*UPDATED*
The latest development in the unfolding US Attorney firing scandal was last night’s 3000-page document dump of White House and DOJ e-mails. At Talking Points Memo (which has lead the way on the purged attorney story), bloggers Josh Marshall and Paul Kiel were trying to figure out how on earth they could troll quickly through so many thousands of pages looking for the few e-mails that mattered.
The two bloggers were bewailing their lack of money and staff when suddenly….it hit them. They didn’t have to examine the documents all by themselves. “Our readers can help.”
The documents are accessible in PDF form at the House Judiciary Committee website. So Marshall and Kiel set up a virtual command post for reporting findings, plus a simple organizational system so that readers wouldn’t duplicate each other’s work.
TPM’s “deputized” bloggers busily doing real-time analysis of the zillions of documents makes for weirdly fascinating reading, as it becomes clearer and clearer that the firings were an attempt to do an end run around checks and balances by firing prosecutors who failed to get with the White House’s program.
(HELPFUL HINT: If you’re the President, you get to appoint all new U.S. attorneys of your liking when you take office, but you don’t get to tell them who, how and when to prosecute after they’re appointed.)
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A NEW SCANDAL?
As the documents continue to go up on the House Judiciary website, a new inquiry has developed about White House and DOJ staffers use of private e-mail accounts. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with having a non-business email address, per se. But when you work for the White House, it is mandated by law that there be a record kept of all your work-related correspondence. Thus if someone happens to discover that you’re carrying on sensitive WH email chats off the official books, so to speak, it raises a flag. This is what Karl Rove deputy, Scott Jennings, did when discussing the replacement of one of the US Attorneys in this e-mail. And, it seems there are other other off-campus emails as well.
Now, of course, the use of the non-WH address for WH biz may simply be a case of absent mindedness. But the fact that the e-mail address was registered to the Republican National Committee, has started the drums beating among bloggers and others.
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UPDATE:
Commenter, Richard LoCicero reminds me that, last week, the LA Times did a very nice little story on Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, and the blogs’ ability to be, in many cases, more nimble than conventional media.
For instance, during the Libby trial, reporters unashamedly cribbed ideas and info from FireDogLake , because Jane Hamsher and her crew had that story, lock, stock and barrel. Reporting from the blog-reading legions is not, of course, limited to the left. It was right-leaning blogger-readers, if you remember, who uncovered—and kept uncovering—60 Minutes II’s shoddy fact-checking of their Bush/Texas Air National Guard memo story.
Celeste, this is an example of Democratic partisan and irresponsible reporting that left-wing journalism professors use to get young students excited about “making a difference” (gag.)
You know as well as I do that this is a hyped non-story, and it is treated quite differently than the truth of Clinton firing all the U.S. Attorneys at once, which was unprecedented although Democratic talking points say that it isn’t.
The best lesson that students can learn from this story is that the press is ignoring its ethical duties to readers and that students would be advised to report stories accurately than to report them to reflect their own political leanings.
Here’s another take from someone who sees the story for what it is:
a scandal invented and nurtured by Democrats, with eager help from the leftist/Democrat media
Celeste you beat me to it. I was going to encourage everyone who reads BEAUTIFUL HORIZONS and is concerned about the US Attorney firings to go over to TPM and join in the “Easter Egg” hunt. As the LAT story on Marshall made clear the combination of muckrakering reporters and an alert readership reporting on local news stories that never make it to the National glare is going to change the way journalism is done. It already had that effect in the Libby trial where traditional reporters admitted they went to FIREDOGLAKE and their crew to get the latest on that trial.
“Change the way journalism is done”…? Isn’t journalism bad enough without making it worse, which is the suggested direction?
I guess nothing is “an issue” unless the press sees that they can use it to hurt Republicans and to help Democrats–even if the press has to use inconsistent standards to do that. The main stream press will always disort issues for the Democrats as long as there are stupid people to believe them–and, we’ll never run out of those, espcially with the state of our public schools.
Why don’t you people analyze how you would view this if it was about the Democrats…and, it just as well could be.
