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Friday, May 11, 2007

If Karl Rove did nothing wrong, why are they hiding his e-mails?
Posted by Jill | 5:39 AM
What is in Karl Rove's e-mails about his role in the firing of U.S. attorneys that the White House doesn't want us to see?

Murray Waas:

The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove's, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas

The withheld records show that D. Kyle Sampson, who was then-chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, consulted with White House officials in drafting two letters to Congress that appear to have misrepresented the circumstances of Griffin's appointment as U.S. attorney and of Rove's role in supporting Griffin.

In one of the letters that Sampson drafted, dated February 23, 2007, the Justice Department told four Senate Democrats it was not aware of any role played by senior White House adviser Rove in attempting to name Griffin to the U.S. attorney post. A month later, the Justice Department apologized in writing to the Senate Democrats for the earlier letter, saying it had been inaccurate in denying that Rove had played a role.

Brad Berenson, an attorney for Sampson, said in an interview that his client did not intend to mislead Congress. Sampson, he said, signed off on the February 23 letter based on representations made by the White House that it was accurate.

The withheld e-mails show that Sampson's draft was forwarded for review to Chris Oprison, an associate White House counsel, who approved the language saying that Justice was not aware of Rove having played any role in supporting Griffin. But an earlier e-mail from Sampson to Oprison that has already been made public indicates that the two men discussed Rove and then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers as being at the forefront of Griffin's nomination.

Several of the e-mails that the Bush administration is withholding from Congress, as well as papers from the White House counsel's office describing other withheld documents, were made available to National Journal by a senior executive branch official, who said that the administration has inappropriately kept many of them from Congress.

The senior official said that Gonzales, in preparing for testimony before Congress, has personally reviewed the withheld records and has a responsibility to make public any information he has about efforts by his former chief of staff, other department aides, and White House officials to conceal Rove's role.

"If [Gonzales] didn't know everything that was going on when it went down, that is one thing," this official said. "But he knows and understands chapter and verse. If there was an effort within Justice and the White House to mislead Congress, it is his duty to disclose that to Congress. As the country's chief law enforcement official, he has a higher duty to disclose than to protect himself or the administration."


Of course Gonzales doesn't believe that's true, as is obvious both from his ridiculous testimony, in which he'd rather appear to be a complete moron than complicit. And that the White House doesn't want Karl Rove's role known is yet another indication that the right-wing story of the firings being for cause and something every president has done is utter bunk. Rove's entire career has been about one thing and one thing only: getting his man elected by whatever means necessary. And those means have included tactics from bugging his own office and blaming it on his candidate's opponent to methodically starting and spreading utter falsehoods about his candidates' opponents (from "Ann Richards is a lesbian" to John McCain's illegitimate black baby) to the Florida voter purges of 2000 and the Ohio shenanigans of 2004.

But with more and more states getting the message about the unreliability of touch-screen voting after the many irregularities associated with George W. Bush's 2004 re-election -- phantom votes in New Mexico, the shenanigans in Ohio -- and a GOP in disarray, Rove had to come up with a new way for Republicans to remain in power in 2008. And using U.S. Attorneys to intimidate minority, immigrant, and elderly voters off the rolls was his method of choice.

Nine U.S. attorneys have been fired, but many more who DIDN'T refuse to do the Administration's corrupt bidding are still on the job (*cough* Chris Christie *cough*). So it remains to be seen just how much Rove has been stopped -- unless Congress starts realizing that it is dealing with people who have no respect for the rule of law and stop dealing with them as if they do.

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