“What just happened? Evidence.”

August 7th, 2008

We have, in Pulitzer-winning reporter Ron Suskind’s new book, a smoking gun of willful determination to war for subjective reasons on the part of the tippy-top Bush ‘bad apples’; and that would include our own wormy Dubster [and let me give Mr. Lord-I-Need-A-Legacy his due ... he blasted China on human rights just prior to his arrival for the games; a little late, but ... on the record. Sadly, it does little more than raise his standing as a hypocrite.]

Day in, day out, minds across this nation are changing; and below that deep undercurrent of restlessness and discouragement is a desire to make someone accountable. In my humble opinion, it’s necessary, if only as deterrent and warning-shot across the bow of the next guy. With time so short and problems so severe, Obama isn’t likely to want to spend political revenue punishing anyone — but perhaps the public will insist, eventually. This book will help nail that case to the illustrious walls of Congress if it does.

Yesterday, I ventured out of the Pea Patch to attend a political fundraiser for my House Rep, Ike Skelton. This is the guy who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, and decides where all that military budget goes; when Bush ordered 400 steel-reinforced Humvee’s to protect our folks from undercarriage explosions, for instance, Ike made sure they got 15,000. He’s a Blue Dog, of course — but he’s ethical and dedicated to the troops.

I struck up conversation with a gloomy-faced lady whose only son had been deployed as a reservist, and stop-loss’ed for another several months; I opened a vein for her, I guess, because within moments she was shaking, teary-eyed and ANGRY. SERIOUSLY angry — I was not surprised. The anger out there is palpable; I expect it to get much more intense as we pull back the flaps on the box of outrages the Pubs are leaving behind when they go, and leaving us to peer inside at the actual damage done our Republic.

Again, if you’re interesting in a hardcover of Suskind’s book, go to Buzz — support your local Lefty’s. They did a good review, first link. Then, as always, Froomkin is a treasure trove — and he’s written on the subject two days in a row.

The title quote is by Suskind himself, he blogged a short piece for Huffy. There’s a Capital Hill Blue [YouTube laden] rant, and a snarling Pottersville along with revealing details from the book, below. This one won’t be swept under the rug but it could get lost in the ongoing eruption of scandals. The bonus article indicates another such, to keep our eyes on.

Here’s yer quote for the day, from a public address by John Kerry who is playing “interim VP” by taking on the swifty’s and others for Obama:

“I don’t know if you know this. John McCain is looking for someone for vice president who has more economic expertise than he does. So congratulations to all of you, you’re on the short list.”

And, in news, Salim Hamdan, our first Gitmo prosecution, has been convicted of being badly employed! But he is no war criminal, that has finally become obvious. Where it goes from here, who knows — and it appears to me to be just more WOT none-sense; Hitler’s driver wasn’t convicted, why should Hamdan take the load? MSM here and blog here.

Jude

The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism (Hardcover)
By Ron Suskind
Buzzflash review/store

The Forged Iraqi Letter: What Just Happened?
Ron Suskind, HuffPo
August 5, 2008

What just happened? Evidence. A secret that has been judiciously kept for five years just spilled out. All of what follows is new, never reported in any way:

The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush — a man still carrying with $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush’s famous deck of wanted men — has been America’s secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger). The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, “resettled” Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD — as Habbush had foretold — the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a “small team from the al Qaeda organization.”

The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists with Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting CIA from conduction disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.

So, here we go again: the administration full attack mode, calling me names, George Tenet is claiming he doesn’t remember any such thing — just like he couldn’t remember “slam dunk” — and reporters are scratching their heads.

Everything in the book is on the record. Many sources. And so, we watch and wait…. ++

A White House Forgery Scandal?
Dan Froomkin, WaPo
Tuesday, August 5, 2008

The White House’s Weak Denials
Dan Froomkin, WaPo
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
[a snip, below]

Dick Polman blogs for the Philadelphia Inquirer: “So who do you believe: Ron Suskind (who says that everything in the book is on the record, many sources), or the Bush White House (which is assailing Suskind for “gutter journalism”)? Unfortunately for Bush, we have an imbalance here.

“Suskind, who won a Pulitzer while writing for The Wall Street Journal, has been watchdogging this White House ever since he worked with ex-Treasury Department secretary Paul O’Neill on the latter’s tell-all book, and the administration has never been able to wreck his reputation. Suskind, in 2004, authored the now-famous New York Times Magazine article that quoted a Bush official voicing disdain for “the reality-based community,” a comment that has come to epitomize the Bush regime’s faith-based mindset.

