U.S. Attorneys

Bush Ducks Question on Rove Role in U.S.A. Firings

Paul Kiel | May 30, 2007, 11:13AM

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.

U.S. Attorneys

Email Raises More Questions about Rove's Role in U.S. Attorney Appointment

Paul Kiel | May 25, 2007, 5:17PM

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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Karl Rove

Senate Committee Continues Quest for Rove Emails

Paul Kiel | May 25, 2007, 1:50PM

Third time's the charm? They've asked the White House, the Justice Department, and now Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and ranking member Arlen Specter (R-PA) are giving Karl Rove's lawyer a try to see if they can get their hands on his emails.

U.S. Attorneys

Leahy to White House: A-HEM

Paul Kiel | May 16, 2007, 2:51PM

Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT), following up an angry letter last night to Alberto Gonzales, wrote White House counsel Fred Fielding today to warn that if the White House did not stop stonewalling the committee's U.S. attorney firings investigation, then "I will have no choice but to issue subpoenas to try to get to the truth in this matter."

Leahy first requested interviews with Karl Rove and other White House staff two months ago. Leahy's request was met with a White House offer to have Rove and others interviewed privately with no oath and no transcript. Efforts by Leahy and others, including ranking member Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), to get the White House to moderate its offer have been unsuccessful.

During those two months, the Senate and House judiciary committees have been steadily accumulating evidence of White House involvement in the firings. And so Leahy's writing again. You can read the letter here.

Some excerpts below the fold.

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Must Read

Today's Must Read

Paul Kiel | May 11, 2007, 9:51AM

If at first you don't succeed, investigate again.

That, at least, seems to be Karl Rove's philosophy.

As McClatchy and The Washington Post report this morning, Rove requested last October that the Justice Department investigate allegations of voter fraud in three jurisdictions. Those three were Milwaukee, New Mexico and Philadelphia -- all battleground states.

The White House really put the heat on. McClatchy reports that at least twice in October, Rove or his deputies passed on word of the allegations to Kyle Sampson. In addition, both Rove and President Bush raised the issue with Alberto Gonzales the same month.

Sampson, in turn, passed on the allegations to a Justice Department official named Matthew Friedrich. Friedrich dutifully agreed "to find out whether Justice officials knew of 'rampant' voter fraud or 'lax' enforcement in parts of New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and report back."

Friedrich has told congressional investigators that Sampson also gave him a 30-page report prepared by Wisconsin Republicans about voter fraud in Milwaukee. Sampson apparently expected Friedrich to pass it on to the department's criminal division. Friedrich says he didn't do that because that would "violate strict Justice rules that limit the pursuit of voter-related investigations close to an election." (At least someone in the Justice Department cares about that rule.)

Now, you can see that 30-page report, titled "Fraud in Wisconsin 2004: A Timeline/Summary" here (pdf, see page 10). As the title would indicate, it was nothing but a collection of news clippings related to voter fraud allegations in Milwaukee... in the 2004 election.

Two things about that. First, it appears that Rove wanted the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation of two-year old allegations right before the 2006 election. But second, these allegations had already been investigated -- as part of the most comprehensive effort by a U.S. attorney's office to investigate voter fraud in the entire country. The U.S. attorney there, Steven Biskupic, launched a joint task force with local prosecutors to probe allegations of fraud in the 2004 election. Finally, more than a year after the election, Biskupic announced that the task force hadn't in fact found evidence of a conspiracy to steal the election. But prosecutors nevertheless prosecuted nearly twenty individual cases for a variety of voting-related offenses (Biskupic's office handled 14). No U.S. attorney office in the country can touch those numbers.

But that apparently wasn't good enough for Rove, who thought that Biskupic had been "lax" in his approach to voter fraud.

The only thing that saved Biskupic from being fired, according to the Post, is that "Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty argued against the firing, saying it would 'not be a wise thing to do politically' and could raise 'the ire' of Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), who had recommended Biskupic and was then chairman of the House Judiciary Committee."

David Iglesias of New Mexico, obviously, wasn't so lucky. Nevermind that, together with Biskupic, he was the only other U.S. attorney to have launched a voter fraud task force in the 2004 election -- and that the Justice Department had him and Biskupic teach a seminar on election crimes. He hadn't convinced the person whose opinion matters most at the Justice Department: Karl Rove's.

Note: In case you're wondering about the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia and why he wasn't fired.... Pat Meehan was formerly senior counsel to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), formerly the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- now the ranking member. If they didn't want to risk the ire of Rep. Sensenbrenner, they certainly didn't want an angry Sen. Specter.

