Mary Beth Buchanan, A U.S. Attorney That Just Won’t Quit

[caption id="attachment_28357" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Mary Beth Buchanan -- 'I am open to considering further service to the United States.' (Bob Donaldson/Post-Gazette)"][/caption] Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, has announced that she will forgo the customary courtesy of handing in her resignation when President Obama takes offices, saying "It doesn't serve justice for all the U.S. ...

TPM Wins Journalism Prize

Whilst perusing Talking Points Memo earlier, I noted that Josh Marshall and company had won the George Polk award. Having never heard of said prize and casually presuming that it was in some sort of blog-specific category, I didn't bother to click through. Will Bunch's post, "A landmark day for bloggers -- and the future of journalism," highlighted at ...

Mukasey Next Attorney General

Michael Mukasey, a respected retired judge without close ties to the Bush Administration, will be nominated as the next Attorney General. Barring some dramatic revelation, he's expected to sail to easy confirmation. President Bush has decided to nominate Michael B. Mukasey, a former federal judge from New York who has presided over some high-profile terrorism trials, as his next attorney ...

Gonzales Resigns as Attorney General

Reuters Breaking News: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has resigned from office, an official confirmed on Monday. The Justice Department refused to comment on Gonzales' departure but has scheduled a press conference for 10:30 a.m. EDT. Good news, if long overdue. Oddly, President Bush not only didn't push this move on Gonzales but apparently tried to talk him out of it, at ...

The Real Crime is What’s Legal

Congressmen running for re-election routinely tout all the money they've brought to the district and presidents love to personally hand out disaster relief funds during election season. While unseemly, that's just the way the game is played. Marisa Taylor and Kevin Hall report that something a little more fishy has been going on, though, in recent years: Top Commerce ...

Gonzales Could Become Chief Executioner

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is about to be

Specter Says Gonzales a ‘Wily Witness’

Arlen Specter says that Alberto Gonzales was intentionally misleading in his testimony before the Senate on the U.S. Attorney firings but that he was merely a "wily witness" rather than a perjurer. TPM's Paul Kiel has details: Reading from a Supreme Court opinion on the statute of perjury, which said that a witness cannot be convicted of perjury simply because he ...

Gonzales Target of Perjury Probe

As the sorry spectacle of the investigation into the firing of a dozen U.S. Attorneys for political purposes has unfolded, it's been rather clear that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been both an incompetent administrator of his Department and a really bad liar, doing a lousy job of covering up something that almost surely didn't need to be covered up. ...

Bush Won’t Enforce Contempt of Congress

The Bush Administration announced yesterday it will ignore demands from Congress to issue contempt indictments for officials the president has ordered not to testify. Dan Eggen and Amy Goldstein report on the front page of today's WaPo: Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that ...

Siegelman and Selective Prosecution

A NYT editorial calls for an investigation into the successful prosecution of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman. It is extremely disturbing that Don Siegelman, the former governor of Alabama, was hauled off to jail this week. There is reason to believe his prosecution may have been a political hit, intended to take out the state’s most prominent Democrat, a serious ...

More on the USAs and the Voter Fraud Question

Cross-posted from PoliBlog: Via the LAT, Minnesota case fits pattern in U.S. attorneys flap:A hint at why Heffelfinger's name was on termination lists that Justice Department officials and Bush political strategists put together emerged when Monica M. Goodling, the department's former White House liaison, testified last week before the House Judiciary Committee about the firings. Goodling said she had heard Heffelfinger criticized ...

2004 Washington Governor Election Redux

Stefan Sharkansky (via Patrick Frey via Pejman Yousefzadeh) has some rather persuasive evidence that John McKay, the recently fired U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, did an amazingly sloppy job of investigating allegations of . . . wait for it . . . voter fraud in the 2004 Washington governor's race that was decided by 133 votes. ...

Monica Goodling, Politics, and Adult Supervision

Steven Taylor has two posts (here and here) on the revelations from yesterday's testimony by former DoJ official Monica Goodling. Aside from the obvious points about how it would be nice to have the people in charge of enforcing federal laws actually obey those laws, he makes a point many seem to miss: I remember during the Clinton administration an ongoing ...

Bush Pleased With Gonzales Performance

President Bush has issued a statement praising Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' performance before the Senate yesterday, saying he was "pleased" and that it "showed that nothing improper occurred." Given the formal nature of the release, he stopped short of saying, "Gonzie, you did a heck of a job." I missed the hearings yesterday but, from what I gather, the president ...

Gonzales Hearings Today

Via the AP: Gonzales to Appear Before Senate PanelAttorney General Alberto Gonzales was to be summoned to a Capitol Hill showdown Thursday as he fights to save his job in the face of calls for his ouster over the bungled firings of eight U.S. attorneys that Democrats say were driven by party politics. The Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled a daylong hearing ...