Entries by emptywheel

Gillespie Squared

Rove’s bed is not even cold and already Ed Gillespie is crawling into it.

Now, with the departure of Karl Rove, the president’s closest adviser, Gillespie, 46, a former lobbyist and Republican National Committee chairman, has once again been asked to help fill the void.

White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Boltenhas said that he plans to divide Rove’s broad political andpolicymaking duties — and the 60 or so White House staffers

About that May FISC Ruling

In light of the weekend’s news that there were actually two FISC rulings against the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretap program, I’d like to return to this James Risen article from May 2.

Senior Bush administration officials told Congress on Tuesday thatthey could not pledge that the administration would continue to seekwarrants from a secret court for a domestic wiretapping program, as itagreed to do in January.Rather, they argued that the president had

TSP Timing, Again

Josh and Spencer are just now catching up to something I pointed out three weeks ago: Tom DeLay got briefed on the TSP program on March 11, 2004, the day after the Hospital Meeting. Of course, that’s not particularly surprising since one of the things that went down at the briefing of the Gang of Eight on March 10 is that the Administration floated passing legislation to fix the problems in

Behavior Detection

There are two things that “always” happen to me when I fly to DC. I “always” (often, rather) sit next to MI’s Republican Congressmen in First Class. And I “always” (almost always, probably) get pulled into secondary when I’m flying out of Reagan National Airport. I know why the latter occurs:

Interesting Timing

I’m not so much surprised that Scottish Haggis Specter has urged Pat Leahy to ask for a meeting with the White House to negotiate testimony of White House officials.

For the last several months, I have been seeking the voluntary cooperation of the White House with the efforts of the Senate Judiciary Committee to get to the bottom of the scandal surrounding the firing of so many of the United States Attorneys

Ghost Writing

I think it ought to be mandatory for everyone who reads this LAT article to also watch Bill Kristol on TDS. It’s bad enough, after all, to learn that the Petraeus report we’ve all been waiting for might as well be called the Dick Cheney report.

Despite Bush’s repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S.

Pearlstine’s Off the Record

I’ve been wavering about how much attention to give this book. In it, Norm Pearlstine, who was the editor in chief of Time Inc. when it fought Fitzgerald’s subpoena of Matt Cooper, describes the whole process of fighting the leak. Most interestingly, Pearlstine describes how he came to believe that Time had to turn over Cooper’s notes, not least because Time had no business defying an order of SCOTUS.

I’ll just make

Privacy versus the Press

Judge Reggie is back in the news today, granting, in part, Steven Hatfill’s pursuit of journalists’ sources for information that he was the main subject of the FBI’s anthrax investigation. Walton required the journalists themselves to give up their sources, but not the media companies.

Based on the foregoing analysis, the plaintiff’s Motion to Compel Further Testimony from Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman, Allan Lengel, Toni Locy, and James Stewart [D.E.

image_print