Operationally, what are the implications of the Renzi and Doolittle investigations heating up?

Does this mean that the FBI has slipped the leash from Gonzales control and is figuring that it can take on high profile investigations without him being in a position to tell them not to?

Are any local USAs involved in either case?

I have trouble accepting that the timing of these cases and Gonzales’ disintegration are coincidental.

Albert Fall: I had the same thought when I read about the FBI raids, and wondered if the FBI had suddenly decided to take matters into its own hands.

Another, more devious thought occurred, as well: could there be a cadre of FBI and DoJ people who are so disgusted with the current administration that they have had their own ’underground’ organization going? I know that really sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it works… If you consider the career people who believed in what they are doing (and abiding by the rules), but they were surrounded by hacks and trolls concerned with ensuring the continuity of the Republican regime, they would tend to hunker down until an opportunity presents itself to reassert the rule of real law.

I think we are seeing the same thing happening in other areas, with the anonymous letters from DoJ employees, and tidbits of information being passed along. Soon, maybe the true believers in the founding principles of our country will begin to get out of their foxholes and shed light on what they know. If that is the case, I am thankful for their integrity and bravery in clinging to what they believe in!

Far-fetched maybe, and we can only hope…

Albert Fall:

The alternative is, of course, that the FBI is still loyal to the Junta, and the raids are hoovering up incriminating documents that might implicate high-level White House involvment in these scandals as well. Think â€pre-emptive strike.†Don’t wait for Waxman to subpoena emails, just go and get them now. When you ask Doolittle for his copies of all the RNCHQ.com or GWB43.com emails, he can honestly say, â€I don’t know what you’re talking about, the FBI took all of my files weeks ago.â€

I think we’ll have to wait and see.

The Renzi investigation did start before Charlton was fired. That was before the elections and the info started coming out was only a little bit and that was not enough to prevent his re-election unfortunately.

Charlton was being pressed on a death penalty case where there was no body or murder weapon. The case was built on witness statements who were members of gangs & druggies.

Another little point in the WSJ article is this:

â€Congressman Renzi told me that the purchase of the Sandlin parcel was a matter of national securityâ€

WTF?

Though Robert Mueller never makes headlines (except for the FBI’s computer problems), he seems to be honest, dedicated, serious, experienced, competent and intelligent, and perhaps to have insulated the Bureau from Rove, Gonzales, Meiers, and Cheney (does anyone think, for example, that Patrick Fitzgerald would have survived if Mueller himself had opposed him?)

Delusional as it sounds, this hypothesis might explain a few strange things. And putting it to the test would be simple–a matter of learning how many, if any, of those twenty-year-old right-wing wrecking machines have landed inside the Bureau.

Teddy

I’m not sure what the motive for prosecutions are. Perhaps it’s DOJ making a short term effort to appear diligent, to get the Pulic off poor Gonzales’ back. Perhaps the interim USA wants to make sure prosecutions go forward before the designated political lackey comes in to take over. Or perhaps Rove has decided shill prosectutions will go forward only to have something throw the case.

For now, I think we simply take note and watch the actual prosecution to make sure it seems to hold up.

alabama,

I took notice when recently Mueller testified to the effect that to his knowledge there are no investigations into political corruption â€being held up.†I took that as a tacit signal that the FBI is continuing to do its job.

It is worth noting that the FBI is much harder to corrupt than the DOJ since one really does have to work one’s way up the professional ladder to get into leadership positions. There are far fewer opportunities to stack the upper echelons with political appointees; much like the military in that sense. The culture that has been built within the agency since the days of Hoover have been designed to create a firewall between law enforcement and politics. Not always perfect, but better than it was in the 60s, for instance.

Hopefully the mess with Gonzales will embolden honest FBI agents and offices.

I think the â€conspiracy theory†is plausible, and the timing of the Renzi raid during the USAgate hearings is consistent with this, because right now anyone with some seniority in the DOJ has de facto immunity by virtue of the attention on the DOJ now—that is, unless the person is one of the crooks.

INterestingly. Robert Mueller was the US Attorney in San Francisco before he went to the FBI. As I recall, he was generally well thought of, which is why he was tapped for the FBI, which he took over a few days before 9/11. Kevin Ryan may have succeeded him as USA in SF, but I think there was someone else who served in between. Remember Deep Throat was FBI, someone who was horrified at some of the things going on at the FBI as well as elsewhere in the Nixon Admin. There are plently of career people who would be willing to talk to Congressmembers and staff (and have), so disgusted are they at the politicization of their agencies.

OT – Committee to Consider Subpoena for RNC Documents Related to White House E-mails

Chairman Waxman informs the RNC that the Oversight Committee will meet on April 25 [Thu] to consider a subpoena for documents relating to possible violation of the Presidential Records Act and the Hatch Act by White House officials.

