A subdued Bernie Kerik, the man who's taught Rudy Giuliani the value of background checks, made an appearance on Fox News today.

After weighing in on the Iran hostage resolution and inveighing against Nancy Pelosi's trip to Syria, Kerik was finally asked about reports that he was the target of a federal investigation.

He responded by rattling off every award and citation he'd received in his long public service career, allowed that he'd "made mistakes" (to which he'd pled guilty), and cautioned that "the U.S. attorney may do an investigation, he does not have to push criminal charges."

Unfortunately for Kerik, while the U.S. attorney doesn't have to charge him, it seems very likely that Kerik will eventually be indicted.

Monica Goodling's reign as the first ever sitting Justice Department official to plead the Fifth is over, CNN just reported. She'll resign tomorrow.

Update: More from the AP:

The top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales abruptly quit on Friday, almost two weeks after telling Congress she would not testify about her role in the firings of federal prosecutors.

"I am hereby submitting my resignation to the office of attorney general," Monica M. Goodling said in a three-sentence letter. There was no immediate reason given, but her refusal to face Congress had intensified a controversy that threatens Gonzales' job...

Calling her five-year stint at Justice an honor, Goodling told Gonzales in her letter, "May God bless your richly as you continue your service to America."

In the wake of what the U.S. attorney firings scandal has revealed about the Bush Justice Department, it's hard to imagine a more troubling scenario than this:

A Bush-nominated U.S. Attorney launches a corruption case during an election year that implicates the Democratic governor. He pushes the case, which targets an obscure state bureaucrat and obtains a conviction in June; she's sentenced to 18 months in prison in late September. The case is featured prominently by Republicans in attack ads against the governor.

But when the case is appealed (after the election), the circuit court, in a remarkable reversal, rejects the conviction out of hand, saying that the evidence against the bureaucrat "is beyond thin." Says one of the three circuit judges, "I'm not sure what your actual theory in this case is."

Well, it happened -- in Wisconsin. And the U.S. attorney in the case is Milwaukee's Steven Biskupic, appointed by Bush in 2002. Somehow he's been given the privilege of serving beyond his four year term.

Dozens of readers have written in, asking if this is what a "loyal Bushie" looks like. It's hard to see it otherwise.

Steve Benen has more.

The U.S. attorney firings scandal has laid bare the administration's -- and particularly Karl Rove's -- preoccupation with prosecuting voter fraud. But there's a flip side to this coin. The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has virtually abandoned its traditional role, undertaken since the 1965 Voting Rights Act, of actively protecting African American voters from discrimination.

There's no greater demonstration of that fact than this simple fact: During the first five years of the Bush administration, the Justice Department's voting section only filed a single case alleging voting discrimination on behalf of African American voters. That's despite the fact that the section, part of the Civil Rights Division, was created mainly to protect African American voters from discrimination.

But during that same time period, the section managed to file the first ever "reverse" discrimination case under the Voting Rights Act.

That case, United States v. Ike Brown and Noxubee County, alleges that Brown, the chairman of Noxubee County's Democratic Executive Committee in Mississippi, has been trying to limit whites' participation in local elections. The case, filed in 2005, is currently being tried, and is likely to reach its conclusion later this month.

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update: For a more recent list, click here.

Alberto Gonzales is working hard to shore up support on the Hill, but there are a number of Republicans who aren't worth a phone call.

Below is a list of GOP lawmakers and other notables who want Gonzales gone. In the interest of clairty, we've chosen to limit it to those who've made unequivocal statements -- if the list included those who've merely expressed skepticism, it would be much, much longer.

Here it is:

The Senate:

Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR)- "For the Justice Department to be effective before the U.S. Senate, it would be helpful."

Sen. John Sununu (R-NH)- "The president should fire the attorney general and replace him as soon as possible with someone who can provide strong, aggressive leadership."

The House:

Rep. Vern Elhers (R-MI)- "Since he's such a close, personal friend, he's hurt the President by what he's doing, he should have the politeness to offer his resignation."

Rep. Paul Gillmor (R-OH)- 'Given the totality of the circumstances, I think it would be better for the President and the Department if the Attorney General were to step down."

Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA)- "Even for Republicans this is a warning sign … saying there needs to be a change."

Rep. Lee Terry (R-NE)- "Frankly, until these statements came out that contradicted his first statement, I was backing him, saying that he shouldn't resign. Now I think that he should."

Other Notables:

The National Review Editorial Board- "Alberto Gonzales should resign. The Justice Department needs a fresh start."

