The story about former U.S. Attorney John McKay's performance on the 2004 election is growing. It has national significance as Attorney General Gonzalez is under increasing criticism.
Today's Seattle Times : "GOP chair called McKay about '04 election"
The Wall Street Journal mentions McKay in today's editorial about the sacked U.S. Attorneys.
McKay says that he
filed no charges and did not convene a grand jury because ... there was not sufficient evidence of federal crimes.What information about the election did McKay examine, and how did he justify his conclusion?
For example, Bob Edelman sent this letter with exhibits to the FBI and to McKay in 2005. What kind of investigation ensued? What were the specific conclusions? That these were legal votes? Innocent mistakes? That it wasn't kosher, but too small potatoes to justify a federal case? The public deserves the details.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at March 14, 2007 03:50 PM | Email ThisMcKay should have been fired then. The phrase "useless like tits on a boar" come to mind, but that actually understates his aiding and abetting the crime of corruption. He actually should be in prison, not merely fired.
Posted by: Dick on March 14, 2007 04:58 PMmckay's performance may receive the necessary and deserved scrutiny b/c the dems control congress and can exercise the constiutionally-mandated oversight function of the executive. in doing so, stefan's hard work on this matter may be both advanced and further validated.
michelle re post #1: quit with the faux news talking points and pay attention to the facts:
"While that's true, the current case is different. Mass firings of U.S. attorneys are fairly common when a new president takes office, but not in a second-term administration. Prosecutors are usually appointed for four-year terms, but they are usually allowed to stay on the job if the president who appointed them is re-elected.
Even as they planned mass firings by the Bush White House, Justice Department officials acknowledged it would be unusual for the president to oust his own appointees. Although Bill Clinton ordered the wholesale removal of U.S. attorneys when he took office to remove Republican holdovers, his replacement appointees stayed for his second term.
Ronald Reagan also kept his appointees for his second term."
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/16897325.htm?source=rss&channel=krwashington_nation
Posted by: dinesh on March 14, 2007 05:47 PMCheck your facts. Wholesale firing of US Attorneys has nevera been common practice. Bill Clinton was the only president to fire all of them. (All but one - he caved to political pressure from a NJ Senator and didn't fire Michael Chertoff.)
Posted by: Bob Edelman on March 14, 2007 06:07 PMThere is a Federal case here. Every Washington State voter who was effectively disenfranchised by having their vote cancelled by an illegal voter suffered harm. There is that little matter of equal protection under the law. It is even in the Constitution, IIRC.
Posted by: Interested Observer on March 14, 2007 06:22 PMExample #1: the provisional ballot without a signature ... look again: it's signed.
Example #2: the address which does not exist. Try a search at maps.google.com -- the claim made that this was a "non-existent block of 19th avenue" is simply untrue.
Example #3: did both the provisional and absentee votes get counted? until we know that, there isn't a crime ... though I'd love to know if both of these votes were counted. How do we find out?
I'm all for rooting out voter fraud and for having clean elections, but you gotta have more evidence than this garbage to get the attention of a US Attorney, in my humble opinion.
Posted by: James on March 14, 2007 07:23 PM2. Stuart Gerson was the acting AG under Clinton when those US attorneys were let go. He was a holdover from the Bush I administration. Here's what he said at Wash Post Online today:
"It is customary for a President to replace U.S. Attorneys at the beginning of a term. Ronald Reagan replaced every sitting U.S. Attorney when he appointed his first Attorney General. President Clinton, acting through me as Acting AG, did the same thing, even with few permanent candidates in mind. What is unusual about the current situation is that it happened in the middle of a term. However, all of the incumbents had served more than the four years presumed in their original commission and, I suggest, replacing them is entirely the prerogative of the executive, as each deposed U.S. Attorney has agreed. The personnel practices employed, giving inaccurate reasons for terminating them and not giving them the courtesy of notice, are, as the AG now concedes, unacceptable."
Posted by: Zenger on March 14, 2007 07:33 PMHow can this be called "firing"? Had McKay been released before his four year term was up, then it would be appropriate to say he was "fired". But not when he was allowed to stay many months after his term had expired.
Posted by: Richard Pope on March 14, 2007 07:58 PMThis evidence was posted photographically and logically day by day on his blog, and made a very strong case that some County rules for handling, canvassing and counting ballots were being blown off, to say the least.
First, you'd think that our ever-eager newspapers would compete with one another to dig up documentary evidence, since they have far better entree to our local bureaucracies than any individual. Hah. Our newspapers looked languidly at the excess of votes over voters, made a mildly bothered remark or two, and left for Wenatchee to report the trial as if it were a football game. Looks like their entree was gained by wearing blindfolds and earmuffs.
Second, the Secretary of State's office should have stepped up, but acted like benign insects in amber. And a gang of County Auditors circled the wagons and declared in a letter - with no evidence - that King County could do no wrong.
And third, US Attorney John McKay should have done more with the material sent to him and the FBI than simply roost on it. His failure to even acknowlege receipt of the information from Stefan and Bob Edelman, let alone meet and discuss it, was inexplicable then and is no better now. Without any explanation for his inaction based on those exhibits, his behavior was more prejudiced than rational.
It appeared to me that Stefan as an individual citizen, bearing such information no matter how impeccably researched and documented, was seen by all these authorities as a mark, a crank, and one who could be sacrificed for the greater harmony of the political class of County, State and Country. But when it comes to a strong presumption of voter fraud, that's the last way that our bureaucracy should be behaving.
Stefan's evidence should have been thoroughly examined and judged on its merits by our political representatives, with a full report on the findings. It never was. If John McKay is going to pose as wrongly terminated, let him make a full explanation of his inaction in 2005.