Suskind spoke to a wide range of Republicans for that article, and ultimately concluded that Bush’s governing style was characterized by “a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners.” Four years later, is there even a phrase in his conclusion that rings false?

“On the other end of the believability scale, we of course have a White House long practiced in the art of deception. Bush oversold a slew of Saddam threats that turned out to be phony. . . . Indeed, over the past several years, roughly six in 10 Americans have said that Bush deliberately misled us into war.

“Tony Fratto, a Bush deputy press secretary, uttered the standard denial about Suskind yesterday. . . . but how would he know? When the alleged letter forgery was carried out in 2003, Fratto was working for the Treasury Department, and we already know, from Scott McClellan’s book, that Bush press secretaries are routinely kept in the dark anyway. . . .

“Even if one is inclined to doubt the notion that the Bush war team would actually fake a document in the service of better propaganda, Suskind’s broader theme has long rung true - that Bush has spent much of the last seven years seeking only the kind of evidence that would square with his certitudes.”

Marty Kaplan blogs on Huffingtonpost.com: “When this came up on MSNBC, moderator Chuck Todd asked Politico’s Mike Allen whether this would lead ‘the anti-war crowd’ in Congress to call for impeachment. Allen replied that it would ‘give the lefty blogosphere something to grab onto.’

“And so, in less time than it takes to say ‘Dick Cheney,’ the subject is changed from what would be one of the most outrageous violations of the Constitution in the history of the Republic to a left/right issue. . . .

“If the White House asked the CIA to cook up this disinformation aimed at the American people, why shouldn’t the righty blogosphere, too, be up in arms? Why doesn’t every American, regardless of political party, have a stake in the truth and the rule of law?

“I know, I know: that’s not Chuck Todd’s or Mike Allen’s jobs. Unfortunately, the closest that the MSM usually comes to weighing the evidence is saying: Ron Suskind charges X, and the White House denies it. This is what is now called reporting.” ++

The time for impeachment is at hand
Capital Hill Blue
August 6, 2008

Ron Suskind has given us what we need to FINALLY impeach Bush and Cheney in his new book. He was on Keith Olbermann’s show last night and the entire piece on his book was not only enlightening but uplifting. It really is true that the truth will set you free. Watch and enjoy!

Countdown: Intro To The Suskind Interview

Countdown: Ron Suskind Interview

Countdown: John Dean Interview August 5, 2008

John Dean calls the Bush Administration….WORSE THAN WATERGATE and explains how the Bushies are in trouble for defrauding the government just like Nixon. And Suskind has the tapes to prove his book!

The best part is where Keith asks John Dean why we shouldn’t just ignore this and wait for Bush to leave office? Dean’s answer is truly great.

The time has come to get rid of these cockroaches. IT IS NOW! ++

Book says White House ordered forgery
MIKE ALLEN, Politico
8/5/08

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

The letter’s existence has been reported before, and it had been written about as if it were genuine. It was passed in Baghdad to a reporter for The (London) Sunday Telegraph who wrote about it on the front page of Dec. 14, 2003, under the headline, “Terrorist behind September 11 strike ‘was trained by Saddam.’”

The Telegraph story by Con Coughlin (which, coincidentally, ran the day Hussein was captured in his “spider hole”) was touted in the U.S. media by supporters of the war, and he was interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“Over the next few days, the Habbush letter continued to be featured prominently in the United States and across the globe,” Suskind writes. “Fox’s Bill O’Reilly trumpeted the story Sunday night on ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’ talking breathlessly about details of the story and exhorting, ‘Now, if this is true, that blows the lid off al Qaeda—Saddam.’”

According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

The White House flatly denied Suskind’s account. Tony Fratto, deputy White House press secretary, told Politico: “The allegation that the White House directed anyone to forge a document from Habbush to Saddam is just absurd.”

The White House plans to push back hard. Fratto added: “Ron Suskind makes a living from gutter journalism. He is about selling books and making wild allegations that no one can verify, including the numerous bipartisan commissions that have reported on pre-war intelligence.”

Before “The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism,” Suskind wrote two New York Times bestsellers critical of the Bush administration – “The Price of Loyalty” (2004), which featured extensive comments by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, and “The One Percent Doctrine” (2006).

Suskind writes in his new book that the order to create the letter was written on “creamy White House stationery.” The book suggests that the letter was subsequently created by the CIA and delivered to Iraq, but does not say how.

