The Washington Post interviewed William Jeffress, one of Lewis Libby's lawyers on the latest Fitz filing (pdf) that opposed Libby's request for additional documents and disclosed Libby's statements to the grand jury about Bush and Cheney's role in the declassification of the NIE document.

Jeffress argued that the information in Fitzgerald's filing is irrelevant to Libby's defense: that he forgot about those conversations as he dealt with crucial national security issues.

Jeffress said Fitzgerald's revelation about Libby's disclosure of information from a CIA National Intelligence Estimate "is a complete sidelight" to his accusation that Libby deliberately lied. "It's got nothing to do with Wilson's wife," Jeffress said in a brief interview, adding that Libby continues to expect to be exonerated at trial.

Fitz' filing certainly shifted national attention from Libby's alleged perjury and obstruction of justice to Bush and Cheney's role in declassifying documents about the NIE report and whether they authorized their disclosure to reporters. But let's take a step back and look at why Fitz filed this document in the first place.

Homeland Security Deputy Press Secretary Brian Doyle, charged last week in an Internet underage sex sting, has resigned. HSA Chief Michael Chertoff's reaction to Doyle's alleged crimes sounds like a shrug of the shoulders and "Sh*t happens."

"From time to time, there will be instances when misconduct occurs," Chertoff said,

And catch this. Chertoff says:

"We try to weed out those who pose a security risk," Chertoff said in a briefing with reporters. "I don't know ... that background checks with people hired will predict future behavior."

Yet, now it turns out this wasn't Doyle's first time getting caught:

Time Magazine has a cogent explanation for why Harry Reid scuttled the immigration compromise bill yesterday. He figured out he had walked into a trap, like the one I described here. From Time:

After initially signing on, Reid decided he might be walking into a trap. Some Republicans wanted to vote on amendments that Reid believed would have essentially picked apart the compromise plan; under one of them, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security would have had to certify that the border was secure before any illegal immigrants could be made legal.

What's more, even if he could defeat the amendments, any bill the Senate passed would have to go into a conference committee with the House -- which wants to build a wall along much of the U.S.-Mexico border, criminalize all illegal immigrants in the U.S., and dramatically increase the penalties against those who help them, from businesses to churches. Looking several moves ahead in a game of legislative chess, Reid feared that the conference would produce something that looked more like the House bill, which currently has no amnesty provisions for making current illegals citizens, than the Senate version.

Knights Ridder reporters say that Bush/Cheney's authorization to Scooter Libby to declassify and divulge classified information about Iraq "fits a pattern of selective leaks of secret intelligence to further the administration's political agenda."

Scott McClellan today tried to justify the Adminstration's actions:

Without specifically acknowledging Bush's actions in the Libby case, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters: "There were irresponsible and unfounded accusations being made against the administration suggesting that we had manipulated or misused that intelligence. We felt it was very much in the public interest that what information could be declassified be declassified."

McClellan didn't address why administration officials often declassified information that supported their allegations about Iraq but not intelligence that undercut their claims.

Here's a question I'm not seeing answered. If Libby was authorized to disclose newly declassified information to Judith Miller, and if it was all on the up and up, why did Libby, Cheney and Bush let her do 85 days in jail for refusing to say she got the information from Libby?

And, as Digby says, if they wanted to declassify and disclose information favorable to their case for war in Iraq, why didn't they call a press conference? Why did they give it to selected reporters? That's not disclosure to the public, that's a selective leak for partisan purposes.

Do the missing e-mails from the Office of the Vice President implicate Bush and Cheney in Plamegate? Jason Leopold writes:

The officials, some of whom are attorneys close to the case, added that more than two dozen emails that the vice president's office said it recently discovered and handed over to leak investigators in February show that President Bush was kept up to date about the circumstances surrounding the effort to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

The sources indicated that the leak probe is now winding down, and that soon, new information will emerge from the special counsel's office that will prove President Bush had prior knowledge of the White House campaign to discredit Plame Wilson's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who accused the administration of "twisting" intelligence on the Iraqi threat in order to win public support for the war.

If you are wondering what President Bush told Fitzgerald during his 2004 interview, Jason reports,

Ryan Singel at Wired News has the latest on the class action lawsuit against AT&T for turning over customer records to the feds in Bush's warrantless NSA surveillance program.

AT&T provided NSA eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker cooperating in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against the company.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, submitted an affidavit in support of the EFF's lawsuit this week. That class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco last January, alleges that AT&T violated federal and state laws by surreptitiously allowing the government to monitor phone and internet communications of AT&T customers without warrants.

