I think they lose on that too, based on the not so much tenuous, as non-existent, threads of “future prosecution” they try to assert. But even before you get to that assertion, I think they don’t have a competent party to make the assertion as to the evidence from the Libby investigation. I think it has to be someone who can claim on behalf of themselves of their office a direct link to that investigation – I don’t think you can have a stranger to the litigation make the claim of privilege, and Breuer’s office is a stranger to that litigation, by deliberate choice of his superiors with respect to that litigation – the Acting AG for that litigation.

Fwiw – which probably isn’t much.

Obama, Holder, Whitehouse, Leahy, Waxman, Pelosi….”no one is above the law” Really? The peasants just do not believe you folks

retry

Judge Sullivan has apparently highlighted what he wanted the parties to address. As Crew lays out, the court was requesting more input on these standards:

Exemption 7(A) requires a demonstration that “disclosure (1) could reasonably be expected to interfere with (2) enforcement proceedings that are (3) pending or reasonably anticipated.” Mapother v. Department of Justice, 3 F.3d 1533, 1540 (D.C. Cir. 1993). “Reasonably anticipated” means a “concrete prospective law enforcement proceeding.”

So the court is singling out the law enforcement privilege for a closer look. This makes a lot of sense, because as best I can tell it is the only privilege properly before the court. DOJ, when it discusses why Cheney’s waiver could not be a waiver of the privileges asserted, points out that:

But none of the privileges at issue here was ever his to waive. These privileges belong to the government. The presidential communications privilege belongs to the President; the deliberative process privilege asserted here belongs to the White House; and the law enforcement privilege asserted here belongs to DOJ.

Who is there asserting the President’s privilege (Obama or counsel?) or the White House privilege (Greg Craig?)? DOJ isn’t the competent entity to choose for the WH and President whether and to what extent to assert privilege. So that would leave law enforcement for the focus.

But I’m still not convinced they have a competent invocation even on that front. While DOJ is trying to shore up Breuer’s qualifications as a crystal ball reader who can see into the future on unrelated cases, they mention that as head of the criminal div, Breuer is, “apart from the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, the individual most responsible for the development, enforcement and supervision of the application of all federal criminal laws.”

But that’s not really true in Fitzgerald’s investigation. That investigation was set up, deliberately, so that the head of Crim Div was not the individual (other than DAG and AG) most responsible for enforcement and supervision of criminal laws in that investigation – as a matter of fact, head of Crim Div was absolutely excluded from having enforcment and supervisory decisions with respect to the case.

So how you take an office that is specifically excluded from having a supervisory function in an investigation and interpose it to make the privilege assertions with respect to that investigation mystifies me. I don’t think that’s a competent invocation. My take would have been that you needed someone on Fitzgerald’s crew or the acting AG supervising the Special Prosecutor and his crew on the investigation.

All that “procedurally” before you get to the next issue of the substance of the invocation/argument – that the possible “concrete, prospective law enforcement proceeding” contemplated by law is the possiblity that there might be ANY possible future proceedings, ever, where a senior adminisration official might be interviewed, even though they implicitly concede that there is no prospective law enforcement proceeding that will be related to the operative facts in the Cheney statement.

Implicitly, bc easily the easiest way for them to win on law enforcment is for someone charged with investigatory powers tells the court that something in the statement may be operative in a pending investigation – a someone with supervisory powers (like Holder, or even Breuer here) asserts that there is a prospective investigation related to something in the statement.

No one tries that.

Yet they do still seem to think that if they get the statement to the court, the court will side with them. That takes me back to my spec on Cheney trying to send Fitzgerald down paths other than the Libby/Cheney path with statements involving people never charged.

all fwiw, if my comment doesn’t disappear this time.

It’s all connected, tenuously in some places, tightly in others, with the intersection being energy. We ended up in Iraq because of energy, OBL was pissed off at us because the U.S. was defending energy, AIG’s derivatives in no small way were impacted by energy markets, our economy tanked in part because of the energy market’s volatility last year — the connections are there.

But showing a conscious conspiracy would be impossible, especially at scale. It should be enough to say that we have been immersed in a global energy war and nearly every scandal we’ve examined is in some way tied to or impacted by it.

Not even the media emerges unscathed since they are owned by so few entities which in turn invest in both energy and in the politicos which protect energy; the media turns a blind eye to the scope and scale of this problem because they can’t make it sexy, nor can they bite the hand that feeds it. They ignore it like a two-bit-manwhore in the White House press gaggle.

Back in the day, Deep Throat said, “Follow the money.” But today money is only a proxy for energy.

You’ll be better off if you can come to grips with that.

It’s certainly plausible that many of your assumptions are correct. However, and speaking **only** for myself, I tend to view culture and education and ‘opportunity’ as key facets of human development that both reflect and drive it.

Just because the system is rotten, corrupt, predatory, and often inhumane doesn’t mean that I have to yawn and ignore it. People and cultures both change; it’s my sense that many in American culture are quite open to new ways of doing business, and new ways of thinking about money.

Once that happens, the Bushies and Cheneys are irrelevant.
The concentration of wealth and the corruption that used to be background noise are now daily topics; things are shifting.

The past 8 years in general, and the last 4 in particular, have seen so many outrages that the public has grown weary in protesting– which is exactly what the Republicans are counting on. Perhaps it is another one of Cheney’s design features.

While agree with all the problems you note, and the US is far from perfect, I also recall that at least the group I spent Election Night of Nov 2008 with… well, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place and the champagne was flowing and we toasted the teevees set up (one for CNN, one for MSNBC, plus a couple computers…).

That night it felt like the earth’s axis shifted, just a sense of relief that so many millions of people could — in a determined, gutsy, methodical, unflinching, slogging fashion — register voters, teach people about issues, keep making phone calls, watch polls, drive voters… it was miraculous.

And I can definitely say that it was amazing to watch some of the 20-somethings get involved.

We’re way ahead of where we were even 12 months ago.
Now, to keep at it…

But I’ve been pondering **exactly** the same points that you make — but I’ll add to your list by one or two.

I’d probably heard the name ‘Hank Greenberg’ in hushed tones any number of times and not paid one bit of attention until a few years back when EW wrote a post on him, which prompted me to go, “….hummmmmmmm…??!”

Greenberg-Traurig links to Abramoff, who was there doing lobbying… lemme guess, was it on energy issues when he was in Denver? (At least, I think he did a stint in Denver?)

Now, Greenberg links to AIG.
AI-fucking-G. Who got their credit derivatives through Congress as ‘insurance contracts’, meaning they were un-fucking-regulated.

So after $180 BILLION dollars to AIG (at least $20 million of it as pass-through to Goldman Sachs, but I digress…) no one can figure out that maybe all these dots connect?

Elliott Spitzer got outed literally the day he was going to Congress to expose AIG’s role in looting state pension funds. Literally THE day he was going to start pulling back the veil on AIG.
And we end up with detailed, almost blow-by-blow accounts of Elliott and the Hooker?!
And then… months later… months afterward… AIG surfaces in the news and Paulson (former head of GS) tells Pelosi and Reid that they have to fork over hundreds of billions to bail out…. AIG?!!!

Now, I have more background reading to do on Enron’s role in trying to get fund and own **energy pipelines** including around the Caspian.

Rayne, I fervently hope that you are right and that someone has the goods on Cheney and whoever his contemptible minions are/were. But some of it had to involve an awful lot of black money; it’s so big, and so huge.

And Elliott Spitzer has said repeatedly: “AIG was a the center of it all.” By which I presume that he means, “an incredibly corrupt system of fraud, theft, and black money”.