End of the Conservative Ascendency

Wolfowitz tenure at the World Bank is coming to a messy close.  At least that's the case if you judge by the press stakeout outside his house.

The NYT says Wolfowitz is resigned about his coming resignation and is not battling over who gets the blame:

Mr. Wolfowitz was said to be adamant that he be cleared of wrongdoing before he resigned, according to people familiar with his thinking.

The negotiations were still under way on Wednesday evening, and bank officials said they were increasingly hopeful that a solution was in sight, ending what had become a bitter ordeal at the bank, within the Bush administration and at economic ministries around the world...

People close to the negotiations said that the threat to oust Mr. Wolfowitz had, in the previous 24 hours, taken a bizarre U-turn, with Mr. Wolfowitz challenging the bank’s directors to vote him out, knowing that the United States would oppose that move. Previously, Mr. Wolfowitz had been doing everything in his power to prevent such a vote.

In effect, bank officials said, he was using the fear among European leaders at the bank of a possible rupture with the Bush administration at a time when the United States and Europe are struggling to cooperate on Iran sanctions, trade and other economic issues.

“The bank board is ready to vote Wolfowitz out of office, and Wolfowitz is calling their bluff,” said a bank official briefed on the negotiations. “It’s going to be difficult for the board to drop its charges against him, but they’re going to have to do it if they want to resolve this. They’re staring each other down, but the bank side is blinking furiously...”

Especially galling to bank board members, various officials said, was Mr. Wolfowitz’s request that the 24-member bank board reject the conclusions of its seven-member subcommittee charging him with violating several codes of conduct and trying to cover up his involvement in Ms. Riza’s salary and promotion.

H/T to CAP:

In a 2006 hearing, when Sen. Chuck Schumer asked him about Comey’s objections to the NSA wiretapping program, Gonzales denied there was any “serious disagreement about the program“:

GONZALES: Senator, here is a response that I feel that I can give with respect to recent speculation or stories about disagreements. There has not been any serious disagreement, including — and I think this is accurate — there has not been any serious disagreement about the program that the president has confirmed. There have been disagreements about other matters regarding operations, which I cannot get into. I will also say –

SCHUMER: But there was some — I am sorry to cut you off, but there was some dissent within the administration, and Jim Comey did express at some point — that is all I asked you — some reservations.

GONZALES: The point I want to make is that, to my knowledge, none of the reservations dealt with the program that we are talking about today.

Gonzales’ answer suggests two possibilities.

1) Comey’s objections apply to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program that Gonzales was discussing. If so, then Gonzales quite likely made serious mis-statements under oath. And Gonzales was deeply and personally involved in the meeting at Ashcroft’s hospital bed, so he won’t be able to claim “I forgot.”

2) Perhaps Comey’s objections applied to a different domestic spying program. That has a big advantage for Gonzales — he wasn’t lying under oath. But then we would have senior Justice officials confirming that other “programs” exist for domestic spying, something the Administration has never previously stated.

The special committee set-up to look into allegations against Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank has issued its report to the Board of Directors and it's not good for Wolfowitz, who appears pretty disconnected from the rules and reality in his tenure as World Bank President:

The report charged that Mr. Wolfowitz broke bank rules and the ethical obligations in his contract, and that he tried to hide the salary and promotion package awarded to Shaha Ali Riza, his companion and a bank employee, from top legal and ethics officials in the months after he became bank president in 2005.

Citing what it said was the “central theme” of the matter, the report said Mr. Wolfowitz’s assertions that what he did was in response to the requests of others showed that “from the outset” of his tenure he “cast himself in opposition to the established rules of the institution.”

“He did not accept the bank’s policy on conflict of interest, so he sought to negotiate for himself a resolution different from that which would be applied to the staff he was selected to head,” the committee said, adding that this was “a manifestation of an attitude in which Mr. Wolfowitz saw himself as the outsider to whom the established rules and standards did not apply.”

“It evidences questionable judgment and a preoccupation with self-interest over institutional best interest,” it said.

Leading conservative blog www.redstate.com has announced a major campaign to block Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA) from taking Rep. John Doolittle's (R-CA) seat on the House Appropriations Committee.  Doolittle is being investigated by the FBI and Calvert's been accused of similar corruption problems, and Red State has had enough of the House GOP Steering Committee that is filling Doolittle's spot: "The House GOP Steering Committee will either embrace reform or reject it,” he wrote. “And we will encourage them to embrace it."

This time it is Paul McNulty, who claims he's quitting "because of the "financial realities" brought on by "college-age children and two decades of public service."" Of course he's also at the center of the scandal that has claimed just about every high-level DOJ official besides Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. A refresher on why McNulty is in hot water from the WAPO:

McNulty began work as Gonzales's deputy in November 2005. McNulty became a central figure in the furor after he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in February that the White House played only a marginal role in the dismissals -- a characterization that conflicted with documents later released by Justice and with subsequent testimony.

He also said most of the prosecutors were fired for "performance-related" reasons. That statement angered many of the former U.S. attorneys, most of whom had sterling evaluations and had remained largely silent about their departures.

Don's miss the WAPO article, but it boils down to this - if you didn't disenfranchise voters aggressively enough for Karl Rove's taste, your job was in jeopardy.

