“White House Says It Hopes Attorney General Gonzales Survives Calls for His Resignation,” and remains in President Bush’s cabinet. “When asked if Gonzales will serve for the rest of President Bush’s term, White House press secretary Tony Snow said, ‘Well, we hope so.'” What do you mean, we hope so? They hope he’ll stay? It’s up to him? (sigh) I don’t know. I was talking about this last night with a friend. I just remain mystified over this White House’s refusal to fight back on any of this stuff. There has to be a reason, and the reason cannot be that they don’t understand that they are being targeted for destruction. They have to know that. It cannot be that they are relying on some miracle down the road to pop up and embarrass all these critics. (If it’s that, Lord help us.) There has to be an active policy and philosophy that says, “We’re not going to respond to this. We’re not going to fight it, and we’re not going to get down in the mud with the people leveling these charges. We’re just going to give these people what they want. We’re going to act embarrassed. We’re going to act like we got caught.”
It is really inexplicable to me.
Some might say that the president has never been partisan because he believes that being partisan is beneath the dignity of the office and he’s just not going to do it. Well, okay. Fine and dandy. But why does that mean when they want Rumsfeld’s scalp, you give them Rumsfeld’s scalp? Why does that mean when they want somebody else’s scalp you give them that scalp? I’m telling you, it’s beyond explanation to me. I just don’t have an answer. I have thought of every possibility out there. It’s not just the president. Nobody within the administration reacts to this stuff in an instinctive or visceral way the way all of us do, the way all of us would if it were us that were being targeted for destruction.
Make no bones about this: I keep saying that the objective here of the Democrats is to take Bush out before the 2008 election. “Ah, they’re not going to do that. They don’t have time.” Maybe they won’t have time and maybe they won’t get it done, but I’m going to tell you right now I full well (and I’ve been predicting this before the 2004 election) expect there to be articles of impeachment filed at some point this summer just to get the whole process going. Whether they succeed with it or not is irrelevant to them. If you want to have the ultimate procedure in pestering and hounding the White House with all these Iraq resolutions and everything else that’s going, the US attorney flub, why not add articles of impeachment to it?
Let me pull back. I’ll stop short of predicting it at the moment, but I seriously will not be surprised when it happens.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let’s move on to the US attorney story because nobody’s letting go of this. We start with audio sound bites. Senator Specter was on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, who said, ‘This week you said that Chuck Schumer, his role leading the investigation into the US attorneys, at the same time he’s running the Democrat Senate Campaign Committee is a conflict of interest. Has he crossed a line here?’
SPECTER: I think he has, and I confronted Senator Schumer on it eyeball to eyeball on Thursday in the judiciary committee meeting. Senator Schumer is leading the inquiry, and the day after we have testimony about Senator Domenici, he puts his name up on the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee criticizing — or, really, making the argument — that he ought not to be reelected.
RUSH: I’m going to tell you something, folks. Something’s going to have to be done here about Senator Schumer. This is the man who wrote a letter demanding action from the justice department on the special prosecution of Valerie Plame’s leaking. (That is an interesting way to put that, by the way. ‘Valerie Plame’s leaking,’ a faux pas that actually conjures up a weird image.) But nevertheless, he’s sending letters to the attorney general and the Department of Justice demanding to know where the investigation is. In other words, he’s interfering with it. He’s demanding action, demanding progress reports, exactly the same thing he accused others of doing in this controversy over the firing of eight US attorneys by the Bush justice department. The man knows no shame. He is responsible for this special prosecution that nailed Libby. He’s the one they kept hectoring and pestering the justice department — and, by the way, I’m just going to say this again. This is a direct result of not getting rid of the Democrat dead weight at the DOJ when Bush took office in 2001.