Mark Corallo, Justice Department spokesman (2002-2005)- "Alberto Gonzales' loyalty to George Bush has got to trump George Bush's loyalty to Alberto Gonzales."

How much longer will the list grow after the April 17 hearing?

Note: If we've missed any other notable calls for the AG's head, let us know in the comments.

Though the tide of documents from the Justice Department has stemmed for now, the Senate Judiciary Committee is determined that it not stop.

As we've pointed out before, the Justice Department has not turned over to Congress all the documents relevant to the U.S. attorney firings -- some of those documents are bound to be among the most interesting.

And in addition to the withheld documents, many of the documents provided to Congress have been heavily redacted. For instance, in the documents turned over to Congress, the Justice Department has redacted all information related to other U.S. attorneys they considered firing and all mentions of possible replacements for the canned prosecutors. That's crucial information. Congressional staff have been allowed to visit the department to examine unredacted versions, but are forbidden to make copies or take notes.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will wait no longer, The Washington Post reports. Next Thursday, the committee will issue subpoenas for the unredacted documents, as well as for all other documents the department has related to the firings.

Democrats Delay Gonzales Testimony
"Senate Democrats postponed on Thursday Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' first chance to testify in his own defense over the firings of eight federal prosecutors. The decision to shelve next week's Senate Appropriations hearing frustrated the White House, which wants Gonzales to quickly give lawmakers his side of the story amid calls for his resignation." (Associated Press)

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For Vice President Cheney's lies and distortions to be exposed is common. But it's a rare satisfaction for them to be thrown back in his face on the same day.

Yesterday, Cheney, in an interview with Rush Limbaugh, again touted a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, saying:

...remember Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, al Qaeda affiliate; ran a training camp in Afghanistan for al Qaeda, then migrated -- after we went into Afghanistan and shut him down there, he went to Baghdad, took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq; organized the al Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene, and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June.... This is al Qaeda operating in Iraq. And as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq.

Now, as with nearly every Cheney statement, this is about three distortions rolled into one big lie. The three distortions: Zarqawi did not organize operations for Al Qaeda prior to the invasion, in fact, he did not affiliate himself with al Qaeda until 2004; prior to the 2003 invasion, he was in the northern Kurdish portion of Iraq, outside of Saddam Hussein's control, not Baghdad; and there's no evidence of collusion between Zarqawi and Hussein. (A bonus fourth distortion might be the fact that the U.S. reportedly had a prime chance to kill Zarqawi before the invasion, but chose not to -- some say because his presence in Iraq provided justification for the war.) But the big lie is that Iraq and Al Qaeda were allies and co-conspirators.

It just so happens that something else happened yesterday: Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) released a declassified version of the Defense Department's Inspector General's report on Doug Feith's intel shop at the Pentagon, the one tasked with finding a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda in the runup to the war. And the report shows that not only did the Intelligence Community speak with one voice before the war that there was no evidence of a significant relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but they were right. From The Washington Post:

...the inspector general's report, in a footnote, commented that it is "noteworthy . . . that post-war debriefs of Sadaam Hussein, [former Iraqi foreign minister] Tariq Aziz, [former Iraqi intelligence minister Mani al-Rashid] al Tikriti, and [senior al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh] al-Libi, as well as document exploitation by [the Defense Intelligence Agency] all confirmed that the Intelligence Community was correct: Iraq and al-Qaida did not cooperate in all categories" alleged by Feith's office.

From these sources, the report added, "the terms the Intelligence Community used to describe the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida were validated, [namely] 'no conclusive signs,' and 'direct cooperation . . . has not been established.' "

Sigh.

General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan was raked across the coals last week in a House hearing for having Karl Rove's deputy come and brief government employees on the wellfare of the Republican Party. But apparently that presentation was just business as usual for Rove.

TPM alum Justin Rood reports at ABC News:

The White House political office has been giving presentations similar to the one at GSA since at least 2002, briefing officials throughout the government on Republican campaign information, according to a recent book by two Los Angeles Times reporters.

"[White House political adviser Karl] Rove and [former Bush campaign chief and one-time Republican National Committee head Ken] Mehlman ventured to nearly every cabinet agency to share key polling data" leading up to the 2002 midterm elections, wrote Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten in their book, "One Party Country," "and to deliver a reminder of White House priorities, including the need for the president's allies to win in the next election."

While previous administrations had sent officials to cabinet agencies, the duo wrote, "Such intense regular communication from the political office had never occurred before."

Justin also reports that Doan is under investigation by the Office of Special Counsel. The meeting, and Doan's reported enthusiasm for leveraging the GSA's considerable taxpayer-funded resources to help GOP candidates, is a possible violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits using government resources for political means.