The author claims that such an operation, part of “false pretenses” for war, would apparently constitute illegal White House use of the CIA to influence a domestic audience, an arguably impeachable offense.

Suskind writes that the White House had “ignored the Iraq intelligence chief’s accurate disclosure that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.

“They secretly resettled him in Jordan, paid him $5 million – which one could argue was hush money – and then used his captive status to help deceive the world about one of the era’s most crushing truths: that America had gone to war under false pretenses,” the book says.

Suskind writes that the forgery “operation created by the White House and passed to the CIA seems inconsistent with” a statute saying the CIA may not conduct covert operations “intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies or media.”

“It is not the sort of offense, such as assault or burglary, that carries specific penalties, for example, a fine or jail time,” Suskind writes. “It is much broader than that. It pertains to the White House’s knowingly misusing an arm of government, the sort of thing generally taken up in impeachment proceedings.”

Habbush is still listed as wanted on a State Department website designed to help combat international terrorism, with the notation: “Up to $1 Million Reward.”

Former CIA Director George J. Tenet says about the supposed forgery, in a statement: “There was no such order from the White House to me nor, to the best of my knowledge, was anyone from CIA ever involved in any such effort.”

NBC’s David Gregory reported on “Today” that Habbush passed his information in “secret meetings with British intelligence.”

Tenet says about Habbush in the statement: “In fact, the source in question failed to persuade his British interlocutors that he had anything new to offer by way of intelligence, concessions, or negotiations with regard to the Iraq crisis and the British – on their own – elected to break off contact with him.

“There were many Iraqi officials who said both publicly and privately that Iraq had no WMD – but our foreign intelligence colleagues and we assessed that these individuals were parroting the Ba’ath party line and trying to delay any coalition attack. The particular source that Suskind cites offered no evidence to back up his assertion and acted in an evasive and unconvincing manner.”

Asked about Tenet’s statement by Meredith Vieira on “Today,” Suskind said it’s “part of George’s memory issue.”

“[B]y placing so much on its secret ledger,” Suskind writes in his final chapter, “the administration profoundly altered basic democratic ideals of accountability and informed consent.”

The book (HarperCollins, $27.95) was not supposed to be publicly available until Tuesday, but Politico purchased a copy Monday night at a Washington bookstore.

Suskind, an engaging and confident Washingtonian, writes that the book was “one tough project.” He won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where he worked from 1993 to 2000.

The White House said Suskind received no formal cooperation. He writes in the acknowledgments section at the end of the book: “It should be noted that the intelligence sources who are quoted in this book in no way disclosed any classified information. None crossed the line.”

Among the 415-page book’s other highlights:

John Maguire, one of two men who oversaw the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group, was frustrated by what Suskind describes as the “tendency of the White House to ignore advice it didn’t want to hear – advice that contradicted its willed certainty, political judgments, or rigid message strategies.”

And Suskind writes that the administration “did not want to hear the word insurgency.”

In the first days of his presidency, Bush rejected advice from the CIA to wiretap Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2001 in Vienna, where he was staying in a hotel where the CIA had a listening device planted in the wall of the presidential suite, in need only of a battery change. The CIA said that if the surveillance were discovered, Putin’s respect for Bush would be heightened.

But Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, advised that it was “too risky, it might be discovered,” Suskind writes. Bush decided against if as “a gut decision” based on what he thought was a friendship based on several conversations, including during the presidential campaign. The CIA had warned him that Putin “was a trained KGB agent … [who] wants you to think he’s your friend.”

Suskind reports that Bush initially told Cheney he had to “’step back’ in large meetings when they were together, like those at the NSC [National Security Council], because people were addressing and deferring to Cheney. Cheney said he understood, that he’d mostly just take notes at the big tables and then he and Bush would meet privately, frequently, to discuss options and action.”

Suskind contends Cheney established “deniability” for Bush as part of the vice president’s “complex strategies, developed over decades, for how to protect a president.”

“After the searing experience of being in the Nixon White House, Cheney developed a view that the failure of Watergate was not the break-in, or even the cover-up, but the way the president had, in essence, been over-briefed. There were certain things a president shouldn’t know – things that could be illegal, disruptive to key foreign relationships, or humiliating to the executive.

“They key was a signaling system, where the president made his wishes broadly known to a sufficiently powerful deputy who could take it from there. If an investigation ensued, or a foreign leader cried foul, the president could shrug. This was never something he’d authorized. The whole point of Cheney’s model is to make a president less accountable for his action. Cheney’s view is that accountability – a bedrock feature of representative democracy – is not, in every case, a virtue.”

