Rove Had Say in Firing Attorneys

I can't believe nobody's started a thread on this yet, but to recap... we have a slew of US Attorneys fired at about the same time and their stories sound similar... they did not follow through with enough gusto on cases against Democrats. Now we find out Rove was involved. I'm shocked.

Lots of posts recently about how Clinton set a bad example by lying in a judicial process, but here we have an administration not-so-secretly corrupting the entire Justice Department for their own political ends.

Here are execerpts form the NYTimes article today:

 

So, the House will call Rove to testify and the Senate may not be far behind. The administration will do everything they can to keep Rove from taking an oath and being put in a position of either lying to Congress or exposing embarassing/criminal acts. Big Executive Privilege battle looming over Rove's testimony.
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White House says Rove relayed complaints about prosecutors
By Ron Hutcheson, Marisa Taylor and Margaret Talev
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The White House acknowledged on Sunday that presidential adviser Karl Rove served as a conduit for complaints to the Justice Department about federal prosecutors who were later fired for what critics charge were partisan political reasons.

House investigators on Sunday declared their intention to question Rove about any role he may have played in the firings.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Rove had relayed complaints from Republican officials and others to the Justice Department and the White House counsel's office. She said Rove, the chief White House political operative, specifically recalled passing along complaints about former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and may have mentioned the grumblings about Iglesias to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Iglesias says he believes he lost his job as the top federal prosecutor in New Mexico after rebuffing Republican pressure to speed his investigation of a Democratic state official.

Perino said Rove might have mentioned the complaints about Iglesias "in passing" to Gonzales.

"He doesn't exactly recall, but he may have had a casual conversation with the A.G. to say he had passed those complaints to Harriet Miers," Perino said, relaying Rove's hazy recollection.

Perino said such a conversation would be fairly routine at the White House.

"Lots of people at the White House gets lots of complaints about lots of different people on a multitude of subjects," she said. "The procedure is to listen and take the appropriate action to notify the relevant agency."

Perino said Rove told her that he did not suggest any of the eight U.S. attorneys be forced to resign.

The new details about Rove's involvement emerged as the top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee declared their interest in talking to him.

The committee is trying to determine whether the firings were part of an effort to exert political control over federal prosecutors. Democrats consider Rove the key source for any political interference at the Justice Department because of his role at the center of politics and policy in the White House.

Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., confirmed their plans after McClatchy Newspapers reported Saturday that New Mexico's Republican Party chairman, Allen Weh, had complained to Rove and one of Rove's deputies about Iglesias.

"Mr. Conyers and Ms. Sanchez intend to talk with Karl Rove about any role he may have had in the firing of the U.S. attorneys," Sanchez spokesman James Dau said. "The revelations from Mr. Weh certainly give us something else relevant and salient to talk about."

Conyers and Sanchez last week told the White House they intended to interview several unnamed White House officials. But they had not previously specified Rove. It was unclear whether they would seek his public testimony or simply have the committee staff interview him.

The White House's explanation of Rove's role is the latest attempt to explain the firings of Republican appointees in the middle of an administration and in the absence of allegations of misconduct. After initially citing "performance-related" reasons, the Justice Department later acknowledged that policy differences played a role but denied acting at the request of the White House. Rove's statement Sunday indicates a bigger White House role than was previously known.

In another development, two leading Democrats said Gonzales should resign. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., said Gonzales has lost credibility with his handling of the firings, his failure to catch privacy infringements by federal investigators operating under the Patriot Act and other controversies at the Justice Department.

Perino offered Rove's account of his dealings with the Justice Department after talking with him by telephone. She said Rove routinely passed along complaints about various U.S. attorneys to the Justice Department and then-White House counsel Miers.

Among the complaints that Rove relayed were concerns among Republican Party officials in various jurisdictions that the Justice Department was not being aggressive in pursuing allegations of election fraud by Democrats. Such allegations by Republicans were a particular concern in New Mexico and Washington.

Rove acknowledged that he personally complained to Miers that "voter fraud cases were not being treated as a priority" by the Justice Department, Perino said. He also passed along complaints about Iglesias that he had heard going back as far as 2004.

In addition to the voter fraud issue, some New Mexico Republicans were angry that Iglesias refused to speed up his corruption investigation of several Democratic state officials. At the time, party leaders were looking for any advantage they could get that might help them retain control of Congress.

Neither Rove nor his deputy, Scott Jennings, recalled talking to Weh, the New Mexico Republican Party chairman, about Iglesias, but they did not dispute Weh's account of the conversation, Perino said.