Just a taste of what's to come.

In a letter today to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (who's doggedly preparing for his upcoming testimony), Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) scolded Gonzales for failing to respond to prior questions from the committee and requested that Gonzales prepare a written statement in advance of his April 17 hearing. Leahy said the statement should include "a full and complete account of the development of the plan to replace United States Attorneys, and all the specifics of your role in connection with this matter."

Leahy also not so subtly rebuked Gonzales and the administration for publicly complaining about the late hearing date; the White House has said they want it "sooner rather than later" to "get the facts." Leahy wrote: "As you will recall, my staff had requested earlier dates..., but you had declined those offers."

And after detailing Gonzales' failures in providing answers to written questions from the committee -- sometimes ignoring questions for as long as six months -- Leahy concluded:

You would not tolerate this kind of response time in a Justice Department investigation where months go by without answers and when those answers are finally provided they are outdated or superseded by events. That is not conducive to effective oversight.

As I mentioned over at TPM, today Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) released a declassifed version (pdf) of the briefing slides Doug Feith's office used to sell the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda to White House officials in 2002.

Feith, remember, ran the office of the undersecretary of defense for policy, an office tasked in the runup to the Iraq War with making the case that a relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

It's a remarkable document in a number of ways. First, although Feith, unrepetant as always, has claimed that what his office was doing wasn't intelligence analysis, but "criticsm," the briefing is titled, "Assessing the Relationship between Iraq and al Qaida."

Second, the philosophy behind Feith's shop is on full display on a slide titled, "Fundamental Problems with How Intelligence Community is Assessing Information":

In the slide, the briefer complains about the lofty standard of proof of the intelligence community, which had led to a consensus that Iraq and al Qaeda did not have a significant relationship -- as opposed to the "mature, symbiotic relationship" touted by Feith's shop in one slide. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," the slide reads. After all, this was only a case for war.

And just to see it for yourself, in this slide Feith's office pushes the widely discredited claim that 9/11 attacker Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraq spy in 2000.

Now the calls for Alberto Gonzales' resignation are coming from veterans of Bush's own Justice Department. Here it's Mark Corallo, the Justice Department's chief spokesman from 2002 through 2005.

In a piece on Bush's loyalty to Gonzales, USA Today reports that Corallo thinks Gonzales should step down over "mismanagement" of the U.S. attorneys firings. As he put it, "Alberto Gonzales' loyalty to George Bush has got to trump George Bush's loyalty to Alberto Gonzales."

With Senate on Break, Bush Appoints Officials
"President Bush on Wednesday appointed as his top regulatory official a conservative academic who has written that markets do a better job of regulating than the government does and that it is more cost-effective for people who are sensitive to pollution to stay indoors on smoggy days than for government to order polluters to clean up their emissions. As director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the White House Office of Management and Budget, Susan E. Dudley will have an opportunity to change or block all regulations proposed by government agencies." (LA Times)

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Virtually everyone in Washington, D.C. -- with the exception of President Bush -- thinks Alberto Gonzales should resign. The reasons range widely. But that's the conclusion pretty much everyone has drawn.

Is that going to stop Gonzales? No, sir. So he's spending every waking hour getting ready for a showdown with the Senate.

It's a scene reminiscent of a training montage from the Rocky movies. From The Washington Post:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has retreated from public view this week in an intensive effort to save his job, spending hours practicing testimony and phoning lawmakers for support in preparation for pivotal appearances in the Senate this month, according to administration officials.

After struggling for weeks to explain the extent of his involvement in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, Gonzales and his aides are viewing the Senate testimony on April 12 and April 17 as seriously as if it were a confirmation proceeding for a Supreme Court or a Cabinet appointment, officials said.

Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman, and Timothy E. Flanigan, who worked for Gonzales at the White House, have met with the attorney general to plot strategy. The department has scheduled three days of rigorous mock testimony sessions next week and Gonzales has placed phone calls to more than a dozen GOP lawmakers seeking support, officials said.

You can almost hear "Eye of The Tiger" in the background.

As the piece points out, despite the flurry of phone calls, Gonzales will have very few friends when he goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee -- besides Sen. Orrin "Hear No Evil" Hatch (R-UT). The ranking member, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) has privately suggested to Gonzales that he should begin his testimony with an apology, the Post reports. The hearing will only get worse from there. And if it's another one of Gonzales' non-apology apologies, where he apologizes for the way the purge was carried out while not addressing the purge itself, then it will most certainly get much worse.