Suskind is acidly derisive of Bush, saying that he initially lost his “nerve” on 9/11, regaining it when he grabbed the Ground Zero bullhorn. Suskind says Bush’s 9 p.m. Oval Office address on the fifth anniversary was “well along in petulance, seasoned by a touch of self-defensiveness.”

“Moving on its own natural arc, the country is in the process of leaving Bush – his bullying impulse fused, permanently, with satisfying vengeance – in the scattering ashes of 9/11,” Suskind writes. “The high purpose his angry words carried after the attacks, and in two elections since, is dissolving with each passing minute.”

Suskind writes in the acknowledgments that his research assistant, Greg Jackson, “was sent to New York on a project for the book” in September 2007 and was “detained by federal agents in Manhattan. He was interrogated and his notes were confiscated, violations of his First and Fourth Amendment rights.” The author provides no further detail. ++

The Other Half of the Letter
Anonymous Liberal
Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Everyone is buzzing this morning about Ron Suskind’s claim–in his new book–that a letter purportedly written to Saddam Hussien by one of his intelligence officers in 2001 was in fact a forgery authorized by the White House. The letter was provided to a reporter for The Sunday Telegraph (of London) by a member of the Iraqi interim government and was first written about in December of 2003, at around the time Saddam was captured.

All the commentary I’ve seen so far–from the Politico article that broke the story and blogs that have linked to it–has focused on the first part of the letter that describes Atta’s training, but no one seems to be mentioning the more intriguing part of the letter. According to Con Coughlin, the reporter who obtained the document:

The second item [in the letter] explains how Iraqi intelligence, helped by “a small team from the al-Qaeda organisation”, arranged for an (unspecified) shipment from Niger to reach Baghdad by way of Libya and Syria.

Iraqi officials believe this is a reference to the controversial shipments of uranium ore that Iraq acquired from Niger to aid Saddam in his efforts to develop an atom bomb.

Now, as everyone knows, Bush famously trumpeted the uranium from Niger claim in his State of the Union speech just prior to the invasion of Iraq, and the White House later came under fire when Joe Wilson went public and disputed that claim in July 2003.

So this letter, which appears to support two highly dubious pre-war claims by the Bush administration–the link between Saddam and al Qaeda and the Niger uranium claim–is “discovered” in December of 2003. I’m not sure what proof, if any, Suskind has that the White House was responsible for this letter, but if that claim is true, it’s a HUGE deal. ++

If It’s 2008, It Must Be 1984
Jurrasic Pork, Welcome Back To Pottersville
Tuesday, August 5, 2008

“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place… Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.”

- George Orwell, 1984, chapter four

Ron Suskind has a new book coming out today, entitled The Way of the World.

The biggest highlight, according to Politico.com, which obtained a copy last night, is that the White House had ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a letter allegedly written by Iraq’s head of intelligence to Saddam Hussein that “proved” a link between the dictator and the al Qaeda network. Obviously, this is in violation of a longstanding federal law that prohibits the CIA in engaging in activities to sway public opinion, among other things.

This, coupled with Seymour Hersh’s recent admission of a Dick Cheney-led WH meeting in which a false flag operation that would’ve resulted in the murder of Navy SEALs through friendly fire in order to instigate a war with Iran was seriously floated, further shows that this government, either knowingly or unknowingly, is using George Orwell’s 1984 as a template in both their foreign and domestic policies.

Disappearing emails by the millions. The State Department’s annual terrorism report suddenly kept under wraps, with numbers being redacted in copies given to Congress. The Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherfording of Valerie Plame and Susan Lindauer. The suppression of vital environmental information at the EPA. The use, once again, of the CIA to heavily censor op-eds to be published in the NY Times. The suppression of scientific, peer-reviewed science at NASA, the NOAA, the Surgeon General’s Office, and other government organizations, all the way up to the censorship of Congressional testimony of CDC officials. The list goes on.

And yet Bush is rebuking China for reneging on a promise to allow journalists Internet access during the Olympics.

Don’t make me laugh.

Much of this was taking place long before right wingers tried to turn the draft-dodging Bush into another Comrade Ogilvy at the same exact time they were Swiftboating an actual Vietnam War veteran and hero.

