Don't get your hopes up yet. But the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has told the government that it needs to submit an argument for why the court shouldn't disclose rulings from earlier this year on the warrantless surveillance program that prompted the Bush administration to gut the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Ten days ago, the ACLU filed a motion with the secret court seeking the release of two contentious rulings in particular: a January 10 ruling that Alberto Gonzales described as "innovative" enough as to allow the surveillance program to be placed under FISA; and the ruling from the spring that led to the wholesale FISA revision. In a conference call today, Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU disclosed that around lunchtime, the court, in response to the ACLU's "unprecedented request," asked the government to file any objections it has to a disclosure by August 31. Jaffer cautioned the court action doesn't herald actual disclosure, but it shows that the court is taking the ACLU's request seriously.

The workings of the FISA Court have been a black box in the entire affair. It remains hard to understand how the court could be so "innovative" in January with regard to the Terrorist Surveillance Program but so restrictive in the spring. The court's notice today brings us a step closer to finding out how much revision to FISA was really warranted.

The verdict is clear: Alberto Gonzales is the lying-est attorney general in recent history. "I don't trust you," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) told him last month. Ranking member Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) sounded him out for his "lack of credibility." "He tells the half truth, the partial truth and everything but the truth," said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that Gonzales. “He’s one sneaky, lying S.O.B., to put it bluntly" is Rep. David Obey's (D-WI) frank take.

But even though we've been cataloging the troubles, and Gonzales' dwindling credibility, at the Justice Department for the past several months, we hadn't yet done a rundown. So we've collected below what are, as far as we can tell, Gonzales' six most brazen public untruths.

To do this, we were forced to constrain the endeavor. Gonzales' amazingly faulty memory is clearly cause for strong suspicion -- but his countless "I don't recall"s have not yet been proven to be dishonest. And there have been a stream of dubious statements -- such as that he'd never fire a U.S. attorney for political reasons or his insistence that they were fired for "performance" reasons -- countered by weighty circumstantial evidence. But we've set a high bar. Certainly we expect our little list to lengthen in the future as more evidence is produced -- and as Gonzales continues to speak publicly.

We arrived at the six statements below. Some can be judiciously described as lies, i.e. apparently consciously false statements made with the intent to deceive. Some are better described as "wily" prevarications, or as literally true statements made with the intent to deceive or cover up. (I count #2-5 in the former category, #1 and #6 in the latter.)

Yesterday, Sen. Leahy requested that the Justice Department's inspector general investigate five public statements that Gonzales had made -- the same five statements that we chose as #1-5 in our tally. Certainly these statements will play a significant role in impeachment proceedings, should Democrats decide to go that route.

Enjoy:

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Wired's Ryan Singel has a great find in his review of FBI Director Robert Mueller's March 2004 notes on the warrantless-surveillance imbroglio. One of the aides Mueller met with the day Acting Attorney General James Comey likely informed him that he wouldn't reauthorize the surveillance program is Michael A. Fedarcyk, then the chief of the Counterterrorism Division's Communications Exploitation Section. That meeting may shine a light into how information generated from the National Security Agency's surveillance of international communications made its way into domestic terrorism investigations.

The Communications Exploitation Section is where FBI counterterrorism analysts sift through communications of suspected terrorists to determine patterns of communication within the U.S. to discover hidden networks. Singel notes that Fedarcyk's presence at the March 9, 2004 morning meeting with Mueller indicates that his office was involved, somehow, in the NSA surveillance effort: "perhaps only as a receiver of leads from the NSA -- perhaps as a partner in the government's alleged data-mining of U.S. citizens phone and internet usage records."

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Who is the man behind the key scandals erupting in Alaska? It's Bill Allen, former CEO of Veco Corp., of course. But how did he get to be such a political force in the state? The Los Angeles Times take us through Allen's story:

Of all the scandals and investigations, the one that has drawn the most attention here -- and that could lead to a watershed change in Alaska politics -- centers on Allen, a high school dropout from Socorro, N.M., who arrived in Alaska in the 1960s as a welder.

When oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay in 1968, Allen formed the VECO oil-services company with a partner who later left, and then rode the roller-coaster economy of the Alaska oil fields.

Veco filed for bankruptcy in the 1980s, but was saved by (of all things) the Exxon Valdez spill which drenched Prince William Sound with millions of gallons of oil. Veco got the major contract to clean it all up.