Note: For those muck junkies among you for whom Timothy Flanigan's name rang a bell, it's because he was President Bush's nominee to be deputy attorney general in 2005 -- his nomination was withdrawn mostly due to his connnection to the Abramoff scandal as a former senior counsel at Tyco.

Ah, the recess appointment. From the AP:

President Bush named Republican fundraiser Sam Fox as U.S. ambassador to Belgium on Wednesday, using a maneuver that allowed him to bypass Congress where Democrats had derailed Fox's nomination.

Democrats had denounced Fox for his 2004 donation to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The group's TV ads, which claimed that Sen. John Kerry exaggerated his military record in Vietnam, were viewed as a major factor in the Massachusetts Democrat losing the election.

Recognizing Fox did not have the votes to obtain Senate confirmation, Bush withdrew the nomination last month.

It's almost too perfect.

When Justice Department official William Moschella was asked why the Department had fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, he told Congress that “Iglesias had delegated to his first assistant the overall running of the office. And, quite frankly, U.S. attorneys are hired to run the office.” Internal documents from the time show officials planning to accuse Iglesias of being an "absentee landlord" to justify his firing.

Iglesias did, in fact, leave the office for 45 days each year. But that's because he's a a captain in the Navy Reserve -- something that was no secret to his superiors.

So now the Office of Special Counsel is investigating whether Iglesias was wrongfully terminated due to his reserve duty, Newsweek reports. It is against the law for employers to discriminate against members of the U.S. military.

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In a four-page letter today, the lawyer for Justice Department official Monica Goodling again rebuffed Democrats' efforts to hear her testify.

Responding to a letter from House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) yesterday, Goodling's lawyer John Dowd pulled no punches, at one point even comparing Conyers to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, "who infamously labeled those who asserted their constitutional right to remain silent before his committee 'Fifth Amendment Communists.'"

In his letter yesterday, Conyers had hinted that Goodling might be called before his committee to invoke the Fifth publicly if she did not meet privately to explain her decision. He also challenged Goodling's basis for invoking the Fifth, writing that "several of the asserted grounds for refusing to testify do not satisfy the well-established bases for a proper invocation of the Fifth Amendment against self- incrimination."

Dowd's letter essentially repeated the argument in his earlier letter that Goodling would not appear because the Democrats had already "reached conclusions" about the matter. The Fifth is meant to protect "the innocent, who might otherwise be ensnared by ambiguous circumstances," Dowd wrote.

But he went even further. Goodling was also invoking the Fifth, he wrote, because Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty had told Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he provided false testimony to Congress because Goodling and others kept information from him. That would implicate Goodling in a crime -- and that's reason enough for her to invoke the Fifth. But Dowd didn't stop there, taking the opportunity to assert Goodling's innocence:

Mr. McNulty's allegation that Ms. Goodling and others caused him to give inaccurate testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee is a sufficient predicate for Ms. Goodling's invocation of her Fifth Amendment privilege, regardless of whether Mr. McNulty's allegation is factually correct -- which it is not. [my emphasis]

You can read the whole letter here.

The House's chief sleuth, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA), continues to press the administration and the Republican National Committee.

Today, in a letter to the RNC's chairman, he asked for emails "that relate to the use of federal agencies and federal resources for partisan political purposes."

It's just the latest move in Waxman's investigation into the use of RNC email addresses by White House personnel, a practice that some charge violates the Presidential Records Act. Last week, Waxman asked the RNC not to destroy any such emails and asked White House counsel Fred Fielding what the administration's email policies were.

Today, Waxman's letter seeks any communications by White House personnel concerning political presentations at government agencies. A hearing last week revealed that Karl Rove's deputy Scott Jennings had given a PowerPoint presentation on Republican political prospects at the General Services Administration. He organized the briefing using a gwb43.com address -- the domain belongs to the RNC. Jennings used the same address when corresponding with Justice Department official Kyle Sampson about the U.S. attorney firings.

Waxman wants to know where else Jennings or others' in Rove's office gave such presentations -- a potential violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits using government resources for political ends -- and wants any emails that might be related.

The full letter is below.

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Just a reminder, you might say.

Over the past month, the U.S. attorneys scandal has focused resolutely on Alberto Gonzales, other senior Justice Department officials, and the White House. But remember that early on, much of the focus was on Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM). Weeks before Election Day, both called then-U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias to squeeze him on his office's corruption investigation of a state Democrat. Iglesias charged that he was fired because he hadn't brought an indictment before the election.

