Bad Deeds for 3-26-07

GSA Chief Accused of Using Agency to Aid GOP – Witnesses have told congressional investigators that Lurita Doan, the Bush-appointed chief of the General Services Administration, joined in a videoconference earlier this year organized by one of Karl Rove’s deputies, during which she asked how GSA officials could help “our candidates” in the next election. Doan – who is under investigation by the GSA’s Office of Inspector General and the independent federal Office of Special Counsel – will testify this week before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, where she is also expected to face questions about her attempt last summer to give a no-bid job to a friend.

Ex-Prosecutor Says He Faced Partisan Questions Before Firing – John McKay of Washington state, one of the eight former U.S. attorneys fired by the Bush administration, said yesterday that White House officials questioned his performance in highly partisan political terms at a meeting in Washington in September, three months before his dismissal. According to McKay, White House counsel Harriet Miers “asked me why Republicans in the state of Washington would be angry with me,” an apparent reference to McKay’s decision two years earlier – backed by the FBI’s office in Seattle – not to pursue voter fraud charges that could have undermined a Democratic victory in a closely fought gubernatorial race.

Despite historical facts, John Bolton says Bush never said Saddam Hussein was an ‘imminent threat’ – Last week on The Daily Show, former Bush appointee to Ambassador the United Nations showed that he didn’t know the historical facts about the Lincoln administration. This past Sunday, on CNN’s Late Edition on Sunday, John Bolton showed he doesn’t know the historical facts about the Bush administration. Bolton said, “The president never made the argument that he [Saddam Hussein] constituted an imminent threat.” However, on several occasions, administration officials have used the term “imminent threat” to describe Iraq in the run up to the war. On March 16, 2003, President Bush said, “This is about imminent threat.” “This is about imminent threat,” said then-White House spokesman Scott McClellan on February 10, 2003. “When did the attack on September 11 become an imminent threat? Now, transport yourself forward a year, two years or a week or a month…So the question is, when is it such an immediate threat that you must do something?” was Donald Rumsfeld’s message in November 2002, implying that Iraq would need to attack the US to become more of an immediate threat than it was. Vice President Dick Cheney in August 2002 used the similar term “mortal threat” saying, “What we must not do in the face of this mortal threat is to give in to wishful thinking or to willful blindness.”

New York police spied broadly before 2004 GOP convention – For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews. Records show that in hundreds of files labeled “NYPD Secret,” the NYPD intelligence operations chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law. The files included members of church and anti-war groups, environmentalists, and even three New York City elected officials.

Regards,

Jim