It's always about teh sex with these people

Bejeebus. Via Digby.

On March 15, Rove heatedly declared before a group of journalism students at Alabama's Troy University that Charlton was fired because of his refusal to seek the death penalty. Rove's claim ostensibly referred to a case review of an August 2006 prosecution by Charlton of a man whose alleged victim's body could not be found, whose murder weapon was never produced, and who was convicted solely on the basis of evidence gleaned from drug addicts and dealers. Charlton protested pursuing the death penalty against the defendant, but was overruled by Justice Department officials.

Yet Rove's complaint against Charlton was not supported anywhere in the e-mails released by the White House to Congress. In fact, only two of those e-mails mention Charlton in a negative light. One of them, written by a Justice Department aide, noted that then Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert's criticism of Charlton's policy on prosecuting marijuana cases. The aide went on to defend Charlton, asserting that limited resources hampered border state prosecutors like him.

The other e-mail contained a weirder charge: that Charlton refused to prosecute obscenity cases. Written by Ward to Sampson on September 20, 2006, the e-mail leveled the same allegation against Dan Bogden, the US Attorney for Nevada, who was also dismissed in the prosecutor purge, despite positive performance reviews. "We have two US Attorneys who are unwilling to take good cases we have presented to them. They are Paul Charlton in Phoenix (this is urgent) and Dan Bogden in Las Vegas," wrote Ward. "In light of the AG's [Attorney General's] comments...to 'kick butt and take names,' what do you suggest I do?"

But the Justice Department did not explain which "good cases" Charlton had refused to prosecute, why he'd refused to prosecute them, or whether he'd even refused the cases.

"The date of the e-mail is subsequent to the date when they asked for [Charlton's] resignation, so it's gratuitous," a former Justice Department source intimately familiar with Charlton's disputed obscenity case told me. "It looks like the White House put this out just to dirty the waters."

According to the source, Ward's accusation against Charlton stems from a case he filed in June 2006. That month, Ward ordered Charlton to prosecute Five Star Video, an adult video store that registered on Ward's radar when it mailed copies of the DVD's Gag Factor 18, Filthy Things 6, Gag Factor 15, and American Bukkake 13 to customers across state lines. Charlton agreed to take the case, but as the source told me, Ward implored him to attach an additional US Attorney to it. Concerned about wasting the already limited resources at his disposal on a case of dubious value, Charlton hesitated. Despite his misgivings, he assigned the additional prosecutor--a key fact missing from the White House e-mails.

Ward's endless stream of mandates, the source revealed, were a source of frustration to many US Attorneys. "There were countless child obscenity cases crying out to be prosecuted," the source told me, "but [Brent] Ward wanted to focus on cases involving consenting adults. That's just not a good way of dedicating resources. When you have so many children being harmed, why not allocate your resources towards that?"

Ward's heedless prosecutions of legally available pornography reflected more than his ideology; they also defined his power within the Justice Department. Once Bush began his second term in the White House, Gonzales declared the prosecution of pornography portraying sex acts between consenting adults "one of the top priorities" of his department. He signed off on an FBI headquarters memo that recruited agents for an anti-porn task force. That memo stated that prosecutions would focus particularly on material depicting "bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior." These acts, according to the memo, were most likely to offend local juries.

I'll skip the usual thoughtful, nuanced, legal discussion normally found on this "web" "log" and get right to it: Fucked. Up.

Haven't seen American Bukkake 13, but if it's anything like AB 12... Wonder if Netflix has it.

But I mostly wonder how the recruiting for that task force is...

wait for it...

coming.

Sting.

Anyway read the whole thing. Bush is right in one thing: chronicling the sheer scale of stupidity, mendacity, politicization of the law, incompetence, cronyism, and just basic insanity of this crew of "Mayberry Machiavellis" is a task historians won't be able to complete before we're all stone cold dead.