Special Counsel Office investigate US attorney firing & Rove

Yes. Turn the lights on bright.

Some concern developing that this might be a diversionary move or stonewalling means. The chap heading up this office is himself the subject of a number of complaints re stifling whistleblowers.

Is the OSC set for a coverup to protect Rove?
Rove's Newest Investigator Is Under Investigation
The Nation
4/24/07

Karl Rove is under investigation by the executive branch. So, too, is his investigator.

On Tuesday, The Los Angeles Times reported that the Office of Special Counsel, an obscure federal investigative and prosecutorial agency that is supposed to protect federal employees from prohibited personnel practices, 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.

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

Rove is tied to all three elements of the OSC investigation. "We will take the evidence where it leads us," Scott Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel, told The Los Angeles Times. "We will not leave any stone unturned."

But who is Scott Bloch, and should his vow be taken at face value? The Times story did not provide background on the fellow who will be examining whether Rove and other administration officials may have violated the law by using political email accounts for White House business, by explicitly encouraging government actions for direct partisan gains, and by dismissing David Iglesias, a US attorney in New Mexico. Bloch is a George W. Bush appointee, and his recent record is not one of a relentless pursuer of government corruption and wrongdoing. Here's an overview:

* In February, The Washington Post reported Bloch himself was under investigation:

The Office of Personnel Management's inspector general has been investigating allegations by current and former OSC employees that Special Counsel Scott J. Bloch retaliated against underlings who disagreed with his policies--by, among other means, transferring them out of state--and tossed out legitimate whistle-blower cases to reduce the office backlog. Bloch denies the accusations, saying that under his leadership the agency has grown more efficient and receptive to whistle-blowers.

The 16-month investigation has been beset by delays, accusations and counter-accusations. The latest problem began two weeks ago, when Bloch's deputy sent staffers a memo asking them to inform OSC higher-ups when investigators contact them. Further, the memo read, employees should meet with investigators in the office, in a special conference room. Some employees cried foul, saying the recommendations made them afraid to be interviewed in the probe.

The OSC's memo, the group said, "was only the latest in a series of actions by Bloch to obstruct" the investigation. "Other actions have included suggestions that all witnesses interviewed...provide Bloch with affidavits describing what they had been asked and how they responded."

* Two years earlier, the paper reported that Bloch had declined to enforce a discrimination ban:

Since taking office in January 2004, the Bush appointee has been accused of failing to enforce a long-standing policy against bias in the federal workplace based on sexual orientation, unnecessarily reorganizing the OSC to try to run off internal critics, and arbitrarily dismissing some personnel complaints and whistle-blower disclosures in an effort to claim reductions in backlogs.

He has denied such allegations and argued that he has made the agency more efficient at processing cases and, at the same time, more receptive to whistle-blowers and federal workers who have suffered unfair treatment.

* That same year, public interest groups and employees at the OSC accused Bloch of running an overly partisan shop. As Govexec.com reported:

Amendments to a complaint filed against Special Counsel Scott J. Bloch in early March allege that OSC took no action on a complaint regarding then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's use of government funds to travel in the weeks before the 2004 presidential election, but vigorously pursued allegations against Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry's visit to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Three nonprofit whistleblower protection groups--the Government Accountability Project, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the Project on Government Oversight--and anonymous career OSC employees filed the initial complaint March 3, listing a series of prohibited personnel practices and violations of civil service laws by Bloch.

The politicization allegations stem from Bloch's decision to have a group of lawyers report to a political deputy rather than a career senior executive. The complaint states that OSC has pursued trivial matters without regard to political affiliation...but has not evenly handled higher profile cases.

At the OSC, Bloch is supposed to protect whistleblowers. But he's been charged with reprising against those who challenge his agency and others. Before Bloch was appointed by Bush to take over the OSC, he was a deputy director and counsel at the Justice Department's Task Force for Faith-based and Community Initiatives.

"By most measures, his tenure has been an absolute failure," says Adam Miles, legislative representative at the Government Accountability Project. "He's been under pressure to start doing something." Miles notes that GAP did not initially expect the complaint it filed against Bloch in 2005 to go anywhere. "It was referred to a federal entity called the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency," Miles recalls, "and we thought it would just rot there." But the case was handed to Pat McFarland, the inspector general for the Office of Personnel Management. McFarland is a former St. Louis detective who spent 22 years as a Secret Service agent before becoming IG at OPM in 1990.

McFarland's investigation of Bloch, Miles says, "hasn't been a totally transparent process but we're hearing it's reaching a conclusion--which could be motivation for Bloch to start this investigation into the White House. If OPM does turn up any adverse information on Bloch, it would be more difficult for the White House to get rid of him while he was actively investigating them." But this could cut the other way. If Bloch is the subject of an investigation, he might be inclined to treat the White House favorably to protect his own position. In either case, there seems to be a conflict of interest. Bloch, Miles says, "may not be the appropriate person to be conducting the investigation" of Rove and the White House.

It is a dizzying situation. The investigator investigating officials who oversee the agency that is investigating the investigator. Forget firewalls. This looks more like a basement flooded with backed-up sewage--with the water rising.