Posted by: Hank Bradley on March 14, 2007 08:02 PMI read the explanation, but I also checked Google Maps and Mapquest, and the block exists... so long as you leave the "1/2" off of "1314 1/2". Google Earth shows the same address, both with and without the "1/2"... and the satellite photo shows a residential area with house on one side of the street and either an apartment complex or duplex on the other. The address does in fact exist. Perhaps the elections software just couldn't read the "1/2" and that's why the adviser overrode it??
Posted by: Mike H on March 14, 2007 08:22 PMMy point is that if this is the "evidence" for deep-seated voter fraud in King County, enough for a USA Attorney to summon a grand jury, bring indictments, and to (potentially) overturn a statewide election where 99.99% of the votes were cast properly, then I'm not at all surprised why Mr. McKay didn't respond.
Posted by: James on March 14, 2007 08:50 PMuntil then, it's business as usual. maybe it's the water. soft. makes everything soft.
Posted by: jimmie-howya-doin on March 14, 2007 09:16 PMMike McKay was given the ceremonial role of Chair of President Bush's campaign in Washington in 2000, thanks to Slade Gorton and Jennifer Dunn. However, Mike McKay contributed money to the re-election campaigns of Christine Gregoire and Ron Sims while he was basking in the glory of being Bush's campaign Chair. And also endorsed several liberal judicial candidates, lending his Bush campaign title to these endorsements.
We can thank people like Gorton, Dunn and Chris Vance (then newly elected as state GOP chair) for putting Mike McKay as head of the patronage appointment selection committee -- instead of choosing a loyal Republican. And for getting John McKay as U.S. Attorney -- a person who conveniently overlooked apparently wrongdoing by Ron Sims' employees which resulted in Christine Gregoire's election as Governor.
Posted by: Richard Pope on March 14, 2007 09:34 PMAlso, I found it interesting that you found a person who voted at a polling station for a neighborhood where they no longer lived. I happen to know a Republican who did this during the last election. I didn't report it because I figured it didn't really matter where he voted since both locations were in King County. But I guess that next time I will report it since Republicans are such dicks that they want to disqualify voters on any ridiculous reason they can think of. I guess Republicans only care if people have the right to vote in Iraq--they don't give a f*** if Americans vote unless they're Republican.
Posted by: TechnoMom on March 14, 2007 09:46 PMExcellent questions Stefan!
The public DOES deserve the details. Anyone who accepts McKays performance in the 2004 election fraud case is simply blinded by liberal partisanship.
The Freedom of Information act should allow access to documents of what transpired in the pre-investigation...(that McKay used to ultimately determine that no formal investigation was warranted.)
James & Mike H--The address does not exist. That's why the envelope was marked "Fatal Pend/Address". Again, the person was not registered to vote because he gave a non-existant residential address. Stephan posted a full explanation with street sign photographs at http://soundpolitics.com/archives/005140.html. He drove there. I also checked property records and verified that there is no property at that address.
TechnoMom--You must be confused about what the fraud evidence shows. There was nothing about persons who voted at polling places where they no longer lived. That's permitted under certain circumstances. Nor was the evidence directed at individuals - it was provided to show that ballots were illegally counted by King County election officials.
And to you all--The figures were examples of categories of evidence, not the total evidence. The letter was accompanied by a CD that contained hundreds of images of envelopes in the three categories.
To dismiss Michelle simply because she brings us a Fox (faux) news talking point is the height of hypocracy. Showing news articles of what other administrations have done in the past and calling these the "facts" ignores the most basic FACT that seems to be lost in all the brouhaha. Every US Attorney serves at the pleasure of the President. He or she may be dismissed at any time for any reason by the President - or his representative. What others may have done in the past or what others may do in the future is completely irrelevant to that most basic fact. The noise is nothing but political posturing.
Posted by: Jay on March 15, 2007 07:20 AMTry using King County's parcel viewer (http://www5.metrokc.gov/parcelviewer/viewer/kingcounty/viewer.asp) and you will see that there isn't a 1300 block of 19th Ave. Yahoo and Google maps must be guessing at where it should have been. According to King County it just doesn't exist.
Posted by: Jim on March 15, 2007 09:34 AMI stand corrected
Posted by: Mike H. on March 15, 2007 10:40 AMTake sacked U.S. Attorney John McKay from Washington state. In 2004, the Governor's race was decided in favor of Democrat Christine Gregoire by 129 votes on a third recount. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other media outlets reported, some of the "voters" were deceased, others were registered in storage-rental facilities, and still others were convicted felons. More than 100 ballots were "discovered" in a Seattle warehouse. None of this constitutes proof that the election was stolen. But it should have been enough to prompt Mr. McKay, a Democrat, to investigate, something he declined to do, apparently on grounds that he had better things to do.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009784
Posted by: Dan S. on March 15, 2007 10:49 AMmichele: you are confusing 2 simple principles. when a new administration of a different party takes over, it has been customary for the incoming president to replace all of the u.s. attorneys (whose 4 year term would be expiring) and appoint a new a.g. (see reagan, the poster child for the republican party and cliinton). while you may call this "firing," it is different from the 2nd principle, which is the replacement of u.s. attorneys during a second term. it is highly unusual to have wholesale replacements of u.s. attorneys.
and, as for the playground rationale "clinton did it," all i can say is congress impeached clinton for lying about a sex act in a private lawsuit. are you suggesting that congress further pursue the b.s. claims that bush made (not under oath, but in the state of the union and elsewhere) regarding the abortion known as iraq?
let's talk hyprocrisy now.
Posted by: dinesh on March 15, 2007 12:13 PMMistakes were made, indeed.
Things are even worse for the GOP than I thought! Pretty soon it will be a criminal offense to hurt their feelings.
Posted by: sestamibi on March 15, 2007 02:23 PM