Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

It’s always a shame when you lose a few e-mails. In the high-tech world, the "dog ate my homework" excuse does not quite work. To lose an e-mail you have to work hard to destroy the evidence. So, I am shocked, shocked, I tell you, to hear that the White House has lost some e-mails!

According to the Los Angeles Times some key emails concerning the US Attorney scandal may have been lost by the White House:

The White House said today that it may have lost what could amount to thousands of messages sent through a private e-mail system used by political guru Karl Rove and at least 50 other top officials, an admission that stirred anger and dismay among congressional investigators.

The e-mails were considered potentially critical evidence in congressional inquiries launched by Democrats into the role partisan politics may have played in such policy decisions as the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

The White House said an effort was underway to see whether the messages could be recovered from the computer system, which was operated and paid for by the Republican National Committee as part of an effort to separate political communications from those dealing with official business.

"The White House has not done a good enough job overseeing staff using political e-mail accounts to assure compliance with the Presidential Records Act," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said in an unusual late-afternoon teleconference with reporters.

As a result, Stanzel said, "we may not have preserved all e-mails that deal with White House business."

Most unfortunate. Surely the missing emails must be recoverable? right?:

The e-mails were sent through a communications system created in conjunction with Republicans early in the Bush administration. Rove and others were given special laptop computers and other communications devices to use instead of the government communications system when dealing with political matters.

The parallel system was designed to avoid running afoul of the Hatch Act, which prohibits using government resources for partisan purposes, White House officials have said.

But evidence has emerged that system users sometimes failed to maintain such separation and used the private system when communicating about government business.

Special laptops. Other communications devices. I have a few questions:

• Were Rove and company using their special laptops on the White House LAN? If so, what is the White House policy on connecting non-government computers to the White House LAN? Is that considered a breach of security?
• If the "special laptops" were using the White House LAN, then emails sent and/or received by those laptops would have had to go through the White House firewall before going out to the internet. Shouldn’t someone look at the firewall logs to determine how many emails were sent out and/or received from these laptops and to which IP addresses? Does the White House firewall log all content that passes through it? If so, someone should retrieve the emails from the firewall logs.
• If these special laptops did not plug into the White House LAN, did Rove and company use a wireless public network (like Verizon Wireless) from inside the White House to send/receive official White House communications to outside parties? Is that considered a breach of security in the White House?
• Were any of the emails sent from these special laptops, through gwb43.com, internal White House communications between White House staffers? If so, has internal White House deliberations been compromised by the communications being sent out over the public internet?
• Does the email server at gwb43.com do regular backups? If so, someone should pull the backup tapes from the relevant time period to retrieve the "deleted" emails.

So many questions. I am sure the crack staff at the White House and the RNC will be able to answer these questions and retrieve these "lost" emails. Because as everyone knows, it really is very difficult to "delete" things these days. There’s almost always a copy lying around somewhere - in some mail server, on some backup tape, in some firewall log, etc.. That DELETE button on the computer doesn’t do what some may think it does.

[Via Think Progress]

Henry Waxman is requesting information on White House contracts with MZM:

As part of the Committee’s ongoing investigation into waste, fraud, and abuse in federal contracting, the Committee has requested information on a $140,000 contract awarded by the Executive Office of the President to MZM, Inc. in July 2002.

The contract with the White House appears to have been MZM’s first prime contract with the federal government. Subsequent investigations of other MZM contracts had uncovered serious irregularities. To date, there has been no examination of the circumstances surrounding the company’s initial contract and the role that White House officials played in the award and execution.

I wrote about MZM’s contracts Sunday night. I noted that much reporting needed to be done. It is encouraging to see Congress investigating this issue.

Today the Washington Post reported that Lurita Doan, the GSA Administrator, will testify this coming Wednesday in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about recent reports of her involvement in the politicization of the GSA. The charges are serious and, if substantiated, she would be removed from her position in violation of the Hatch Act.

Before I discuss this latest scandal, I want to share my personal experience with Lurita Doan. I will warn the reader that I have a positive opinion of Lurita, and I ask that you take my bias into consideration when you read the following. Though we differ in our political views, I have immense respect for Lurita.

