Newly released emails directly contradicted the claims of Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, that he had not prepared the names of replacement candidates for the eight terminated U.S. attorneys. This raises the . . . MORE . . .

This weekend, BBC reporter Greg Palast quoted a source as stating that Tim Griffin, a Karl Rove protégé whose appointment as U.S. attorney in Little Rock launched the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the target of a pending criminal inquiry relating to vo . . . MORE . . .

“Missouri’s election was ground zero for GOP,” was the headline of a terrific story by Greg Gordon for McClatchy Newspapers: . . . MORE . . .

Alberto Gonzales is still the attorney general, which considering what he’s been through over the last two months is an amazing fact. George Bush, in remarks for a cinco de mayo celebration, labeled him as the “eternal general.” He was caught in a do . . . MORE . . .

Now that the basic pattern has been established—the appointment of politically pliant United States attorneys, who understand that they are to use their powers to advance the interests of the Republican Party, and to follow the cue of the White House . . . MORE . . .

“Which brings us to that troubling question: who can be entrusted with power? Who will guard the guardians themselves?” That was Juvenal’s question put to a proponent of the Socratic notion of the Philosopher-King (Satires 6: 347). . . . MORE . . .

Alberto Gonzales’s prepared remarks, just released to the House Judiciary Committee, contain a strained plea. It’s time for Congress to move on, he says, and stop obsessing about all this criminal conduct by figures at the top of the Justice Departm . . . MORE . . .

Today, in a performance that seems largely a repeat of his Senate appearance, Alberto Gonzales had his say in front of the House Judiciary Committee. It’s hard to see how this appearance could set aside concerns about his leadership; more likely, it . . . MORE . . .

Dahlia Lithwick offers a brilliant analysis of Fredo’s appearance today before the House Judiciary Committee. One interchange really sums the whole thing up: . . . MORE . . .

For the past two months, we’ve seen in various reports how under acting Attorney General Karl Rove, the Department of Justice pressured U.S. attorneys across the country to commence frivolous prosecutions of voting fraud cases. The cases were genera . . . MORE . . .

During his testimony on Thursday, one of the questions to which Gonzales offered the most downright weasely answers was simple: so how many U.S. attorneys were fired as a part of this plan? The initial count was eight. But every week or so we have le . . . MORE . . .

Today the New York Times’s Eric Lipton takes a close look at the role played by Department of Justice White House liaison Monica Goodling and the program to subvert the Hatch Act by building political litmus tests into the hiring process across the b . . . MORE . . .

Vic Gold, whose career in Republican politics got launched with his service as Barry Goldwater’s press secretary, delivers a blistering assessment of the status of the GOP under George W. Bush and Karl Rove before the Cato Institute. A must-watch vid . . . MORE . . .

Anthony Trollope was a very great novelist, a man who in a sense is a far better surveyor of English society in the Victorian Age than Charles Dickens. His works are filled with humor and wisdom and importantly, they never tire the reader. I hardly e . . . MORE . . .

The McClatchy Newspapers report today that in the final weeks before the midterm Congressional elections of November 2006, presidential political advisor Karl Rove orchestrated a large-scale effort to suppress voter turnout among potentially Democra . . . MORE . . .

The New York Times has released a fascinating account of Paul J. McNulty’s internal battles with the White House and Alberto Gonzales and the series of steps leading to his decision to resign. . . . MORE . . .

The reliably Republican editorial page of the Chicago Tribune takes a look at the bubbling cesspool that Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales have made out of the Justice Department. It reaches some inevitable conclusions: . . . MORE . . .

Former senior Justice Department official, now Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal explains in an interview with Time magazine that the late night visit by Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales to the hospital bed of John Ashcroft–described so vividly by . . . MORE . . .

Lieutenant Commander Matthew Diaz has been acquitted on accusations of trying to “aid the enemy” but convicted on counts of passing classified information, reports the Associated Press. He thus emerges as the latest in a long line of military martyrs . . . MORE . . .