As The Hill reports this morning, Domenici and Wilson are still very much on the hook. Kyle Sampson couldn't even recall the alleged "performance" reason behind Iglesias' firing during his testimony last week. And the only possible reason Sampson offered for his firing -- that he'd failed to indict certain voter fraud cases -- amounts to the same allegation: that Iglesias was fired for not indicting more Democrats.

From The Hill:

“[Iglesias’s] dismissal from the Justice Department — that is the one clear-cut example of a dismissal that appears to be based almost entirely on political motivation and political interference,” [Gerry Hebert, the executive director of the Campaign Legal Center and a 21-year veteran of the Justice Department] said....

“Pete Domenici needs to be placed under oath and asked whether he talked to Bush or Gonzales or Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, and what he said,” Hebert said.

In the piece, a former Senate Judiciary Committee staffer also raises the prospect of having a public hearing with Domenici.

Exclusive: The Secret War Against Iran
"A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News. US officials say the relationship is arranged so that the US provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or "finding" as well as congressional oversight." (ABC's The Blotter)

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The conservative view of the U.S. attorneys scandal, courtesy of The Washington Times:

House Republicans don't believe that the Justice Department did anything illegal by firing eight federal prosecutors last year, but they also don't believe that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales is telling the truth about why the attorneys were dismissed.

Several House Republicans are scoffing at Justice Department assertions that a principal reason for several of the dismissals was that the lawyers were not aggressively prosecuting immigration violations.

"It stretches anybody's credibility to suggest that this administration would have retaliated against U.S. attorneys for not enforcing immigration laws," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican, told The Washington Times. "This administration itself is so lax in its attitude towards immigration laws and controlling the border."

Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, said he didn't think immigration cases had "a single thing to do with" the firings....

An aide to House Republican leadership agreed that the Justice Department's explanation for the firings is hard to believe.

"I don't think Republicans buy that," said the aide.

So Democrats and Republicans might part in their interpretations of why the administration has been lying about why they fired these U.S. attorneys (Democrats: to cover something up, Republicans: it's not clear why, but they didn't do anything wrong), but at least there's a bipartisan consensus that Gonzales and other Justice Department officials lied to Congress. Who knew that Gonzales could forge such unity?

It's a busy day for Monica Goodling's lawyer.

House Democrats asked again today to question Monica Goodling, the Justice Department official who has pled the Fifth. Goodling notified the House Judiciary Committee last week that, as she had with regard to a potential Senate committee hearing, she planned to invoke the Fifth rather than participate in interviews with House committee staff -- as seven other Justice Department offiicals have been and will be doing over the coming week.

But in the letter today from committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and subcommittee Chair Linda Sanchez (D-CA), they wrote that Democrats weren't convinced that Goodling was invoking the Fifth for valid reasons. Goodling's lawyer John Dowd had cited earlier comments by Democrats to show that they had "reached conclusions" about the matter under investigation.

Conyers and Sanchez aren't buying it. "The fact that a few Senators and Members of the House have expressed publicly their doubts about the credibility of the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General in their representations to Congress about the U.S. Attorneys' termination does not in any way excuse your client from answering questions honestly and to the best of her ability," they wrote.

Conyers and Sanchez ask that Goodling appear next week to to be interviewed by committee staff and discuss the justification of her invocation of the Fifth. One assumes that a response from her prodigious lawyer will soon be forthcoming.

The full letter is below.

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For perhaps the first time in history, a Justice Department official has invoked the Fifth Amendment -- and remains in her position at the Department. In a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales today, Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and committtee member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) asked what the Justice Department was going to do about it.

The first order of business, they said, was to figure out who to talk to at the Justice Department about Goodling. Ordinarily, they wrote, they would ask the Department about how to proceed, so as not to interfere with a possible criminal investigation. But "the office of the Attorney General appears to be hopelessly conflicted," they wrote. So who's it going to be?

The senators also want to know whether Goodling will be cooperating with the internal Justice Department investigation of the firings, given that career Department employees are required to cooperate with such investigations.

Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington Law School who's handled a number of high-profile clients in his career, said that Goodling, having invoked the Fifth with regard to Congress' investigation, is in a bind.

"It's a very clever question, because if she does not invoke the Fifth [for the internal Justice Department investigation], then she obviously has a fundamental contradiction in her legal position. She would basically be saying that despite having a high-ranking position in the Justice Department, she will not cooperate with a coequal branch... Congress has oversight responsibiilty over the Justice Department, over Monica Goodling. It would be an obvious contradiction with her job description."

Maybe that's why this has never happened before. "I believe she might be the first sitting Justice Department official in history to invoke the Fifth." Normally, he said, "the price of invoking the Fifth in this context would have been to end her career in government service."