Lurita became the first female GSA Administrator on May 31, 2006. Before becoming GSA Administrator, she was the founder and sole owner of New Technology Management, Inc. (NTMI), a small federal contractor located in Reston, Virginia. She sold NTMI before becoming GSA Administrator.

I started working at NTMI in November of 2002. I worked there for four years. For part of my tenure there I led the technical staff in designing and developing a large-scale software application that helps detect and eliminate fraud for a large government agency.

During my time at NTMI I came to admire and respect Lurita. In a bit of coincidence it turned out that she and I attended the same college, ten years apart. Lurita is one of the most dynamic and charismatic people I have ever known in my life. She may also be the most driven and hardest working person I have had the pleasure of knowing. She has been a mentor to me and has been very supportive of me during my time at NTMI. In my long career in the IT industry, she is one of the few CEOs I have met who earned my respect for her honesty, her hard work, and her ability to communicate effectively and build rapport at every level in the company. I am grateful to have known her and have learned much from her.

Lurita is also nothing if not blunt. She will tell you what she thinks and has a very low tolerance for excuses. When she is in a room with you, she commands and demands attention by the sheer force of her personality. Her bluntness has made her many enemies in her short tenure in the government.

Those of us who worked at NTMI knew that Lurita was a long-time supporter of the Republican Party and the Bush Administration. In fact, she was one of the speakers at the 2004 Republican National Convention. She has also met with Mr. Bush as a woman small business owner in 2004 and was cited by Mr. Cheney in his speech at the Small Business Administration in 2003. So, it did not come as a surprise when she was nominated for the position of GSA Administrator.

However, unlike companies like MZM (which I wrote about yesterday) and their meteoric rise, NTMI’s business did not benefit from Lurita’s Republican Party ties. A look at NTMI’s contracts will show the less than stellar performance by the company over the last six years. I should know - I slaved over preparing many responses to RFPs only to be outbid by companies offering a better price or with more experience or leverage. NTMI’s fortunes dwindled when the company graduated from 8(a) status (the graph of NTMI’s revenue trend here will leave no doubt when NTMI graduated from 8(a) status). NTMI struggled, like other government contractors (with the exception of MZM and other shady outfits), to compete for bids in full and open RFPs against much larger and well established companies such as SAIC, EDS, CSC and others. It was an uphill battle in this competitive environment and NTMI suffered as a consequence.

Lurita has been a champion of women and minorities in business. Her appointment to the post of GSA Administrator was supposed to be a step forward for advancement of minorities and women in government. It was widely expected during her Senate confirmation that she would bring her energy and her drive to the GSA after a scandal-ridden period in the agency’s history.

Lurita replaced Stephen Perry as the GSA Administrator. Mr. Perry, you will recall, resigned in October 2005 in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal. Mr. Perry resigned two weeks after David Safavian, Perry’s chief of staff, was arrested for obstructing justice and his connections to Jack Abramoff. I should note that it was during Mr. Perry’s tenure that companies such as MZM, with no experience or revenue, mysteriously obtained multi-million dollar blanket purchase agreements.

Lurita was expected to clean up the mess at GSA:

Investigations in 2003 revealed the agency’s procurement organizations, particularly its Federal Technology Service regional shops, had parlayed their reputation for quick turnaround with few questions asked into a scandalous misuse of technology contracts.

…

Doan, who stepped in more than half a year after Perry quit on Oct. 31, 2005, was expected to clean up the mess. She seemed primed for the job.

 

Doan exudes energy. She leans forward to emphasize points. She gesticulates. She visibly reacts with displeasure or pleasure. Her voice grows animated. She groans audibly when she hears something or encounters someone she doesn’t like. She is not shy.

 

But within weeks of her Senate confirmation, she picked a fight with NASA over the future of its Scientific and Engineering Workstation Procurement. She was accused of saying that the GSA inspector general’s staff "terrorized" regional administrators. She angered an already irritated Defense Department by resisting limitations on using Defense dollars.

