[Dialogue] Office of Special Counsel to Investigate Rove

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 by Los Angeles Times
<http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-probe24apr24,0,5629429,full.stor
y?coll=la-home-headlines>  

Office of Special Counsel to Investigate Rove

by Tom Hamburger

WASHINGTON - Most of the time, an obscure federal investigative unit known
as the Office of Special Counsel confines itself to monitoring the
activities of relatively low-level government employees, stepping in with
reprimands and other routine administrative actions for such offenses as
discriminating against military personnel or engaging in prohibited
political activities. But the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump
into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in
Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White
House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by
chief strategist Karl Rove.
<http://www.commondreams.org/archive/wp-content/photos/0424_05.jpg> 

The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S.
attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep
presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could
create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.

First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats
in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on
Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many
facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part.

“We will take the evidence where it leads us,” Scott J. Bloch, head of the
Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview
Monday. “We will not leave any stone unturned.”

Bloch declined to comment on who his investigators would interview, but he
said the probe would be independent and uncoordinated with any other agency
or government entity.

The decision by Bloch’s office is the latest evidence that Rove’s
once-vaunted operations inside the government, which helped the GOP hold the
White House and Congress for six years, now threaten to mire the
administration in investigations.

The question of improper political influence over government decision-making
is at the heart of the controversy over the firing of U.S. attorneys and the
ongoing congressional investigation of the special e-mail system installed
in the White House and other government offices by the Republican National
Committee.

All administrations are political, but this White House has systematically
brought electoral concerns to Cabinet agencies in a way unseen previously.

For example, Rove and his top aides met each year with presidential
appointees throughout the government, using PowerPoint presentations to
review polling data and describe high-priority congressional and other
campaigns around the country.

Some officials have said they understood that they were expected to seek
opportunities to help Republicans in these races, through federal grants,
policy decisions or in other ways.

A former Interior Department official, Wayne R. Smith, who sat through
briefings from Rove and his then-deputy Ken Mehlman, said that during
President Bush’s first term, he and other appointees were frequently briefed
on political priorities.

“We were constantly being reminded about how our decisions could affect
electoral results,” Smith said.

“This is a big deal,” Paul C. Light, a New York University expert on the
executive branch, said of Bloch’s plan. “It is a significant moment for the
administration and Karl Rove. It speaks to the growing sense that there is a
nexus at the White House that explains what’s going on in these disparate
investigations.”

The 106-person Office of Special Counsel has never conducted such a broad
and high-profile inquiry in its history. One of its primary missions has
been to enforce the Hatch Act, a law enacted in 1939 to preserve the
integrity of the civil service.

Bloch said the new investigation grew from two narrower inquiries his staff
had begun in recent weeks.

One involved the fired U.S. attorney from New Mexico, David C. Iglesias.

The other centered on a PowerPoint presentation that a Rove aide, J. Scott
Jennings, made at the General Services Administration this year.

That presentation listed recent polls and the outlook for battleground House
and Senate races in 2008. After the presentation, GSA Administrator Lorita
Doan encouraged agency managers to “support our candidates,” according to
half a dozen witnesses. Doan said she could not recall making such comments.

The Los Angeles Times has learned that similar presentations were made by
other White House staff members, including Rove, to other Cabinet agencies.
During such presentations, employees said they got a not-so-subtle message
about helping endangered Republicans.

White House spokesman Scott M. Stanzel said the Hatch Act did not prohibit
providing informational briefings to government employees.

Responding to a letter of complaint to the White House from 25 Democratic
senators, Stanzel said: “It is entirely appropriate for the president’s
staff to provide informational briefings to appointees throughout the
federal government about the political landscape in which they implement the
president’s policies and priorities.”

However, questions have emerged about the PowerPoint presentations,
including whether Doan’s comments crossed the line and whether the
presentations violated rules limiting political activity on federal
property.

Whether legal or not, the multiple presentations revealed how widely and
systematically the White House sought to deliver its list of electoral
priorities.

In the course of investigating the U.S. attorney matter and the PowerPoint
presentations, Democratic congressional investigators discovered e-mails
written by White House personnel using accounts maintained by the Republican
National Committee.

For example, they discovered that Jennings, a special assistant to the
president and deputy director of political affairs in the White House, was
using an e-mail with the domain name of “gwb43.com” that the RNC maintained.

That domain name showed up in e-mail communications from Jennings about how
to replace U.S. Atty. H.E. “Bud” Cummins III of Arkansas to make room for
Timothy Griffin, a Rove protégé, in such a way as to “alleviate
pressure/implication that Tim forced Bud out.”

Another Jennings e-mail using the RNC account requested that department
officials meet with a former New Mexico campaign advisor who wanted to
“discuss the U.S. Atty situation there.”

The growing controversy inspired him to act, Bloch said.

“We are acting with dispatch and trying to deal with this because people are
concerned about it 
 and it is not a subject that should be left to endless
speculation,” he said.

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

  _____  

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/24/717/

 

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