It's hard enough to get the facts straight when allegations are made. But everything gets all the more complicated in the Bush Administration's hall of mirrors; it's all pots and kettles.

Consider this dust-up between the Office of Special Counsel and the Justice Department. In one corner, you have Special Counsel Scott Bloch, who heads an obscure little office that is charged with investigating whistleblower complaints, Hatch Act violations, and the like -- but who is himself being investigated for retaliating against whistleblowers and politicizing his office. Oh, and he used a tech service called Geeks on Call to scrub his hard drive at work (he says all the info was personal). In the other corner, you have the Justice Department, and well, you know all about that.

In a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey last week, Bloch charged that the Department was blocking his probe of politicization in the DoJ, his investigation of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias' firing (was it because of his Navy reserve service?), and a whistleblower complaint against former U.S. attorney Rachel Paulose. Eric Black, who reported on the letter last night, has helpfully posted a copy here (pdf).

In the letter, Bloch complains that 1) after the Justice Department launched its own internal investigation of the U.S. attorney firings and politicization in the Department last spring, they asked him to back off, and 2) the DoJ has refused to investigate a whistleblower complaint against Paulose.

Bloch's job, at least under the Bush administration, is to write investigatory reports which the White House will then ignore. Tellingly, Bloch complains in the letter that he's been trying to get White House counsel Fred Fielding on the phone for two months and had no luck.

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The Washington Post has an update to Special Counsel Scott Bloch's alleged scheme to have geeks scrub his hard drive (for background click here). Turns out that Bloch has the files that he erased on a thumb drive, but he's not turning them over, no sir: They're personal. And it's sparked a good bit of squabbling amongst the White House's ineffectual investigative agencies (in this case the other party is the Office of Personnel Management's inspector general).

But here's the part that's good. Earlier this year, Bloch launched, to great fanfare, a sprawling investigation of Karl Rove's alleged efforts to politicize the federal government, but it seems not to have gotten very far. But maybe, Bloch's enemies are saying, the investigation was just a canny ploy to incapacitate the investigations of him:

Attorneys representing the staff members in the complaints against Bloch cited the latest dispute in calling for his resignation.

"At the time that he initiated this probe of Karl Rove, we thought he was doing this to make himself bulletproof so the White House could not take disciplinary action against him," said Debra Katz, an attorney for the staff members. Bloch denied that charge and said the Rove investigation is the responsibility of his office.

Ah, oversight.

Another day, another resignation.

This time, it's Scott Jennings, who worked under Karl Rove in the White House.

Jennings, among other things, was a frequent contact concerning the U.S. attorney firings for Justice Department aides Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling in the White House. The other Rove aide involved in the firings, Sara Taylor, left the White House earlier this year. When he was subpoenaed to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he refused to discuss the firings (or even discuss his role in appointing U.S. attorneys in general), citing executive privilege.

But we'll remember Jennings most of all for his remarkably effective parroting of the White House talking points about the political briefings Jennings gave at various department and agencies. Jennings, remember, gave the most infamous of those briefings, at the General Services Administration. After Jennings had finished his rundown of which GOP candidates were in trouble of losing reelection, GSA chief Lurita Doan asked aloud how GSA projects could be used to help "our candidates." Jennings reportedly replied that the top would be better discussed "off-line."

So in appreciation for Jennings' service, here's last months' TPMtv episode on the subject, complete with Jennings' and Taylor's mind-wracking message discipline:

Back in April, Scott Bloch, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, announced that his office would "leave no stone unturned" in pursuing White House malfeasance. In fact, a special task force was assembled to handle all of Karl Rove's alleged dirty doings.

Problem is, Bloch apparently forged ahead without actually having the money to fund the task force. And as Justin reports over at The Blotter, it's not looking like he'll be able to land that extra $3 million. So some of those stones might just have to stay right where they are.

Without a last-minute infusion of nearly $3 million, the special task force may be unable to pay its staff and buy the kind of technical equipment it needs to investigate allegations that White House political operatives may have improperly injected politics into government activities, according to Jim Mitchell, spokesman for the U.S. Office of Special Counsel....

The cost of the task force for 2008 would be $2.89 million, according to OSC estimates. But Bloch started the probe long after he submitted his 2008 budget request. And now he's having a hard time convincing those holding the nation's purse strings to loosen up and give him some last-minute extra funding.

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Karl Rove made sure that agency and department officials were busy, busy, busy come election time, The Washington Post reported this weekend. And now House oversight committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) wants to figure out just how busy.