It turns out that there’s an assistant attorney general in there by the name of McNulty. The American Spectator writes about this today. A number of other people have been writing about it. Here’s what the Spectator says: ‘The Republican staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, is looking into improper sharing of Department of Justice personnel records by career DOJ employees with members of the legal community. ‘We’ve seen evidence that some state and federal judges with ties to the Democrat Party were given personnel and performance review materials about certain U.S. Attorneys across the country,’ says a Judiciary Committee staffer. ‘Some of the review materials were never seen by the Attorney General and his staff, but were reviewed within the Deputy Attorney General’s office, as well as by professional staff at the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys. [The leaks were] clearly part of a campaign to embarrass the U.S. Attorneys.’ Meanwhile, The American Spectator has learned that members of McNulty’s staff are supporting the possible nomination to one of the vacant U.S. Attorney slots of a former government lawyer who had an affair with a colleague and now resides with not one, but two women in what some in the DAG’s office have termed a ‘tri-sexual’ relationship. ‘That residential situation would be adjusted if the name was put forward,’ says someone familiar with the thinking in McNulty’s office.’
McNulty, whose first name is Paul… What’s happening here is that he is apparently, according to people making the charge, responsible for starting this whole thing and getting everybody all worked up about it because he wants to be attorney general. I’ll tell you, this is just me, but if I were Bush — if I were this administration — I mentioned at the top of the program that it is inexplicable to me the way they’re behaving, as though they do not understand that the Democrat Party is out to destroy them. This just can’t be. It can’t be they do not know that. It can’t be that the president doesn’t know that this is about getting to him. They get Rumsfeld. They wanted Libby. They wanted Rove. They wanted Cheney. Now they want Gonzales! It’s all about getting Bush. Now, I, for the life of me I can’t believe that in the White House they don’t understand the game here. If they wanted to be proactive and go on offense, you fire this Paul McNulty guy and you fire everybody involved here in leaking this stuff, and you get rid of the dead weight.
‘But, Rush! But, Rush! Look at the hullabaloo’.
Yeah, look at the hullabaloo. Look at the hullabaloo now!
RUSH: The hullabaloo now is that this administration is hounded every day about something new, and every time one of these new things pops up, it gets legs for three or four weeks. You have a hypocrite like Schumer — who demanded and led, practically, the charge for an independent counsel looking into the Plame leak — now accusing others of doing exactly what he did in suggesting that they should be fired, that these people were demanding updates and action. There’s also this business, ‘Well, Rush, you have to admit that it looks like they were getting rid of some of these US attorneys who were working on corruption cases against Republicans like Duke Cunningham.’ I take exception with this because where is Duke Cunningham? Last I knew he was in jail! By definition, when you get rid of any US attorney you are theoretically interrupting an investigation. US attorneys don’t do the legwork personally.
Like the Conrad Black trial. Jury selection ended last week. It starts today, the opening arguments of the Conrad Black trial in Chicago. This is Canadian press baron, Lord Black of Cross Harbor. You should see this, by the way. I have been keeping up with this because I know Conrad Black. I think this ought to frighten anybody what’s happened to him. Without one charge being proven they have taken away 80% of his assets, and they’ve limited him to a budget. Without one charge be proven! Bail is something like $21 million. He had to put a house up for collateral to secure it. He’s charged with making his company a piggy bank and basically using it like Kozlowski did with Tyco. Fine and dandy, but they’ve taken away so much of what was his prior to even one charge being proven! The trial is going to go on for three to four months. Some of the comments from potential jurors are scary.
The judge in the case, Amy St. Eve in Chicago, had to tell jurors there’s nothing criminal about having wealth! There is nothing criminal. They kept saying, ‘I can’t believe somebody’s got as much money as Conrad Black had and got it legitimately. Nobody does. That’s Enron-like. You know, that’s what happens to Enron and WorldCom.’ So she’s constantly admonishing these jurors during the selection process, ‘There’s nothing wrong with having a lot of money, and there’s no crime about it.’ It’s scary when you read some of the comments of these potential jurors. I don’t know who they finally ended up with and what their attitudes were, but it’s scary. Anyway, that’s a little sideline. My point is that Patrick Fitzgerald is the US attorney in Chicago, but he’s not going to try the case. The assistant US attorneys do. He’ll stop in the court and check it out. Now, he tried the Libby case because he was the independent counsel. He also had a bunch of assistants that helped out in the courtroom, but these US attorneys don’t go to court. They’re not the ones that are out there actually conducting the process. They run the office. They decide who’s going to go after what and get done and so forth, and they sometimes will show up in opening argument or closing. It’s very rare.
