Last week Bush made an unprecedented request for the Department of Justice to investigate Ohio voter registrations. Something like this has never been done so close to an election. Well now it looks like the DOJ is ignoring Bush:
The Department of Justice will not require Ohio to disclose the names of voters whose registration applications did not match other government databases, according to two people familiar with discussions between state and federal lawyers.
The decision comes about a week after an unusual request from President Bush asking the department to investigate the matter and roughly two weeks after the Supreme Court dismissed a case involving the flagged registration applications.
For the DOJ to ignore this request shows that they must have some serious questions about it. My guess is that they are worried about the fallout it could create. Bush is on his way out and a lot of officials at the DOJ are looking to their futures. With the possibility of a Democratic controlled government growing greater by the minute, they also realize that congressional investigations will have more merit now, and a DOJ already embroiled in scandal from the U.S. attorney purge, which was a result of bogus voter fraud calls, has to play it very careful here on out.
A lot of discussion has been brewing over the revelation that people like Karl Rove use a email address from the RNC as compared to the whitehouse.gov email address assigned to all employees. The biggest question lies within the possible violation of the presidential records act. CREW has been following this closely:
Washington, DC – In light of e-mails released by the House Judiciary Committee this week in response to the on-going U.S. Attorney firing scandal, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter today to Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), asking for an investigation into whether the White House has violated its mandatory record-keeping obligation under the Presidential Records Act (PRA).
[SNIP]
CREW has learned that to fulfill its statutory obligations under the PRA, the White House email system automatically copies all messages created by staff and sends them to the White House Office of Records Management for archiving. It appears that the White House deliberately bypassed the automatic archiving function of its own email system that was designed to ensure compliance with the PRA.
CREW currently is involved in several lawsuits challenging other improper and illegal record keeping practices of the Bush administration. In this matter, CREW cannot bring a lawsuit challenging the White House on its compliance with the PRA because of a legal precedent that relies on presidents to honor the mandatory record-keeping practices, with no judicial review.
Now Henry Waxman is getting into this debate and has told the White House and RNC not to destroy any emails (via Think Progress):
Bush's biggest problem is he lives in the past. He doesn't realize this great new thing out there called the "internets" and exactly how powerful it is. Take for example when Bush tries to change his story and then lie about what he previously said:
Oops. Well I am sure that hasn't happened before.
Oh well I guess it has. Our President isn't just incompetent - he is a total moron. With someone this out of touch with reality and such an ambition to lie to the American people, don't we require a Congress that will exercise the Constitutional mandate of oversight? Every single American deserves it. Our forefathers deserve it. Our nation deserves it. In 13 days we can change the course in our Nation and hopefully hold Bush accountable for his (in)actions.
Some Republican strategists are increasingly upset with what they consider the overconfidence of President Bush and his senior advisers about the midterm elections November 7-a concern aggravated by the president's news conference this week.
"They aren't even planning for if they lose," says a GOP insider who informally counsels the West Wing. If Democrats win control of the House, as many analysts expect, Republicans predict that Bush's final two years in office will be marked by multiple congressional investigations and gridlock.
"The Bush White House has had no relationship with Congress," said a Bush ally. "Beyond the Democrats, wait till they see how the Republicans-the ones that survive-treat them if they lose next month." GOP insiders are upset by Bush's seeming inability to come up with new ideas or fresh approaches. There is even a heightened sensitivity to the way Bush talks about advisers who served his father.
Of course to those of us that actually think, that is not big news. It would be big news if Bush actually had a plan. Instead his election life is like his war life - a life of denial and no plan.
During the 90s, we constantly read articles about Congress investigating the White House. The most infamous was the investigation of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. That was not the limit of investigations though. Questions got raised into who was on the Clinton’s Christmas card list, who was sending mail to the Clinton’s dog, Clinton getting a haircut in L.A. The list is none stop. When all was said and done, there were over 50 congressional investigations into the Clintons.
So why bring this up now? Clinton left office in 2001, it’s like rehashing old memories that don’t need rehashed. Well that is wrong. They do need rehashing and here is why.
I was spending part of my day reading what the right had to say in their own corner of the blogosphere. After browsing a few sites, I came to Michele Malkin’s blog and her take on the arrest of Claude Allen this week.
As usual, Bush Derangement Syndrome is setting in on the Left and in the media. Gleeful minority conservative-bashing and hysterical accusations of a "cover-up" are already underway.
Of course Malkin is in full Bush defense mode. She is accepting his statement yesterday that he is “shocked and saddened” by the news of the arrest of his former aide. So why doesn’t the left follow Malkin’s lead and do the same?
federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government
surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret
authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.
U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the secret
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John
D. Roberts Jr. late Monday notifying him of his resignation without
providing an explanation.
Two associates familiar with his decision said yesterday that Robertson
privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program
authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have
tainted the FISA court's work.
Robertson, who was appointed to the federal bench in Washington by
President Bill Clinton in 1994 and was later selected by then-Chief Justice
William H. Rehnquist to serve on the FISA court, declined to comment when
reached at his office late yesterday.
Word of Robertson's resignation came as two Senate Republicans yesterday
joined the call for congressional investigations into the National Security
Agency's warrantless interception of telephone calls and e-mails to overseas
locations by U.S. citizens suspected of links to terrorist groups. They
questioned the legality of the operation and the extent to which the White
House kept Congress informed.