Allen had become a big political player in Alaska by then, and his clout only grew over the years. The Times points out that it's hard to pin down Allen's drive, whether its greed or a thirst for political power (or both).

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Former U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias has signed a book deal.

Iglesias, remember, has been at the center of the firings controversy ever since he went public with the revelation that two New Mexico Republicans had pressured him about indicting a state Democrat shortly before the 2006 elections. The book promises to focus on Iglesias' experiences as a U.S. attorney in the Bush administration and his role in the scandal, before and after the firing. It's anticipated to be released in April, 2008.

Also, we hear that the book will spend some time discussing Iglesias' handling of voter fraud cases -- how the administration directed Iglesias' focus on the issue, and how that direction made Iglesias uncomfortable. Remember that Republicans all the way on up to Karl Rove and President Bush were frustrated with Iglesias' failure to indict liberals for alleged instances of voter fraud. Apparently Iglesias was no stranger to such pressure.

John Wiley & Sons is the publisher.

A county body in Florida voted today to send back Rep. Don Young's (R-AK) $10 million earmark. Young rewrote the language in the bill while it was on its way to the President's desk -- after passing both Houses of Congress.

Originally, the $10 million was allocated for an I-75 expansion project in Lee and Collier Counties. But after Young's fast one, the money could only be used for an interchange to Coconut Road. That project is unpopular in the area, but a boon to real estate developer Daniel Aronoff, who held a fundraiser that brought in $40,000 for Young right before the earmark appeared.

This morning, the Lee County Metropolitan Planning Organization voted 10-3 to return the money and ask that it be reallocated for the broader project. It's not clear if that will work. Some experts told me the signed legislation carries the force of law. But, this situation is unprecedented. We'll keep following the saga as it unfolds.

The Naples Daily News first broke that Young was behind the Coconut Road earmark and then how he changed the language. They are blogging the MPO meeting live, here.

One million dollars. That’s how much it cost the Defense Department to ship two 19-cent washers after a South Carolina small supplies shipping company exploited an automated shipping system designed to quickly get supplies to American troops. Charlene Corley, the owner of C&D Distributors LLC, pleaded guilty yesterday to wire fraud and money laundering when she and her late sister Darlene Wooten overcharged the government by over $20 million through a loophole in the automated system. (AP)

Someone doesn't want the government to continue its raids against immigrants: the Census Bureau. The agency is trying to prepare for the 2010 population count, and it worries that the raids will erode what remains of the trust between immigrants and the federal government. (Associated Press)

First there were student loans scandals. Now investigators are looking into study abroad programs. The New York attorney general is looking into allegations that study abroad programs have been unfairly influencing universities to adopt their programs by giving cash incentives and perks to administrators. (NY Times)

Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL) is looking for help with his legal defense fund. Unfortunately, one of the first contributors is Tyng-Lin Yang, a federal contractor whose close relationship with Feeney got both men in trouble when Feeney was a state representative. (Orlando Sentinel)

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What did John Ashcroft really know about the warrantless surveillance program?

According to FBI Director Robert Mueller's notes on the March 10, 2004 visit to Ashcroft's hospital room, Ashcroft told Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales that "strict compartmentalization rules" by the White House prevented him from "obtaining the advice he needed" about the warrantless surveillance program. At first glance, I thought that meant that Ashcroft himself was prevented from knowing certain aspects of the program. Several commenters read it differently, and judged that Ashcroft was complaining that his key advisers were barred from information about the program that would inform Ashcroft about its legality. And today, the Washington Post backs them up, citing anonymous official sources.

This, however, seems like two sides of the same coin. If Ashcroft couldn't consult with senior legal advisers about Program X, the White House was essentially keeping Ashcroft -- and the Justice Department -- in the dark about the legal basis for the surveillance program, expecting him to simply bless the effort without asking too many questions. After all, Ashcroft's tenure showed a consistent deference to presidential prerogative -- most notably, when he warned the Senate about the Patriot Act that "those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists." If Ashcroft couldn't vet the program with his legal advisers, it's an open question about what he really "knew" about its legality. Sure enough, as soon as the program was opened to Ashcroft's deputy, Jim Comey, a longtime U.S. attorney and Justice official, Comey saw a program riddled with legal problems.