…

Despite her energy, some of Doan’s efforts have backfired. The Office of Management and Budget renewed NASA’s governmentwide procurement contract and told her to "avoid unnecessary discordant publicity on this matter." Late last year, she capitulated to the Pentagon on how quickly its funds must be disbursed.

She picked the wrong people to pick a fight with in trying to eliminate government waste. She may have also made some political enemies inside and outside GSA who were accustomed to the Bush Gravy Train:

Contracts specific to a department or function of government, such as the Navy’s Seaport, a 2004 IT contract, and the Homeland Security’s Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for Leading Edge Solutions, an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity technology acquisition, compete with GSA. For years, agencies other than GSA have run technology contracts open to all agencies. Doan contends they waste tax dollars.

 

"We just don’t want duplications," she says. "If it’s a unique requirement that’s being supplied by a particular [agency’s governmentwide contract], that’s fine." Otherwise, procurement should go through GSA, Doan says. Only GSA covers its costs by collecting fees as opposed to using appropriated funds, she asserts. Other agencies might say they’re not using appropriated money to support contracts open to all, "but unless you absolutely carve out your costs for your rent, you carve out your costs for the air you breathe, practically . . . then there’s an added burden to the taxpayer," she says.

I always suspected she would make powerful enemies with her style. She picked a fight with the biggest guy in the schoolyard - the Defense Department contracting office. It was probably a matter of time before she was pushed out.

Immediately after her tussle with DOD and NASA, articles appeared in the Washington Post about her falling out with the GSA IG and her attempt to offer a $20,000 contract to a long-time friend. Now the scandal has gone into overdrive because White House political staff were coaching GSA political appointees in a videoconference that was presided over by Lurita. This latest scandal reeks of the same politicization of the government that the U.S. attorney scandal reeks of. Given the central role GSA has played in the Jack Abramoff scandal and in the Duke Cunningham/Gonzogate scandal, it rings true that the White House is involved in across-the-board politicization of government.

I am disappointed that Lurita is alleged to be involved in the latest scandal. I eagerly await Congressman Waxman’s hearing this Wednesday to learn more. I do hope the investigation does not stop at Lurita. I expect, like in Gonzogate, that the Congress will hold the White House accountable and not be satisfied with being thrown scraps. With her blunt style and her immediate attack on government waste she is ripe to be thrown overboard by this White House as scrap.

Finally, I wrote this diary, from a personal point of view, partially because I saw an alarming diary on Daily Kos that called Lurita an unconscionable name. I hope, as we continue to ferret out corruption in the Bush Administration, that we do not lose sight of who we are and what our mothers taught us.

Thanks for reading, and now let the flaming begin.

When Carol Lam, the US Attorney for the Southern District of California, was publicly humiliated and dismissed by the Bush Administration on December 7, 2006, she became the latest casualty in George W Bush’s "War on Terror". The "War on Terror" is multi-pronged. It consists of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war against al Qaeda, and the war of profit and political favors. It was the war of profit and political favors that killed Carol Lam’s career.

This is the story of one of the warriors of greed and profit. This is the story of the warpath of dollars that leads all the way to the White House.

The reason being floated by the Administration for Carol Lam’s dismissal is her alleged lax pursuit of immigration cases. Congressman Darryl Issa has attacked Ms. Lam on her office’s prosecution of immigration misdemeanors prior to her firing, and that attack is being now spun as a cause for her dismissal. However, it is clear from the emails released by the Justice Department that the Department was aggressively defending Ms. Lam and considered Mr. Issa something of a pest.

It is ironic that Darryl Issa, who has been arrested multiple times for gun possession and auto theft, should pursue Carol Lam for exercising prosecutorial discretion in deciding whether to pursue misdemeanor offenses. If the prosecutors had not exercised prosecutorial discretion in the cases involving the Congressman, Mr. Issa would likely have seen some jail time. But I digress.

Politics however is sometimes fought as asymmetrical warfare. The most plausible speculation about Carol Lam’s dismissal is that she was fired because of her prosecution of Duke Cunningham and the possibility that the ongoing investigation was starting to come too close to the White House. Darryl Issa, a defender of Duke Cunningham to the end, may have been prosecuting a flanking maneuver.

