W's urge to purge... another peek < ò > < ó >

This story, which I originally found on C&L and read about further in a March 22 WaPo piece, floored me. What shocked me even more was that Chris Wallace explored this on his show yesterday.

It seems that the Bush Justice Department stuck its nose right where it should not have gone - right up Big Tobacco's tar hole.

The story's so unreal, I'm not even going to try to describe it - just read a few excerpts for yourself from the WaPo story:

Sharon Y. Eubanks said Bush loyalists in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's office began micromanaging the team's strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial, to the detriment of the government's claim that the industry had conspired to lie to U.S. smokers.

She said a supervisor demanded that she and her trial team drop recommendations that tobacco executives be removed from their corporate positions as a possible penalty. He and two others instructed her to tell key witnesses to change their testimony. And they ordered Eubanks to read verbatim a closing argument they had rewritten for her, she said.

"The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said," Eubanks said. "And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public."

Eubanks, who served for 22 years as a lawyer at Justice, said three political appointees were responsible for the last-minute shifts in the government's tobacco case in June 2005: then-Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum, then-Assistant Attorney General Peter Keisler and Keisler's deputy at the time, Dan Meron.

News reports on the strategy changes at the time caused an uproar in Congress and sparked an inquiry by the Justice Department. Government witnesses said they had been asked to change testimony, and one expert withdrew from the case. Government lawyers also announced that they were scaling back a proposed penalty against the industry from $130 billion to $10 billion.

WTF? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that someone is getting paid here. This was the government's chance to drop the hammer on Big Tobacco, which has been exploiting the American public for decades, including intentionally putting additives in cigarettes that made them more addictive.

Here's a cheerful thought - if this administration would do something like this with Big Tobacco, what kind of influence do you think Bush and Cheney, oil men both, have over what goes on with Big Oil? Read on...

Yesterday [March 21] was the first time that any of the government lawyers on the case spoke at length publicly about what they considered high-level interference by Justice officials.

Eubanks, who retired from Justice in December 2005, said she is coming forward now because she is concerned about what she called the "overwhelming politicization" of the department demonstrated by the controversy over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys. Lawyers from Justice's civil rights division have made similar claims about being overruled by supervisors in the past.

Eubanks said Congress should not limit its investigation to the dismissal of the U.S. attorneys.

"Political interference is happening at Justice across the department," she said. "When decisions are made now in the Bush attorney general's office, politics is the primary consideration. . . . The rule of law goes out the window."

Hey, where there's smoke, there's fire. I have no doubt in my mind that Bush, Rove, Cheney and their cabal played a big role in the attorney firings. Now it's just a matter of finding out for sure by uncovering the legal trail, and deposing witnesses, under oath and with a legal transcript.