more GOP scandals
The sheer volume of information about the numerous ongoing Bush/GOP scandals doesn’t permit me to go into great detail on any of them; cataloging conservative corruption could easily be a full-time job.
First, there is the House Oversight Committee’s report (164KB PDF) on the RNC email scandal and possible violations of the Presidential Records Act (h/t: Carpetbagger Report). Tony Snow(job) tried the “Clinton did it too” defense, but—surprise!—he was lying. Think Progress has the details:
In 1993, President Clinton’s then-Assistant to the President John Podesta issued a staff memo clearly stating that all administration e-mails dealing with official business had to be “incorporated into an official recordkeeping system,” stressing that no “e-mail document that is a Presidential record should be deleted.”The Clinton administration’s policy also made clear that personal and political e-mail accounts — which are generally exempt from the Presidential Records Act — could not be used for official business. Indeed, the Bush administration has seemingly implemented a policy opposite of the Clinton administration’s.
Second, the “signing statements” scandal is not going away. Charlie Savage’s expose in the Boston Globe discusses the new GAO study (549KB PDF):
Federal officials have disobeyed at least six new laws that President Bush challenged in his signing statements, a government study disclosed yesterday. The report provides the first evidence that the government may have acted on claims by Bush that he can set aside laws under his executive powers.[…]
Bush's signing statements have drawn fire because he has used them to challenge more than 1,100 sections of bills -- more than all previous presidents combined. The sample the GAO studied represents a small portion of the laws Bush has targeted, but its report concluded that sometimes the government has gone on to disobey those laws.
White House spokesperson Tony Fratto, in arrogance all-too-typical of this administration, comments, "The signing statements certainly do and should have an impact. They are real." Are Bush’s interpretations—of bills he decided to sign instead of veto—more real than the words written by Congress?
Finally, Seymour Hersh has some incendiary information from Major General Taguba about the imbroglio over “integorration” at Abu Ghraib. Hersh describes an early meeting with Rumsfeld and others, where they strived to minimize the import of the nascent scandal:
…the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. “Could you tell us what happened?” Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, “Is it abuse or torture?” At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”
Later in the article, Taguba describes being “appalled” at Rumsfeld’s claim to Congress that he hadn’t seen the Abu Ghraib photographs until the night before his testimony:
He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. […] “The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here to protect the nation from terrorism’—is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”
One week and three more deepening scandals: That’s quite enough lawbreaking for a while, even for the most corrupt administration ever.