Gigoting…

Gigoting…


Gigone


Since every new President gets to rotate the stock and replace any of the "at your pleasure" positions with his or her own people, the truest comparator between Fredogate and What Has Gone Before is not what happened with Clinton and the Justice Department appointments, but what happened with Clinton and the White House Travel Office.

L’affaire du Travel Office was not one of Bill Clinton’s finest hour.

As Mark Shields said at the time, “The public sacking of the White House travel office staff was stupid, unfair, and ignoble, but not criminal.” That sounds about right. It was the firing of a handful of people. People who, under normal circumstances, the President is fully within his rights to fire. And executed in a way that was botched and embarrassing and done specifically so that the President could slot friends of his into those jobs.

That, however, is where the similarity ends. With all due respect to the Travel Office, they book flights and handle baggage. The USAGs prosecute crimes on behalf of the American people.

The Travel Office firings were old fashioned patronage; the firing of USAGs was part of Karl Rove’s overarching scheme to radically pollute, politicize and partisanize the day-to-day activities of every public institution, from FEMA to NASA to the Department of Justice.

The Travel Office firings were not part of a larger scheme to protect friendly office holders from being brought to book for criminal behavior or continue to debase and corrupt the American electoral system in a way that favors the President's political allies. More and more that is exactly what Fredogate looks like.

The Travel Office firings were not preceded by a special, secret clause being slipped into the Patriot Act in the dark of night rigged up to allow for their partisan sacking with no questions asked, and specifically to prevent Congress from reviewing them and giving them the smell test.

The Travel Office firings were not preceded by the Attorney General of the United States standing before Congress, under oath and swearing by Almighty God, that he would never, ever do what he then turned right around and did.

And that is the moment that Fredogate transcended “stupid, unfair, and ignoble” and became a crime.

So what does partisan Republican waterboy Paul Gigot have to say about the USAG firings? (All quotes pimped out with a little emphasis added by me)

...Gigot: U.S. attorneys are political appointees. They're prosecutors appointed by the president, who serve at his pleasure. So presumably the president can dismiss them. What did the administration do wrong in this case?

diGenova: They have the right to fire them. They don't have the right to smear them or to give inconsistent and inaccurate answers to Congress about why they were removed. I think the real crime here is not a violation of Title 18. The crime is the clumsiness and the ham-handedness with which this was handled by the Justice Department.

I think that's really what--this was handled so unprofessionally that now they're--this would have been fine if the Republicans were still in control of the Congress. But they're not any more. The power has changed, and as a result, Democrats are in control. They can ask tough questions, and subpoenas start to fly. That's why you have to have adults in charge at the White House counsel's office and at the Justice Department.

Gigot: So there's nothing wrong, in your view, when the president of the United States, who's won re-election as the president did in 2004; and in 2005 they had some discussions in the White House and the Justice Department about replacing officials. There's nothing wrong with the president saying, "You know, I want to replace a half dozen, 10, 12, even 20 or more U.S. attorneys"?

Got it? By Gigot’s reckoning, there is nothing wrong with the President whacking USAGs for any reason or none. Although is it kinda funny that while Gigot argues specifically ” There's nothing wrong with the president saying …”, the White House flails and pivots like a Tilt-A-Whirl in an 8.0 earthquake and throws up a defense for both Dubya and Abu G that amounts, in essence, to: “This was all handled by underlings and children with no experience with anything other than giving political tongue baths, so I din’t know nuffin’!”

Gigot sees nothing wrong with the Attorney General lying to Congress in furtherance of an action that seems to have been clearly designed to pervert the Department of Justice into just another political arm of the RNC.

So what, you might ask, was Paul Gigot’s response to the admittedly “stupid, unfair, and ignoble” firing of White House booking agents and baggage handlers?

Take a wild fucking guess:

…
I've long thought that if she wanted formal power Hillary should have taken a formal job, like attorney general of chief of staff. But while Congress can't sanction, it can expose. I'd argue that one of Congress' most important jobs is to educate the public. There are kinds of behavior that aren't a crime -- such as firing travel office employees to give jobs to your friends -- but are still reprehensible. What's wrong with a little democratic accountability? If voters think the investigations are a waste of time, they can always vote the Clintons a second term.

Yeah, Paul.

What exactly is wrong with a little Democratic accountability?