Karl's been trying to get Republicans off the legal hook since 2001

tom's picture

Wow, get a load of this:

WASHINGTON -- Former Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.) said Tuesday that White House political adviser Karl Rove told him in the spring of 2001 that he should limit his choice for U.S. attorney in Chicago to someone from Illinois.

According to Fitzgerald, who was determined to bring in a prosecutor from outside the state, Rove "just said we don't want you going outside the state. We don't want to be moving U.S. attorneys around."

Fitzgerald said he believes Rove was trying to influence the selection in reaction to pressure from Rep. Dennis Hastert, then speaker of the House, and allies of then-Gov. George Ryan, who knew Fitzgerald was seeking someone from outside Illinois to attack political corruption.

Fitzgerald said he announced his choice, Patrick Fitzgerald (no relation), a New Yorker, on May 13, a Mother's Day Sunday, to pre-empt any opposition.

A year or so later, according to Peter Fitzgerald, Rove "said to me that Fitzgerald appointment got great headlines for you, but it ticked off the base." Peter Fitzgerald said he believes the "base" was Illinois Republican insiders upset at the prosecutor's assault on corruption.

Um, guys? I think it's time to subpoena Karl Rove. He's apparently been doing this for years. After reading this, I'm beginning to believe he was in charge of the whole thing.

Here's my favorite part:

Peter Fitzgerald said he gives Rove credit for not interfering with the nomination once it was made public.

Oh so we should all be happy that Rove had the good sense not to make his tampering even MORE obvious? Wow that's pretty astonishing.

BTW, my guess is that Bud Cummins was actually pushed out by Roy Blunt because Cummins was investigating his son's administration for corruption at the time he was let go. I think that's another angle that should be pursued in this scandal, don't you?

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This should--should, mind you--be what gets Rove

finally sacked out of the White House anyway. Not that he will suffer anything more than an egobooboo before going off to wreak havoc for somebody else's campaign or signing up for Wingnut Welfare in some other form. But his gelatinous, acidic oozy effluations are just all over this USA's story.

Don't have a link but this is Blumenthal in Salon dated tomorrow (swiped from Duck Pit comments):

All roads lead to Rove
The White House political director was clearly at the center of the partisan plot to fire U.S. attorneys, despite the administration's clumsy attempts to pretend otherwise.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Mar. 15, 2007 | The Bush administration's first instinct was to shield Karl Rove from scrutiny when Congress began inquiring about the unusual firings of eight U.S. attorneys. Among the replacements, the proposed new U.S. attorney for Arkansas happened to be one of Rove's most devoted underlings, his head of opposition research, Tim Griffin, who boasted during the 2000 presidential election about the effectiveness of the negative campaign against Al Gore: "We make the bullets!" Griffin also posted a sign in his department at Bush headquarters: "Rain hell on Al!" A letter written by the Department of Justice in late February informed Congress: "The department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin." Despite this categorical disavowal, a sheaf of internal Justice Department e-mails released this week to Congress under subpoena revealed Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff, writing in mid-December 2006, "I know getting him appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, etc." Harriet, of course, was Harriet Miers, then the White House legal counsel.
The Justice Department's statement on Karl Rove was simply one part of its coverup. The department's three top officials -- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and William E. Moschella, principal associate deputy attorney general -- all testified before Congress under oath that the dismissed U.S. attorneys had been removed for "performance" reasons, not because they had been insufficiently partisan in their prosecution of Democrats or because they would be replaced by those who would be. Yet another Sampson e-mail, sent to Miers in March 2005, had ranked all 93 U.S. attorneys on the basis of being "good performers," those who "exhibited loyalty" to the administration, or "low performers," those who "chafed against Administration initiatives, etc."
The day before the e-mails were made public Sampson resigned, offering a classic fall-guy statement, claiming that he was the one who failed to inform Gonzales and other officials about the firings. Sampson, who was Gonzales' closest aide, accompanying him from the White House Counsel's Office to the Justice Department when Gonzales was appointed attorney general, had sought to become a U.S. attorney himself through the purge. And Sampson was considered to be politically adept enough to be considered a stand-in for the supposedly indispensable Rove. When it was rumored that Rove might be indicted in the Valerie Plame case, the Washington Post reported that Sampson was likely to replace him.
Sampson's abrupt departure was followed by Gonzales' bizarre press conference on Wednesday.

h/t to GWPDA the Utterly Invaluable Scholar....

Ruth's picture

Keep flipping back

....over time and more slime emerges. [see article on DeLay Effect above]

The Judicial Activism campaign was meant to defeat Clinton appointments, and carried over into pathetic Terry Schiavo resuscitation attempt.

The place that the judiciary was most undermined? In the GOP 'mind', where it became another arm of the right wing raised against the public. Ruth

Ruth

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