Bradley J. Schlozman, who temporarily replaced dismissed U.S. attorney Todd P. Graves of Kansas City, Mo., also said that career officials in the department's public integrity section approved the case, in which four former employees of a liberal-leaning group were charged with voter-registration fraud.
Former interim U.S. attorney Bradley J. Schlozman, fourth from left, told a Senate panel that he "did not think it was going to influence the election at all," referring to the indictment of four ex-employees of a liberal-leaning group.
"I did not think it was going to influence the election at all," Schlozman said.
But Graves, who also testified yesterday, said he would have handled the case differently.
"It would have been my understanding that you would not do that," Graves said. ". . . It surprised me that they'd been filed that close to an election."
To suggest that Schlozman who is known more as a political operative than as a prosecutor would not realize how the Republican Party would use the news of the indictments is a reach, to say the least.
5 comments:
There's one thing I don't understand about this whole mess. Bush 41 and Clinton both fired all US Attorneys and no one said a word or talks about it today. Bush fired a few and somehow that's a scandal. Please explain.
I'll explain. The US Attorney position is a political appointment. Every President usually cleans house at the beginning of his Presidency and replaces the exiting attorney with either a) one from his own party, or b) someone who donated or worked heavily to get the President elected. Rarely does a UA Attorney get dismissed prior to the end of a Presidents term. It is a big deal here because these attorneys, these ministers of justice, were dismissed because they would not file charges in cases that purportedly would have furthered the GOP cause. No one was dismissed because of poor performance, on the contrary, they were fired because of their decision to be apolitical in their decsions to indict. And before you wonder where I am on the spectrum-lifelong Republican. But this is wrong-anyway you look at it.
OK, so this is a political appointment and we are upset because the president treats it as a political appointment? I'm not a fan of the administration but this seems like a concocted issue to satisfy the media's desire to smear the president. There are plenty of reasons to question the administration's conduct. Not this.
The US Attorneys scandal is symptomatic of the extent of corruption in the Bush Administration. You're not paying attention to the important details of these revelations, or else you just don't want to know. Up to this point it has also become increasingly clear to me that the Republicans did indeed steal the last two Presidential elections.
A couple of observations that Randy fails to mention in his post:
First, the ACORN employees were indited by way of a Grand Jury (see http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/mow/news2007/davis_carmen.ind.htm) Which means the decision to charge these people were made by a jury of their peers after being presented with the government’s evidence not by way of a lone political operative. And before anyone says it, I have heard the one about grand juries and ham sandwiches but since Randy routinely presents probable cause statements and PA charging documents as proof positive that DWI defendants must be guilty, I would think he should find a grand jury indictment even more compelling.
Second, thus far two of the four have pleaded guilty to the charges and the other cases remain open (see http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/mow/news2007/franklin.ple.htm And http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/mow/news2007/davis_carmen.ple.htm).
Third, the actual U.S. Attorney is generally an administrator and not the person who really investigates or prosecute cases, thus a change in prosecutors does start not stop prosecutions. Again, if you go to the above websites you will see the name of the real prosecutor in these cases and you will also see that the crimes were investigated by the FBI.
A question for Randy, if you think the decision to prosecute voter law violators prior to an election would affect the outcome, what do you think the effect would be if the U.S. Attorney’s Office looked the other way until after the election? Personally, I find it shocking to think that there is some rule in the U.S. Attorney handbook that states that voter registration crimes should be allowed to occur at election time and only dealt with after the election has occurred and the damage has been done.
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