Karl Rove protégé Tim Griffin, installed as interim U.S. attorney in Little Rock in the first round of Purgegate, had a term of 120 days, which ran out on April 20, 2007. Guess what? He’s still there. Notwithstanding Alberto Gonzales’s personal assu . . . MORE . . .

The Associated Press and several local Wisconsin papers continue to explore Wisconsin U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic’s ill-fated and highly political prosecution of Wisconsin civil servant Georgia Thompson. The case exploded a little more than a month . . . MORE . . .

The Republican Presidential debate conducted in South Carolina on Tuesday night accomplished what a presidential debate really should: it gave us a deep peek into the soul of the current GOP and the candidates vying for its leadership. Since the arri . . . MORE . . .

Tom Hamburger at the Los Angeles Times does more yeoman work looking into the cashiering of Albuquerque U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. The former role model for “A Few Good Men,” Iglesias says that “There was an illegitimate basis for their effort to . . . MORE . . .

One week ago, following his appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Alberto Gonzales told friends that he had “weathered” the scandal and expected to stay on. That seems laughable at this point, as Congress prepares to vote “no confidence” i . . . MORE . . .

In the last two national elections, a single organization appeared on the scene, spouting all of Karl Rove’s “voting fraud” talking points. It was called the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR for short). It had instant access and appeared every . . . MORE . . .

Marcus Stern and his colleagues Jerry Kammer, Dean Calbreath, and George E. Condon Jr. are the authors of the newly released book, The Wrong Stuff: The Extraordinary Saga of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the Most Corrupt Congressman Ever Caught. The four . . . MORE . . .

Voters in the northern reaches of San Diego, centered around the town of Poway, California, sent Randy “Duke” Cunningham to Congress for a generation. In short order he became one of the most powerful Republicans in the House of Representatives. Cunn . . . MORE . . .

The office of Committee Chair Rep. Henry Waxman announced today that Susan Ralston, a top aide to Presidential advisor Karl Rove long thought to have played a key role in the U.S. attorneys and vote fraud scandals has invoked her Fifth Amendment righ . . . MORE . . .

Kudos to Greg Djerejian, who demonstrates extraordinary care and insight in dissecting the current infantile banter in the rightwing blogosphere on the issue of torture. Given Karl Rove’s decision to use torture as an election issue in two national e . . . MORE . . .

Former Nixon administration counsel to the president John Dean looks at the conduct of Alberto Gonzales from the outset of the Purgegate affair and draws some conclusions: perjury, obstruction of justice, orchestration of a potentially criminal consp . . . MORE . . .

Wednesday was Monica Goodling day in the House Judiciary Committee. After invoking the Fifth Amendment, Monica got immunity in order to facilitate her testimony. In the end, what she put on the record is very unwelcome news for the three men at the t . . . MORE . . .

I previously lamented the failure of the House Judiciary Committee to get into Monica Goodling’s dealings with Rove and Miers. A reader points me to Dan Froomkin’s column: . . . MORE . . .

We are asked to consider providing advice to the new American president who will be sworn in on January 20, 2009. The Bush Administration has pursued a war on terror for over five years. On the basis of its track record, what changes should now be . . . MORE . . .

Yet another senior aide to Karl Rove has resigned in the face of a Congressional subpoena. Sarah M. Taylor, a presidential assistant who works directly under Karl Rove and is widely known as an expert in voting suppression targets directed against mi . . . MORE . . .

One of the telltale signs of the somnolent mainstream media is its inattention to the nation’s fiscal situation. Throughout the Clinton years, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page would raise the siren call of irresponsible spending and excess ta . . . MORE . . .

Tom Heffelfinger, the U.S. Attorney in Minneapolis who was replaced by one of Monica Goodling’s best 30-something friends, Rachel Paulose, has continued to be something of a mystery case. Was he a part of the purge? Or did he just decide to go? Initi . . . MORE . . .