Then I think of what Ron Suskind quoted a senior Bush administration official (almost surely Karl Rove) back in 2004:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

Into this Orwellian age of censorship on steroids dodders and shuffles John McCain, a guy who’d be best employed hanging around an all-night convenience store at the crack of dawn, hoping to catch the attention of the manager and being offered a job sweeping the floor.

And this man is actually leading Obama, according to the latest Zogby poll. A man who’s never felt passionate enough about censorship and propaganda to speak out against it and would surely continue it were he to get elected.

A man who thinks so little of our intelligence that he blatantly lies time and again about telling lies and talking bullshit even though he’s on videotape. A man who rewrites history with the industry of a Newt Gingrich alternate history novel. You deadender, racist, brain-damaged lemming/sheep hybrids think this man will get us back on the right path that 80% of us do not believe we are on?

One way or the other, we deserve the government we vote for. ++

bonus

Justice Department Subpoenas Its Former Lawyers In Civil Rights Probe
HuffingtonPost
August 6, 2008

A federal grand jury has subpoenaed several former senior Justice Department attorneys for an investigation into the politicization of the Department’s own Civil Rights Division, according to sources close to the investigation.

The extraordinary step by the Justice Department of subpoenaing attorneys once from within its own ranks was taken because several of them refused to voluntarily give interviews to the Department Inspector General, which has been conducting its own probe of the politicization of the Civil Rights Division, the same sources said.

The grand jury has been investigating allegations that a former senior Bush administration appointee in the Civil Rights Division, Bradley Schlozman, gave false or misleading testimony on a variety of topics to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sources close to the investigation say that the grand jury is also more broadly examining whether Schlozman and other Department officials violated civil service laws by screening Civil Rights attorneys for political affiliation while hiring them.

Investigators for the Inspector General have also asked whether Schlozman, while an interim U.S. attorney in Missouri, brought certain actions and even a voting fraud indictment for political ends, according to witnesses questioned by the investigators. But it is unclear whether the grand jury is going to hear testimony on that issue as well.

One person who has been subpoenaed before the grand jury, sources said, was Hans von Spakovsky, who as a former counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights was a top aide to Schlozman. An attempt to reach Spakovsky for comment for this story was unsuccessful.

Earlier this year, Spakovsky withdrew his name from nomination by President Bush to serve on the Federal Election Commission after repeatedly claiming a faulty memory or citing the attorney-client privilege to fend off questions from senators about allegedly using his position to restrict voting rights for minorities — and that he hindered an investigation of Republican officeholders in Minnesota accused of discriminating against Native American voters.

Three current and former Justice Department officials were questioned by investigators about allegations that Schlozman–with Spakovsky advising and assisting him– made decisions whether to hire and fire attorneys in the Civil Rights Divison on the basis of their political affiliation.

Another person subpoenaed by the grand jury, according to several sources, was Jason Torchinsky, who, like Spavosky, was also a Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.

Torchinsky is not under investigation for any wrongdoing himself, but rather subpoenaed as a witness in the probe, sources said. Previously, however, Torchinsky had refused to voluntarily answer questions from investigators working for the Justice Department’s Inspector General about the politicization of the Civil Rights Divison. Reached at his home on Tuesday night, Torchinsky declined to comment for this article.

Sources familiar with the federal grand jury subpoenas say that they were approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department.

The sources said that investigators working the case as well as senior Department officials were distressed that some of the Justice Department’s most senior political appointees refused to co-operate with an investigation by the very Department they once served.

“What does this say for the average person on the street if we want them to co-operate?” said a senior official, “How can we say to the ordinary citizen that you should report crimes, tell the government what you know, when the people who ran the Department of Justice thumb their noses at the system?”

Another federal law enforcement official familiar with the subpoenas said that they believed that senior Justice Department officials had no choice but to approve the subpoenas because to do otherwise would have meant overruling career prosecutors and their actions would appear political if they did. The official also said that political appointees at the top of the Department had to appear to be aggressive in their investigation of the politicization because to do otherwise might lead to calls for a special prosecutor to take over the investigation from them.

A former Justice Department attorney who was subpoenaed said that he believed they had been called before the grand jury as “retaliation” for refusing to talk voluntarily to investigators working for Justice’s Inspector General. Current Justice Department employees are required to talk to investigators, while former employees are not.

But sources with first-hand knowledge of the investigation said that the former Justice Department officials were subpoenaed because they had information necessary to the Department’s probe and without subpoenas there was no other way to compel their testimony.

During his tenure in the Civil Rights Division, career employees charged that Schlozman disregarded longstanding voting rights law to electorally favor Republicans over Democrats.

