and had been actively lobbied by the administration to keep it quiet (Such traitors, these elitist journalists!).

Here is a portion of the amazing resignation letter written by Deputy Attorney General James Comey:

Tell the Democratic Movement that you are sick of their spinelessness!

Are you on the email lists of MoveOn, Edward Kennedy, John Edwards or (gasp) John Kerry? Perhaps you receive email (or regular mail) asking you to sign petitions, or ’send a message’ to someone regarding an issue that bothers progressives?

I just received a message from Edward Kennedy (www.democraticmajority.com) regarding Dick Cheney’s snub of Executive Order 12958, requiring accounting of classification of documents by the executive branch, which Cheney openly has ignored since 2003 and now claims his office does not fall under.

The message includes references to his other violations:

“Under Dick Cheney’s watch, some of our country’s most disgraceful moments have happened — from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib. Because of him, the Bush administration started in secrecy, marched to war in secrecy and will end in secrecy, all with great damage to our Constitution, to our government and to the American people.”

It asks me to sign (yet another) petition to:
“Tell Vice President Cheney he’s not above the Constitution. He can’t rewrite the Constitution to suit himself.”

Supposedly they will send a copy of the Constitution to Mr. Cheney along with all our signatures.

Well if Mr. Cheney is in violation of the Constitution, why are we sending him letters? We’ve been doing that for seven years now and he’s just sneering at them and piling them up in his Mosler safes so that he’ll have something to wipe his ass with when hes done wiping with the Constitution!

Cheney was blatantly and openly challenging the law here. And when the federal agency responsible for enforcing the law went after him, he officially suggested abolishing the agency!

I am SICK of hearing that all we can do is write letters or petitions. That’s pathetic (or as Alberto Gonzales said of the Geneva Conventions, that’s “quaint”).

So this time, rather than sign the letter (like a good little Dem), I unsubscribed to Kennedy’s emails, and explained why in a short letter:

I AM the democratic majority. But I am sick of this congress backing down when it comes to matters of the war, matters involving torture, wiretapping. Why would impeachment be off the table when these guys have very likely broken many laws? Let’s stop writing letters and petitions to these crooks and start investigating and indicting them. Have a spine, congress! That’s what we thought we would get when we elected you!

Maybe if we all start rebelling in this way they will actually get scared and do something.

What do you think?

This shit is way worse than watergate, so why doesn’t it make bigger news?

The testimony of James Comey to the Senate judiciary Committee two weeks ago was originally about the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys…but it unearthed something startling about the illegal NSA wiretapping program.

The video of his testimony plays out like a hollywood movie or a Sopranos episode, and illustrates (even more than usual) what a bunch of crooks and thugs this administration is.

As Newsweek reports, The head of the FBI, the head of the Department of Justice, and 30 other top officials threatened to resign because of the illegal program and the Tony Soprano-like visit to a sick, weak John Ashcroft in order to coerce him to sign off on the program, one which he already considered illegal:

So consider these scenes from March 2004, described by two former top Justice officials who, like other ex-officials interviewed by NEWSWEEK, did not wish to be identified discussing sensitive internal matters. Attorney General John Ashcroft is really sick. About to give a press conference in Virginia, he is stricken with pain so severe he has to lie down on the floor. Taken to the hospital for an emergency gallbladder operation, he hallucinates under medication as he lies, near death, in intensive care. On the night after his operation, he has two visitors: White House chief of staff Andrew Card and presidential counsel Alberto Gonzales. As described in public testimony, they want Ashcroft to sign a document authorizing the government’s top-secret eavesdropping program to go on. The attorney general, who thinks the program is illegal, refuses.

Back at the Justice Department, there is an equally extraordinary scene. Appalled by the White House’s heavy-handed attempt to coerce the gravely ill attorney general, virtually the entire top leadership of the Justice Department is threatening to resign. The group includes the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum and the chief of the Criminal Division, Chris Wray. Some of them gather in the conference room of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who describes Ashcroft’s bravely turning away the president’s men from his hospital bed. The mood that night in the conference room was tense—and sober.

“This was a showdown,” says a former senior Justice Department official who was there. “Everybody understood the choice they were making and the gravity of the situation. Everybody knew what the stakes were.” A different source estimated that as many as 30 top DOJ officials would have resigned.

Days later the Boy King was questioned about the incident and deflected the question in his normal, awkward manner (See video):

“There’s a lot of speculation about what happened and what didn’t happen and I’m not going to talk about it…It’s a very sensitive program…”

But why does the press and the Congress let him get away with this?