Last year, Center for American Progress CEO John Podesta convinced Stephen Colbert to give the commencement address at Podesta’s alma mater Knox College. This year, Knox invited President Clinton to be the commencement speaker, and Colbert was livid:

“If you give Clinton the same doctorate you gave me, I will be forced to burn [my degree] on the air,” Colbert said, contending that the former president had “stolen his thunder.”

As ThinkProgress highlighted, Clinton gave the commencement address and shot back, saying Knox had only given Colbert a degree “to give his ratings a boost.” Last night, Colbert responded:

while he was governor of Massachusetts:

Decorated Iraq war veteran Anthony Circosta seemed like an ideal candidate for a pardon from then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for his boyhood conviction for a BB gun shooting.

Romney said no — twice — despite the recommendation of the state’s Board of Pardons.

At age 13, Circosta was convicted of assault for shooting another boy in the arm with a BB gun, a shot that didn’t break the skin. Circosta worked his way through college, joined the Army National Guard and led a platoon of 20 soldiers in Iraq’s deadly Sunni triangle.

In 2005, as he was serving in Iraq, he sought a pardon to fulfill his dream of becoming a police officer.

Romney on pardons now:

Romney said it’s “worth looking at a pardon [for Scooter Libby],” because special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald “clearly abused prosecutorial discretion” by going on a “political vendetta” against Libby despite knowing he was not the original source of the leak.

House oversight chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) wrote Transportation Secretary Mary Peters today requesting information about “apparent efforts by the Department to lobby Members of Congress to oppose efforts by California and other states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.” In a voicemail message received by a member of Congress, an aide at the Transportation Department acts as an auto lobbyist, urging the member to take a stand on tougher state emission standards because “‘this would greatly impact the auto facilities’ in the member’s district.”

Justice Department documents released tonight include new emails linking Karl Rove’s top aides — former White House political director Sara Taylor, who resigned last month, and her deputy Scott Jennings — to the U.S. attorney scandal. Congressional subpoenas have been authorized, but not approved, for both Taylor and Jennings.

The emails, from February 2007, all relate to the case of Rove-protege Tim Griffin, who was installed as U.S. attorney in Arkansas without Senate confirmation. Griffin’s predecessor, Bud Cummins, was fired to make way for Griffin.

In the first exchange, Taylor writes to Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales’ former chief of staff, and suggests retribution against Cummins for speaking out about the reason for his firing:

I normally don’t like attacking our friends, but since Bud Cummins is talking to everyone – why don’t we tell the deal on him?

In another set of emails from Feb. 16, Taylor again writes Sampson, complaining about how Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and the Justice Department put Griffin in a “horrible position…hung to dry” by admitting that Cummins was pushed out specifically to make room for an ally of Rove. “[T]his is not good for [Griffin's] long-term career,” Taylor writes.

In a third set of emails, Scott Jennings writes to Taylor and former Gonzales counsel Monica Goodling, suggesting the Justice Department remove a line from a press release implying that the administration would work to find another U.S. Attorney if Arkansas’ senators did not approve of Griffin.

The messages from Taylor and Jennings to the Justice officials are sent from their Republican National Committee email accounts. They provide new evidence that senior White House officials were intimately involved in the attorney scandal, and that the White House was still interested in installing Griffin as U.S. Attorney even after the controversy over the firings had become public.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said in a statement tonight:

These documents, which should have been released by the Department long ago, provide further evidence that White House officials like former Political Director Sara Taylor were deeply involved in the mass firings of well-performing prosecutors. The Department of Justice should not be reduced to a political arm of the White House. We need an end to the White House’s stonewalling of our investigations so we can learn the truth.

Read the full set of emails HERE.

UPDATE: McClatchy now has a story out. It includes this tidbit from another email in the document dump: “The White House counsel’s office thought in January that the ousted prosecutors had ‘disloyally stirred up the senators‘ but argued against criticizing them publicly because they hadn’t ‘fired any shots’ at the administration.”

UPDATE II: Jeremybloom, Pachacutec, CorrenteWire, and emptywheel have additional analysis.

“For the second time in a week,” lobbyists for major polluters visited the White House last Friday “in an effort to influence the US EPA’s upcoming proposed standards for smog.” Representatives of the Edison Electric Institute and the American Chemistry Counsel met with White House officials to lobby against tighter smog standards.

Earlier last week, lobbyists for the electric power, oil, automobile, and diesel engine industries met with OMB. Also sitting in on that meeting was a representative of Vice President Dick Cheney, long considered the go-to guy for big industries opposed to tougher environmental standards. … It’s pretty rare for someone with the Vice President to sit in on a meeting like this. It suggests that industry has really sought to elevate this politically.

“The U.S. war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo have betrayed the principles of fairness that made the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg a judicial landmark, one of the U.S. Nuremberg prosecutors said on Monday.

“I think Robert Jackson, who’s the architect of Nuremberg, would turn over in his grave if he knew what was going on at Guantanamo,” Nuremberg prosecutor Henry King Jr. told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“It violates the Nuremberg principles, what they’re doing, as well as the spirit of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.”

“The concept of a fair trial is part of our tradition, our heritage,” King said from Ohio, where he lives. “That’s what made Nuremberg so immortal — fairness, a presumption of innocence, adequate defense counsel, opportunities to see the documents that they’re being tried with.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a business meeting on Thursday to authorize subpoenas for any legal opinions and advice the Bush administration has received regarding the NSA’s domestic spying program. Politico reports, “Under Judiciary Committee rules, Republicans can postpone the vote on the subpoena authorizations for a week, but Democratic insiders don’t expect Leahy will have any problem gaining approval for the subpoenas at that time.”

UPDATE: Last week, the Justice Dept. refused Leahy’s request to voluntarily turn over domestic surveillance documents for the ninth time.