Who is Graves, and why would his name be on the lawsuit or not?

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.

Todd Graves was the US Attorney in Kansas City who suspiciously resigned in March 2006 and was replaced by the infamous Bradley Schlozman.

If you read the story I linked to, Graves's cover story is that he was fired, er, resigned because he wouldn't sign off on a lawsuit against the Missouri Secretary of State to force voter roll purges. He was replaced by Schlozman who immediately pushed the lawsuit forward. But the kicker is that Graves's name is on the lawsuit so somebody is lying here.

That lawsuit, interestingly enough, was tossed out in Federal court about a month ago.

And I couldn't tell the players without a scorecard.

Sometimes a one or two line summary from someone who really knows the subject matter can give a post standalone value, yes?

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.

Iraq's, at least as read by outsiders. (Note, I am an outsider but years of residence in both IL and TN, plus some coverage I've done of specialized issues in the state, have been of help in grasping these matters. I used to have relatives up in the northwest part of the state but I think they're all dead now.) But here's a few notes on navigating the Missouri Morass:

(1) The names of even major figures are usually unfamiliar to a national audience

(2) Names overlap severely as politics is genetically transmissible even by Midwestern standards. (trying to keep track of Blounts alone requres a scorecard; to be bipartisan about it the same can be said about Carnahans.)

(3) Geographical details matter but are well enough known to locals as to often be omitted. Unlike Illinois for instance which has one population/power center on the edge vying against a capital in the middle, Misosuri has two: Kansas City and St. Louis. This sucks a lot of influence out of the capital 90% of the population couldn't name on a bet.

(4) Gravity and the other favorite laws of physics are different in Missouri. If you've ever been down the Ozarks way you will have seen any number of "House of Mystery" exhibits along the roadsides, where people's heights differ based on which end of a flat concrete slab they stand on for instance, and plumb bobs do not hang straight. These attractions often have caves nearby, and we all know caves are attractors for dark forces if not actual Openings to the Pits of Hell.

(5) Half the disputes in this state go back to the Jayhawk/Bushwhacker disputes from the War To the Knife period just before the Civil War. This carried into the war itself when, far from the eyes or interest of the Eastern press, some exceptionally nasty events transpired. Everybody knows the famous story that when Harry Truman came home from the war to see his mother, she told him that was the first time anybody in a blue uniform had been allowed in her house since 1865? We're talking nasty events whose memory lasts a long time.

You've had a lot of money sloshing around MO in recent decades as the Branson area has built up. That isn't that far from Bentonville Arkansas, and we all know what that represents. This money acts as a sort of invisible gravitational force of the sort they use to detect planets around other stars. When things seem inexplicable--"WFT is Karl Rove fighting so hard for friggin' Missouri for chrissakes?" keep this attractor in mind.

Tom I'm sure can throw in more useful details but I am just nattering here to avoid having to work on my resume. How do you list previous employment when it was so long ago the company's been bought, broken up and renamed six times since you worked there, or else it is still in business but everybody you worked with is dead or retired? Hmmm.. oops, sorry, wandered OT there. Back later.

I have too many questions about this to try to understand what went on. Is there some protocol about names on lawsuits whereby the then USA's name goes on the lawsuit even though the order to proceed came from higher up? Can you think of some other matter about which all conerned wish to remain silent and so use the lawsuit as a cover story? What would be so bad that the story about misuse of the USA's office for political gain is an improvement? If not that, then I don't know what this is about.

Its time to admit publicly what was done here in Kansas and there in the Western District of Missouri, forging Grave's signature so Schlozman could go forward with the suppression of minority votes would just be the icing on a very rotten cake.

This is from the proposed Truth and Reconcilation Commission:

"Along with the United States Attorney for the District of Kansas Eric F. Melgren, the former US Attorney for Missouri Bradley J. Schlozman brought the most voter fraud indictments. It has now been revealed the voter fraud defendants targeted by Melgren and Schlozman were part of a nationwide conspiracy coordinated by Bradley J. Schlozman to ignore civil rights violations and selectively prosecute Democrat get out the vote drives in minority and socially disadvantaged neighborhoods. The goal of the plan executed by Melgren and Schlozman was to bring vote fraud allegations just five days before the elections in Missouri, the state with the closest US Senate race to save Republican Jim Talent from being defeated by Claire McCaskill and in Kansas to build on Bradley J. Schlozman’s work with officials in several states that included Missouri, Georgia and Arizona to impose voter I.D. legislation known to reduce election participation by African Americans, Hispanics and American Indians believed to vote predominately for Democrat candidates.

On April 26, 2007 US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales promoted Bradley J. Schlozman to the Executive Office for United States Attorneys where he will be able to control career Department of Justice attorneys across the nation. Under the threat of firings and smear campaigns from main Justice, US Attorneys are no longer free to exercise their own legal judgment in the conduct of their offices. The United States Attorney for the District of Kansas Eric F. Melgren was not targeted but had to demonstrate his loyalty. Melgran’s office caused City of Topeka police instead of US Marshalls to serve a summons for a May 20th, 2004 deposition to Rosemary Price a witness in the Kansas District Court civil rights case Melvin E. Johnson v. John E. Potter, USPS No. 01-CV-4182-SAC on May 26th, six days after Rosemary Price appeared and testified as scheduled. The police threatened to shoot Rosemary Price’s dog if she did not open the door.