Posted on: Fri, Apr 20 2007 2:00 AM

mimikatz, I have my own (rather paranoid?) hypothesis about the care and feeding of the action against the outing of Valerie Plame.

The CIA, the DoJ, the FBI, State, and some of the uniformed military, frightened and furious at the abuse they’d been taking for a good two years at the hands of Cheney and his gang, all wanted to act in some way, but (since none could act alone) had to coordinate their efforts, and to do so they needed (1.) a complaint of sufficient gravity for all of them to go forward, and (2.) a patron of standing, well-connected with all parties, who could channel their pressure in timely ways. The outing of Plame was their opportunity, and their patron, to my thinking, was Colin Powell.

I have the idea, then, that Powell, in concert with Tenet, Mueller and some his old military colleagues, made it impossible for Ashcroft (or Rove, or Cheney, or Rumsfeld) to interfere with Fitzgerald’s (eventual) appointment and proceedings. This would have been known to Powell’s enemies, who took him out in short order.

Of course I have nothing to base this on.

bmaz

Is that what happened? They’re stuck with Knauss and he’s going to play it straight? That’s what I keep hoping–all the sunshine will mean they’re stuck with non-political appoints. Ha!

I appreciated the forest exchange link left by a commenter, above. I am busy elsewhere now, so can offer only approving remarks quickly concerning the parent’s part of the state, instead of the alfalfa matter. I worked with some of the people developing the ag science that enabled expansion of vineyards on the Sonoita side of the hill more west than the fort; my involvement was bookish fundamentally, though I met a few folks with ranches. It is a difficult terrain in the elevated Sonora desert landform where valley floors are near a mile above sealevel and mountains snow-capped protrude yet more lofty; not what your typical Alsatian would select for terracing gewirztraminer vines, rather more like an unforgiving moonscape with cattle meandering in the shadows of tall bushes in thorned succulent corridored trails seeking forage and the rare clump of desert herb. One of Associate Justice O’Connor’s most charming attributes, to me, was the demographic statistic that included a childhood in a town called Hereford, which, as far as I could discern on a few tourist visits there over a year, actually consisted more of cattle holdings, not what you would name justifiably even a hamlet. Such is the remote quality of human dwellings places to eek out a living in that desert fastness. Hereford is quite a few miles over the hill from the Renzi holdings in Sonoita. In fact Hereford is pretty distant from the fort, and is more close to the San Pedro drainage. This past year was the first time in the history of the remarkably scenic San Pedro river valley that the aquifer water extraction from the fort caused the entire flow of the river to disappear. A dilettantish drive along the river valley reveals parched and dying trees, but extraordinary variety of wildlife. The politics of maintaining the fort is age-old, and many well intentioned people are trying to devise a way to protect both river and fort. The ’fort’ is quite different from what one might imagine; no fence of tall stakes surrounding it. And the civilian and millitary support population which resides in normal suburbia outside the fort comprises something very different from a shriveled and desiccated hamlet with one convenience store which a first time visitor might anticipate finding. Rather, the civilian village is more of a city; when I last visited the city was 30,000 population; and the fort housed an equal number of dwellers. A drive in the city is extraordinary; one of the first things I noticed was most of the cars were new and typically it was difficult to find a place in traffic with any two neighboring cars having the same state licenseplate. The city is a melting pot of intellectuals on brief tours of duty on the base. One can hear excellent Russian spoken in the local store by US anglos in civies, and a vibrant young man who might be a university professor is avidly expostulating in an educated voice in a nondescript bar holding forth on the verses he is reading from an Arabic copy of the Koran, discussing middle east spirituality with any and all who will participate in the conversation.
All this is far from corporate Poway, but the same IT companies all have presence there.

I always liked the old parade ground section inside the fort, and the natural creek which wells from the adjoining mountain is a reminder that the original fort in the era pre-annexation into the US was built next to a precious water source. I guess I ain’t very political, and I enjoy the grapevine business. I lived around there one year perforce, yet, it was a remarkably salubrious environ, even though the politics of groundwater and the intelligence community are very divisive. I think, though, the alfalfa business must be somewhere else. Well, maybe Sonoita is a place I should visit; I spent my time on the Hereford side of the hill, near the San Pedro River. I agree with the commenter above who voiced support for one of the river’s prime protectors, CBD; their crew of scientists and biologists are providing leadership in many western civic organizations and courts in favor of environment protections.
There is one other feature of the region that relates to the security matters that the US has on its collective mind these days, namely, the zone’s proximity to the border. In fact, there is a MX smelter whose plumes of bluegreen smoke often drift up the San Pedro valley on oft prevailing winds blowing into the US, a contentious and difficult issue between the two nations; and foot crossings are rumored to be in the zone, though the mountainous trails popular to sports enthusiasts ice over for weeks at a time. I hope these vignettes help actualize some of the ideas in the thread and provide context, though admittedly I am pretty much a visitor to both the geography, and the issues.