And yet Goodling, though on indefinite (and voluntary) leave, remains on the Justice Department's payroll.

While Alberto Gonzales is busy prepping for his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in two weeks, here's a tough line of questioning that he can expect.

Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) has publicly accused Gonzales of lying to him in a conversation late last year about the appointment of Tim Griffin to be the U.S. Attorney in Little Rock. Gonzales, Pryor says, promised him that the administration would submit Griffin for Senate confirmation, while privately plotting to string Pryor along for the remainder of Bush's term, because Gonzales knew Griffin's chances at confirmation were hopeless. It was a strategy that his chief of staff Kyle Sampson outlined in a lengthy email only a couple of days after Pryor's conversation with Gonzales: armed with the newly won legal authority to indefinitely appoint U.S. attorneys, the administration didn't need its nominees approved by the Senate, so they could just "run out the clock." "I think we should gum this to death," Sampson wrote, and after rattling off a list of stalling tactics, added: "All of this should be done in 'good faith,' of course."

When Sampson testified last week, he only strengthened Pryor's accusation that Gonzales had been stringing him along, lying to him as part of the strategy to keep Griffin in office until the end of Bush's term.

Under questioning by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), Sampson admitted that he'd touted the "bad idea" of using the Patriot Act provision to circumvent the Senate. When Specter asked him whether he'd talked about it wtih Gonzales, Sampson answered, " I think I did, but I don't think he ever liked the idea very much." Sampson, oddly enough, couldn't describe just how Gonzales expressed this dislike during their conversations. But he did say, "I don't remember him specifically rejecting the idea until after he spoke with Senator Pryor in mid-December."

Let that sink in. Gonzales and Sampson had conversations about circumventing the Senate to install a former aide of Karl Rove as the U.S. attorney in Arkansas. Gonzales didn't reject the idea. And when it finally came time to implement the strategy when Griffin was appointed, Gonzales seemed to be reading from Kyle Sampson's playbook.

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Gonzales Preps for Showdown with Senate
"His job on the line, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales shelved plans for a family vacation and began prepping Monday for a showdown with senators over the firings of federal prosecutors. An appearance next week in front of a Senate panel that oversees Justice Department spending is shaping up as a trial run for Gonzales' scheduled April 17 testimony to a separate Senate committee investigating the eight dismissals." (Associated Press)

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And another one of Gale Norton's former colleagues falls. This time, it's Italia Federici, the founder of a conservative environmental group that served as Jack Abramoff's gateway to the Interior Department.

Legal Times reports that Federici received a target letter from investigators in January. Target letters are frequently a warning of an indictment.

Federici's ex-boyfriend, Steven Griles, formerly the #2 at the Interior Department, also received a target letter in January. And he pled guilty last month to lying to Congressional investigators about his relationship with Federici and Abramoff.

Federici ran a nonprofit called the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA), a conservative think tank, which she founded with Gale Norton, who became Bush's Secretary of the Interior. As a result, Federici was well connected in the Interior Department. So she and Abramoff had a deal. Abramoff's clients pumped $500,000 into her organization; in return, she ensured that people inside the department knew about his tribal clients' needs.

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The Washington Post goes front page today with a piece headlined, "How Bogus Letter Became a Case for War."

The subject, of course, is the Niger yellow cake forgeries, the letter that led to Bush's 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address, and eventually, in part, to the invasion of Iraq.

But there's a funny thing about the piece -- something symptomatic of most of the reporting on the Niger forgeries. It doesn't really tell how a bogus letter became a case for war. In that story, the beginning and the end would be of utmost importance -- the beginning being the origin of the documents, the end the Bush administration's suppression of their fraudulence.

But the Post story doesn't cast light on either of those parts of the story. Instead, the piece is mostly about an almost irrelevant aspect of the story, the sale of the documents by Rocco Martino, a former Sismi (Italy's intelligence service) agent, to an Italian journalist, Elisabetta Burba. The sale occurred in October, 2002 -- long after they were acquired by the U.S. from Sismi, and almost six months after Joseph Wilson's fated trip to Niger to investigate whether such a sale was even possible.

About the Bush administration's use of the documents, the Post reports, "dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available at the time showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable." Nothing new there.

And about the documents' origins -- the only unanswered question from the whole farce? It's addressed in two sentences at the very end of the piece:

It remains unclear who fabricated the documents. Intelligence officials say most likely it was rogue elements in Sismi who wanted to make money selling them.

It's actually not so much of a mystery. It's just that the Italians, for some reason, don't want to get to the bottom of it.