Celeste, stop the double-standard insanity.
Woody,
I’m afraid, we’re never going to agree on this one.
Nothing wrong with hiring all new U.S. attorneys when you come into office. Every president pretty much does it. And they choose folks who fit their administration’s political leaning. What is different with this situation is that a series of attorneys—all already appointed by Bush—appear to have been fired—not for their job performance, but for not toeing the political line. If true, this is an attempt to politicize the the legal process in a way that should be alarming to all of us. Again, it’s a subversion of checks and balances.
Another thing, while there’s a gleeful witch hunt aspect to this, of course, just as there was similar glee with the right-of-center bloggers as they yanked apart the “60 Minutes II” story on Bush’s TANG days. In both cases, the partisan glee, while irritating to the other side, doesn’t make the material and the story uncovered untrue.
This is all good stuff you’re doing here and a great-looking blog on top of the quality content. I’m going to stay out of commenting on commentors, charges of “insanity”, etc. For obvious reasons.
Celeste, truth has to be comprehensive and cover all pertinent information, which this story does not and, thus, it distorts.
The U.S. attorneys are political appointees. On one hand, you excuse Clinton’s mass firing (actually, unlike any previous administration’s) saying that it’s okay to suit an “administration’s political leanings.” Then, you say that Bush’s removal of a few U.S. Attorneys is “an attempt to politicize the legal process….” Either both are “alarming” or neither are.
I sure don’t see how you can excuse Clinton’s one-day firings of everyone over Bush’s later firings of just some of his own appointees. I suppose that you think that a hiring and firing of the U.S. Attorney General is wrong if based on politics–which it is always. You want it both ways to suit you.
And, finally, there is no problem with checks and balances or constitutional law as you claim, except maybe Congressional interference into a President’s hiring for its purely political reasons.
To remind you of one more piece of information from the link that I provided:
The reason for firing these U.S. attorneys seems to be that they were reticent in pursuing criminal investigations and prosecutions of Democrats for voter fraud. It seems to me that somewhere along the line the media would be somewhat interested in those allegations of fraud at the polling place. Ahhhh … but then it’s Democrat voter fraud we’re talking about, isn’t it?
Never mind.
One more thing. Do you know who is running the investigation in the House? California Democrat Linda Sanchez is the chairman of the House subcommittee looking into the matter. Her sister, Loretta, was elected with the help of massive Democrat voter fraud in Orange County, California.
So, the Republicans’ “political leanings” include honest elections. No wonder the Democrats and liberal media oppose them.
If your students need to learn any lessons, it’s that the coverage of this story, whether by CBS, CNN, the NYT, or other left-wing media, is deceitful and fraught with its own brand of politics–which “should be alarming to us all.” Students need to learn that journalists cannot be considered professional until they have a uniform code of ethics, and they don’t. Make that a term project.
P.S. How funny that rlc and you recognize the value of blogs today when the left-wing earlier was attacking blogs for raising stories that we would otherwise never hear, such as uncovering photo-shopped pictures from Beirut and John Kerry’s claims of being in Cambodia, his war wounds, and his on-going efusal to fully open his military records.
At Marc Cooper’s site on a particular post, you and others argued that blogs did not represent journalism in any form. Has that changed, too, to suit the left-wing purpose?
By the way, I really like the “graffiti” thing with your pix…
Celeste, do you have a filter on comments for vile profanity? If not, you might get one based upon your new visitor. Too bad that you cannot filter out serial, left-wing rants.
Hey, as long as good sentence structure and reasonably good grammar is involved, I’m fine with it all.
PS: Thanks, reg. Since that kid-crayon/spray can/graffiti effect is all that my motor coordination and VAIO laptop touch-pad allow, I figure, heck, If You Can’t Fix It, Feature It.
My sentence structure is notoriously awkward…Expletively awkward!!!
Just tell certain people to go Cheney themselves!
Celeste: Hey, as long as good sentence structure and reasonably good grammar is involved, I’m fine with it all.
Lucky for some of you that honesty and logic is not one of Celeste’s requirements for commenting.
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