The smoking gun tying Carol Lam’s firing to the Duke Cunningham case seemed to be contained in an email from Kyle Sampson:

The U.S. attorney in San Diego notified the Justice Department of search warrants in a Republican bribery scandal last May 10, one day before the attorney general’s chief of staff warned the White House of a "real problem" with her, a Democratic senator said yesterday.

The prosecutor, Carol S. Lam, was dismissed seven months later as part of an effort by the Justice Department and the White House to fire eight U.S. attorneys.

…

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a television appearance yesterday that Lam "sent a notice to the Justice Department saying that there would be two search warrants" in a criminal investigation of defense contractor Brent R. Wilkes and Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who had just quit as the CIA’s top administrator amid questions about his ties to disgraced former GOP congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

The next day, May 11, D. Kyle Sampson, then chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, sent an e-mail message to William Kelley in the White House counsel’s office saying that Lam should be removed as quickly as possible, according to documents turned over to Congress last week.

"Please call me at your convenience to discuss the following," Sampson wrote, referring to "[t]he real problem we have right now with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires."

Since that revelation the issue has been much clouded by the raising of the immigration issue. But where there is smoke, there is likely to be fire - especially when the Bush Administration is involved.

Duke Cunningham was being bribed by MZM, a company run by Mitchell Wade. It has emerged through the hard work of Talking Points Memo and Think Progress that MZM got its start in government contracting and the bribery business in a most unusual way:

– Wade’s company MZM Inc. received its first federal contract from the White House. The contract, which ran from July 15 to August 15, 2002, stipulated that Wade be paid $140,000 to “provide office furniture and computers for Vice President Dick Cheney.”

– Two weeks later, on August 30, 2002, Wade purchased a yacht for $140,000 for Duke Cunningham. The boat’s name was later changed to the “Duke-Stir.” Said one party to the sale: “I knew then that somebody was going to go to jail for that…Duke looked at the boat, and Wade bought it — all in one day. Then they got on the boat and floated away.”

Of course, the big prize for MZM followed the very next month:

The money and gifts MZM gave Cunningham were a small price to pay for the ultimate prize. In September 2002, the General Services Administration signed a so-called blanket purchase agreement with MZM totaling $250 million over five years.

So, the facts are a company (MZM) gets its first contract from the White House, gets paid $140,000, and two weeks later spends $140,000 to bribe Duke Cunningham, and the very next month gets a $250 million dollar contract from the Defense Department. That kind of meteoric rise is unheard of in government contracting. Add to that the fact that MZM was the only bidder for a $250 million dollar contract from DOD, and you have the makings of major corruption. Anyone who has ever bid for a government contract, especially a $250 million dollar contract that was a full and open bid, knows that everyone who is anyone in government contracting would have bid for such a lucrative contract.

When the Pentagon noticed that they had handed out such a large contract without a competitive bidding process, they apparently stopped any new work on the contract. That Pentagon decision, in June 2005, came the same week that the relationship between Duke Cunningham and MZM became known:

The Pentagon has ordered a halt in new work for MZM Inc., a local defense and intelligence firm, under a contract that has brought the company $163 million in revenue during the past 2 1/2 years.

A Pentagon spokesman said in a statement that the decision to cut off further awards for MZM under the 2002 contract, known as blanket purchase agreement, was because of a change in procurement law.

Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.), a member of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, acknowledged last week that his relationship with MZM founder Mitchell J. Wade is being examined by federal authorities.

The story so far is quite damning. But, it is far from complete.

The contract MZM received from the White House for $140,000 was not an isolated contract. That contract was part of a Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) that MZM signed with the GSA on May 13, 2002 [Click here for a PDF of the GSA schedule for this BPA]. In addition to this BPA, MZM rode the gravy train on two other BPAs. The three BPAs are as follows:

• GSA BPA contract number GS-35F-0486M effective May 13, 2002 to May 12, 2007
• GSA BPA contract number GS-10F-0392R effective July 19, 2005 to July 18, 2010
• DITCO contract number DCA20002A5016 effective sometime in September, 2002

Between 2002 and 2006, when MZM was ostensibly sold (more on that later), the company was paid over $176 million mainly under GS-35F-0486M and DCA20002A5016. A company that made no money before 2002, made $140,000 in 2002, over $43 million in 2003, over $69 million in 2004, over $60 million in 2005 and over $3 million in a few months in 2006 before the company was sold.

