Domestic Spying and Opposition Research
Digby has been demonstrating how the DOJ got taken over by a bunch of hack opposition researchers (see also this post).
And again, what were the Pat Robertson’ U grad Goodling’s primaryqualifications before joining the Department of Justice? She workedwith Barbara Comstock and Timothy Griffin (the US Attorney fromArkansas who Rove pushed through under the patriot act) at the BushCheney oppo research department in 2000.
It doesn’t automatically make her a criminal, but it sure stinks of unethical politicization of the Justice Department.
She goes onto make what seems to be a generalized comment.
Many of us were told to pipe down when we complained that the JusticeDepartment and the NSA had been involved in spying on Americans with nooversight.But now that we know that Barbara Comstock, Monica Goodling and TimGriffin, Karl Rove’s personal smear artists, were promoted to thehighest reaches of the federal police agencies with access to recordson their political opponents and every other American, then it’s clearthat we weren’t suspicious enough. At this point, I think we have toassume that with these people in charge and having the use of all thenew powers of the Patriot Act, there have been no limits at all on thepartisan, political use of the government’s investigative powers.
To which I’d like to raise a specific example. MZM. MZM, you see, was contracted to engage in some of the most abusive domestic spying under DOD’s CIFA program (contracted through the part of DOD, incidentally, where Mitch Wade first got his start under Dick Cheney in the early 1990s). And Carol Lam got fired for getting too close to Brent Wilkes’ and Dusty Foggo’s ties to Duke Cunningham’s pocketbook. Not to mention getting to close to Jerry Lewis, who as Chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee approved the key contracts to MZM. So I’d like to suggest that these issues–the politicization of DOJ, the firing of Carol Lam, and the interruption of the investigation into Lewis and Foggo and Wilkes may be more closely related than we know.
