Bloviation of the day

"I think part of what we've got to do with regard to the global terrorist problem I talked about is for all the forces of civilization, all of our friends and people who love freedom need to understand that this is a battle against freedom and tyranny worldwide, that the good guys need to be on one side."
—Fred Thompson, announcing his candidacy on the Tonight Show (emphasis added).

Query: Will we ever have another president who can speak coherently on any subject? Or one who can at least distinguish concepts like between and against?

The 1,000-year R majority hits some bumps

As Alberto Gonzales nears the end of his career as Attorney General, thanks to his bumbling performance before a Senate committee last week, maybe the focus will shift to the broader issues that got him in so much trouble: the radical politicization of the Department of Justice, along with every other branch of the federal government, in pursuit of long-term Republican dominance. The firing of U.S. Attorneys who resisted the White House's political agenda only revealed a small slice of this agenda, notably Karl Rove's obsession with pursuing spurious "voter fraud" prosecutions as a way of intimidating the political opposition.

In his column for the New York Observer, Joe Conason described the "broader scheme" that was designed to nurture fantasies of a thousand-year Republican majority:

Developed by deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, the President’s top political aide, that scheme was evidently designed to advance his objective of discouraging minority voters and others with the bad habit of supporting Democratic candidates. In Republican parlance, such attempts to hamper registration, intimidate citizens and reduce turnout in targeted communities are lauded as “combating voter fraud.” Several of the fired U.S. Attorneys had angered party operatives, including Mr. Rove, because they had shown so little enthusiasm for trumping up fraud cases against Democrats.

Following the 2004 election, David Iglesias, then serving as the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, set up a task force to investigate Republican allegations of fraud. Those accusations boiled down to a single case where a woman had created a handful of phony registrations. (She did so for financial reasons, rather than out of any desire to manipulate the election.) When Mr. Iglesias declined prosecution for lack of airtight evidence, local Republicans began to demand his replacement with a more pliable and less professional prosecutor—a demand eventually fulfilled by Mr. Rove and President Bush.

The Biskupic case in Wisconsin, as noted in a previous posting, fits the overall pattern nicely:

In Wisconsin, by contrast, U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic prosecuted voter-fraud allegations regardless of merit, winning big headlines when he indicted 14 black Milwaukee residents for casting ballots illegally. Nine of those cases were either tossed out or lost in court—an awful result compared with the normal conviction rate of over 90 percent. But at least the mediocre Mr. Biskupic—whose conviction of a Democratic state official was just overturned on appeal—managed to remain in the good graces of the White House and keep his job.

The Republican cry of “voter fraud” is a specious complaint, amplified by right-wing hacks to conceal the fact that in recent years, the most sustained efforts to interfere with orderly elections and voting rights can be traced to the Republican National Committee.

Harassing minority voters with bogus claims of fraud is a venerable tradition in the G.O.P., as anyone familiar with the career of the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist would know. Back in the early 60’s, when Rehnquist was just another ambitious young lawyer in Arizona, he ran a partisan campaign to confront black and Hispanic voters over their “qualifications.” Along with many of today’s generation of Republican leaders, he was a stalwart of the Goldwater campaign in 1964, which garnered its handful of electoral votes in the South by opposing the Voting Rights Act.

Karl Rove came on the political scene during the Nixon era. Conason notes:

Under his leadership, the G.O.P. has repeatedly been disgraced by conspiracies to diminish voter participation.

In 2002, Republican operatives used a telemarketing firm to illegally jam Democratic phone banks in New Hampshire to win the U.S. Senate seat now held by John Sununu. In 2004, Florida state officials sent armed officers into certain Orlando neighborhoods to scare elderly black registrants, while Republicans sought to challenge minority voters en masse in communities in Kentucky, Nevada, South Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and paid for the destruction of Democratic voter registrations in Nevada and Oregon.

Actual voter fraud of the kind decried in Republican propaganda is rare, according to nonpartisan experts. Although the White House recently rewrote a careful federal study by the Election Assistance Commission to hide that basic fact, it remains true that very few individuals intentionally seek to fabricate a registration or cast an illegal ballot.

Naturally there are exceptions, as Conason is quick to observe, "most notably illustrated by Republican celebrity Ann Coulter:"

When the far-right columnist and television personality registered to vote in Palm Beach, Fla., in 2005, she wrote down the address of her realtor’s office rather than her own home address. She then signed the form, despite its plain warning that falsifying any information on it would make her liable to felony prosecution—and which she, as a lawyer, surely understood. According to Palm Beach County election officials, she also voted in the wrong precinct the following year, disregarding a poll worker who explained her error. (Coulter fans can view her dubious voter-registration form online at www.bradblog.com.) [And a lot more here.]

If proved, those acts would be crimes punishable by prison terms of up to five years, but Ms. Coulter has stonewalled the ongoing investigation. (She says the Palm Beach officials are syphilitic and mentally defective.) No charges have been filed so far, perhaps because her lawyer is a prominent Republican who worked on Bush v. Gore in 2000—and whom the President then appointed as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. He must know a lot about voter fraud.

But now back to Wisconsin and USA Biskupic's humiliating attempt to prosecute Georgia Thompson on corrupation charges.

