It appears that Bush just can’t stay out of trouble. Now he has Henry Waxman, the chair of the House Government Oversight Committee sending our beloved Attorney General another letter asking for all records concerning Bushie’s handling of a recent federal case against the tobacco industry. This action was a result of a front-page story in the Washington Post which claimed that top political appointees in the Justice Department had pressured the lead prosecutor in her case — lying to smokers concerning the risks — against the tobacco industry to lessen the penalties against the top tobacco executives. Is there no end to the Bushie’s misadventures?

Sharon Y. Eubanks the lead prosecutor said that Bush loyalists in the Attorney General’s office interfered with the team’s strategy in the final weeks of the 2005 trial. According to the article, 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.”

Government lawyers also announced that they were scaling back a proposed penalty against the industry from $130 billion to $10 billion. At the time I heard this, I smelled a rat. Of course, the high-ranking Justice Department officials said there was no political meddling and the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) ostensibly found nothing. Mind you, this is the same department who was investigating the authorizations of warrantless wiretaps in which Gonzales, who was the target of this investigation, advised the President not to provide records. So the OPR simply closed the case.




According to a Time’s article, Eubanks was retired from Justice in December, 2005, only coming forward now because of her concern over what she calls “overwhelming politicization” by the Justice Department. She said that Congress should look further into other areas than just the recent firings of the eight U.S. Attorneys. She also stated that lawyers from the Justice’s civil rights division have made similar claims about being overruled by Bushies in the past. She said,

Political interference is happening at Justice across the department. 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.

So, poor Gonzales, not only having to provide all documentation and communications regarding the warrantless wiretaping fiasco, the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys, but now he has to come clean with all records regarding the tobacco case. Waxman is demanding all communications between the White House and the Department of Justice related to the Department’s suit against the tobacco industry; all notes, in any form, kept by political appointees at the Department related to White House involvement; and an accounting of all contacts between the White House and the Department of Justice related to the tobacco litigation.

Can you imagine getting letters of this sort day after day? It’s really funny because this is the same man who said of the first request for records regarding the eight U.S. attorney firings, that he was too busy to bother with gathering records. Well, if he was busy then, you can imagine how he is scrambling now. All I can say is “Go get ‘em Waxman”.