Lena Saradnik in the Arizona Star March 26th, 2007

Arizona is on the front line of the national immigration issue. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people come across our border. Many of them do not stay. Instead, they travel to jobs waiting for them in every state in this nation.Illegal immigration is a serious problem we must address. The state Legislature must take action with meaningful, practical and real solutions to these problems, but those real solutions need to start at the federal level. I hope Congress will pass reform this year.

In Arizona, one of the areas we can address is the “demand” side of the equation. We can make it harder for Arizona employers to hire undocumented workers. In order to do that and subsequently hold employers accountable, we must have a quick method to verify the legal documents (Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, etc.) presented to employers for work in the United States.

Until then, employers — including the Arizona House of Representatives, which recently experienced an immigration-related hiring incident — must simply wait for the Internal Revenue Service to notify them that the employee’s documents do not match records on file with the federal government.

We also need to tone down the rhetoric surrounding this issue because several opportunistic hate groups have aligned themselves with the anti-immigrant movement. Two members of our Legislature, one Democrat and one Republican, have received numerous threats related to their positions on immigration.

The reason I did not support HB 2779 is that it has no verifiable method for employers to check the legal status of potential employees. HB 2779 has no enforcement provision and lacks a method to investigate complaints.

Because this bill does not require that valid complaints be forwarded to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for investigation, it is essentially a very expensive Maricopa County-dominated catch-and-release program.

The bill provides $2.5 million in funds. The bill says $1.5 million will go to Maricopa County, $500,000 to Pima County, and $500,000 will be divided among all the other counties.

Most likely, this legislation will be challenged in courts. In the meantime, the legislature is wasting valuable time and resources and burdening Arizona’s businesses with a meaningless layer of bureaucracy.

We have all heard that the Gonzales matter is a perfectly legitimate personnel matter.  So now it comes out that Monica Goodling will be involking the 5th Amendment protections against self-incrimination.  Wonderful, makes you wonder what she is hiding.  For that matter, it is not obvious that Karl Rove and Harriet Miers interviewing “off the record, not on oath and not for transcription” are seeking to avoid purjury indictments.

Anyway, in today’s New York Times, Monica Goodling, a senior Justice Department official involved in the firings of federal prosecutors, will refuse to answer questions at upcoming Senate hearings, citing Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, her lawyer said Monday.

The White House, meanwhile, continued to stand by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales despite new calls over the weekend for his resignation and documents that indicate he may have been more involved in the dismissals than he has previously acknowledged.

Democrats have accused the Justice Department and the White House of purging the prosecutors for political reasons. The Bush administration maintains the firings were not improper because U.S. attorneys are political appointees. Click here to read more.

The McClatchey Washington bureau reports that Karl Rove is delibertly trying to use tougher voter identification laws as a means of suppressing Democratic voters in a story by Greg Gordon and associates.

Under President Bush, the Justice Department has backed tougher state voter identification laws and steered U.S. attorneys toward investigating voter fraud; policies that critics say have been intended to suppress Democratic votes.

Bush, Karl Rove, the president’s deputy chief of staff, and other Republican political advisers have highlighted voting rights issues and what Rove has called the “growing problem” of Democratic election fraud since Bush took power in the tumultuous election of 2000, a race ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Since 2005, McClatchy Newspapers has found, Bush has appointed at least three U.S. attorneys who had worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division when it was rolling back long-standing voting rights policies aimed at protecting predominantly poor, minority voters.

Last April, while the Justice Department and the White House were planning the firings, Rove gave a speech in Washington to the Republican National Lawyers Association. He ticked off eleven states that he said could be pivotal in 2008. Bush has appointed new U.S. attorneys in nine of them since 2005: Florida, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Arkansas, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico. U.S. attorneys in the latter four were among those fired. Click here to read more.

J. Steven Griles, the second-highest official at the Interior Department during President Bush’s first term, pleaded guilty today to lying to a Senate committee about his ties to Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist who obtained help from the Interior Department for his Indian tribal clients. [Perhaps this expains why Karl Rove wants to avoid testifying under oath.]

Mr. Griles entered a Guilty plea shortly after 11 a.m. Eastern time at a hearing before United States District Judge Ellen Huvelle. Sentencing was set for June 26.

Under a plea agreement with Mr. Griles, the Justice Department recommended a five-month jail term and another five months in a halfway house or confined to his home. The maximum sentence for a conviction would have been five years in prison. In our opinion five months is a travesty! As a former oil and gas lobbyist, this guy will be back working for Exxon before year end!

Alberto Gonzales gets no good days this week. Sharon Eubanks, a Federal prosecutor who worked for the Justice Department (and Gonzales) charged today that Bush Administration staffers intervened in her case against the tobacco industry in late 2005. Their interference watered down and weakened the case which was ultimately decided in favor of the industry.

The former leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted a landmark lawsuit against tobacco companies said Wednesday that Bush administration political appointees repeatedly ordered her to take steps that weakened the government’s racketeering case.

Sharon Eubanks, who served 22 years as a lawyer at Justice, said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ office began micromanaging the team’s strategy in the final weeks of the June 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government’s claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers. Click here to read more in the Seattle Times.