The White House got the ball rolling in 2002 under GS-35F-0486M. In 2004, the Executive Office of the President also paid MZM a total of $421,474 ($50,115, $92,161, $112,161 under DCA20002A5016 and $167,037 under GS-35F-0486M) for "intelligence services" .

On February 24, 2006, the government secured a guilty plea from Mitchell Wade, the head of MZM. Wade pleaded guilty to funneling $1 million in bribes to Duke Cunningham. In the plea agreement Wade admitted to bribing the DOD Program Manager on the DITCO contract (DCA20002A5016) by hiring the Program Manager’s son and later hiring the Program Manager at MZM. In return MZM received favorable reviews and inside information that helped secure contracts for MZM under the BPA.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, the Pentagon claimed in June 2005 that they would not award any further work to MZM under the DCA20002A5016 BPA. However, government records show that MZM was awarded multiple task orders, amounting to millions of dollars, in fiscal year 2006 on the BPA.

On July 18, 2005, while MZM was being investigated for bribery and after the Pentagon claimed to have cut off the DCA20002A5016 gravy train, the GSA awarded MZM with a $2,250,000 blanket purchase agreement (GS-10F-0392R) for the MOBIS program [Click here for a PDF of the GSA schedule for this BPA]. In September 2005 MZM was renamed Athena Innovative Solutions after a purchase by Veritas Capital. Athena has continued where MZM left off by collecting over $7 million in 2006 under GS-10F-0392R and GS-35F-0486M. The gravy train continues.

Surprisingly, fully 100 percent of Athena’s inherited (from MZM) contracts and 78 percent of MZM’s contracts were full and open bids, but only had one bidder - MZM. Given the size of these contracts, these statistics should raise eyebrows.

The question must be asked - how does a small business with no revenue secure a BPA worth tens of millions of dollars (GS-35F-0486M) as the prime contractor in a full and open (not a small-business set-aside) bidding process? The question must be asked - what role did the White House play in securing this contract given that the White House was MZM’s first customer?

The question must be asked - how does a small business which has only one prior past performance in buying furniture secure a massive DOD contract worth up to $250 million dollars to do classified work without any prior DOD related experience? The question must be asked - how did the White House grant a series of unprecedented contracts in 2004 for "intelligence services" to the very same company that the White House previously hired to buy furniture? The question must be asked - since the DCA20002A5016 contract has been shown to involve bribery, were there any improprieties involved in the granting of task orders by the White House to MZM under this BPA?

The question must be asked - why would the GSA grant a multi-million dollar contract (GS-10F-0392R) to MZM within a month of it becoming public that the company was involved in bribery involving government contracts?

Finally, the question must be asked whether Carol Lam was asking these very questions? In light of the email from Kyle Sampson cited above, it appears quite likely that Carol Lam’s investigation of the Duke Cunningham scandal was probably venturing into sensitive areas - thus making Carol Lam a "real problem".

That "real problem" was solved on December 7, 2006 when Carol Lam was fired.

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The story goes like this: Negroponte is unhappy with Goss. Negroponte goes to Bush for help in getting rid of Goss. Bush approves. Goss is fired. Hayden is looked upon as a likely replacement. Bush will announce on Monday that Hayden is the new CIA Director.

That is the story that the major news outlets are peddling based on some high octane spin coming from the White House. Karl Rove must be losing what hair he has left burning the midnight oil.

I have one major problem with this story line. The problem is that Porter Goss dropped everything on Friday and ran to the White House with virtually no notice to quit. That is simply not done when you are the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the middle of an intelligence driven War on Terror. His hasty exit has left the CIA in turmoil. If he was pushed out as a result of a power struggle the Administration would have had a successor at the ready to smooth the transition. Not having a successor ready is either monumentally irresponsible or an indication of a scandal that is big enough that all other considerations seemed not to matter to Goss and the President.