Among the army of columnists that populate the American print world, George Will is my favorite Tory. I use “Tory” in the best sense – in the sense that Samuel Johnson and Dr. Arbuthnot were Tories, for instance. In an English way that lays a proper . . . MORE . . .

Some months ago one of my Alabama relations mentioned that she had been tracking the prosecution of Governor Don Siegelman, a Democrat. “There’s something awfully fishy about this whole prosecution. It just doesn’t smell right. It smells like politi . . . MORE . . .

Something’s rotten in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Heart of Dixie Edition, continued. Seems that the New York Times has now secured the full text of the affidavit which is quoted in the morning edition, and it’s far more explosive than first indicated . . . MORE . . .

The evidence of corruption and misconduct in the U.S. Attorney’s offices in Montgomery and Birmingham related to the prosecution of former Governor Don Siegelman continues to mount. Now Time Magazine joins the New York Times in characterizing the ca . . . MORE . . .

Former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey’s responses to the written questions of the Senate Judiciary Committee have now been submitted, and they contain a number of further bombshells. In general, his testimony and his written responses reflec . . . MORE . . .

The Federalist Society bills itself as “a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order.” It sponsors debates and public information functions at law schools around the country. I have participated in Fede . . . MORE . . .

There’s something dark and unseemly in the Heart of Dixie. The Assistant U.S. Attorney who handled the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman–a matter which has now moved to the front burner of the U.S. Attorneys corruption scandal–has . . . MORE . . .

Karl Rove promised to transform the American political scene for a generation, locking in a majority that would provide a basis for Republican government for decades. But as they say, be careful what you wish for. The latest poll by AP-Ipsos is in a . . . MORE . . .

Notwithstanding the case made for Wordsworth in the current Harper’s, I hold steadfast to the belief that Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the Prometheus of English Romanticism. Moreover, Coleridge is such a vibrant and roguish figure put side-by-side with . . . MORE . . .

On a hill above Birmingham, Alabama stands a statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge, a symbol of the city’s debt to the steel industry around which it grew. Today, however, little steel is forged in Birmingham, but scandals are coming aplenty. . . . MORE . . .

In an op-ed column that appears in today’s Washington Post, the “dean of the Washington press corps,” David Broder, struggles with the trial and sentencing of Scooter Libby. It raises the question: does David Broder belong to the reality-based commu . . . MORE . . .

Michael B. Nifong was the state prosecutor in Durham, North Carolina, who brought and trumpeted rape charges against a group of Duke University lacrosse players. The charges were false, and the decision to hype them to the media was unconscionable. N . . . MORE . . .

I’ve now heard from several sources within the Administration that a significant part of the documents which are being withheld–both by the Department of Justice and the White House–demonstrate Karl Rove’s on-going dabbling in the internal affairs of . . . MORE . . .

It’s Friday after the close for the evening news, just the time every week when we sit and wait for the latest carefully shelved piece of bad news from Bushland to drop from the sky. And today’s headline… . . . MORE . . .

In the frenzied days of the 2006 midterm election, U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic, in hot water with Karl Rove for “not doing enough” to bolster the Republic election effort, brought and hyped a prosecution of Georgia Thompson, a Wisconsin public offic . . . MORE . . .

There is a case south of the Mason-Dixon line that resembles the Thompson case in some respects, except that the prosecutorial misconduct appears if anything more serious and more pervasive. In fact, the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Sie . . . MORE . . .

The White House’s claims concerning the email-habits of Karl Rove and his key associates just get curiouser and curiouser. First we learned that Rove and Company used a large volume of private email accounts with the Republican National Committee to . . . MORE . . .

The Judiciary Committee wants your help in investigating Justice Department misconduct. . . . MORE . . .

At the core of the complex of scandals swirling around the Department of Justice now is a process of Gleichschaltung, namely a careful review of career staff to purge all those considered not sufficiently loyal to the Republican Party and George W. B . . . MORE . . .

Funny, isn’t it? Alberto Gonzales, Hans von Spakovsky, Will Moschella, Brad Schlozman, and now Paul J. McNulty. When they are questioned by Congress about the key decisions that were made to cashier a crop of U.S. attorneys, terminate staffers and h . . . MORE . . .

