Looking For Criminals In All The Wrong Places

You can always count on the law and order Democrats to devote the taxpayers' time and money to the really important criminal threats. For instance, the Department of Justice recently dismissed all charges against the members of the New Black Panther Party whose only bad act was to show up on election day, armed and angry, to threaten people exercising their most important right--the right to vote.

Since President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder consider this kind of voter intimidation a minor matter, it was decided to devote no more energy to prosecuting and convicting these gentlemen who say they were merely protecting the polls. In fact, these fine upstanding citizens are so important to the Obama post-racial agenda that Holder even ordered the career DOJ prosecutors to drop the cases which had already been won.

So where else might we look for the Obamists to be finding criminals? The latest round seems to be checking out those vicious Nazi cadres of intimidators at the town hall meetings. They must be treasonous criminals because they're questioning the government takeover of, well, everything. They claim to be questioning the costs and methodology of socialized health care, but in reality they are questioning the wisdom of The Chosen One, and that is against the law (someone forgot to tell Holder and his gang of night school law graduates that the Sedition Acts were declared unconstitutional by Chief Justice John Marshall back during the first Adams administration). But since the perpetrators of this attack on the monarch's constitutional authority have not been identified, it's too soon for indictments, although it's likely the Congressional investigations will start some time soon.

And speaking of Congressional investigations, let's jump to the actual subject of this column. The real criminals are finally being outed in the worst act of criminal lawlessness in history--the 2006 firing of eight employment-at-will US Attorneys by their bosses. How dare a President of the United States fire political appointees for political reasons? This requires hundreds, even thousands of hours of investigation and hundreds of thousand of the taxpayers' dollars to remedy. This nefarious act must not go unpunished lest the very foundations of politicized government jobs be endangered. And nothing like it has ever happened before, at least not since the fourteen midnight firings by the Clinton administration.

The New York Times breathlessly reports that "on Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee released thousands of pages of congressional testimony and e-mail messages related to the controversial dismissal of eight US Attorneys by the Bush Administration. Most media coverage of the materials focuses on the role former Bush adviser Karl Rove played in the dismissals,with stories reporting that his participation seems to have been more active than Rove publicly admitted." Aha! Now we've got something to talk about. Rove was more active in doing something perfectly legal than we had originally been misled into believing.

Now understand, we have this information from a most reliable source--the Honorable Congressman John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, who heads the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers is exactly the right man to be looking into these charges, since he has multiple ethics violations of his own (pending, proven and admitted) to guide him. Remembering how successful his fellow Democrats were in convicting Scooter Libby of lying about a non-criminal act, Conyers thinks he's found some even bigger fish to fry.

The Wall Street Journal reports that "it remains far from certain whether the 5,400 pages of e-mails and other documents released Tuesday contain information that would help prosecutors bring criminal charges against Rove or any other former official of the Bush administration." That doesn't stop ethical warrior Conyers. Conyers says he has "sent the material to a special prosecutor, who is investigating the firings on behalf of the Justice Department." See? Congress and the DOJ both have their priorities straight. Since Conyers and Eric Holder don't spend a lot of time reading the law, they don't much care that the firings were perfectly legal.

Here's the case. In 2005, the White House had expressed serious doubts about the abilities and focus of several United States Attorneys, most particularly David C. Iglesias in New Mexico. Iglesias was ultimately fired, along with seven others. All seven held their political appointments at the will of the President, and when they failed to do what he considered to be a good job, he fired them. This is by far more clearly a legal and valid exercise of executive power than was the non-criminal "outing" of non-secret operative Valerie Plame which resulted in the lynching of Scooter Libby.

What triggered the Iglesias firing was that he had been told many times that he was purposely dragging his feet seeking indictments against then-Representative Heather A. Wilson and other Democrats in New Mexico on corruption charges in order to protect them in their tight Congressional races. This was true in all eight firings, and in all but one matter, the charges were ultimately filed and proven. So all eight US Attorneys were fired in a perfectly legal manner for failing to perform their duties. And at the risk of being repetitive, these are not career DOJ positions protected by civil service regulations. These are plum political appointments, meant to enhance political and elective bona fides, and for that honor they are expected at the very least to do an adequate job.

When the Democrats went into high dudgeon over the firings, they followed the same pattern as the Plame investigation. Only this time, they didn't even have the shred of a criminal act to hang their holy hats on. But that didn't prevent them from conducting investigations anyway. Lots of investigations. Lots of testimony. Lots of evidence. All to prove that the Bush administration had perversely done something completely within the law. But if Rove was involved, they reasoned, there must be something we can do to "get him."

So what, you ask, do the Democrats think they can accomplish, besides ruining personal reputations? Ask Scooter Libby. I remind you, 5,400 pages of testimony, e-mails and other evidence. Rove is the real target, but other favorite targets of the Democrats are involved in the year-long firing process, including White House Counsel Harriet Miers. And she already testified that Rove was angry about the inaction from the legal beagles, but could not "recall whether Rove told her specifically that the prosecutor should be fired." Rove remembers it slightly differently. 5,400 pages, conversations, e-mails, over a year in time, and multiple persons involved. But if everybody doesn't remember every detail exactly the same way, or exactly the same way twice, somebody must by lying under oath. Or so Democrat logic goes.

In addition, Iglesias was fired for failing to properly pursue actions against an Obama favorite--ACORN. Iglesias not only sat on those voter fraud cases, but in the case of one of the corruption investigations, blew the prosecution's case by interfering with the work of the career attorneys by prematurely revealing the details of the investigation. Scooter Libby was crucified on the slimmest evidence of wrongdoing simply because he told two slightly different stories (only in the minds of Democrats do poor memories of detailed events over long periods of time comprise perjury). But unlike this case, it's impossible to posit any reason for perjury, let alone actual perjury. There was simply no illegal act which anybody from Rove down would have any reason to lie under oath about.

Conyers has declared that the Committee and the special prosecutor (beholden to Holder) have determined that the documents "show greater White House involvement in the firings than previously known." It really doesn't matter if Bush himself oversaw the whole thing and personally said "fire the son of a bitch!" All perfectly valid, perfectly legal and perfectly constitutional. Ah, but if just one person, under oath, tells a story that isn't 100% consistent with all the others, we're in the fast lane on the Autobahn to Perjury.

As a final note, think about the opening paragraph. What Iglesias was fired for is exactly what the Holder DOJ just repeated, with impunity. Obama-friendly thugs, armed with baseball bats and heavy chains, blocked the entrance to a polling place in order to intimidate anyone who might vote against Obama. No harm, no foul, says Holder. And the concepts of equal justice under law and protection of the best interests of the people both suffer another major blow from the lawless Democrats.