Adding fuel to the fire, asked about his resignation Porter Goss was decidedly unhelpful:

Porter Goss said Saturday that his surprise resignation as CIA director is "just one of those mysteries," offering no other explanation for his sudden departure after almost two years on the job.

It looks like Porter Goss is not on board with the program. Look for Goss to sing like a canary in the near future.

We are also to believe that John Negroponte was involved in a power struggle with Goss.  To buy into this spin, we would have to believe that Mr. Negroponte takes his job seriously. Unfortunately, Mr. Negroponte is so engaged in his job as the Director of National Intelligence that he spends three hours of his busy workday relaxing at a ritzy private club:

On many a workday lunchtime, the nominal boss of U.S. intelligence, John D. Negroponte, can be found at a private club in downtown Washington, getting a massage, taking a swim, and having lunch, followed by a good cigar and a perusal of the daily papers in the club’s library.

“He spends three hours there [every] Monday through Friday,” gripes a senior counterterrorism official, noting that the former ambassador has a security detail sitting outside all that time in chase cars. Others say they’ve seen the Director of National Intelligence at the University Club, a 100-year-old mansion-like redoubt of dark oak panels and high ceilings a few blocks from the White House, only “several” times a week.

…

But there seems to be a new, relaxed John Negroponte. And some close observers think they know why.

He’s figured out the job. Which is to say, he really doesn’t have much control over the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

It does not appear that Negroponte was struggling with much of anything let alone struggling with the Director of the CIA.

If there was a power struggle, it might have been between the Defense Department and the CIA. The Defense Department appears to be usurping most of the intelligence budget and activities from the CIA. Mr. Negroponte is a hapless bystander in this power struggle as the following exchange with Senator Diane Feinstein illustrates:

“We appointed you to be the person to (run) all intelligence,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., lectured Negroponte at a Feb. 28 hearing of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. (CQ Transcripts: Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing, Feb. 28, 2006)

Feinstein asked Negroponte about “recent media reports [that] have spotlighted a number of activities that appear to be related to intelligence collection or covert action, but that well may be outside of the official intelligence community’s channels.

“For example,” Feinstein continued, “military databases of suspicious activity reports . . . by the (domestic military) counterintelligence field activity, or CIFA; and, secondly, a Pentagon program to secretly pay Iraqi newspapers to run pro-American articles.

“Were these activities subject to your approval and oversight?”

Negroponte’s answer was short-circuited by an unidentified voice, according to the CQ transcript, quite possibly his deputy, former Air Force general and NSA chief Michael Hayden.

“Ma’am, I don’t believe that either of those activities would fall into Mr. Negroponte’s area. They are Department of Defense programs, I believe.”

“Now, let me raise this problem then,” Feinstein continued.

“Now, I know how tough it is. But if you didn’t know and you didn’t give a go-ahead [to domestic military spying], it indicates to me that, for 85 percent of the budget, which is defense-related, that you’re not going to have the controls that you should have,” Feinstein said.

“You want to comment?”

Negroponte, who not long ago in Baghdad was dismissing senior military officers with the wave of his hand, had to be feeling an acute wave of heartburn.

The Director of National Intelligence was forced to concede that the U.S. intelligence activities Feinstein was asking him about had “not risen to the level of my office.” In any event, they came “under the direction of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence” — a pipsqueak, relatively speaking.

Negroponte said he “understood” that the Pentagon was doing an internal review of spying programs because of a congressional uproar.

“But will you get the results of that review?” Feinstein asked.

“Yes,” promised Negroponte, dismissed like a schoolboy, “I will get those results.”

Enter General Michael Hayden. He apparently is the forerunner to be the new CIA Director. If he is nominated it will be a victory for Dick Cheney and will further diminish the power of the CIA vis-à-vis the Defense Department. Michael Hayden after all is Dick Cheney’s go to guy for warrant-less eavesdropping. The former Director of the National Security Agency was the implementer and chief public defender of the Administration’s warrant-less domestic spying program. General "Bill of Rights" Hayden of course famously excised the "probable cause" clause from the Fourth Amendment:

QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I’d like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I’m no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American’s right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use —

GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually — the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But the —

GEN. HAYDEN: That’s what it says.

QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.

GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But does it not say probable —

GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says —

QUESTION: The court standard, the legal standard —

GEN. HAYDEN: — unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: The legal standard is probable cause, General. You used the terms just a few minutes ago, "We reasonably believe." And a FISA court, my understanding is, would not give you a warrant if you went before them and say "we reasonably believe"; you have to go to the FISA court, or the attorney general has to go to the FISA court and say, "we have probable cause." And so what many people believe — and I’d like you to respond to this — is that what you’ve actually done is crafted a detour around the FISA court by creating a new standard of "reasonably believe" in place in probable cause because the FISA court will not give you a warrant based on reasonable belief, you have to show probable cause. Could you respond to that, please?

GEN. HAYDEN: Sure. I didn’t craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order. All right? The attorney general has averred to the lawfulness of the order.

Just to be very clear — and believe me, if there’s any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it’s the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you’ve raised to me — and I’m not a lawyer, and don’t want to become one — what you’ve raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is "reasonable." And we believe — I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we’re doing is reasonable.

He is just the guy we need to head our spy agency.

Michael Hayden, the Defense Department and Dick Cheney (even perhaps Negroponte) may be jockeying to take advantage of the power struggle caused by Goss’s departure but it is not plausible to conclude that they were the primary cause of his departure. The New York Daily News asserts today that its "all about the Duke Cunningham scandal" (better known as Hookergate). The Wall Street journal also reports that Goss’s number 3, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, may be under federal criminal investigation for his involvement in Hookergate. Josh Marshall widens the net by looking at possible misdeeds at the DHS related to Hookergate contracting. No one however has yet connected Porter Goss directly to the scandal. The involvement of Foggo with Hookergate does not explain the abruptness of the Goss exit. Something else must have spooked Goss. Whatever caused his sudden flight probably involves him directly, not tangentially.

There is way too much smoke here for there not to be fire. There is much original reporting to do here. I trust that our worthy investigative reporters will leave no stone unturned to unearth the roots of this scandal. The Nixon Watergate scandal started with a third rate burglary. The reality challenged G. Gordon Liddy has always claimed that the real story involved hookers. Mr. Liddy may finally get his wish in that the new Watergate scandal is starting with hookers. Where it leads is anyone’s guess. However, it does promise to be a hot summer in Washington.

"On the first hour of the first day, we will restore decency and integrity to the Oval Office. They will offer more lectures and legalisms and carefully worded denials. We offer another way, a better way, and a stiff dose of truth." - Richard B. Cheney, August 2, 2000

"Just because our White House has let us down in the past, that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen in the future. In a campaign that’s going to restore honor and dignity to the White House." - George W. Bush, September 23, 2000

Today CIA Director Porter Goss unexpectedly announced his resignation. Any suggestion that his resignation may be remotely connected to prostitution and bribery charges swirling around the halls of power in Washington would be wild speculation. Please ignore the unfortunate timing of the sudden departure - it in no way is connected to any Washington scandal. Repeat after me: This is part of the Administration shake-up after the appointment of Josh Bolten.

Some time ago I floated a theory that the internal logic of an Administration like this would lead to structural collapse and sooner or later it would emasculate itself. So far, Andy Card, Scooter Libby, Scott McClellan and Porter Goss have fallen victim. There are certainly more to come. Yet these are dangerous times and the stakes are very high. The Administration’s agenda has yet to be fulfilled: Iran and Syria are in its sights and time is running short.

Will the Langoliers of history catch up with the Bush Administration before it blunders us into another war? Or will we be watching bombs over Tehran this November? These are dangerous times indeed.

The French Revolution produced many horrors, but none more so than The Reign Of Terror when thousands were sent to the guillotine in the name of public safety. The name most often associated with the horrors that transpired at that time in France is Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre was one of the leaders of the French Revolution that culminated in the beheading of King Louis XVI.

