The Loyal Bushies

From Digby:

Today the Washington Post shows that “Brownies” were baked in to the Justice Department all over the place:

About one-third of the nearly four dozen U.S. attorney’s jobs that have changed hands since President Bush began his second term have been filled by the White House and the Justice Department with trusted administration insiders.

[...]

“If we have eight U.S. attorneys dismissed because they were not ‘loyal Bushies,’ then how many of the remaining U.S. attorneys are?” asked Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), borrowing a phrase that Gonzales’s former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, used in an internal e-mail to describe criteria by which prosecutors were chosen to be fired.

Digby comments:

…what were the Pat Robertson’ U grad Goodling’s primary qualifications before joining the Department of Justice? She worked with Barbara Comstock and Timothy Griffin (the US Attorney from Arkansas who Rove pushed through under the patriot act) at the Bush Cheney oppo research department in 2000.

It doesn’t automatically make her a criminal, but it sure stinks of unethical politicization of the Justice Department.

I heard Orrin Hatch filibuster for what seemed like hours this morning on Meet the Press about how there wasn’t a “shred of evidence” that there was any wrongdoing. Well, except for the totally unethical phone calls by Domenichi and Iglesias and the US Attorneys’ publicly stated suspicion that they were let go for partisan political reasons, I suppose not. But they need to lay off the tequila if they actually expect to get the benefit of the doubt about their good intentions after they populated the Justice Department with dirty tricksters in extremely sensitive jobs.

Many of us were told to pipe down when we complained that the Justice Department and the NSA had been involved in spying on Americans with no oversight. But now that we know that Barbara Comstock, Monica Goodling and Tim Griffin, Karl Rove’s personal smear artists, were promoted to the highest reaches of the federal police agencies with access to records on their political opponents and every other American, then it’s clear that we weren’t suspicious enough. At this point, I think we have to assume that with these people in charge and having the use of all the new powers of the Patriot Act, there have been no limits at all on the partisan, political use of the government’s investigative powers.

I am no longer confused about why Monica Goodling took the fifth. I have little doubt that there are many crimes that took place and she’s not taking any chances. This is bigger than the US Attorney scandal.

When you put this together with what Herny Waxman’s Committee on Oversight and Goverment Reform has been uncovering regarding the politicization of the General Services Administration, the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame for political reasons, the FBI’s wanton abuse of National Security Letters, and then you add in the endless war, the profiteering, the torture the rendition, and you can only wonder how far this goes. How deep into the bowels of our government has the Bush administration installed these Loyal Bushies? Will they be like the abandoned Japanese soldiers who finally crawled out of their South Sea island caves years after the end of World War II? Will we have to be rooting them out for generations to come?

This is all just so, so, sickening.

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