The Pinal County Democrats hold their meetings at 7pm on the third Wednesday of each month in Florence. We generally gather for a dutch treat supper at about 5:30 pm at the A&M Pizza on Highway 287 west of Florence. This is great opportunity to meet and greet fellow Democrats in an informal setting. The meeting is held at the offices of the Pinal County Attorney at 31 N Pinal St. Carpooling is generally available from SaddleBrooke.

Washingtion pundits are never known for letting grass grow under their feet. Speculation is bubbling in Washington as to who will succeed Alberto Gonzales, the embattled Attorney General. So far, three names have surfaced.

The serious talk about who will take over for Gonzales focuses on former Solicitor General and veteran Washington fixer Ted Olson; Larry Thompson, a former US attorney for the northern District of Georgia who led the Southeastern Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force before serving as Deputy Attorney General under John Ashcroft during President Bush’s first term; and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who as a U.S. Attorney in New Jersey and a judge on the United States Court of Appeals before being named an assistant U.S. Attorney General under Ashcroft.

Ted Olsen, you may remember, was one of George Bush’s attorneys in the infamous Gore v Bush legal case at the U.S. Supreme Court following the 2000 election. Ted was successful in getting the Supreme Court to ignore uncounted ballots in favor of simply ruling that Bush had won the Florida election. George may want to reward loyalty.

Larry Thompson signed the October, 2002, order that rejected concerns about torture and ordered the removal of Canadian Maher Arar from the U.S. custody in a move that would ultimately land Arar in Syria. After the O.K. from Thompson, Arar was secretly flown to Jordan and then driven into Syria, where he was indeed tortured. After an international outcry, Arar’s name was finally cleared in 2006 by a Canadian Commission. If he’s for blood and torture, he seems like a good choice.

Chertoff is, of course, the co-author of the USA PATRIOT Act. And, as the chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division under Ashcroft, he advised the Central Intelligence Agency on how to avoid liability for torture, er, “coercive interrogation.”  Just the sort of fellow you want to run the FBI and decide on who get prosecuted for political crimes.

For more comentary, click here for today’s article in The Nation.

Republicans and Democrats sternly warned the FBI on Tuesday that it could lose its broad power to collect telephone, e-mail and financial records, after revelations of widespread abuses of the authority detailed in a recent internal investigation.  Republicans and Democrats were reacting to an inspector general’s report that the FBI paid only lip service to Bill of Rights concerns regarding so-called “National Security Letters” that let them set up wire-taps, and surveillance measures for “thousands of U.S. citizens” all without court order or review.

Their threats came as the Justice Department’s chief watchdog, Glenn A. Fine, told the House Judiciary Commitee that the FBI engaged in widespread and serious misuse of its authority in illegally collecting the information from Americans and foreigners through so-called national security letters.

“If the FBI doesn’t move swiftly to correct the mistakes and problems revealed last week in Fine’s 130-page report, “you probably won’t have NSL authority,” said Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., a supporter of the power, referring to the data requests by their initials.

Democrats were presumably less tolerent! Click here to read this story.

The Arizona Republic today reports that the firing of former Arizona U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton shut down a preliminary investigation of Arizona Rep. Rick Renzi, for an alleged pattern of corruption involving influence-peddling and land deals, writes Max Blumenthal with The Nation.

Blumenthal wrote this:

In September 2006, just weeks before pivotal Congressional midterm elections, Paul Charlton, US Attorney for Arizona, opened a preliminary investigation into Republican Representative Rick Renzi of the state’s First Congressional District for an alleged pattern of corruption involving influence-peddling and land deals. Almost immediately, Charlton’s name was added to a blacklist of federal prosecutors the White House wanted to force from their jobs. Charlton is someone “we should now consider pushing out,” D. Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez’s chief of staff, wrote to then White House Counsel Harriet Miers on September 16. In his previously safe Republican district, Renzi had barely held on in the election. On December 7, the White House demanded Charlton’s resignation without offering him any explanation.

Stacks of internal Justice Department e-mails subpoenaed by Congress in early March from the White House provided evidence that the dismissals of Charlton and seven other US Attorneys was a political purge orchestrated to install “loyal Bushies,” as Sampson called them, into their posts and to protect Republican lawmakers like Renzi from indictments for corruption. The Administration’s explanation that the ousters were “performance-related” has been discredited in light of the exposure of the e-mails–and especially proved false in Charlton’s case. A model of professionalism, Charlton’s office was honored with the Federal Service Award and hailed by the Justice Department as a “Model Program” for its protection of crime victims. Click here to read more.

The Senate voted overwhelmingly today to revoke the authority it granted the Bush administration last year to name federal prosecutors without Senate confirmation.

By a vote of 94 to 2, the Senate voted to restore the previous system for naming federal prosecutors. Under that system, when a vacancy occurred, the attorney general was allowed to name an interim United States attorney to serve for up to 120 days while the administration submitted a nominee for permanent appointment to the Senate. If a nominee is not confirmed within that period, the federal district court could then name a replacement.

With this kind of bi-partisan support; can we expect Mr. Gonzales’ resignation shortly?  Click here to read more in the New York Times.