Paul Wolfowitz may have to work even harder to hang onto his job, according to the NYT:

Xavier Coll, vice president of human resources, provided to a bank committee investigating the matter supported the charge that Mr. Wolfowitz was aware of engaging in favoritism. One said the documents were “devastating” to Mr. Wolfowitz’s case...

A special committee investigating the allegations of misconduct will transmit its findings to the larger 24-member board of the bank on Monday. Also to be transmitted is a recommendation on how or whether Mr. Wolfowitz should be censured.

The bank board will listen to Mr. Wolfowitz’s testimony on Tuesday and decide what to do on Wednesday.

European leaders are working to ease Paul Wolfowitz out as President of the World Bank by offering a deal.  If Wolfowitz leaves soon, they say they will allow the United States to pick the next President, as has been tradition since the bank was founded.

Leading governments of Europe, mounting a new campaign to push Paul D. Wolfowitz from his job as World Bank president, signaled Monday that they were willing to let the United States choose the bank’s next chief, but only if Mr. Wolfowitz stepped down soon, European officials said.

European officials had previously indicated that they wanted to end the tradition of the United States picking the World Bank leader. But now the officials are hoping to enlist American help in persuading Mr. Wolfowitz to resign voluntarily, rather than be rebuked or ousted.

The goal, they said, is to avert a public rupture of the bank board over a vote, possibly later this week, to sanction Mr. Wolfowitz. Even if the vote is a reprimand, they said, it could effectively make it impossible for him to stay on.

And the WAPO talks about the how this current scandal could threaten future funding for the World Bank.

Michael Hirsch at Newsweek takes a look at some of the historic names that are leaving the ever more conservative, outside the mainstream Republican party.

Susan Eisenhower is an accomplished professional, the president of an international consulting firm. She also happens to be Ike's granddaughter—and in that role, she's the humble torchbearer for moderate "Eisenhower Republicans." Increasingly, however, she says that the partisanship and free spending of the Bush presidency—and the takeover of the party by single-issue voters, especially pro-lifers—is driving these pragmatic, fiscally conservative voters out of the GOP. Eisenhower says she could vote Democratic in 2008, but she's still intent on saving her party. "I made a pact with a number of people," she tells NEWSWEEK. "I said, 'Please don't leave the party without calling me first.' For a while, there weren't too many calls. And then suddenly, there was a flurry of them. I found myself watching them slip away one by one."

Eisenhower isn't the only GOP scion debating if the party still feels like home. Theodore Roosevelt IV, an investment banker in New York and an environmental activist like his great-grandfather, Teddy, takes issue with what he says is George W. Bush's inattention to global warming (and Republican presidential contender John McCain's flirtations with the religious right). He's unhappy with the cost of the global war on terror and the record deficits incurred to finance it. Ninety years ago, former president Teddy Roosevelt attacked Woodrow Wilson's pro-democracy idealism, calling it "milk-and-water righteousness"; Roosevelt's great-grandson doesn't like how the current president is promoting values abroad, either. "I come from a tradition of pragmatic Republicanism," he says. "This administration has taken the idea of aggressively exporting democracy à la Woodrow Wilson and gone in a direction even Wilson wouldn't have considered."

The party might even be alien to Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee who jolted the party rightward when he said that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Goldwater's youngest daughter, Peggy, who is active in GOP politics in Orange County, Calif., says she is a "moderate conservative," just as her firebrand father became later in life, irked by Republicans in Washington who embrace big government. "The government is taking on more than I feel they can handle," she says.

The internal investigations unit of the Justice Department has admitted the obvious - under Bush, Rove and Gonzlaez, the DOJ was rapidly being turned into a subsidiary of the Republican Party.  From the NYT:

The Justice Department has begun an internal investigation into whether a former senior adviser to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales improperly tried to fill vacancies for career prosecutors at the agency with Republicans loyal to the Bush administration, department officials said Wednesday.

And Karl Rove is under increasing pressure to share what he knows with Congress:

The Senate committee issued a subpoena to Mr. Gonzales for all Justice Department e-mail about the dismissals involving Karl Rove, the senior White House political adviser.

And more details are coming out about the coverup that followed the politically motivated firings of the 8 US Attorneys:

Three of the dismissed prosecutors provided, for the first time, accounts of telephone calls they said they received earlier this year from Michael Elston, the chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, as Mr. Elston squeezed them to remain silent about the circumstances of their ousters, in an effort to tamp down public scrutiny.

The calls came within weeks after each of them had been dismissed, but before department officials, including Mr. Gonzales, had begun in testimony to cite performance failings as the rationale for their removal.

Paul K. Charlton, the former Arizona prosecutor, said he was left with the impression that Mr. Elston “was offering me a quid pro quo agreement: my silence in exchange for the attorney general’s.”

John McKay, the former United States attorney from Seattle, said he was disturbed by the entire exchange.

“I greatly resented what I felt Mr. Elston was trying to do: buy my silence by promising that the attorney general would not demean me in his Senate testimony,” Mr. McKay told the investigators in his statement. “I believe that Mr. Elston’s tone was sinister and that he was prepared to threaten me further if he concluded I did not intend to continue to remain silent about my dismissal.”

H. E. Cummins, the former prosecutor in Arkansas, had raised a similar accusation in February in an e-mail message he wrote to other prosecutors who had been dismissed.