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There's no shortage of intrigue over the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance efforts contained in FBI Director Robert Mueller's just-released notes on the March 10, 2004 tussle in John Ashcroft's hospital room between Alberto Gonzales, Andy Card and Jim Comey.

First thing to note. Mueller testified on July 26, contra Gonzales, that the legal dispute between Gonzales and Acting Attorney General Jim Comey that prompted the rush to Ashcroft's hospital room had to do with the program now known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program. (Gonzales insisted on July 24, as he had in testimony last year, that Comey objected to "other intelligence activities," not the TSP.) The surveillance program known as the TSP was but one component of a constellation of surveillance activities, even though Comey and others at the time of the March 2004 controversy considered the whole effort -- authorized under a single 2001 executive order -- to be a unitary enterprise. Now notice that all throughout Mueller's memo, he refers to "program" -- singular.

Secondly, the only non-redacted portion of the notes concerns the Ashcroft hospital visit, which takes up only a scant four paragraphs. Ashcroft -- who, contrary to Gonzales' portrayal, is described in Mueller's notes as "feeble, barely articulate, clearly stressed" -- isn't talking about what happened during the visit. But Mueller reveals something intriguing. According to the FBI director, Ashcroft tells Card and Gonzales that "he was barred from obtaining the advice he needed on the program" -- again, note program, singular -- "by the strict compartmentalization rules of the [White House.]" Now that's cronyism! For the first time, there's the suggestion that even John Ashcroft -- the attorney general of the United States and by all accounts a loyal Bushie -- didn't know all there was to know about the warrantless surveillance efforts. Apparently, Ashcroft wasn't considered trustworthy enough to be kept in the loop on the most legally controversial program of them all -- though his counterpart at the White House, and eventual successor, clearly was.

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Who would have guessed the company that recently swept Ben Stevens off to sea amidst his -- and his father's -- compounding legal woes also happens to be a major federal contractor? Roll Call did.

The younger Stevens took a job aboard a Bering Marine Corp. vessel in hopes of raising some cash to cover his mounting legal expenses. Apparently the consulting fees he earned over the years-- $775,000 from various seafood companies and $240,000 from Veco -- are running out.

Bering Marine is a subsidiary of transportation company Lynden.

Lynden CEO Jim Jansen has had long-standing ties to Ben Stevens. According to Opensecrets.org, Lynden paid Stevens $10,000 to work as a federal lobbyist in 1997.

Additionally, Jansen and Ben Stevens both served on the board of directors of the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, a nonprofit organization created by Ted Stevens to funnel millions in federal dollars to the state’s fishing industry. The FBI and IRS are investigating both Stevens and the members of the AFMB’s board of directors as part of the widening federal probe.

Over the past several years, Lynden companies have secured scores of federal contracts, according to federal records compiled by FedSpending.org. Since 2000, the various companies connected to Lynden and the Jansen family have received at least $312 million in federal funding, much of it coming through contracts with the Department of Defense.

Still no word on when Stevens will be back on land.

During his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last month, FBI Director Robert Mueller revealed that he had kept notes of the infamous encounter between James Comey and Alberto Gonzales over John Ashcroft's hospital bed. Mueller had taken the notes, he said, because the situation was "out of the ordinary."

Well, here they are. They were turned over to the Committee earlier this week and released by Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) today. We'll have analysis of what they tell us in a moment.

Update: Here's Conyers' statement:

“Director Mueller’s notes and recollections concerning the White House visit to the Attorney General’s hospital bed confirm an attempt to goad a sick and heavily medicated Ashcroft to approve the warrantless surveillance program. Particularly disconcerting is the new revelation that the White House sought Mr. Ashcroft’s authorization for the surveillance program, yet refused to let him seek the advice he needed on the program.

“Unfortunately, this heavily redacted document raises far more questions than it answers. We intend to fully investigate this incident and the underlying subject matter that evoked such widespread distress within the Department and the FBI. We will be seeking an unredacted copy of Director Mueller’s notes covering meetings before and after the hospital visit and expect to receive information from several of the individuals mentioned in the document.”

Whatever happened to John Rizzo, the longtime CIA lawyer nominated to become chief CIA counsel? Rizzo, who vetted CIA interrogation guidelines as an agency attorney, got through a contentious June nomination hearing largely by equivocating on whether any detainee in CIA custody was tortured. But his nomination never received a vote from the Senate intelligence committee. And now it's clear why: Ron Wyden (D-OR) is blocking Rizzo from moving through the process.