Matthew Dowd, principled dissenter? Or grieving, over-protective parent driven mad by heartbreak?

Yesterday, Matthew Dowd, a former top strategist for Bush, publicly broke wtih the administration in The New York Times. His reasons were clear from the piece: Bush, he said, had become more "secluded and bubbled in.” And he cited a series of President's Bush's blunders (Abu Ghraib, Katrina, the war in Iraq) to explain his loss of confidence in Bush's leadership.

But Jim Rutenberg, the author of the piece, also wrote that Dowd's was an "intensely personal story of a political operative who at times, by his account, suppressed his doubts about his professional role but then confronted them as he dealt with loss and sorrow in his own life." Ruternberg noted that "in the last several years, as he has gradually broken his ties with the Bush camp, one of Mr. Dowd’s premature twin daughters died, he was divorced, and he watched his oldest son prepare for deployment to Iraq as an Army intelligence specialist fluent in Arabic."

The White House, in reacting to Dowd's criticism, has chosen to focus on the personal nature of Dowd's break.

On Face The Nation yesterday, White House counselor Dan Bartlett said that Dowd was "going through personal turmoil" and that having a son in Iraq "can only impact a parent's mind as they think through these issues."

White House spokesperson Dana Perino amplified that talking point today, emphasizing Dowd's "personal hardship" and that "war brings out a lot of emotions in people." As you can see on the video, when challenged by reporters on this ("It's really about him and not about you, about the president and the White House and the things that he's seen go wrong?") Perino went into a death spiral of talking points, almost losing her way in the middle of a meandering sentence.

Late Update (4/3): And President Bush piled on during his press conference today.

Who's that Justice Department official who apologized to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) about providing false testimony to Congress? And which one's taking the Fifth? And which one threatened the fired U.S. attorneys to keep quiet or else?

Well, to complement our still-growing timeline, we've added a U.S. attorney firings scandal section to our reference section if you ever need refreshing on the players. (Answers: Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, DoJ White House liaison Monica Goodling, and McNulty's chief of staff Michael Elston.)

As you can see from the lack of a Karl Rove or Alberto Gonzales entry, we've still got some work to do, but we think you'll find it useful. And as always, please let us know if you find any mistakes or think we've missed something.

I'm not exactly sure what I imagined, but it wasn't this.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a profile yesterday of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the D.C. madam who has threatened to go public with her high-flying clients' names. Apparently Palfrey ran her business from her home in California, where she kept what you might call a low profile:

Palfrey has lived in Vallejo since 1991, when she purchased her house. Neighbors described her as a recluse who kept her blinds closed and came outside only to feed other people's cats...

The only real communication anyone in the neighborhood had with her was when she called the police and fire departments on her next-door neighbor, Michelle Gandley, who had put out tiki lamps for a Hawaiian luau party....

Palfrey's other house is adjacent to a country club and golf course in Escondido and is for sale for $439,000. Her neighbors there also described her as reclusive and unfriendly.

"I don't think she is a people person," said Lois Weldon, who lives nearby.

Look out! It's Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) on a talking point rampage!

Here's a compilation from Hatch's Meet The Press appearance this Sunday, during which the senator, apparently not a TPM reader, repeated more times than I can count that there's "not a shred of evidence" of impropriety in the U.S. attorney firings. And in an impressive reframing, he called Monica Goodling's choice to plead the Fifth Amendment "gutsy."

Readers are encouraged to compile "shreds of evidence" for Sen. Hatch's future reference in the comments.

During the same appearance, Russert asked Hatch whether he would serve as the next attorney general. Hatch seemed shocked at the idea, stuttering and bubbling over with modesty. Somehow, he managed to add that if duty called, “I would serve this country any way I could.”

When asked about Hatch's possible candidacy as AG, Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) responded, "The rumor on the Hill this week was that he was actively running for it." And Leahy noticeably declined to say if Hatch would have an easy time being confirmed by his committee. Here's that video:

Senator Demands Attorney General Clear Iglesias' Name
"Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote Gonzales on Friday demanding that the attorney general clear David Iglesias' name. Schumer's letter came the day after Gonzales' former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, testified before Congress that in hindsight, he would not have recommended Iglesias for dismissal." (USA TODAY)

Read more »

Immediately following Alberto Gonzales' now famous March 13 press conference, during which Gonzales accepted full responsibility for (while expressing total ignorance of) the U.S. attorney firings, the White House said that Gonzales would soon be making the trek to Capitol Hill to explain himself.

The next day, Bush said that he'd talked to Gonzales "about his need to go up to Capitol Hill and make it very clear to members in both political parties why the Justice Department made the decisions it made, making very clear about the facts.” Tony Snow added soon after: "the attorney general, I think, is going to be doing some outreach to members of Congress to explain what went on."