The Revolution that began with the slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité quickly turned inward on itself. With France engaged in war with Austria and Prussia Robespierre ascended to head the Committee of Public Safety which held the executive power in revolutionary France. Robespierre began to consolidate power to protect the Republic from enemies foreign and domestic. He began to see enemies everywhere. To protect the French population from these terrorists and enemies of the state, Robespierre launched The Reign Of Terror. The Committee of Public Safety began to deploy spies everywhere. Any hint of dissent was viewed as against the public good and the dissenters were quickly dispatched via the guillotine.

In unleashing the Reign of Terror, Robespierre believed he was upholding the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity by protecting the Republic from terrorists that sought to undermine it. The ends began to justify the means. Ultimately however, the Terror that he unleashed not only consumed the Revolution, but its also consumed Robespierre himself. Robespierre was sent to the guillotine by the very forces that he set into motion.

Robespierre was a follower of the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau, in  The Social Contract (Penguin Classics) and subsequent works, argued that a social contract exists between the governed and the ruler. The contract rests on the belief that there is a notion of a general will of the people that the ruler is given the authority to protect and defend. The ruler is endowed with unlimited executive power to protect the general welfare of the governed. Rousseau’s theory does not allow any constraints on the power of the ruler in defense of the general will. In other words, the ruler has inherent power to ignore laws of the Republic. Rousseau was one of the first modern thinkers to formulate the ideas of the Unitary Executive. A number of corollaries quickly follow from Rousseau’s theory. Since the ruler is charged with defending the general will any opposition or public dissent is deemed to be against the greater good of the general will and the Republic.

By taking Rousseau’s social contract to its logical extreme, Maximilien Robespierre became arguably the first practitioner in Western Civilization of the theory of the Unitary Executive.

Today in the United States we are again confronted with Rousseau’s Unitary Executive. Fortunately there are no guillotines in the streets; however, the stakes today are equally high. The Unitary Executive is being used to justify violations of the Fourth Amendment, indefinite detentions, excessive secrecy, leaking of classified information for political purposes; and torture.

The Unitary Execute theory grants the President the power to determine what is in the public interest. Thus, today we were told by the President’s Press Secretary that when the President leaks classified information it is for the greater good, when a whistleblower leaks to the New York Times about warrant-less spying it’s aiding the terrorists. Mr. McClellan took the theory even further today by accusing anyone who questions the President’s motives in leaking the classified information as being "crass" and anti-American. Any dissent, true to the logic of the Unitary Executive, is considered aiding and abetting the enemy.

The Unitary Executive as the rise and fall of Robespierre demonstrated has one major systemic flaw. The belief in the rightness of the ruler to be the soul arbiter of what is in the general will, or national interest, leads to a stifling of ideas within the Executive. Any hint of dissent, even from within, is dealt with harshly. Ultimately the internal contradictions of this theory cause the Executive to cannibalize itself.

I believe signs of this collapse from within have been growing in the Administration. The departure of Scooter Libby was only part of this long slide into failure. We have now seen Andy Card leave and soon we will see others leave or be pushed out (the political equivalent of the guillotine) as this Unitary Executive proceeds to emasculate itself.

In the end, we are left with a touch of irony as the Administration that famously despises all things French is now crumbling under the burden of the Unitary Executive - a theory devised by the French philosopher Rousseau.

President Bush has finally shaken up his inner circle. Chief of Staff Andy Card has called it quits after the longest tenure of anyone in that post. President Bush has responded to calls for "fresh blood" in the White House by replacing his tired Chief of Staff with his tired Director of OMB.

When you live in a bubble and you are looking for fresh blood, its hard to see outside the bubble. So, you pick the ones you can see - Harriet Miers, Josh Bolten, Condi Rice, Stephen Hadley,  etc. I think Mr. Bush’s pick of Josh Bolten speaks volumes about this Administration’s ability to process new ideas or information. President Bush missed an opportunity to reinvigorate his flagging Administration by injecting some fresh blood and fresh ideas. Instead, Mr. Bush displayed his Administration’s tendency to address substantial issues by applying window dressing. The Administration that lives by spin is now sinking under its very tired old spin.