With reporting by Stephanie Condon.
------------------------------------------------------

Complaint document against Bloch:
http://www.pogo.org/m/gp/gp-OSC-exhibits-03032005.pdf

If at first you don't succeed, investigate again.
Today's Must Read
By Paul Kiel - May 11, 2007
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.

Rep. attorney accuses Rove of using DOJ to pursue politics
6/7/07
Talking Points by Josh Marshall

Scott Horton has more on this at his Harpers blog.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/06/hbc-90000210

It is a curious process by which some questions of dubious import get pressed endlessly and others, which matter far more, are entirely ignored. I think we have one of these cases here. And if you'll indulge me I'd like a moment to explain what I mean.

A lifelong Republican attorney from Alabama, Dana Jill Simpson, has come forward and sworn out an affidavit claiming that in 2002 a close associate of Karl Rove claimed that Rove had told him that he'd gotten the Department of Justice to investigate then-Alabama Governor Don Siegelman (D) and that he was sure the investigation would eventually take Siegelman out of politics. Is the claim true? Was Rove successfully using the DOJ to pursue politics by other means as far back as 2002?

The 'denials' from the other parties on the conference call have either been feeble, non-responsive or non-existent. And the charge is serious enough that you would certainly expect that if the claim could be roundly denied it would be roundly denied.

Then there's the White House and the Department of Justice.

Had the last five months not happened, perhaps there'd be no reason for either to deny the charges. But we already have a rather detailed predicate -- abundant evidence of inappropriate contacts between the White House political office and Main Justice.

A few journalists -- included a TPM reporter -- have put this question to the DOJ and the White House. Did Rove have any contacts with the DOJ about investigating Siegelman and did he tell William Canary that Siegelman would be "take[n] care of"?

But the White House refuses to answer the question. As does the Department of Justice.

In the context, I don't think that's acceptable.

Remember, an Alabama attorney who is a lifelong Republican and actually did opposition research for Siegelman's 2002 opponent has signed an affidavit asserting that this is true. The other alleged witnesses won't deny it. Perhaps she's just lying or crazy or has bad memory. But she has a sufficient prima facie claim of credibility to warrant a denial if one can honestly be tendered.

Now, perhaps the issue here is that the Democrats in Washington won't press the issue, and thus the press won't either. And from a political standpoint their position may be understandable, even correct. Siegelman was eventually convicted. And he's set to be sentenced later this month. From what I can tell there are real questions about the prosecution and the trial. But he may well be as guilty as sin. And because of that risk or fact they don't want to touch this one.

But from a rule of law perspective of view it doesn't matter. It can be both. Rove may have been playing games with the Justice Department, getting enemies investigated and Siegelman may also be guilty. It simply does not have to be one or the other.

Because of that, the question might not play politically. But we should want to know one way or another whether the allegations about Rove in this case are true.

So who's going to press this question with the White House and the DOJ? TPM may not be able to get answer but the big papers can. So who is going to ask? Or does this one just get ignored?

My gut tells me this one gets asked. But when?

White House expected to block aide from testifying
White House expected to block aide from testifying
Sat Jul 7, 2007
By Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The attorney for a former White House aide told Congress on Saturday he expects the Bush administration to try to block the aide from testifying on last year's firings of U.S. prosecutors, as the White House and Congress appeared headed for a court battle.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the attorney for former White House political aide Sara Taylor said she would be happy to testify, but she expects a letter from the White House directing her not to do so.

"In our view, it is unfair to Ms. Taylor that this constitutional struggle might be played out with her as the object of an unseemly tug of war," attorney W. Neil Eggleston wrote in a letter to the committee and to White House counsel Fred Fielding.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, who released a letter, said Taylor's testimony was important to the committee's investigation of the firing last year of nine of the nation's 93 U.S. attorneys.

The Vermont Democrat said in a statement it was "unfortunate that the White House is trying to interfere with Ms. Taylor's testimony before the Senate and with Congress' responsibility to get to the truth behind the unprecedented firings of several U.S. attorneys."

He urged the White House to stop "this stonewalling" and accept the committee's offer "to negotiate a workable solution to the Committee's oversight requests."

President George W. Bush last month refused to comply with subpoenas for documents from Taylor and former presidential counsel Harriet Miers, and made clear they would not testify as requested by Leahy's panel and the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.

In refusing to comply with subpoenas, the president asserted "executive privilege," meaning he thought Congress had overstepped its constitutional bounds -- thus setting up a court battle over whether he can refuse Congress' demands.

Lawmakers have given the White House until Monday to provide a legal basis for its privilege claims, but have left open the possibility of a court challenge.

Eggleston asked that any congressional sanctions be directed at the White House, not Taylor, because his 32-year-old client faced "two untenable choices,"

"She can follow the president's direction and face the possibility of a contempt sanction by the Senate, with enforcement through the criminal courts, an action that regardless of outcome, will follow her for life," he said.

Or she could try to accommodate the Senate, which would "put her at odds with the President, a person whom she admires and for whom she has worked tirelessly for years," he wrote.

Leahy said Taylor's testimony was key to the probe of the U.S. attorney's firings.

"There is clear evidence that Ms. Taylor was one of several White House officials who played a key role in these firings and the Administration's response to cover up the reasons behind them when questions first arose," Leahy said.