Iglesias: We Were Summer Help With Law Degrees-Moved About By Rove's Quest-Permanent Repub Control

[kpete]

Out of Bounds
Friday 13 June 2008
by: David Iglesias, Slate.com


..........The current administration seems to have an abundant supply of crash-test dummies that must exist merely for the joy of smashing into things. The assertion of executive privilege looks to be no more and no less than a collision staged to illustrate the infinite reach of this administration's claims to secrecy.

On June 28, 2007, President Bush asserted executive privilege when Congress sought the production of documents from Harriet Miers and former political director Sara Taylor in connection to the U.S. attorney scandal. In shielding those documents, the administration gravely intoned that the president needed to "... receive candid and unfettered advice." That much I agree with, of course. The problem is that President Bush had already stated publicly that he personally had nothing to do with the firing of my former U.S. attorney colleagues and me. The Nixon decision rightly found that Congress shouldn't be able to force presidential aides to report on the advice they gave to the president, especially about diplomatic or military secrets. The Bush administration stretched that privilege like cheap spandex in an attempt to have it cover "free and open discussions and deliberations that occur among his advisors and between those advisors and others within and outside the Executive Branch."

Wait a minute. So now, the qualified privilege carved out in the Nixon decision is supposed to cover discussions among advisers that never even speak to the president, and then beyond that to cover even "others ... outside the Executive Branch"? If the president calls his old college buddy at ExxonMobil for a little advice on gasoline prices, the advice he receives is privileged? And if his secretary's secretary calls the same guy, that advice is privileged as well? In fact, the number of conversations both inside and outside the White House that are not covered by such a privilege starts looking awfully close to zero.

Since when did executive privilege cover nondiplomatic and nonmilitary secrets involving advice given by nongovernmental advisers? I'd call this executive privilege on steroids, or maybe even executive carte blanche. Then again, if you subscribe to the unitary executive theory, then the executive branch is always first among equals. The Bush administration last summer claimed executive privilege no less than four separate times in about a one-month period. If that's not a record, I'll offer to clean Bob Woodward's office for free. I wonder if the administration would claim it if Congress asked for a list of the temperature readings in the Rose Garden?

In my new book, In Justice, I argue that "... to the Gonzales Justice Department, U.S. Attorneys were mere political appointees, not impartial and nonpolitical agents of justice to be protected from the capricious winds of Capitol Hill. It was as if we were mere summer help with law degrees to be moved about the appointment chessboard by the likes of Karl Rove as he sought the Holy Grail of a permanent Republican majority in government." The matter of who moved those chess pieces around, probably just for political advantage, is neither a military secret nor a diplomatic one. It's just an embarrassment.

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David Iglesias was appointed by President George W. Bush to be the US Attorney for the District of New Mexico. He served between 2001 and 2007. His book "In Justice" went on sale in June.

more at:
http://www.truthout.org/article/out-bounds

[truedelphi]

1. Rove and other officials mangled the DOJ

Such that no longer could people make serious complaints about election violations to the proper authority, i.e. the FBI.

Thus election violations went unreported and the officials involved in malfeasance are still in place for 2008!!