“I’m going to keep the hold until the detention and interrogation program is on firm footing, both in terms of effectiveness and legality,” said Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. Mr. Wyden said he was troubled that John Rizzo, who is the Central Intelligence Agency’s interim general counsel, did not object to a 2002 memo authorizing interrogation techniques that stop just short of inflicting pain equal to that accompanying organ failure or even death. Mr. Wyden also said he was concerned that an executive order issued last month by Mr. Bush did not clarify legal guidelines regarding detentions and interrogations.

Rizzo said at his confirmation hearing that, even in retrospect, he didn't regret assenting to the Justice Department's infamous "torture memo." (An embarrassed DOJ repudiated the memo in 2004.) It's hard to see how the CIA can salvage this nomination. That would make Rizzo, at the time the agency's acting head lawyer, the only administration official involved with crafting interrogations policy to have his career suffer as a result.

Well, not so bad apparently. Ex-Rep. Bob Ney's (R-OH) former chief of staff Will Heaton was sentenced to two years of probation today for his involvement with Ney and Jack Abramoff.

Apparently the judge was mollified by Heaton's extensive cooperation with investigators -- wearing a wire for conversations with Ney and even passing on documents from Ney's office.

Heaton's youth (he's still a ripe 29) was also a factor. As prosecutors wrote in a recent court filing, Heaton was tapped to be Ney's chief of staff at 24 exactly because he was young and unqualified. "Ney intentionally hired and quickly promoted young, inexperienced staffers - who did not receive any formal ethics training from Congress - so that the staffers would have neither the knowledge nor the maturity to question Ney's conduct," prosecutors wrote. And he kept all those young staffers in line by making sure they knew that if they stepped out of line, they'd be cut off from all the lobbyist freebies.

Most of the major cooperators in the Abramoff investigation (such as Ney's prior chief of staff Neil Volz) have yet to be sentenced, as they continue to cooperate with investigators.

In a letter today, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) asked the Justice Department's inspector general to probe whether Alberto Gonzales has made false or misleading statements. The IG, Glenn Fine, a former prosecutor who's respected by Democrats and Republicans alike, is already engaged in a joint probe with the Department's Office of Professional Responsibility of the U.S. attorney firings and general politicization at the DoJ.

The inspector general has the power to refer matters for a criminal investigation, but Leahy doesn't want him to stop there:

I ask that you review the Attorney General’s testimony and compare it with other testimony and evidence to determine whether his testimony was in any instances intentionally false, misleading, or inappropriate. Consistent with your jurisdiction, please do not limit your inquiry to whether or not the Attorney General has committed any criminal violations. Rather, I ask that you look into whether the Attorney General, in the course of his testimony, engaged in any misconduct, engaged in conduct inappropriate for a cabinet officer and the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, or violated any duty – including the duty set out in federal regulations for government officials to avoid any conduct which gives the appearance of a violation of law or of ethical standard, regardless of whether there is an actual violation of law.

Perjury can be a high bar for prosecutors to reach -- but so too should there be a high standard for the conduct of the attorney general. Leahy's request leaves room for Fine to find that Gonzales statements aren't quite criminal, but that he's shamed the department by being such a shifty and unreliable witness. Such a finding, Democrats can hope, might provide the knockout blow.

We'll have more on Gonzales' trouble with the truth in a little bit.

The letter is below.

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Will Heaton, former aide to Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH), is set to be sentenced today. As we noted last week, Heaton wore a wire to a meeting with Ney that helped the federal government build a case against the incarcerated former lawmaker.

The owner of a recently collapsed Utah mine has a history of skirting safety regulations by leveraging his political contacts. In 2003, the owner met with the district manager for the Mine Safety and Health Administration who was ordering the mine be shut down for repairs. After threatening to have the district manager fired, the owner said, "Mitch McConnell calls me one of the five finest men in America, and last time I checked he was sleeping with your boss," a reference to the fact that McConnell's wife is the Secretary of Labor. (Huffington Post)

Mississippi residents have brought in a huge amount of federal aid targeted for Katrina victims, largely in part because of the political connections of their governor and former RNC chairman Haley Barbour. But the ones who have benefited most from Barbour's legal pilfering? His family members, who have brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in Katrina-related business fundings. (Bloomberg)

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The Justice Department argued yesterday before a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that two class-action lawsuits involving warrantless surveillance needed to be thrown out of court for potentially exposing state secrets. And it practically got laughed out of court.

