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Getting older every day
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Australia
Posts: 308
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Karl Rove
I know that pasting newspaper articles is frowned upon here, but I have a NY Times account, and from past experience most Cellarites do not.
Do you guys think that Karl Rove will be the first real link that leads to the White House being found corrupt?
Quote:
Rove Is Linked to Early Query Over Dismissals
By DAVID JOHNSTON and ERIC LIPTON
WASHINGTON, March 15 — Karl Rove, the senior presidential adviser, inquired about firing United States attorneys in January 2005, e-mail messages released Thursday show. The request prompted a Justice Department aide to respond that Alberto R. Gonzales, soon to be confirmed as attorney general, favored replacing a group of “underperforming” prosecutors.
The e-mail messages, part of a larger collection that the Justice Department is preparing to turn over to Congressional investigators, indicate that Mr. Rove and Mr. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, had considered replacing prosecutors earlier than either has previously acknowledged.
In a message on Jan. 6, 2005, one White House lawyer wrote to a colleague: “Karl Rove stopped by to ask you (roughly quoting) ‘how we planned to proceed regarding U.S. Attorneys, whether we were going to allow all to stay, request resignations from all and accept only some of them or selectively replace them, etc.’ ”
D. Kyle Sampson, who resigned this week as chief of staff to Mr. Gonzales, responded by e-mail three days later.
Discussing a plan to replace 15 to 20 percent of the 93 prosecutors, Mr. Sampson noted: “Judge and I discussed briefly a couple of weeks ago.” (Mr. Gonzales is a former Texas Supreme Court judge.) Mr. Sampson predicted that any dismissals could stir protests. “That said, if Karl thinks there is the political will to do it, then so do I,” he wrote.
The White House had said earlier this week that Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel, initiated the idea in early 2005 of replacing all the prosecutors.
Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, said again Thursday that Ms. Miers had first proposed the dismissals, but Mr. Snow acknowledged in an interview that the e-mail shifted the time line earlier than the White House had previously said.
“The e-mail does not directly contradict nor is it inconsistent with Karl’s recollection that after the 2004 election, Harriet Miers raised a question of replacing all the U.S. attorneys and he believed it was not a good idea,” Mr. Snow said. “That’s his recollection.”
The e-mail messages are the latest disclosure in the uproar over the dismissals in December of seven United States attorneys. Accusations that the removals were politically motivated and that the administration has misled lawmakers about the reasons for them have led to Congressional investigations, thrown the White House on the defensive and prompted calls for Mr. Gonzales’s resignation.
A Justice Department spokesman said Thursday that Mr. Gonzales did not remember the discussions cited in the e-mail. “The attorney general has no recollection of any plan or discussion to replace U.S. attorneys while he was still White House counsel,” said Tasia Scolinos, the department spokeswoman.
“The period of time referred to in the e-mail was during the weeks he was preparing for his confirmation hearing, Jan. 6, 2005, and his focus was on that,” Ms. Scolinos said. “Discussions of changes in presidential appointees would have been appropriate and normal White House exchanges in the days and months after the election as the White House was considering different personnel changes administrationwide.”
When the Rove inquiry described in the Jan. 6 e-mail message — sent by Colin Newman, a White House lawyer, to David G. Leatch, another lawyer — was forwarded to Mr. Sampson, then a top aide in the Justice Department, he replied with an outline of his thinking, as presented to Mr. Gonzales. “As an operational matter we would like to replace 15-20 percent of the current U.S. attorneys — underperforming ones,” Mr. Sampson wrote.
In the message, Mr. Sampson said, “The vast majority of U.S. Attorneys, 80-85 percent, I would guess, are doing a great job, are loyal Bushies, etc.”
Even then, Mr. Sampson realized there might be a backlash caused by replacing a large number of prosecutors and said it would be “weird” to remove prosecutors before they had completed a single four-year term. “I suspect that when push comes to shove,” he wrote, “home state senator likely would resist wholesale (or even piecemeal) replacement of U.S. Attorney they recommended.”
The White House and Justice Department have defended the dismissals as appropriate, pointing out that the prosecutors are political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president. But some of the fired prosecutors told Congress that Republican lawmakers had pressed them about corruption or voter fraud investigations, provoking charges from Democrats that the dismissals may have been political and that they threatened the traditional independence of the prosecutors.
The White House has said Mr. Rove passed on complaints to the White House counsel’s office, and perhaps to Mr. Bush, about prosecutors’ failure to investigate voter fraud cases. He also pushed for the appointment of a former aide as the United States attorney in Arkansas, which outraged local officials and the state’s senators because the prosecutor, J. Timothy Griffin, had limited experience.
Mr. Rove, speaking at Troy University in Alabama on Thursday, again defended the administration’s handling of the dismissals, saying it was entirely appropriate for the Justice Department to selectively remove any who were not performing or following department policies.
“This to my mind is a lot of politics, and I understand that’s what Congress has the right to play around with, and they’re going to do it,” he said.
The e-mail disclosed Thursday, first reported by ABC News, came as the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to issue subpoenas to senior Justice Department staff, including Mr. Sampson. Republicans succeeded in blocking an effort by Democrats to subpoena Mr. Rove and Ms. Miers, who left the administration earlier this year.
Separately, the House Judiciary Committee, opened a new front in its investigation of Mr. Gonzales, asking him to respond to an article published in The National Journal asserting that he had advised President Bush to effectively terminate a Justice Department inquiry into the program of domestic surveillance without warrants only after Mr. Gonzales learned he might be a subject of the investigation.
Even Republican defenders on Capitol Hill are expressing growing unease.
“I think the attorney general is going to have to explain himself because this has cast a cloud over the department,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, before the latest disclosures. “How much is justified? I don’t know. But it has cast a cloud there.”
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History is a great teacher; it is a shame that people never learn from it.
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03-16-2007, 02:02 AM
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