So the idea that these eight US attorneys that were dispatched shut down investigations is absurd. You can prove it by simply looking at where Duke Cunningham is! But even beyond that, the idea that firing eight US attorneys is ‘bad for law enforcement’ and crime and this sort of stuff, what about when you fire 93 of them, as Bill Clinton did in March of 1993? He fired all 93 US attorneys and then give them ten days to clear out their offices. They’re working on things. Jay Stephens in Chicago working on an indictment against [Democrat Congressman Dan] Rostenkowski. That eventually came. Stephens said he was 30 days away from an indictment; the indictment finally came 14 or 15 months later. But you think investigations weren’t interrupted when 93 US attorneys were dispatched? This whole thing is an imbroglio over nothing. There is no scandal — and the White House acts like there is.
‘Well, we hope Gonzales stays on.’ All weekend long, the Drive-By Media was reporting ‘Tough week. Just waiting now for Gonzales to be fired or Gonzales resignation,’ and the headline today in the story: ‘White House Hopes Gonzales Stays On.’ White House hopes Gonzales stays on? Gonzales might quit on his own and they can’t stop it? This is just crazy! But none of this would be happening if Bush would have gotten rid of the dead weight Democrats, the holdovers from the Clinton administration at DOJ when he took office. Now he’s paying a price for it, in so many ways.
SCHUMER: Yeah, this is much too serious to be about politics, and the bottom line is our committee is simply looking into the misdeeds in the executive branch, in the justice department, in the administration. Anything that has to do with any elected official, any congressman, any senator, will be handled by the ethics committee. So there’s no conflict whatsoever.
RUSH: Yeah, well, what are the odds he’ll be drawn before the ethics committee? He’s using the testimony he gets here and then taking it to the Democrat Senate Campaign Committee, and putting it up on their website, as he did with Domenici. But anyway, that’s beyond the point. ‘Much too serious about politics.’ That’s all this is. The war in Iraq, the surge in opposing it, securing defeat for our troops — all of this is about electoral politics for 2008! Everything the Democrats are doing is about electoral politics for 2008 — and nobody, nobody over the weekend asked Schumer about the letter he wrote to the assistant attorney general demanding to know what was happening with the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame’s name.
I read that letter to you on this program last week. It was a letter of interference; it was a letter demanding to know things he’s not entitled to know; it was a letter commanding certain action take place now. He was behind that whole thing. He was behind the appointment of independent counsel. He was the one that pushed it and so forth — and, of course, it’s ‘not about politics.’ Now we go to Pat Leahy. He was on with Stephanopoulos. He’s just ‘sick and tired.’ Stephanopoulos said, ‘If I understand, Senator Leahy, correctly, if the White House claims executive privilege, you are still going to subpoena?’
LEAHY: The decision I’m putting on the agenda with subpoenas is mine, and they will be on Thursday this week, among the subpoenas will be voted on will be one for Karl Rove and one for Harriet Miers, another one for her deputy. I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths out of this.
RUSH: It’s just unbelievable. There’s no reason to call Rove up there. He’s one of Bush’s political aides. He is a policy aide. Everything that happened with these US attorneys is perfectly legit. It’s all about electoral politics. It’s not letting the president take a breath. I don’t caring what it is, if the earth wobbles on its axis, ‘We gotta talk to Karl Rove about this.’ These guys have got Rove-itis. But I’m telling you, it’s all about destroying this White House and enhancing Democrats’ electoral chances in ’08 and isolating Republicans from the president. It’s relentless. People paying half attention to this, already believe there’s some kind of big-time scandal involving the firing of these attorneys.