alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

March 5, 2007

The Wilson Scandal

by AltHippo @ 12:51 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Isn’t it strange to be reporting on a scandal not involving Joe but Heather Wilson?

Since the coverage at TPM has been so good, one wonders how you can add anything to it.

And in this story you do get a bit of the flip side of the usual story of the blogs. The conventional wisdom is that blogs take stories that you see in your favorite newspaper and then add their own kind of color commentary. Here, you have a case where Josh Marshall has been nudging the story along over the last week, and finally the big papers are picking up on it.

As an example, we have this story on the front page of tomorrow’s Washington Post, my home town paper.

And before saying anything more, it’s important to point out that this isn’t a Republicans bad/Democrats good story. This is about abusing a position of power. I don’t care what your political persuasion is, the idea that someone would use their elected office to stifle or promote corruption investigations is contrary to the notion of democracy.

The four star example of this is Duke Cunningham, who actually had a cheat sheet that he used to figure out which bribe got someone which favor. I think we can come together as a country, both Republican and Democrat, and say this is a bad idea. I think we also agree that when the prosecutor of Duke Cunningham’s crimes gets fired, then something is up.

My question is of the “who” variety. Who came up with idea to fire some set of US Attorneys, and how did they come up with who should get let go?

While I’m drawn to Karl Rove as the ultimate answer to these questions, the record thus far points to people under AG Gonzales. Here’s what Newsweek says:

The decision to fire the U.S. attorneys en masse was made late last year by two top aides to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales—chief of staff Kyle Sampson and deputy A.G. Paul McNulty—according to a senior department official who asked not to be identified talking about personnel.

Here’s what just doesn’t sound right to me. Two assistants to the AG go to him and say: We’ve been taking a look at the US Attorneys around the country, and we’d like to get rid of say, a dozen of them for round numbers. Yes, they have very positive reviews, and as far as we can tell, they’re good prosecutors. We just recommend purging the lot of them.

People at a higher level would need to have been involved.

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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