I hope readers don’t mind that I do frequent round-ups of purge-related news. I like to offer comprehensive coverage of updates as they’re available, but there’s too much information for individual posts on each.<\/p>\n
There are plenty of gems available this morning.<\/p>\n
* The Politico’s Mike Allen reports<\/a> that the DoJ’s document dump on Monday included “a gap from mid-November to early December in e-mails and other memos, which was a critical period as the White House and Justice Department reviewed, then approved, which U.S. attorneys would be fired while also developing a political and communications strategy for countering any fallout from the firings.”<\/p>\n Josh Marshall added<\/a>: “Shades of Rose Mary Woods? An 18 day<\/i> gap? … The firing calls went out on December 7th. But the original plan was to start placing the calls on November 15th. So those eighteen days are pretty key ones.”<\/p>\n * New questions are popping up in California<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Tuesday she wants answers about the departure of the former U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, who resigned last October before the Justice Department’s dismissal of eight other U.S. attorneys sparked controversy.<\/p>\n “I have questions about Debra Yang’s departure and I can’t answer those questions right at this time,” Feinstein, D-Calif. and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters in response to a question. “Was she asked to resign, and if so, why? We have to ferret that out.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Yang, of course, was overseeing the investigation into Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), then Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Her resignation came “right in the midst<\/a> of the summary firings of several US Attorneys who were either investigating Republicans or failing to investigate Democrats.” United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although we receive our appointments through the political process (I am a Republican who was recommended by Senator Pete Domenici), we are expected to be apolitical once we are in office. I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n * Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.), the third-highest ranking House Republican, became the first GOP lawmaker in the congressional leadership to publicly question Alberto Gonzales’ future<\/a>. Gonzales’ “ability to effectively serve the president and lead the Justice Department is greatly compromised, and he himself should evaluate his ability to serve as attorney general.” Putnam said.<\/p>\n * And in a fascinating catch, when the Justice Department decided to fire Bud Cummins as U.S. Attorney in Arkansas and replace him with Karl Rove-protege Tim Griffin, officials decided to bypass Cummins’ deputy Jane Duke, because Duke was pregnant. In an unexpected twist, that was a problematic decision for a series of reasons, not the least of which is that it may violate the Pregnancy Discrimination Act<\/a>, which states that employers, including the federal government, cannot discriminate on the “basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.”<\/p>\n And the hits just keep on coming….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I hope readers don’t mind that I do frequent round-ups of purge-related news. I like to offer comprehensive coverage of updates as they’re available, but there’s too much information for individual posts on each. There are plenty of gems available this morning. * The Politico’s Mike Allen reports that the DoJ’s document dump on Monday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n* David Iglesias, fired after an impressive tenure as a U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, apparently isn’t going away quietly. He has an op-ed<\/a> in the NYT today, explaining it “seems clear that politics played a role in the ousters.”<\/p>\n