Ashcroft Falling out of Favor?
 

from the NYTimes:

June 30, 2004
WASHINGTON MEMO
Ashcroft, Deft at Taking Heat, Hits a Rocky Patch
By DAVID JOHNSTON
and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

ASHINGTON, June 29 — As the country's chief legal officer, John Ashcroft works at the crossroads between politics and the law, and he is not the first attorney general to take the political heat for his administration's legal reversals. But even by those standards, Mr. Ashcroft seems to have entered a turbulent phase.

After years in which his conservative views and his definition of the proper balance between civil liberties and security needs made him a target for liberal critics, Mr. Ashcroft has recently experienced a series of defeats and missteps that have put him under even more intense scrutiny, and not just from Democrats.

On Monday, the Supreme Court repudiated the administration's contention that the president alone could determine the fate of enemy combatants, in effect slapping down one of Mr. Ashcroft's most important legal positions. And last week the White House disowned a legal opinion drafted by the Justice Department regarding how far interrogators could go in using coercive techniques to wring information from detainees. Mr. Ashcroft's role in the preparation of that legal paper is unclear.

Among well-connected Republicans in Washington, there is some private grumbling that Mr. Ashcroft too often pursues his own agenda rather than that of President Bush. Some Republicans are wondering whether Mr. Ashcroft would be asked to return for a second Bush term if the president is re-elected in November, or whether he would choose not to serve again, perhaps to pursue his own run for the presidency in 2008.

Some Republicans say Mr. Ashcroft has become so polarizing a figure that he can no longer be an effective advocate for administration initiatives, like the drive to renew the expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act. While Mr. Ashcroft remains immensely popular on the right, especially Christian conservatives, he is seen within the administration as also having picked up at least his share of political baggage in leading the Justice Department through the tumultuous changes that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Republicans with ties to the White House said.

Allies of Mr. Ashcroft acknowledged the difficult atmosphere, but said the attorney general was not wilting.

"The last couple of weeks have been a little rough," said Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman. "But he keeps saying, you've got to keep focused, you've got to persevere and keep going."

Mr. Ashcroft, who underwent gall bladder surgery in March, seems, from his combative public appearances, to have fully recovered. Some associates said he has tried to ease his pace slightly, although he still works seven days a week. They say that he has no agenda of his own and that he would be open to staying on the job if Mr. Bush wins re-election and asks him to remain.

Mr. Ashcroft's associates said that the attorney general knew that his embrace of aggressive steps after the terrorist attacks would be polarizing and that his popularity might suffer as he tried to deflect criticism from Mr. Bush over policies attacked by civil liberties groups.

"The role the White House had cut out for Ashcroft even before 9/11 was the role of spear catcher," said an administration official. "It has allowed the president to have the running room he needs to get a lot of policies through. Ashcroft has been amazingly effective, but at great cost to his public persona. It's a role he accepts."

The court decision and the disavowal of the memo on interrogations were only the latest challenges to Mr. Ashcroft's record. At an F.B.I. briefing on May 26, Mr. Ashcroft said intelligence reports indicated that Al Qaeda was close to launching a major attack against the United States. "This disturbing intelligence indicates Al Qaeda's specific intention to hit the United States hard," he warned. "Beyond this intelligence, Al Qaeda's own public statements indicate that it is almost ready to attack the United States."

The announcement appeared to surprise the rest of the government, including the Homeland Security Department, where officials said they saw nothing in the threat reporting that warranted increasing the threat level.

In April, the White House, in an unusually public criticism of a cabinet officer, complained after the Justice Department posted on its Web site declassified documents that seemed to attack a member of the independent commission investigating the September 2001 attacks one day before Mr. Bush was interviewed by the commission.

The documents showed that Jamie Gorelick, a commission member, signed a memo in 1995, when she was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, endorsing a separation of intelligence and law enforcement functions. Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said at a news briefing that Mr. Bush told the commission that he expressed disapproval about the release of the memo.