U.S. Attorneys

NJ: Withheld Emails Show White House Signed Off on False Statements

Paul Kiel | May 10, 2007, 1:26PM

Murray Waas has a new story on the U.S. attorney firings, this one leading to the inescapable conclusion that the administration was complicit in attempts to cover up White House involvement in the firings.

The revelations come from emails that the Justice Department is withholding from Congress.

A "senior executive branch offiical" tells Waas that it's no accident that Congress hasn't gotten their hands on these documents:

"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."

A "senior administration official" adds that "Gonzales is doing this to save his own neck."

So what documents are we talking about? The story deals with two separate letters that the Justice Department sent to Congress about the firings.

The first was a January 31 letter to Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AK) assuring him that "not once" had the administration considered using the Patriot Act provision to install Tim Griffin, Karl Rove's former aide, as the U.S. attorney for Little Rock. The provision allowed the attorney general to appoint interim U.S. attorneys indefinitely without Senate confirmation.

Of course, Kyle Sampson had been pushing to use the provision for months -- and had communicated the plan to the White House.

But when it came time to answer questions about it, the White House signed off on a letter saying that they had never contemplated such a thing. And the withheld documents show that Christopher Oprison was the White House official who signed off on the letter -- that's funny because Kyle Sampson had layed out the plan to use the Patriot Act provision to appoint Griffin in an email to Oprison just a month before.

The second letter in the piece is a February 23rd letter to Congress that claimed that Karl Rove hadn't had any role in appointing Griffin. Fittingly, Oprison also signed off on that one -- even though Sampson had written him in an email in December that Griffin's appointment was "important to Karl."

White House spokesman Tony Fratto tells Waas that "Chris did not recall Karl's interest when he reviewed the letter."

But Fratto also says that "We have no record of that letter ever leaving the White House counsel's office." In other words, they never bothered to ask Karl Rove or any one in his office to check whether the statement was true. And they just forgot that Sampson earlier had boasted about Rove's interest. Huh.

U.S. Attorneys

Who Dunnit?

Paul Kiel | May 4, 2007, 2:11PM

Bit by bit, word has leaked out from congressional investigators' interviews with the Justice Department officials involved in the firings. And one by one, they've denied responsibility for putting certain U.S. attorneys' names on the list.

Let's go down the list. Michael Battle, the former Director of the Executive Office of United States Attorneys, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, Kyle Sampson, and William E. Moschella, the principal associate deputy attorney general, all have told Congress that they did not put any names on the list. And today The Washington Post reports that David Margolis, the senior career official at the department, claims responsibility for adding a single name: Kevin Ryan. Ryan, you might remember, is the only U.S. attorney who everyone agrees had actual performance issues. Margolis also says he fingered U.S. Attorney from western Michigan Margaret Chiara as having managerial issues in her office, but it's unclear if he's responsible for her name being on the list.

For all six of the U.S. attorneys at the center of the controversy -- Carol Lam, Daniel Bogden, Bud Cummins, John McKay, Paul Charlton, and David Iglesias -- no one has taken responsibility.

Only three Justice Department officials who were supposedly consulted to construct the firing list remain unaccounted for. Two of them -- Michael Elston, Paul McNulty's chief of staff, and acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer, the absentee U.S. Attorney for Montana -- have already been interviewed by congressional investigators. The strong impression given by public comments by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) since those interviews is that neither have taken responsibility for adding any names.

*Update: House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) was even more explicit in his opening statement yesterday: "We have interviewed numerous senior officials in the Department, and all deny making the actual decision to place these names on the list."

The third and sole remaining Justice Department offiical is Monica Goodling, the liaison to the White House. She, of course, is yet to be interviewed.

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Karl Rove

Senate Committee Subpoenas Rove Emails

Paul Kiel | May 2, 2007, 3:09PM

Tired of waiting for a response, Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) issued a subpoena for any of Karl Rove's emails in the Justice Department's possession that might be relevant to the U.S. attorney firings. That includes emails sent from Rove's White House account (which apparently doesn't get much use) and emails from his account issued by the Republican National Committee.

You can see the subpoena here.

Note: Since the subpoena is to the Justice Department and not to the White House, it sidesteps any executive privilege concerns. And it seems possible that it could even claim internal White House emails since the subpoena specifically includes emails that were obtained by Patrick Fitzgerald as part of the Plame investigation.