The three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago has just (April 20th) issued a unanimous 14-page opinion supporting its extraordinary decision to free Thompson on April 5th. She was accused of obtaining a "private benefit" from her decision to award a state contract to a travel agency which had made a political contribution to a (surprise!) Democratic candidate for governer. The court held (on page 13) that "neither an increase in salary for doing what one’s superiors deem a good job, nor an addition to one’s peace of mind, is a 'private benefit' for the purpose of [a federal criminal prosecution]." The opinion concludes:

This prosecution, which led to the conviction and imprisonment of a civil servant for conduct that, as far as this record shows, was designed to pursue the public interest as the employee understood it, may well induce Congress to take another look at the wisdom of enacting ambulatory criminal prohibitions. Haziness designed to avoid loopholes through which bad persons can wriggle can impose high costs on people the statute was not designed to catch.

In the end, the Thompson case demonstrates the effects of combining overly broad federal laws with a zealous prosecutor who has transparent political motives.


PHOTO: Ann Coulter spewing venom at the Republican convention in 2004.

The curious case of Georgia Thompson

Last November— coincidentally, no doubt, just before the election—state purchasing agent Georgia Thompson was sentenced to eighteen months in a Wisconsin federal prison after being convicted of official corruption: namely, steering a lucrative government contract to a company that donated $20,000 to Democratic Governor Jim Doyle for his hard-fought campaign for re-election. The trial judge refused to release Thompson from prison while her appeal to the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago was pending.

In their attack ads, Republicans relied heavily on the fresh Thompson conviction as proof of Doyle's corrupt administration. Nonetheless, Doyle won the election with 53% of the vote.

So far this sounds like a routine white-collar prosecution with a political twist, but on further examination the facts get more interesting:

• The competing bids were close (a "statistical tie"), but Thompson's final decision favored a Wisconsin firm over one that was out-of-state.

• Georgia Thompson was appointed to her position in 2001 by a Republican, and she was sentenced by a Republican appointee to the federal bench.
  

• The U.S. Attorney (USA) in Milwaukee, Steven Biskupic (a Dubya appointee), survived the Justice Department's purge of eight USA's who were deemed insufficiently partisan in their prosecutions of official corruption and "voter fraud" (1) by Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove (as described previously here and here, and all over the net).
  


• Most critically, legally speaking, there was no evidence at trial that Thompson had any knowledge whatsoever of the campaign contribution to Doyle that allegedly motivated her decision.
  

Thompson's conviction demolished her reputation, led to the loss of her job and cost her at least $300,000, mostly in legal fees and lost salary (2).

Faced with the trial record, a three-judge panel (including one Democratic and two Republican appointees) of the 7th Circuit held last week that "no reasonable jury" could have convicted Thompson on the evidence presented. One of the judges told the Assistant USA at the hearing that “it strikes me that your evidence is beyond thin." The written order of the court in Case No. 06-3676 was terse and direct:

"The judgment of conviction is reversed, and the case will be remanded with instructions to enter a judgment of acquittal... Thompson is entitled to immediate release from prison, on her own recognizance. The United States must make arrangements so that she may be released before the close of business today."

It is unclear whether the government will appeal to the full panel of the 7th Circuit.

Appellate courts usually remand cases back to the trial court for further proceedings; they rarely acquit defendants on the spot and order their instant release from prison (after just 26 minutes of oral argument). This extraordinary result came "with a swift, blunt decisiveness almost never seen in the legal system," and "struck a blow to the credibility" of Biskupic and his office.

A Democratic state senator said:

"I think it's right out of the Karl Rove playbook... I never thought I'd see a prosecution like this. That woman is innocent. He's ruined her life."

As Congress investigates the purge of the eight USA's, the prosecution of Thompson presents a larger question: (as noted in a NY Times editorial): "what did the surviving attorneys do to escape the axe?" Is it just a coincidence that only 17.8% of federal prosecutions for official corruption have been directed against Republicans by Bush's Justice Department?

Ordinarily the motivation to prosecute isn't legally relevant if the evidence shows that a crime may have been committed. But the evidence suggests that Thompson may have been "railroaded" based on scant proof of guilt. How many other convictions in federal court are vulnerable to attack because of partisan motives? And how many federal prosecutions were actually blocked for partisan reasons? The scandal in the Justice Department will be playing itself out for the remainder of Bush's interminable presidency.

NOTES

(1) Sure enough, Biskupic led a "joint inquiry" into voter fraud last year that found:

...clear evidence of fraud in the Nov. 2 election in Milwaukee, including more than 200 cases of felons voting illegally and more than 100 people who voted twice, used fake names or false addresses or voted in the name of a dead person.

But even with a reported discrepancy totaling 4,609 in the Milwaukee voter rolls, none of the alleged fraud occurred on a scale that would have affected the statewide election results for governor or president.

Biskupic seems to have a reputation for impartiality, but it remains to be seen whether he was unaffected by the political storms within the Bush/Rove Justice Department.

(2) Gov. Doyle didn't help Thompson's cause by stridently dissociating himself from her after her conviction, saying that he had "zero tolerance for ethical lapses in government." Now he proclaims that she was "a political football" and "an innocent woman who was imprisoned for more than four months just for doing her job." [This analysis has been disputed—see comment below.]

NOTE: A high-quality audio version of the oral argument is online at the 7th Circuit's site. It's easy to see where the court is headed as it takes the case under the briefest "advisement" before issuing its order.

PHOTO: Biskupic speaking at the Federalist Society, the source of many right-wing appointments to the federal bench (including Justices Scalia and Thomas) and prominent conservative attorneys like Kenneth Starr. The NY Times notes that:

...much of the [Society's] influence, and most of the intrigue, flows from an informal social network, which members use to advance one another's causes and careers. Openly and behind the scenes, members have played prominent roles in the most pitched political battles in recent years, including the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the Florida recount fracas in 2000 that led to the election of Mr. Bush.