Mr. Ashcroft has never been especially close to Mr. Bush, certainly not in the way that Robert F. Kennedy was to his brother or even that Edwin Meese III was to President Ronald Reagan. If Mr. Bush is unhappy with Mr. Ashcroft, he would not be the first president seeking a second term to think about other options. President Bill Clinton, angry over Janet Reno's appointments of independent prosecutors, made her wait for more than a month after his re-election before giving her a second term.

It did not escape the notice of career lawyers at the Justice Department last month that when Mr. Bush gave a speech in Buffalo on the Patriot Act, he was accompanied on stage not by Mr. Ashcroft, who did not make the trip, but by Larry Thompson, the former deputy attorney general. In an aside during his presentation, Mr. Bush seemed to send a signal that Mr. Thompson, who stepped down last year after two years under Mr. Ashcroft, could be a contender for Mr. Ashcroft's job.

"Larry, we miss you over there," Mr. Bush said, "and don't get too comfortable."

:lol: :lol: :lol:

He couldn't even beat a dead man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

He's already a laughing stock, he wouldn't want to take it any further. He's a racist who got promoted from being a regular member of the Klan to being head of the Klan's legal team.

I wish he would've won that Senate seat. He'd be a lot more harmless there than as AG.

You wouldn't say that if he was your Senator. ;) :lol:

I never knew...
 

Ass-crack ever was in "in favor" to begin with. :lol: :laugh: :lol:

:laugh: :laugh: Possibly.

When I saw the title of this thread, I thought, "falling out of favor with whom?" :lol:

To expand on what...
 

George Carlin said back during the first Gulf war:

With A Bush ("W"), A Dick (Cheney) and a Colon (Powell)...Add to it Ass-crack (Ashcroft) and it definitely sounds like someone is gonna get screwed!!!

I just want to point out once again, because it's fun, that Asscroft lost an election to a dead man.

Hey, hold on--I LIVE in Missouri; don't do that to us!!!!!!!!! :laugh:

Patti

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?...articleId=8073

Exclusive: The Attorney General received numerous briefings last year on the Plame case: "Whatever the FBI knew, [he] was able to know within days if he wanted to."
By Murray S. Waas
Web Exclusive: 07.08.04


Attorney General John Ashcroft received numerous detailed briefings last year regarding the criminal investigation of the unauthorized disclosure of a CIA agent's identity, during which he was told specific information relating to the potential culpability of several close political associates in the Bush administration, according to senior federal law-enforcement sources.

Among other things, the sources said, Ashcroft was provided extensive details of an FBI interview of Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's chief political advisor. The two men have enjoyed a close relationship ever since Rove advised the Attorney General during the course of three of Ashcroft's political campaigns.

The briefings for Ashcroft were conducted by Christopher Wray, a political appointee in charge of the Justice Department's criminal division, and John Dion, a 30-year career prosecutor who was in charge of the investigation at the time. Neither Wray nor Dion returned phone calls seeking comment for this story.

The briefings raise questions about the appropriateness of Ashcroft's involvement in the investigation, especially given his longstanding ties to Rove. Senior federal law-enforcement officials have expressed serious concerns among themselves that Ashcroft spent months overseeing the probe and receiving regular briefings regarding a criminal investigation in which the stakes were so high for the Attorney General's personal friends, political allies, and political party. One told me, "Attorneys General and U.S. Attorneys in the past traditionally recused for far less than this."

One senior federal law-enforcement official said that there appeared to be no restrictions regarding the extent of information provided Ashcroft: "Whatever the FBI knew, the Attorney General was able to know within days if he wanted to."

Rove's interview with the FBI was highly significant, sources said, in that although Rove adamantly denied having leaked the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame, he admitted to having disseminated the information -- after it appeared in the news media -- to journalists, political activists, and other administration officials in an attempt to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. At the time, Wilson was raising questions about the veracity of intelligence information used by President Bush in making the case to go to war with Iraq. Rove, through an assistant, declined to comment for this story.