Update: I just accessed the court documents, now unsealed. The case was filed by the Government as USA v. Removable Cosmetic Dental Appliances. Here's the Application and Affidavit for Seizure Warrant. Here's the order granting the stay. Here's the actual seizure warrant. Scroll to the bottom of the post for my conclusion after reading the documents. The ATF agent who submitted the affidavit knew the grills might not be removable. There was no authority in the warrant to remove the defendants from the jail to take them to a dentist.

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Original Post:

If this wasn't reported in a national paper like the the Seattle Times, I wouldn't believe it, but it's true.

A defense expert and the attorneys for two men facing federal drug charges in Tacoma are crying foul over efforts by federal prosecutors and officials with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to have the gold-capped teeth -- commonly called "grills" or "grillz" -- removed from their clients' mouths.

"I've been doing this for over 30 years and I have never heard of anything like this," said Richard Troberman, past president of the Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and an expert on forfeiture law. "It sounds like Nazi Germany when they were removing the gold teeth from the bodies, but at least then they waited until they were dead."

There's been a lot of complaining about why the police waited two days to get a search warrant in the Duke lacrosse player incident in which an stripper-dancer claims she was brutally raped by three players. The police were trying to evaluate her claim, but there was this to take into consideration:

According to a 2002 police report, the woman, currently a 27-year-old student at North Carolina Central University, gave a taxi driver a lap dance at a Durham strip club. Subsequently, according to the report, she stole the man's car and led deputies on a high-speed chase that ended in Wake County.

Apparently, the deputy thought the chase was over when the woman turned down a dead-end road near Brier Creek, but instead she tried to run over him, according to the police report. Additional information notes that her blood-alcohol level registered at more than twice the legal limit.

Defense lawyer Joe Cheshire confirms the 911 caller was the other dancer at the party. It couldn't be anyone else as as I'm concerned.

I meant to post this the other day but it got lost in draft mode.

The Judge in the Scooter "Libby" case denied most of Libby's request to prevent the Government from submitting secret (ex parte) filings on classified information that may have to be disclosed to the defense. You can read the memorandum order here (pdf.) But he threw Libby one bone.

The Judge ruled (page 12) that Team Libby can file an ex parte (secret) affidavit within two weeks outlining its defense so that the Judge will be more informed before deciding what material Fitzgerald has to turn over to Libby.

That's kind of cool for Libby, because it means the Judge will know exactly where Libby is going but Fitzgerald won't.

The congressional race in Colorado's 7th District has been referred to as one of the most important for Democrats in taking back the House in November, 2006. It's the seat currently held by Republican Bob Beauprez, who is vacating it to run for Governor. There are three Democrats vying for the primary, Peggy Lamm, Ed Perlmutter and Herb Rubenstein. The Republican challenger will be Rick O'Donnell (for whom Dick Cheney came to town in recent months to fundraise.)

Politicians are reaching out to bloggers to get their message across. A few months ago I spent two hours interviewing Peggy Lamm at a local eatery and she followed up with a phone call. This Tuesday, I spent two hours with Ed Perlmutter at a downtown Starbucks.

I just posted my interview with Ed Perlmutter over at 5280, Denver's superb monthly glossy magazine, where I blog on local issues. My post on my followup phone call with Peggy is here. My post on Ed came out much more detailed, so I'm going to write more on Peggy and what she had to say during our two hour interview soon. Colorado Pols reports that Peggy just did a campaign shakeup.

The Hagel-Martinez compromise immigration bill touted by Senate leaders yesterday failed by a 38 to 60 test vote today.

It's just as well. Had it passed, it would have gone on to the house to be reconciled with Sensenbrenner's H.R. 4437 and the Democrats would likely have compromised on keeping some of that bill's excessively punitive provisions.

Frist's bill also failed, garnering even less votes.

My view: Take the punitive provisions out. Let families stay together. Then let's talk about a bill.

Should a bill pass, when it comes time to appoint conferees to reconcile the House and Senate versions, AILA is recommending that the Senate conferees include every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

by TChris

Jessie Misskelley and two others were convicted of the gruesome murders and mutilations of three 8 year old boys in West Memphis in 1993. A reporter and a lawyer are raising serious questions about their guilt.

[Attorney Daniel] Stidham contends Misskelly had the I.Q. of a 5-year-old and was told by police what to say though hours of interrogations. "It's not really difficult to get someone mentally handicapped to confess to something they didn't do," says Stidham.