Waxman sent out a request to 19 different agencies/departments today (take a deep breath: Departments of Justice, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, Labor, State, Agriculture, Commerce, Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration, General Services Administration, United States Agency for International Development, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy), all of which apparently took part in Rove's scheme to use agency officials to help vulnerable Republicans.

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The New York Times and others weigh in with the obvious: Karl Rove's departure doesn't change a thing with regard to the Democrats' investigations of him. They'll keep pursuing him, and the White House will keep stonewalling with the same sweeping claims of executive privilege. The only thing that changes is that Rove has got to get himself a lawyer.

As for Rove, he says that he's the Democrats' Moby Dick. Given how well read he is, I'm sure he knows how that novel ends (not well for Captain Ahab). The Democrats, to be sure, would prefer another metaphor.

Karl Rove on whether he's running away (sub. req.) from Democratic oversight:

What about those who say he's leaving to avoid Congressional scrutiny? "I know they'll say that," he says, "But I'm not going to stay or leave based on whether it pleases the mob." He also knows he'll continue to be a target, even from afar, since belief in his influence over every Administration decision has become, well, faith-based.

"I'm a myth. There's the Mark of Rove," he says, with a bemused air. "I read about some of the things I'm supposed to have done, and I have to try not to laugh." He says the real target is Mr. Bush, whom many Democrats have never accepted as a legitimate president and "never will."

So there you go. However much the U.S. attorney firings, the political briefings to senior agency officials, and other dirty deeds that have been pegged as Rovian (an adjective that will live on) might seem like his handiwork, it's just the phantom Mark of Rove. One wonders if the Mark will continue to haunt the Bush Administration after he leaves.

After he gets to work on his book on the Bush presidency, Rove says that he'd like to teach. Will college freshmen be clamoring to get into Dividing The Electorate 101? Any ideas on what that course might be called?

Note: A portion from The Wall Street Journal piece that I'll note without comment:

It is his long and personal relationship with Mr. Bush that has made Mr. Rove arguably the most influential White House aide of modern times. The president calls him to chat about politics on Sunday mornings, and they have a contest to see who can read the most books. (Mr. Rove is winning.)

As The Washington Post reported over the weekend, Justice Department officials attended a dozen political briefings at the White House since 2001. You can see the Justice Department's catalog of the briefings here.

Karl Rove and his aides, remember, delivered the briefings for agency officials throughout the government. Briefing slides from a presentation at the General Services Administration and the State Department show that Rove's shop lectured the officials on which GOP incumbents were vulnerable. It wasn't publicly known until Friday that Rove had included Department officials in his briefing circuit. White House aides have defended the briefings by saying they were merely meant to "inform" appointees by giving them the "political landscape."

As you can see, most briefings were attended by the White House liaison at the Department, and a number were delivered by Karl Rove himself.

Most notable is a September 5, 2006 briefing for "agency Chiefs of Staff and White House Liaisons" at the White House; both Kyle Sampson, Gonzales former chief of staff, and Monica Goodling, the White House liaison, were scheduled to attend. Rove led the briefing.

These, of course, were the two 30-something senior staffers at the center of the U.S. attorney firings, and the briefing was given shortly before the firing process entered its final stage. One week after the briefing, Sampson sent then-White House counsel Harriet Miers another draft list of U.S. attorneys to fire -- the first such list he'd drafted for more than six months. There's no evidence that the briefing, which was given to political appointees from a number of agencies, led directly to the generation of that list, but surely it helped Sampson and Goodling, who were at the forefront of the politicization of the Department, to be well apprised of "the political landscape."

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From The Washington Post:

Justice Department officials attended at least a dozen political briefings at the White House since 2001, including some meetings led by Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, and others that were focused on election trends prior to the 2006 midterm contest, according to documents released yesterday.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that he did not believe that senior Justice Department officials had attended such briefings. But he clarified his testimony yesterday in a letter to Congress, emphasizing that the briefings were not held at the agency's offices....

Justice officials attended 12 political briefings at the White House, and another held at the Department of Agriculture, from 2001 to 2006, according to the list sent to Waxman. At least five were led by Rove or included presentations by him.

We'll have more on this tomorrow.

The scheme was simple: dispatch political aides from the White House to agencies throughout the government and make sure political appointees there knew which Republican members of Congress were faltering. There was a line, however, that ought not to be (openly) crossed. Political appointees got a "not-so-subtle message about helping endangered Republicans," but they were not given explicit directions. That would be a blatant Hatch Act violation.