In addition, sources said, Ashcroft received a briefing regarding copious notes maintained by I. Lewis Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. The notes, later turned over to investigators, detailed the inner workings of the White House Iraq Group. The ad hoc group was set up by senior administration officials to devise strategies to win over U.S. and international public opinion to support going to war with Iraq. Besides Libby, other regular key participants included Rove; Nicholas E. Calio, who was at the time the White House legislative liaison; and Deputy National Security Council Advisor Stephen J. Hadley.

Some of those notes described efforts to discredit Wilson by the White House Iraq Group, including Rove, in July of last year as the group was struggling to counter Wilson's allegations that the White House had exaggerated the potential nuclear threat posed by Saddam Hussein to the United States. It was during that time that two senior administration officials leaked information to columnist Robert Novak that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert CIA operative.

A federal law-enforcement official said that "there was serious discussion at the highest levels of the Justice Department" as to whether it was "proper" or a "good idea" for Ashcroft to receive briefings not only regarding what Rove had told the FBI, but also what other evidence existed, such as Libby's notes, that might corroborate or contradict Rove's account.

The briefings for Ashcroft abruptly came to a halt last December, several officials said in interviews, when Ashcroft, bowing to political pressure from congressional Democrats and responding to concerns raised by career Justice Department officials, named a special counsel to take over the Plame investigation.

The special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is also the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, was tasked to determine whether any Bush administration officials violated federal law in disclosing that Plame was a covert CIA officer to columnist Novak.

A recent flurry of activity by Fitzgerald has fueled speculation that the prosecutor is completing his work, either to bring criminal charges or close out his probe without seeking any criminal charges. On June 24, President Bush was interviewed in the Oval Office for more than an hour by Fitzgerald and several members of his staff. Vice President Cheney had earlier been interviewed at length by investigators. And on June 18, White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzalez testified for more than an hour before a federal grand jury empanelled to hear evidence in the case.

Despite these developments, Fitzgerald's intentions currently remain one of the most tightly held secrets in Washington. There have been scant leaks to the media as to the findings of his investigation so far, and senior White House officials are reeling from the implication that they know nothing more than rank speculation about a highly charged criminal investigation during an election year. In my article that appeared on Alternet.org first disclosing that Ashcroft was being briefed about the Plame investigation, Mark Corallo, the director of public affairs at the Justice Department, confirmed Ashcroft had received "status updates" regarding the probe from John Dion, a career Justice Department prosecutor. Corallo defended the briefings at the time, telling me: "The attorney general wants this to be investigated thoroughly and promptly, and to that end, he wants to be informed of the progress of investigators."

In a routine appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee last October, Wray, the head of the Justice Department's criminal division, also confirmed that he had briefed Ashcroft regarding details of the Plame investigation. But during that appearance, Wray denied that Ashcroft's failure to recuse himself was compromising the integrity of investigators.

"I can assure you that it has been made painfully clear to everyone involved that no punches are to be pulled in this investigation and that anybody who thinks that we are going to be pulling any punches in this investigation doesn't know the lawyers and the agents working on the investigation very well," Wray told the committee.

Among those expressing such concerns in private, sources said, was James B. Comey, the Deputy Attorney General. The sources said that Comey pressed his own view and that of other senior Justice Department officials -- that Ashcroft should recuse himself and name a special counsel to take over the probe entirely -- during private discussions with Ashcroft last winter, when Comey was new to his position, the sources said.

In describing the pressure that Ashcroft recuse himself and name a special counsel to take over the probe, one senior official said: "He [Ashcroft] wasn't shoved. And it is probably too strong to say he was pushed. But he was strongly prodded to do what he did. There were respectful discussions. He was provided with some strong recommendations. We should leave it at that."

In announcing the appointment of a special counsel to take over the Plame case last December 30, however, Comey portrayed the decision to name an independent counsel as one made by Ashcroft: "The attorney general, in an abundance of caution, believed that his recusal was appropriate based on the totality of circumstances and the facts and evidence developed at this stage of the investigation. I agree with that judgment."