But that outreach never occurred. And when the Senate Judiciary Committee finally scheduled Gonzales' testimony, the two parties agreed on April 17, a full month after Gonzales' press conference. Chairman Pat Leahy says that the committee wanted an earlier date, but Gonzales objected.

That was before Kyle Sampson testified.

Now, the administration has suddenly realized that postponing Gonzales' testimony only feeds the fire. Now, Gonzales can't testify soon enough. Gonzales had a Justice Department official ask for an earlier hearing date. And White House counselor Dan Bartlett hit the airwaves this Sunday to say, "Let's move it up and let's get the facts.... Let's have the attorney general there sooner rather than later."

But the Democrats are just fine with the way things are.

That's because in the meantime, staffers for the House and Senate judiciary committees will be conducting private interviews with seven Justice Department officials involved in the purge. And when Gonzales appears before the committee, senators will be armed with transcripts from those interviews to check the AG's story. Says Leahy: "We're, in effect, interrogating a number of people leading up to it... The 17th is now the time…. It's the date the hearing will take place."

Given Gonzales' penchant for memory lapses, it'll be handy for the senators to know just what he's forgetting.

There has been an assumption that Monica Goodling, the Justice Department's liaison to the White House, is pleading the Fifth simply because of her role in preparing false testimony to Congress. That is, at least, the impression given by her lawyer's letter to the investigating committees.

But this profile in Legal Times shows that Goodling is far from just a mid-level aide who played a peripheral role in the purge. On the contrary, she's very well-connected and apparently one of the main drivers behind the process of selecting U.S. attorneys.

Just look at how Legal Times describes Goodling's role in the interviews to select U.S.A. replacements:

Interviews for U.S. Attorney replacements took place with only a handful of people: David Margolis, the department's top-ranking career official and a 40-plus year veteran; a member of the White House Counsel's Office; the head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys; and Goodling.

Charles Miller, whom Gonzales appointed as interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, interviewed with the panel in the fall of 2005. "They asked me what I'd done to support the president," Miller says. It wasn't a question Miller expected. He told them he'd voted for Bush.

But a former prosecutor who did not get a U.S. Attorney post was left with a sour feeling after his interview in 2006. "Monica was in charge, in essence, of the interview," recalls the former supervisory assistant U.S. Attorney. "I walked out of that room and thought, 'Wow, I've just run into a buzz saw.'"

It can't be surprising, then, that Goodling got her start in national politics in 1999 by working in the Republican National Committee's war room for political opposition research. There, she was working directly underneath Tim Griffin, then the deputy research director of the RNC who bragged that his shop made the bullets in the war against Democrats -- and later the administration's pick to be the U.S. attorney for eastern Arkansas. Goodling, of course, played a key role in helping install her old boss in the spot last year.

But Goodling worked alongside a number of others who went on to hold prominent positions in the Justice Department:

Among Goodling's close associates were Barbara Comstock, head of opposition research for the RNC and later the chief spokeswoman for Ashcroft; Griffin, Comstock's deputy...; and Mark Corallo, who in 2003 took the helm of the Justice Department's Public Affairs Office after Comstock.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Poor Rudy. All he did was choose one crooked guy to run New York City's police force (OK, OK, and then to run the Department of Homeland Security... well, and he also chose Kerik to be his business partner, but that's it), and people just won't let it go.

From The New York Times:

Buffeted once again by bad news about his disgraced former police commissioner [Bernard Kerik], Rudolph W. Giuliani said Saturday that he should have looked more closely into the commissioner’s background and acknowledged that it may cause voters to question his judgment....

“I think I should have done a better job of investigating him, vetting him, however you want to describe that,” Mr. Giuliani said in his first extended public comments on the latest revelations about Mr. Kerik. “It’s my responsibility, and I’ve learned from it,” he said, adding, “I’ll make sure that I do a much better job of checking into people in the future.”

That would ring hollow coming from anyone. But coming from a former U.S. attorney, it sounds profoundly dishonest.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that -- in addition to pleading guilty last year to accepting illegal gifts from a mobbed-up contractor -- Kerik is likely to be charged with several felonies (tax evasion, filing false information to the government, and conspiracy to commit wiretapping) by federal prosecutors. It's not clear if this federal investigation is the same one that was reported to focus on the hundreds of thousands of dollars that disappeared from a nonprofit affiliated with New York City's Department of Corrections when Kerik headed the agency. It's hard to keep track, you know.