The Road to Shell Is Paved With Bad Intentions

From The New York Times:
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is investigating whether a former secretary of the interior, Gale A. Norton, violated the law by granting valuable leases to Royal Dutch Shell around the time she was considering going to work for the company after she left office, officials said Thursday.
The officials said investigators had [...]

Glory, Glory Halliburton

From POLITICO:
Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) offered an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts to companies who prevent victims from filing lawsuits against sexual assault and harassment.
Franken proposed the amendment after hearing the story of Jamie Leigh Jones, who alleges that she was brutally raped while working a contractor for Halliburton/KBR [...]

Gonzogate: The Story That Never Dies

From The New York Times:
WASHINGTON — Thousands of pages of internal e-mail and once-secret Congressional testimony showed Tuesday that Karl Rove and other senior aides in the Bush White House played an earlier and more active role than was previously known in the 2006 firings of a number of United States attorneys.
Aides to former [...]

Gonzo’s doing interviews. A little Berty told me!

Hey kids! Gonzo is doing interviews! From The New York Times :

As the first Latino to have served as the attorney general, what are your thoughts as Sonia Sotomayor prepares to become the first Latina on the Supreme Court?
This is obviously a proud and historic moment for all Hispanics.
It has been two [...]

It Had To Be Yoo

From Talking Points Memo:
The fact that John Yoo was the only Justice Department OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] official who was “read into” the surveillance program — even though he wasn’t the head of OLC at the time — has already been noted by others looking through the inspectors general report on the program released [...]

Creepier by the Dozen

From The New York Times:
WASHINGTON — A coalition of left-wing advocacy groups filed legal ethics complaints on Monday against 12 former Bush administration lawyers, including three United States attorneys general, whom the groups accuse of helping to justify torture.
The coalition, called Velvet Revolution, asked the bar associations in four states and the District of Columbia [...]

Bye Bye Bybee

From the San Jose Mercury News:
WASHINGTON — For six years, a little-known federal judge, Jay Bybee, has worked in a Las Vegas courtroom, hearing cases for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Now, a furious debate over the use of torture by the Bush administration, fueled by the release of a memo written by [...]

Cheney Gang

From MSNBC:
In an interview with MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell, Liz Cheney, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State during the Bush administration, defended her father, saying that the harsh interrogation tactics yielded valuable intelligence and that the tactics didn’t amount to torture.
…snip…
Cheney added that the tactics outlined in the CIA memos are the same techniques are [...]