In an interview Saturday with McClatchy Newspapers, Weh said he complained in 2005 about Iglesias to a White House liaison who worked for Rove and asked that he be removed. Weh said he followed up with Rove personally in late 2006 during a visit to the White House, but Rove told him Iglesias had already been fired.

"He's gone," Rove said, according to Weh. While Rove didn't remember the conversation, Perino said that it most likely occurred during a White House Christmas party on Dec. 14 - a week after Iglesias was told that he should step down.

Sunday, Weh said he wanted to be clear he didn't think Rove had the power to fire Iglesias.

"Folks, this isn't about the White House political office, this is about an incompetent attorney," he told McClatchy Newspapers. "Clearly I'm smart enough to know Karl Rove can't terminate anybody. It was a request."

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/16884148.htm

 

US Attorneys are indeed political appointees. However, there is a difference between being a political appointee and using the power of the US Government's Law Enforcement infrastructure to serve the whims of political operatives. Do you really not see the danger in this? Suppose Clinton had fired US Attorneys who were either not zealous enough in pursuing cases against Republicans or too zealous in pursuing cases against Dems? Would you dismiss it as "no BFD?" I wouldn't.

 

The big difference is "when they came into office." They are political appointees, so each Pres is entitled to make the appointments. Some of the backstory to this is the fact that in the latest reauthorization of the Patriot Act, a provision was slipped in without any debate that allows the administration to simply appoint US Attorneys without having them confirmed by the Senate, a step that all of Clinton's appointees had to go through.

And the problem is not that these are Republican appointees. It's that the decisions about their continuing in their positions was made by the political arm of the Republican Party in part because they did not prosecute Dems aggresively enough or went after Repubs too much for the politicos. The larger question is what about the Attorneys who didn't lose their job? What did they have to do in order to not get fired?

Is there a further tie beyond that? Did you watch any of the hearings? Have you not seen the MO of this administration over and over again?

The fact that the guy from Arkansas was replaced by a guy from Rove's staff who's only job the last 10 years had been as an oppo researcher for either Rove or the RNC. (What Presidential candidate spent time in Arkansas again?)

The guy from Washington State just happened to not go after Dems in the wake of a high profile extraordinarily close Gov's race which the Dems won.

The gal from SoCal was in charge of the lead office in the Cunnigham case and had expanded the investigation to look at Pentagon procurement issues.

The guy from New Mexico resisited pressure from a Congresswoman and a Senator to indict Dems before the election. (There's also a Dem running for Prez from NM.)

The guy from Nevada was bumped to give someone else a chance to "build their resumes," was a declared Independent, and was leading investigations into Republican officials. And it just so happens that the Senate Majority Leader is from Nevada.

The guy from AZ also happened to be investigating a former Republican official.

The guy in NoCal sounds like he had some problems. Either they tried to tag the rest on to him or they manufactured the problesm to get him out. Of course, I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the Speaker of the House is from NoCal, as are both CA Senators.

 

Really? You want political operatives telling a US attorney what cases to prosecute? You want a political operative to have the power of bringing the entire force of the United States Government to bear on an individual? If that were the usual case, this country would fall into ruin quickly as each party would exact revenge through the legal process. I'm not naive enough to think that doesn't go on already, but there is a big difference between what has happened in our history at times and codifying the politcalization of the law. Saying there are things that are orders of magnitude greater than this? I suppose lying to get in an unnecessary war might count, but the corruption of the Justice Department is way up there as it goes to the heart of our democracy, rule of law, and the rights of American citizens. The firing of the Attys in and of itself are at a minimum a symbol of that corruption.

 

Every one of those has at its heart or as a major part the corruption of our legal system. I don't think you can dismiss one part of that sordid pie as "no BFD."

 

This deserves its own response.

Yes, lying and laziness are part and parcel of the Administration's MO. However, in a way it lets them off the hook. I read somewhere recently a piece on Katrina and the idea that accusing the administration of "incompetence" lets them off the hook because it's really the policy and personnel choices, made in a cauldron of right-wing whacko ideology, that led to the incompetence. Similarly, one could argue that the lying and laziness focus too much on the individual aspects of the policy decisions. In other words, the lying and laziness are a reflection of the ideology and should not be looked at in a vacuum. If you do so, it makes it too easy to say "well, it's Frank's fault... let's fire him," only to have an Ed come by two years later with the same level of incompetence when the real culprit is the people who allow terrible decisions to be made in support of an ideology that bears little resemblance to anything seen in our past save Nixon.