Smoking Guns in the Bushes of Justice
February 6th, 2009by Glynn Wilson
We have known all along that the smoking gun was hiding somewhere, nestled down in between the cracks of all the ongoing probes of the Bush Justice Department. In fact we have known that there are way more than one smoking gun hiding in the bushes behind the misdeeds of George W. Bush’s White House — and that Karl Rove’s fingerprints are, without a doubt, all over them.
There are a few more smoking guns to chase down before we are through, all of us dedicated to disclosing the worst crimes of the Bush administration, that is, before the cowboys all ride into the sunset back to Texas.
There are still e-mail servers to chase and hidden documents to go after, material no one’s even thought to stick their noses into, yet.
But if you look closely at a couple of largely ignored reports from two of the hardest working investigative reporters digging into these stories, one of the smoking guns is right in front of our faces.
Jason Leopold with his fairly new investigative reporting site The Public Record has unearthed one of the guns, while Wayne Madsen on his proprietary Wayne Madsen Report is handling the smoke (no link available).
Leopold is now reporting that the chief of staff to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Kyle Sampson, has been cooperating with special prosecutor Nora Dannehy by providing “damaging information” on meetings and conversations between Gonzalez and former Bush political adviser Karl Rove showing direct political involvement in the decisions to fire U.S. attorneys around the country.
Sampson is said to have provided Dannehy with an important piece of evidence that bolstered her case against Gonzales: the former Attorney General was aware of and helped create a list of federal prosecutors to fire.
The list is the gun.
Gonzales testified under oath before Congress in April 2007 that he played no role in creating such a list, telling Jeff Sessions, Alabama’s junior Republican senator:
“I have searched my memory. I have no recollection of the meeting…. I don’t remember the contents of this meeting.”
But according to multiple legal sources, Leopold writes:
Sampson is said to have told Dannehy that Gonzales met regularly with White House officials in the Office of Political Affairs, headed by George W. Bush’s former senior adviser Karl Rove, about the identities of the federal prosecutors that should be placed on the list and subsequently fired.
If that turns out to be true, then it’s enough of a smoking gun to bring both Gonzalez and Rove up on charges of a criminal conspiracy. Although there are indications Ms. Dannehy is looking for a way to let them off the hook by dancing around the issue of a direct “intent” to commit a crime, and on whether the firings were indeed specifically intended to thwart public corruption cases.
Before we get to the motivation for why Ms. Dannehy might not want to pursue criminal charges against anybody from the Bush White house, there’s more.