Deep in southwestern Alabama sits the town of Monroeville. It’s a sleepy place, not of much consequence since the cotton industry gave out. People in America may think they don’t know it. But then, perhaps they do. This town gave America two of its l . . . MORE . . .

My story in the July issue of the magazine details how two beltway lobby shops I approached, on the pretense that I represented a shady London-based energy firm with a stake in Turkmenistan, proposed to whitewash the image of that country’s Stalinist . . . MORE . . .

Our friends at Talking Points Memo have been keeping a watch on the Siegelman affair. Since a Republican lawyer went forward with a sworn affidavit concerning the GOP plot to frame former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman–a plot involving Karl Rove, his . . . MORE . . .

I get a chuckle reading in what passes for newspapers down in Alabama that the “flap” over the conviction of former Governor Don Siegelman is all just so much protesting from “Democrats.” However, the facts are different. No political party in Americ . . . MORE . . .

In a bizarre twist in an increasingly inexplicable case, prosecutors in proceedings in Montgomery today argued to federal district court judge Mark Fuller that former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman should be sentenced to thirty years in prison on acc . . . MORE . . .

Note: Updated August 2, 2007. . . . MORE . . .

United States District Court Judge Mark Fuller has sentenced former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman to a term of over seven years in prison and a fine of $50,000. The sentence was imposed this evening in the Montgomery federal courthouse. . . . MORE . . .

On Thursday, United States District Judge Mark Fuller sentenced former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman to prison for a period of seven years and four months—a sentence of unprecedented harshness and severity. Ruling that appeals had no prospects for s . . . MORE . . .

Out in the Texas hill country, a short drive to the northwest of San Antonio is the town of Boerne—a name picked by German Catholics who emigrated there in the mid-nineteenth century. Those who know the history of those times would hardly be challeng . . . MORE . . .

The immortal Victor Hugo knew the type perfectly. In his great novel of the quest for justice, he gave us the character of Javert—formed from an historical figure, Eugène-François Vidocq, a one-time criminal who rose to the prefecture of police. He i . . . MORE . . .

The current scandal over politicized prosecution had its epicenter in the Land of Enchantment, where a highly regarded young Republican prosecutor, David Iglesias, was ousted for refusing to politically manipulate a prosecution of a Democratic electe . . . MORE . . .

The Washington Post leads this morning with a must-read analytical piece by Peter Baker examining George W. Bush in the seventh year of his presidency. Never in modern American political history (and for these purposes, we can define “modernity” as t . . . MORE . . .

I knew that there was a fair amount of hostility towards the high-end Washington press corps, but until Saturday, when the Los Angeles Times ran my op-ed, I had no idea how deep that hostility ran, and how many people shared it. . . . MORE . . .

Some friends down in Alabama chide me justifiably for failing to note what may be the single most striking editorial run today in the Heart of Dixie. It comes from the pages of what I’ve long considered the best independent paper in Alabama, The Ann . . . MORE . . .

Scooter Libby is not the only confidant of President Bush who is apparently above the law. There’s also Karl Rove. Now Rove serves as a senior presidential advisor and in this capacity he has been given a very high level national security clearance, . . . MORE . . .

Having just posted on the curious ransacking of the office of Siegelman’s attorney, I just want to make clear that I am in no way suggesting that the forces involved with the Siegelman prosecution had anything to do with this or any of the other curi . . . MORE . . .

We can sum up George Bush’s notion of justice by looking at how he has dispensed it over the last six years. There are basically two flavors of justice: one for those who are “with us,” and the other for those who are “against us.” The “us” in this . . . MORE . . .

Noel Hillman (photo) is a federal judge in Camden, New Jersey appointed to the court by President Bush in the spring of 2006. He gathered the support of New Jersey’s two Democratic senators, and his appointment was considered uncontroversial. Hillman . . . MORE . . .