The two cases, Hepting v. AT&T and al-Haramain v. Bush, both center on aspects of the secret surveillance effort run by the National Security Agency after September 11, 2001. In the former case, an ex-AT&T employee claims that the company illegally provided the government with access to a panoply of subscriber information through a system of communications hubs along the west coast. The latter case involves an al-Qaeda-linked charity that claims to have evidence that it was the target of illegal surveillance.

The Justice Department claims that neither case can go forward without compromising crucial intelligence-gathering materials, and asked the judges to dismiss them. Deputy Solicitor General Gregory G. Garre and DOJ lawyer Thomas M. Bondy didn't find them particularly sympathetic.

"This seems to put us in the 'trust us' category," Judge M. Margaret McKeown said about the government's assertions that its surveillance activities did not violate the law. " 'We don't do it. Trust us. And don't ask us about it.' "

At one point, Garre argued that courts are not the right forum for complaints about government surveillance, and that "other avenues" are available. "What is that? Impeachment?" Pregerson shot back.

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The FBI wants to know why oil services company Veco Corp. won federal contracts worth $170 million to provide the National Science Foundation with polar and arctic research support, despite having no experience in the field, the Anchorage Daily News reports.

Veco won the federal awards right around the time CEO Bill Allen oversaw the remodeling of Stevens' Girdwood home, another field in which Veco had no prior experience.

Stevens, who has long supported NSF arctic research, would have had authority over NSF funding as a senior member of the Senate Commerce Committee, though no evidence has surfaced holding Stevens responsible for directly securing the contracts for Veco.

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The New York Police Department deserves a lot of credit for trying to think through the conditions that turn someone into a jihadist, a task that suffers from lazy assumptions and insufficient empirical rigor. What its report on potential radicalization of U.S. Muslims suggests, though, is that determining patterns of behavior that indicate future terrorism is a frustrating and complex task. As a result, most of what we learn about potential homegrown jihadists is that their pre-radical behavior is... a lot like that of non-jihadists.

Contrary to its billing, the report doesn't identify actual Muslim population clusters in the U.S. that incline toward terrorism. Instead, NYPD intelligence analysts Arvin Bhatt and Mitch Silber try to construct a model, based on prominent European Muslim and U.S. Muslim terrorists and would-be terrorists, that isolates patterns indicating radicalization. They ultimately come up with a four-stage process: pre-radicalization; self-identification with jihadism; indoctrination following exposure to jihadist literature or arguments; and, finally, "jihadization." They usefully point out that most western al-Qaeda adherents aren't responding to directly-experienced deprivation or oppression, but are rather aggrieved middle-class men under the grip of ideology. (You can read the whole report here.)

Each step adequately describes the road taken by the extremists profiled by Bhatt and Silber. But that's largely because the process is itself a generic description of the process of joining any identity-oriented group. al-Qaeda adherents or al-Qaeda-inspired radicals are a maddeningly diverse bunch, extending in background from former high-tech engineers to Mary Kay cosmetics representatives to former metalheads. They can be second-generation U.S. or European Muslims, or converts.

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It wasn't long ago that the White House couldn't find anyone to become its "war czar," a brand-new position created in the spring by President Bush to oversee interagency coordination for Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, the war czar has an apparent under-czar.

Crack TPMmuckraker intern Tanvir Vahora noticed that President Bush announced today that Brigadier General Terry Wolff, a veteran (pdf) of the not-going-so-great U.S. training effort for the Iraqi military, will become Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan Policy Implementation. This is apparently a deputy position to War Czar Douglas Lute, a low-key figure whose most prominent role so far came when he lobbied the Senate in July to defeat Democratic antiwar amendments to the defense authorization bill. Most recently, Lute went on NPR to muse that it might be time to look at reimplementing the draft.

The difference between the two posts? Lute's title is Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan, and he outranks Wolff by two stars. The substantive difference between the two jobs is anyone's guess: neither actually makes policy on the wars, but implementing decisions made by the White House on the wars is the key responsibility of both positions.