Joseph Rich, who was chief of the voting rights section of the Civil Rights Division under Schlozman, told the Boston Globe: “Schlozman was reshaping the Civil Rights Division. Schlozman didn’t know anything about voting law. . . . All he knew is he wanted to be sure that the Republicans were going to win.”

Schlozman and other Bush administration appointees in the Justice Department claimed that federal law enforcement authorities had been deficient in prosecuting cases of voter fraud. Schlozman and other Bush administration officials–most prominently Karl Rove- claimed that the failure to prosecute purported voter fraud benefited Democrats at the expense of Republicans.

But most independent assessments suggest that the vast majority of reports of voting fraud are unfounded.

A recent study [PDF] by Lorraine C. Minnite, an assistant professor of political science at Barnard College, found that most reports of voting fraud turned out to be “unsubstantiated or false claims by the loser of a close race, mischief, and administrative or voter error.” Joseph Rich, who was chief of the voting-rights section in Justice’s Civil Rights Division until 2005, told me in an interview: “There is virtually no evidence that voter fraud ever occurs except by individuals and in rare instances.”

Democrats and interest groups ranging from the League of Woman Voters to the NAACP to those who protect the rights of the disabled, assert that the White House and Republican activists exaggerate claims of voter fraud as a means to suppress voter participation. Citing allegations of purported voter fraud, the Bush White House has supported state initiatives which would require voters to produce state photo identification at the polls.

In the courts, however, state and federal judges have said that such requirements might discourage voting by minorities, the disabled, the impoverished, students, and the elderly–all segments of voters who traditionally vote in greater numbers for the Democrats.

Von Spakovsky, Schlozman’s deputy, who has been subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury because of his refusal to speak to investigators, was also alleged to have to misused his official position by setting aside the law to take actions to help Republican candidates.

When von Spakovsky was nominated to serve on the Federal Election commission, six career officials of the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Section, who had worked under him, wrote the Senate asking that he not be confirmed.

The six alleged that “during the 2004 election cycle” von Spakovsky “broke with established Department policy by getting involved with contentious and partisan litigation on the eve of the election. Mr. von Spakovsky drafted legal briefs between the Republican and Democratic parties in three battleground states, Ohio, Michigan and Florida just before the election, all in favor of the Republican party’s position.” The six career officials further asserted: “These briefs ran counter to the well-established practice of the Civil Rights Division not to inject itself into litigation or election monitoring on the eve of an election where it would be viewed as expressing a political preference or could have an impact on a political dispute.”

These briefs ran counter to the well-established practice of the Civil Rights Division not to inject itself into litigation or election monitoring on the eve of an election where it could be viewed as expressing a political preference or could have an impact on a political dispute. Moreover, in another case between the Republican and Democratic parties which concerned an Ohio law that permitted political parties to challenge voters, he drafted a letter that was sent to the court which supported the Republican Party position even though the law did not implicate any statute that the Department enforces.

During his tenure with the Civil Rights Division, Schlozman also repeatedly clashed not only with career attorneys in his own office but also with federal prosecutors who he did not believe were taking the issue of voting fraud seriously enough.

One of those he clashed with was Todd Graves, the U.S. Attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, a conservative Republican stalwart who excelled in his job, but who also was fired by the Bush administration in March, 2006– only to be temporarily replaced by Schlozman.

As interim U.S. attorney, less than a week before a tightly contested U.S. Senate race in Missouri in 2006, Schlozman brought an indictment of voter fraud against four workers with a liberal advocacy group, despite the fact that Justice Department guidelines prohibit such indictments so close to election day. Schlozman said that he was justified in his actions because he was afraid that more fraud might take place.

But Robert Kengle, a former deputy chief in the voting-rights section at Justice during the Clinton and Bush administrations, told me in an interview: “They cooked up that there is a general exception to the policy because they wanted to prevent more fraud. But indicting people before the election was not going to change anything. Registration had already closed…. There just wasn’t a justification for bending the law.”

The Justice Department guidelines state: “Federal prosecutors and investigators should be extremely careful not to conduct overt investigations during the pre-election period or while the elections are underway.”

One reason for such a policy, the guidelines say, is that “a criminal investigation by armed, badged federal agents runs the obvious risk of chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities.”

In the end, the indictment had to be reissued after the election. In his haste to bring charges, Schlozman had indicted the wrong person–someone with a name similar to the person he wanted to charge.++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves