purge-gate -- new e-mails spell trouble for rove & sampson

in a well-worn "trial by bataan-
death-march" technique, the ad-
ministration tonight turned over
another 300-some pages of e-mails
to the senate judiciary committee,
about 15 hours before d. kyle sampson,
the former chief of staff for alberto
gonzales, is to appear and testify. . .

josh marshall at the tpmmuckraker
gets all the credit here, for i first
saw versions of the texts there, but
i've tried to present them in an
easily-digestible, condensed and
highlighted fashion, below [just
click each image to see full-size]. . .




via the above, we see (highlighted) in february
2007, sampson writes, and the administration
subsequently repeatedly claims, "rove had
no role in the decision to appoint" an
attorney general named tim griffin, a rove-friendly. . .

paul mcnulty, the deputy attorney general, repeats
this line to a congressional inquiry. . . just one
little problem -- tonight's e-mail dump proves sampson
himself wrote something entirely inconsistent
with that, in december 2006 -- just two months earlier:



note particularly the last yellow highlight.

senator leahy -- a former prosecutor -- will
have quite a bit of "cross-examination" fodder
when the hearing convenes at 10 am eastern,
this coming morning.

i think i'll revise my bets -- sampson will
ultimately be disbarred, but he will also ultimately
say that "others" directed his actions. . .
i see no other path out of the woods for him. . .

so -- whom will those "others" be?

rove? cheney? bush, himself?

in any event, i think we can stick a fork
in mr. sampson -- he's done -- done practicing
law, unless there are documents yet-to-be pro-
duced to counter what appears to be a fairly
glaring prevarication.

this may be one of those "sam ervin" moments,
but we'll have to catch it on cspan 3, not nbc. . .

~~~~~~~~~~~~

nota bene: in the final image, above,
note the yellow-highlighted quotations
around the term "good faith".

why did sampson set "good faith" in
quotations? was he acknowledging that the
effort there described would actually not
be made in good faith? i think so.

i think it evinces a cynical use
of the term -- thus the reference
to "running-out-the-clock", pre-
sumably to the end of 2008. . .

disgusting.