If it turns out that Wolff is in fact Lute's replacement -- we've got calls out to the White House to see what exactly the story is, and we'll update you when we hear something -- the war czar job is losing prestige after only two months in existence. If not, don't expect many people to understand what Wolff's actual responsibilities will be, as Lute's aren't entirely clear. In any case, the proliferation of czars will surely lead to a complete turnaround in the war's fortunes.

Update: Just heard from a National Security Council press aide (who wouldn't give his name). Wolff is one of Lute's deputies. Lute hasn't lost his job. And it's still unclear what exactly Wolff's brief is.

Late Update: NSC spokesman Gordon Johndroe explains that Wolff's job will be to make sure that sub-cabinet officials across the interagency process in Washington and Baghdad follow through on Lute's demands to get Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker the resources they need.

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) finally stood up for himself. He called out the Anchorage Daily News for trying to destroy his credibility during an interview with its editorial board last week. Presumably Stevens is upset about coverage of events like the FBI raid of his Girdwood home, which marked the first time in history federal investigators searched a sitting U.S. senator's residence.

Stevens initially threatened to leave the interview when a reporter brought up the ongoing federal investigation, but Stevens did respond to a question about his "ability to be effective in Congress":

A. What about it? You're destroying it. More people are repeating what you're writing in your paper than anything else in the country. This paper has caused me more difficulty, and I've told you that before, than anything else. You've created me as the senator-for-life. You've been hanging me weekly.

You read any paper, the information -- most of it is not true -- started right here. And your guys just yesterday, they taunt me. They taunt me with statements that really no respectable reporter would ask a senator. It was already said I'm not going to answer your questions. They say, don't you have any concerns for your own integrity? Don't you have any conscience? That's what your reporters do to me. ...

I've spent hours here with you here in the past, and I've never seen any result of it at all. ... This paper has done nothing but try to assassinate me.

Yeah Daily News, ease up.

Something of great concern to civil-liberties hawks: the Department of Homeland Security is about to receive expanded access to U.S. intelligence's powerful spy satellites.

The decision, made three months ago by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, places for the first time some of the U.S.'s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials. The move was authorized in a May 25 memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking his department to facilitate access to the spy network on behalf of civilian agencies and law enforcement.

Until now, only a handful of federal civilian agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey, have had access to the most basic spy-satellite imagery, and only for the purpose of scientific and environmental study.

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Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) wants to have a talk with President Bush. Man to man. Subpoena issuer to stonewaller. Just the two of them to work it out.

Leahy made the offer in a letter (pdf) to Bush yesterday (see below). In it, he explains why it's time to chat. "The accumulated evidence" from the U.S. attorney firings investigation, he writes, "shows that the list of those to be fired was compiled based on input from the political ranks in the White House and that the reasons publicly given for these firings were contrived as part of a cover up."

The White House has rebuffed the committee's efforts to speak with Karl Rove at all, based on an assertion of executive privilege -- and though Rove's aides Scott Jennings and Sara Taylor at least showed up to testify, they refused to discuss any internal White House deliberations about the firings. So now Leahy stands ready to issue citations for contempt of Congress to those who've refused to testify (meaning Rove for certain -- it's still unclear whether he'll move to cite Rove's aides).

Standing at the brink, Leahy writes that his colleague Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) has asked him "to write to you directly and suggest that we sit down together to work out our differences. That is the purpose of this letter."

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Here's something that comes to us via very-alert DailyKos diarist drational. The day after Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card ran to John Ashcroft's hospital room to have him overrule acting attorney general James Comey's determination that the administration's warrantless surveillance program was illegal, the White House gave a briefing on the super-secret program to none other than Tom DeLay.

Practically no members of Congress knew about the surveillance. The White House typically limited Congressional notification about the program to the bipartisan political leadership of the House and Senate and the heads of the Congressional intelligence committees -- the so-called Gang of Eight. DeLay, then the top House Republican, has no intelligence experience, and just the day before, at the White House, House Speaker Dennis Hastert received a briefing about the program, making DeLay's presence the next day redundant. The second-ranking House Democrat in 2004, then-whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland, didn't receive a similar briefing.

"It sounds like a political decision on the part of the White House, rather than one driven by legal imperatives or Congressional norms," says Steven Aftergood, an intelligence expert with the Federation of American Scientists. "The obvious speculation is that they judged that they had a political fight on their hands and wanted to enlist him on their side."