Karl Rove's aide Scott Jennings understood the game. That's why when he briefed (pdf) employees at the General Services Administration early this year (see a sample slide above), he knew to keep things at the not-so-subtle level -- but no more. From The Washington Post:

At [the briefing's] completion, GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan asked how GSA projects could be used to help "our candidates," according to half a dozen witnesses. The briefer, J. Scott Jennings, said that topic should be discussed "off-line," the witnesses said. Doan then replied, "Oh, good, at least as long as we are going to follow up...."

Today, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) took advantage of Jennings appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee to question him about the briefings. And Jennings, like Rove's former aide Sara Taylor, was right on message.

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Even though Rove's aide Scott Jennings said less than nothing today about the U.S. attorney firings (he wouldn't even testify about emails which had already been turned over to the committee), he did testify about two other areas of interest. One of those concerns the White House's use of Republican National Committee-issued email accounts. A number of aides, including Jennings, violated the Presidential Records Act by using those accounts for official business. The underlying allegation, of course, is that Karl Rove's shop used a kind of off-the-record email system on purpose. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), who's investigating, has called it "the most serious breach of the Presidential Records Act in the 30-year history of the law."

The White House's fig leaf for that has been the Hatch Act, which prohibits using government resources for political activities. Staffers in the White House Office of Political Affairs have both a White House address and computer and a RNC email address and devices. And as Jennings testified today, he frequently used his RNC address for official business (including matters related to the U.S. attorney firings) for "convenience and efficiency." (That's also what Jennings' boss Sara Taylor testified. Rove also found using his RNC blackberry incredibly convenient.) In fact, it sounds like he hardly used his White House address, since he carried an RNC-issued blackberry with him. The problem was not lost on Jennings, apparently, who testified, in response to a question from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), that he had actually asked for a blackberry for his White House email once.

It was "very early in my employment," he testified, "the President was doing a lot traveling in my region [the South]... I was receiving a lot of email on my official account and I requested [a blackberry for White House email] at that moment, and I was told that it wasn't the custom to give the political affairs staffers those devices."

So even though Jennings was aware that this was a problem and apparently raised the issue with a supervisor, he was told to ignore it. That doesn't quite square with the White House explanation for the illegal use of the RNC accounts, which is "oops."

Here's a little taste of how Scott Jennings answered any questions that had anything remotely to do with the firing of U.S. attorneys this morning.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) couldn't even get Jennings to answer the question "what role you have in the selection of nominees to be U.S. attorneys." When Jennings refused to answer based on the President's assertion of executive privilege, Leahy cautioned, "now, let's not be too contemptuous of this committee, I'm just asking you what you do."

Other lines of questioning were (slightly) more fruitful. We'll have more on that later.

Note: Jennings' former boss in the White House, Sara Taylor, began her hearing last month with a similar tack, but then ended up answering a number of questions that Jennings has refused to answer.

The White House, as expected, claimed executive privilege with regard to testimony by Karl Rove and Rove's aide Scott Jennings about the U.S. attorney firings. You can see that letter here.

But while the White House found that Rove, as an "immediate presidential advisor" was "immune" from Congressional subpoena, they did not make that claim for Jennings. And so he's up this morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee. We'll bring you a little from that hearing, which is going on now, shortly.

Finally, the big one.

The Senate Judiciary Committee issued two more subpoenas as part of the U.S. attorney firings investigation today: one for Karl Rove and the other for his deputy, Scott Jennings. Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) announced the subpoenas on the Senate floor.

The question for Rove and Jennings, of course, is whether to take the same course taken by Rove's former aide, Sara Taylor, who appeared before the committee to answer questions that were not covered by executive privilege -- or to take the approach taken by Harriet Miers, who refused to show up at all.

The subpoenas call for Rove and Jennings to show up on August 2nd and also produce documents by that date.

Update: Leahy's statement is below.

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Why should it just have been U.S. Attorneys? Or the General Services Administration?

Yes, Karl Rove -- who, the White House has insisted for years, isn't involved in foreign policy -- instructed his White House deputies to repeatedly brief State Department officials and U.S. ambassadors in key foreign missions about GOP electoral priorities. The push to enlist U.S. embassies into the service of Rove's dream of a permanent Republican majority, according to today's Washington Post, has been a feature of the last six years. They involved the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Peace Corps. Needless to say, all are expected to be non-political agencies.

Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is going to explore the depths of the White House's political outreach to foreign-policy officials during today's confirmation hearing for Henrietta Holsman Fore, nominated to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID employees apparently received two briefings for the White House in the last ten months.

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It's time for another round of "Which Office or Agency is the White House Politicizing Now?"

House oversight committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA), having recently brought to light the politicization of the surgeon general's office, is shining a light on the nation's drug czar. The czar, John Walters, and his deputies traveled on the taxpayers' dime to 20 events with vulnerable Republican members of Congress in the months prior to the 2006 elections, according to a committee press release. Not only that, but several of the trips were "combined with the announcement of federal grants or actions that benefited the districts of the Republican members." If government officials were using government funds to help elect Republicans, that would be a violation of the Hatch Act.

You can guess who was behind all that GOP-boosting travel: Karl Rove. Waxman says that Rove's former top aide Sara Taylor was the point person, and so he wants her to testify before his committee. He's requested that she appear for a deposition July 24th and raises the possibility of a hearing on July 30th. Taylor, you'll remember, just testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week about the U.S. attorney firings.

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That's from Sen. Chuck Schumer's (D-NY) opening statement at the hearing, as he made a point of saying that the Senate Judiciary Committee's fight is not with Sara Taylor, but "with the White House," which, he said, had issued a "gag order" in the form of an assertion of executive privilege.

Ranking Member Arlen Specter (R-PA) said that he hoped that the committee would not seek to cite Taylor with contempt for refusing to answer questions that the president claimed was protected by privilege.

Ex-Gov. Don Siegelman (D-AL) is again questioning the motives and impartiality of the prosecutors who want to put him away for 30 years. And the prosecutors keep giving him good reason to.

Siegelman's sentencing hearing, which has extended into its second day today, has provoked his latest assertions.

His lawyers have also raised objections to prosecutors supporting their call for an extraordinarily tough sentence by using evidence connected to charges on which Siegelman was acquitted. Siegelman was charged with 32 counts, but acquitted of 25. According to the New York Times, Siegelman's lawyers have had it:

“The government is asking that he be penalized for every single thing he was charged with, whether he was acquitted or not,” said Susan James, a Siegelman lawyer. “The government drastically lost the case,” she said. “We strongly object to the court considering acquitted conduct.”

This is not the first time Siegelman has called his prosecution biased. He has long maintained that the investigation was based on a Republican vendetta. He's pointed to an affidavit signed by Republican lawyer Dana Jill Simpson to support his claim.

As we've detailed before, Simpson says she heard Bill Canary, a state GOP operative, say Karl Rove had promised to get the Justice Department on Siegelman. Canary also allegedly said he'd get his "girls" on Siegelman, referring to two of the US attorneys in the state.

One of those US attorneys is Canary's wife. After launching an investigation, she was forced to recuse herself from the case after objections from Siegelman's lawyers. The head prosecutor on Siegelman's case now, Acting US Attorney Louis V. Franklin, has claimed he has had complete independence from Canary. He even goes so far as to say he was solely responsible for Siegelman's case.

But there is reason to think he protests too much.

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Those salmon never stood a chance.

As The Washington Post reports this morning in part four of the paper's series on Vice President Cheney, when the fate of some endangered salmon threatened Republican electoral prospects in Oregon, Cheney sprang into action. Farmers wanted water from the Klamath River basin diverted for irrigation, but federal biologists said that two species of fish were at stake. From the Post:

Bush and Cheney couldn't afford to anger thousands of solidly Republican farmers and ranchers during the midterm elections and beyond. The case also was rapidly becoming a test for conservatives nationwide of the administration's commitment to fixing what they saw as an imbalance between conservation and economics.

And as the Post details, Cheney reached deep into the Interior Department to make sure that the issue was dealt with.

But Karl Rove also weighed in -- in his own way. Just in case the vice president's heavy hand wasn't enough, Rove made sure that Department officials far and wide knew where the administration stood on the issue by way of one of his now famous PowerPoint presentations.

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White House strategist Karl Rove has been markedly quiet on the subject of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D), despite being accused of orchestrating a political prosecution that now stands to land the former lawmaker in prison for 30 years.

A reporter from The Huntsville Times caught Rove on Thursday on a visit to the state with President Bush. The reporter asked Rove about the allegations made by a Republican lawyer in a sworn affidavit (available here). The lawyer, Dana Jill Simpson, claims that on a conference call in 2002, a GOP strategist said he and Rove spoke about having the Department of Justice investigate Siegelman purely to get him out of the way.

