MM: When someone is obliged to tell a reporter that he or she has been picked up on a wiretap…

[Huh??? Did that make sense to anyone??]

That wouldn’t be ostentation by Mukasey purported to show that the administration is serious about minimization, would it? I’d better not posit that based on a statement that I find inscrutable.

http://thinkprogress.org/

I think EW has made abundantly clear that drawing blanket conclusions about what Karl Rove says is not the correct way to interpret his statements. Or those of anyone speaking on behalf of this administration at any time.

Rove said that he did not communicate with “Department of Justice or Alabama officials” or ask others to communicate on his behalf,

about the investigation, indictment, potential prosecution, prosecution, conviction, or sentencing of Governor Siegelman.

That leaves a lot of people he could have talked to, including national, state and local Republican Party officials, their lobbyists, organizers, consultants and fund raisers. Rove could also have spoken to almost everyone in the federal government other than those employed by the DOJ. Moreover, it’s not clear who Rove means when he refers to, “Alabama officials”. He could mean state, county or local “officials”; it probably depends on who’s asking.

Rove could also have talked to anybody, “DOJ and Alabama officials” included, about things other than the listed items referring to “Governor Siegelman”. The way Rove uses language, he could have talked about “former Governor Siegelman”, about Democratic governors or competitors generally, the list is endless.

Rove’s careful parsing also doesn’t address the, “Who will rid me of this priest” problem, which has been around since Henry II had that tiff with Archbishop Becket. Those in power, those in thrall to “needful things”, play rhetorical games. One is to lament a problem without asking anyone to fix it. Old hands, ambitious acolytes, would be insiders who want to make their bones know what to do without being asked.

We can talk about these documents in more detail in comments (and I’ll post a timeline in a follow-up post).

Woo-hoo!!

More Spin On the Political Prosecution of Don Siegelman

From the newest member of the Liberal Blog Hive, even though we should have been in it three years ago:

The Locust Fork News and Journal
http://locustfork.net/
http://blog.locustfork.net/

Okay, I hereby rephrase to “waiver of what Gooper morans and stoopid Big Media think has been asserted”.

That work?

But as I said, that was all Rove was ever shooting for, particularly in recent days. So there is no waiver of anything Rove hadn’t already ceded.

If there is any validity whatsoever to the “doesn’t have to appear at all privilege/immunity” (and I fully assert there is none whatsoever), then it is rooted in the concept that the critical Executive personnel are too busy with critical work on the nation’s business to take time out to appear. That simply does not, and cannot, apply here.

i do hope that witness pushes this somehow. any of you lawyers know what can be done to protest such a travesty? can the witness press charges? the victim?

where are those ambulance chasers when we need ‘em?