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"How many United States attorneys have been asked to resign in the past year?" Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) asked Alberto Gonzales during a January 18th Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Eight months later, she's still asking.

Her latest answer from the Justice Department? We already told you. "We believe that information responsive to Senator Feinstein’s question was provided to the Committee in the course of the staff’s confidential, transcribed interviews of Department officials," Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski wrote to Feinstein in a letter last week.

But if her question was answered, Sen. Feinstein must have missed it. The Justice Department's reply is "wholly unsatisfactory," Feinstein says.

The letter was a follow-up to Feinstein's questions to Gonzales during a hearing last month. When Feinstein asked then whether Gonzales had fired more than the nine U.S. attorneys that are publicly known, Gonzales said, maybe:

"Senator, there may have been others. I would be happy to get back to you with that kind of information about who has left. But I don't know the answer to your question. But I can certainly find out."

And the Justice Department still won't simply tell her how many U.S. attorneys have been fired.

As always, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey provided a stark contrast to the current Department leadership when he testified before Congress in May. Comey freely offered that he'd fired two U.S. attorneys during his tenure -- and then went on to candidly discuss the reasons as much as he could in an open setting. He made it seem so easy.

Not a record to be proud of. The federal government’s crackdown on corrupt contracts for Iraq reconstruction has resulted in a record number of criminal and administrative cases last month, including the $10 million bribery case involving Army Maj. Gen. John Cockerman. Out of the 29 people convicted so far on shady Iraq contracts, seven were convicted in July. Pentagon auditors have questioned at least $4 billion worth of contracts thus far. (USA Today)

The U.S. is preparing to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization due to its support of Iraqi insurgents. True, the U.S. has already labeled Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism, but this new step is certainly an escalation in the heated rhetoric that has been fired between the two nations over the past few months. (NY Times)

A student, not a terrorist. That's what Jose Padilla's lawyer spent yesterday afternoon impressing upon the jury during closing arguments. The case against Padilla is wrapping up, with jury deliberations to begin today. The prosecution's case has largely become one of intent, with the final arguments coming down to the issue of whether or not the man arrested on allegations of plotting a "dirty bomb" attack had demonstratable intentions to attack American citizens. (Boston Globe)

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One of the best defenses the U.S. has against terrorism is the resistance of American Muslims to radicalization. Al-Qaeda can -- and does -- attempt to place sleeper cells inside the U.S., but its resource-intensive task would be made much easier if the nation's Muslims, estimated at between three and six million, embraced Osama bin Laden's contentions of an irreconcilable conflict between the west and "true" Islam. Instead, owing largely to comparative socio-economic opportunity and the U.S.'s high rates of religiosity, U.S. Muslims are overwhelmingly more likely to work with the FBI than with al-Qaeda. But a report set to be released today by the NYPD warns that one of the U.S.'s best defenses against terrorism is in danger of eroding.

As previewed by ABC News, the report warns of over two dozen population "clusters" in the northeastern U.S. "on a path" to terrorism.

In a report to be made public today, New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly concludes the 9/ll attacks were an "anomaly" and the most serious terror threat to the country comes from clusters of "unremarkable" individuals who are on a path that could lead to homegrown terror.

The report by the NYPD intelligence division, "Radicalization in the West and the Homegrown Threat," plots "the trajectory of radicalization" and tracks the path of a non-radicalized individual to an individual with the willingness to commit an act of terror, multiple sources say.

"The threat is real; this is not some bogey man we are creating here. There are individuals who are proselytizing, inciting angry young men to go down this path," said [Rand Corporation terrorism expert Brian] Jenkins, who reviewed and contributed to the NYPD report.

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CQ reports that former-Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) is serving his last term in Congress:

After less than a year as a rank-and-file House member, former Speaker J. Dennis Hastert is expected to call an end to a political career that made him the longest serving Republican Speaker in the history of the House of Representatives.

Several Illinois newspapers, including the Aurora Beacon News and the Chicago Tribune, reported Tuesday that the Illinois Republican has scheduled a Friday announcement on the steps of the Kendall County Courthouse in Yorkville, Ill. While Hastert aides are refusing to discuss what he plans to say, he is expected to announce that he will not run for a 12th term in 2008, according to Republican sources.

There will be some who'll remember Hastert mainly as ex-Majority Leader Tom DeLay's (R-TX) plaything.

