{"id":691,"date":"2003-09-30T10:31:36","date_gmt":"2003-09-30T15:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/691.html"},"modified":"2003-09-30T10:31:36","modified_gmt":"2003-09-30T15:31:36","slug":"criminal-investigation-of-the-white-house-is-now-officially-underway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/criminal-investigation-of-the-white-house-is-now-officially-underway\/","title":{"rendered":"Criminal investigation of the White House is now officially underway"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/articles\/A21389-2003Sep30.html\">The AP is reporting<\/a> this morning that the Justice Department has officially launched a full-blown criminal investigation of the Wilson\/Plame scandal. The White House has been notified of the investigation and White House counsel Al Gonzales has notified the White House staff to &#8220;preserve all materials that might in any way be related to the department&#8217;s investigation.&#8221; As the AP said, this would presumably include telephone logs, emails, and notes. (Josh Marshall <a href=\"http:\/\/talkingpointsmemo.com\/sept0304.html#093003937am\">obtained a copy<\/a> of the Gonzales White House memo.)<\/p>\n<p>This may not be satisfactory. Few can reasonably argue that John Ashcroft is impartial enough to launch an objective and unbiased investigation of his boss&#8217; White House. Ashcroft&#8217;s conflict-of-interest is fairly obvious &#8212; he&#8217;s not only loyal to Bush, but Karl Rove, who may have been involved with the illegal leaks, was a former paid-consultant of Ashcroft.<\/p>\n<p>Today&#8217;s announcement of the criminal investigation is an important step, but this will not silence calls for independent special counsel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The AP is reporting this morning that the Justice Department has officially launched a full-blown criminal investigation of the Wilson\/Plame scandal. The White House has been notified of the investigation and White House counsel Al Gonzales has notified the White House staff to &#8220;preserve all materials that might in any way be related to the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}