Eric F. Melgran’s office caused the summons to be served knowing Rosemary Price had attended the deposition because Johnson’s lawyer had warned Melgran’s Assistant US Attorney D. Brad Bailey that Melgran’s office needed to stop suborning obstruction of justice through intimidation and retaliation against witnesses coming to give testimony in Kansas District court, calling Assistant US Attorney D. Brad Bailey’s his attention to federal and state officials taking retaliatory actions against the African American Kansas national guardsman Mark Hunt and the plaintiff Melvin Johnson for appearing in U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson’s courtroom to give testimony against the City of Topeka and misconduct of City of Topeka police officers in Kansans for the Separation of School and State v. Adams, Ks Dist. Ct. Case No. 04-cv-04034-JAR-KGS on May 3, 2004.

Bradley J. Schlozman worked with Tim Griffin, now US attorney for Arkansas and Karl Rove to misuse voting law enforcement to challenge the votes of African American soldiers deployed overseas and to develop the caging lists of 70,000 names and addresses of voters in largely African-American and Democratic areas of Florida during the 2004 election. The Justice Department refuses to identify the officials that added U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, of New Mexico to the list of US Attorneys to be targeted because Iglesias was refusing to bring pretext voter fraud indictments to interfere with Democrat voting by Hispanic and American Indian minorities. Both Bradley J. Schlozman and Tim Griffin were installed as US Attorneys under an unconstitutional use of the USA PATRIOT Act.

As head of the Civil Rights Division at USDOJ, Bradley J. Schlozman tried to implement a barrier to minorities voting in Georgia, the 2005 Georgia voter I.D. law that a federal judge compared to a Jim Crow-era poll tax. During his work in Georgia, Bradley J. Schlozman made connections with state lawmakers benefiting from reduced African American voting and was able to build for them the high level relationships that gave them protection from USDOJ law enforcement, including the False Claims Act investigation of Georgia GOP state representative David E. Ralston. US Attorney David Nahmias for Georgia and Assistant US Attorney Laura Kennedy Bomamder declined to prosecute the case even though the IRS filed tax liens against Rep. David E. Ralston for the false claims revealed by the complaint.

As U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri Bradly J. Schlozman obtained search warrants in September 2006 which the FBI would use to raid the home of Columbia, Missouri businessman and Muslim philanthropist Shakir Hamoodi to attempt to help Jim Talent’s reelection campaign by appearing to be fighting terrorism, even though Hamoodi is not involved in terrorism and only was a member of an ethnic group Schlozman thought Missouri voters would believe was a terrorist.

Bradley J. Schlozman used his previous position in main Justice to improperly screen new hires on political party affiliations. Schlozman also changed the job performance evaluations of career civil servant attorneys including Tobey More a geographical analyst in Schlozman’s section in retaliation for not supporting Karl Rove’s voting suppression policies. Eric F. Melgran’s Assistant US Attorney D. Brad Bailey was able to use a threat of Justice Department prosecution in May 2004 against Melvin Johnson’s attorney if Johnson’s attorney made a criminal complaint regarding the intimidation of witnesses with testimony against the City of Topeka. The State of Kansas is now bringing an ethics prosecution against a second private attorney who brought out evidence of the City of Topeka’s corrupt misuse of Housing and Urban Development funds as well as Tax Increment Financing (“TIF”) funds in Topeka’s minority neighborhoods.

The promotion of Bradley J. Schlozman to main Justice where he can continue to misuse his office to obstruct justice in voting rights investigations and assist Karl Rove in preventing public corruption from being prosecuted gives American citizens the impression that this has become the policy of the US Department of Justice. Already since Bradley J. Schlozman’s return to Washington D.C., main justice has started to employ the tactics pioneered in Kansas, the smearing of honest attorneys and the use of a Justice Department Ethics prosecution against Monica Goodling to intimidate her despite Congress’s grant of immunity to testify fully and freely on the retaliatory firings of US Attorneys.

“Our nation cannot go through what we lived through here in Kansas, a Republican Attorney General, Phil Kline receiving the benefit of dollars from out of state corporations for refusing to enforce laws to protect consumers. A department Phil Kline entrusted to a conservative party operative attorney Bryan Brown despite Brown’s arrests and sanctions for misconduct. With the promotion of Bradley J. Schlozman we are seeing the US Department of Justice taking the same wrong turn. Its time for Alberto Gonzales to fire Bradley J. Schlozman and for all US attorneys and Assistants to come forward in every community and tell the truth of what happened so our nation can start to heal” said David Price."

Time for a Truth and Reconcilation Committee and for Woods and the rest of the 92 US Attorneys to publicly renounce any further involvment in the main Justice voting suppression and public corruption conspiracy:

http://www.1888pressrelease.com/judicial...

What I think is the money quote:

“I was pushed,” [Graves] said.

But given the intricacies of the situation on the ground in Missouri, I think this post takes a subject matter expert.

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.

Here:

Gonzales, asked about Graves during a Michigan appearance on Tuesday, said: "I'm not aware he was forced out."

Right. That's because you delegated the results to underlings for plausible deniability.

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.