But we here at TPMmuckraker prefer to remember him for his even lower moments, such as convening Republican leaders after the Mark Foley scandal broke to get their stories straight for the press. Unfortunately for Hastert, not even that ten-thumbed effort managed to keep the inconsistencies from piling up. Even the toothless ethics committee report on the scandal found that Hastert and others had "willfully" ignored Foley's interest in House pages.

Thanks for the memories!

The AP teamed up with Taxpayers for Common Sense to take a hard look at how Alaska has benefited from earmarks:

More than 2,000 projects worth $7.5 billion have gone to Alaska since 2000, says Taxpayers for Common Sense. Alaska received a little over $1 billion in the 2005 highway bill.

A 2005-2007 study of earmarks by the group showed that Alaska _ ranked 47th in population _ has done far better than other states, when spending is calculated per person. Spending over the three-year period came to $4,311 per person in earmarked projects for Alaskans, while Hawaii was a distant second at $1,812. At the low end were the populous states of Texas, at $98 per person, and New York, $95 per person.

Part of the difference can be explained by Alaska's special needs, with its remote geography, rough terrain and extreme weather. But the clout of Stevens and Young also has played a huge role.

Here are a few of the more, ahem, interesting projects.

Rep. Don Young's (R-AK) ethically and legally questionable $10 million Coconut Road earmark doesn't smell right to the editorial board at the Naples Daily News, the paper that originally broke the story.

From the earmark's mysterious appearance in the 2005 transportation bill for the narrowly tailored project, to the revelation that the allocation came from a far-flung congressman, the editorial board didn't like what it saw.

Now comes the worst smell test failure. A study compiled by a retired veteran of congressional funding practices shows the earmark was changed to specify Coconut Road between the time an overall transportation bill was passed by Congress and later signed by President Bush. Editing solely for style rather than substance is supposed to take place at that stage.

As we reported last week, this is an extremely unusual case.

Rep. Don Young (R-AK) reached out to his constituents yesterday day via a salmon bake where hundreds of Anchorage residents lined up for free food. A few dozen protesters gathered at the event.

Thanks to reader Dennis Zaki of AlaskaReport.com for sending us some photos of the event.

All the while, a small but loud cluster of protesters chanted slogans at Young from a few feet away. Young, standing in front of watermelon slices and hamburger plates, ignored some of the taunts and danced along with others.

"FBI! FBI!" the protesters yelled.

Young smiled and did a little dance, shaking his hips and pumping his arms. "They'll never get the best of me," he said at one point to a supporter who was making his way through the line.

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Overwhelming evidence shows that Alberto Gonzales isn't fit to be attorney general. But despite that, his office continues to accrue important powers. Recently, the FISA bill took oversight powers from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and gave them to the attorney general. And next month, a new rule will come into effect that gives the attorney general new power over state death penalty cases.

In June, former U.S. Attorney for Arizona Paul Charlton testified about the nonchalance with which Gonzales' Justice Department views executing U.S. citizens. Charlton's office had convicted Rios Rico on murder charges, but Charlton did not want to seek the death penalty. His reason: "If a government seeks to take another person's life it should do so on only the best of evidence." The government had not obtained the victim's body, and the Department had refused Charlton's request to cover the cost of exhuming it.

After the Department overruled Charlton, deciding to seek the death penalty, he asked to talk it over with the leadership. He spoke with Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and was subsequently told that McNulty had spent a "significant amount of time" with Gonzales on the issue -- as much as "5 to 10 minutes." When he asked to speak with Gonzales directly, he became an object of ridicule among Gonzales' senior staffers. After Charlton was fired, Department officials cited "insubordination" as one of the chief causes.

So that's how Gonzales has exercised his power over federal inmates. The new rules will give Gonzales new powers over how state death row inmates are able to appeal their convictions.

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The New York Times and others weigh in with the obvious: Karl Rove's departure doesn't change a thing with regard to the Democrats' investigations of him. They'll keep pursuing him, and the White House will keep stonewalling with the same sweeping claims of executive privilege. The only thing that changes is that Rove has got to get himself a lawyer.

As for Rove, he says that he's the Democrats' Moby Dick. Given how well read he is, I'm sure he knows how that novel ends (not well for Captain Ahab). The Democrats, to be sure, would prefer another metaphor.