Rove's response (with a smile) to such an explosive accusation:

"I know nothing about any phone call," Rove said.

Then a White House press aide stepped up and said, "What he meant to say was that he has no comment."

No one has accused of Rove of being involved in the call -- just that his name was mentioned in it.

Siegelman was convicted last year of appointing a chief executive of a health care company, Richard Scrushy, to a hospital board in exchange for a $500,000 contribution to an education fund. Siegelman's sentencing hearing is scheduled for tomorrow. The prosecution seeks a 30 year prison term.

Email messages sent by White House officials using Republican National Committee addresses have been extensively destroyed, according to an early report on the ongoing investigation released today by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The full report is here (pdf) and the executive summary is available here.

Of the 88 officials using RNC accounts, the RNC has deleted records for 51 users. Still, the committee found heavy use of the account by some high-ranking officials. For instance, the RNC tracked down 140,000 messages sent to or received by Karl Rove. Half of those were addressed to or from an official ".gov" address. The White House Director of Political Affairs Sara Taylor sent 66,018 emails and Deputy Director of Political Affairs Scott Jennings sent 35,198 emails, according to RNC records.

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From McClatchy's interview with President Bush:

Q How central a role did Rove play in the U.S. attorney business? That's what everybody wants to know. Was he the main guy drawing up the list?

THE PRESIDENT: Just look at the facts as they've come out.

Q It's unclear.

THE PRESIDENT: There has been plenty of testimony, plenty of hearings, plenty of statements. And one thing is for certain, that there was no wrongdoing done. And --

McClatchy's Ron Hutcheson mercifully moved on to another topic.

It's been apparent from very early in the U.S. attorney scandal that Tim Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who was appointed the U.S. attorney for Little Rock, was different from the others.

Emails show that White House and Justice Department officials worked together for months to install Griffin, dating back to last summer. Rove's aides in the White House Office of Political Affairs were intimately involved. Up until now, however, there had been no evidence of direct communication between Rove and Griffin about the appointment. But an email contained in documents released earlier this week shows Griffin directly emailing Rove and his deputies in the White House Office of Political Affairs (click to enlarge):

David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was among those fired last year, told me that he thought the direct contact was "really inappropriate and over the line." The only time he ever contacted anyone there, he said, was to return phone calls about job opportunities. He'd twice been considered for positions, he said: once as director for Executive Office of United States Attorneys and another time as the assistant secretary of homeland security for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The White House had called to see if he was interested in the appointments; he told them he was not. He said that he'd never heard of a U.S. attorney speaking to someone in the Office of Political Affairs for any other reason.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

The email, dated February 16, 2007, shows Griffin forwarding a copy of a local news article about his announcement that he would not seek Senate confirmation. Griffin wrote Rove, three of his deputies, and Christopher Oprison of the White House counsel's office that he was "glad" that he "did this" ("this" presumably being his announcement not to seek the nomination), and explaining why he'd taken a "swipe" at Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR).

Griffin had been a controversial figure ever since his December 15th appointment, due not least to his ties to Rove. But Sen. Pryor had been most alarmed by the administration's apparent scheme -- which Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson laid out in a December 19, 2006 email that was later turned over to Congress in March -- to appoint Griffin indefinitely without Senate confirmation, via a little noticed provision in the USA PATRIOT ACT Reauthorization bill. Griffin's appointment drew even more scrutiny after it was revealed in January that at least six other U.S. attorneys besides Griffin's predecessor Bud Cummins had been fired by the administration.

“It’s unfortunate," Griffin is quoted as saying in the article, "that Sen. Pryor is blaming the administration for using a law that he voted for to appoint me, apparently with the excuse that he didn’t know what he was voting for when he voted." After explaining in the email to Rove why he'd said that, Griffin added, "I am going to go back to focusing on my job until I am told otherwise."

Responding to the email, Michael Teague, spokesman for Sen. Pryor, wondered how many other contacts Griffin had with Rove. "This is just an email. Was he calling him every day?"

In fact, the email was only produced by the Justice Department because Oprison of the White House counsel's office had forwarded it on to Monica Goodling at the Justice Department, who forwarded it to Kyle Sampson the same morning. Despite requests from Congress, the White House has not produced any emails related to the firings.

Sampson's and Oprison's appearance in the email raises an additional question.

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