Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales former Chief of Staff, is set to testify under oath tomorrow before the Senate on his role in the rapidly evolving US Attorneys scandal. And wouldn't you know it... the Dept of Justice just happens to have released yet another set of documents! I'll let Paul Kiel over at TPM do the explaining:
On February 23, acting Assistant Attorney General wrote Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and other senators in response to questions about the appointment of Timothy Griffin, a former aide to Rove. In the letter, Hertling stated "The Department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin."But emails subsequently released by the Justice Department showed that wasn't the case. Last December, for example, Sampson wrote in an email that Griffin's appointment was "important to Harriet, Karl, etc." Other emails showed that Rove's deputy had been intimately involved in the effort to get Griffin installed as the U.S. Attorney in Eastern Arkansas.
In a letter accompanying documents sent to Congress today, Hertling admits that the assertion in his letter isn't true, adding, "We sincerely regret any inaccuracy." And to answer questions about who was responsible for that inaccuracy, he accompanied his letter with 202 pages documents "reflecting the preparation and transmittal of the February 23 letter."
Among the documents is a February 8th email from Kyle Sampson providing what ultimately, with a few small revisions, comprised Hertling's letter. And in that email Sampson wrote that Hertling should say, "I am not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the Attorney General's decision to appoint Griffin."
Now, Hertling might not have known of Rove's role in Griffin's selection, but Sampson sure did.
There are three distinct ways in which this is an absolutely crucial moment:
1. It is a felony under US law to knowingly cause another person to make false statements before Congress. Sampson, it is clear from the record, did precisely that. Tomorrow, he will have to explain himself to that very same congress.
2. What was Sampson's motive? To understand that you need look no further than the content of the lie. His goal was to hide the involvement of Karl Rove from the congress. His goal was to hide the involvement of the White House. The key question tomorrow will be why. If USA's serve at the pleasure of the president, USA's can be fired at any time. Nevertheless, he felt the need to lie. What was he trying to hide? Why precisely did Karl Rove want these people fired?
3. On an even broader level, Eve Fairbanks over at TNR reframes the revelations of the past few weeks as the "meta-screw up." Via Kevin Drum, here is the key excerpt of her argument:
So the messed-up FBI is like the messed-up situation in Iraq. Or maybe it's more like that messed-up thing with the U.S. attorneys. Whatever. In the last couple of weeks, even in the minds of the lawmakers tasked with oversight, the administration's scandals and screw-ups have started to blur together into one Meta Screw-Up--a situation in which every procedural safeguard, institutional norm, and carefully designed plan seems to have "just melted into oblivion with this sloppy administration," as Senator Dianne Feinstein put it at the Mueller hearing. The impression that we are, by now, witnessing the unfolding of one giant, undifferentiated scandal is compounded by the sense that this is some kind of watershed moment: The U.S. attorneys affair unleashed last Thursday's complaint that Bush partisans meddled with a Justice Department tobacco prosecution, which unleashed Monday's accusation that the General Services Administration was misused for political ends, and on and on.
Fairbanks goes on to suggest that this is actually a bad thing. The scandal in the FBI over the admitted misuse of national security letters in literally thousands of cases is a scandal, one that deserves far more attention that it is currently getting. On that count, I cannot help but agree.
But in a broader sense, I'm really not sure it matters much. This entire thing is like one giant game of Katamari, where all kinds of unique but related things get picked up and rolled into one gigantic ball. Sadly, this is an unavoidable consequence of the combination of three distinct but mutually reinforcing phenomenon: 6 years of the absence of any congressional oversight; 6 years of a presidential administration that sees governing no different than campaigning; and 6 years of a presidential administration that from day one was determined to dramatically expand, both qualitatively and quantitatively, presidential power. Any two of these three we might have been able to stand; all three together, however, have produced a Katamari of scandal.
Unfortunately, I have to run off now to host a film series here at BU (tonight's film? Control Room), but I'll no doubt be back with much more on this idea over the next 24-48.
Stay tuned...
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