Documents Show Karl Rove Had Key Role In Firing of US Attorneys

What a surprise. Rove lied about his role in the firing of the U.S. Attorneys. The New York Times reports:

Thousands of pages of internal e-mail and once-secret Congressional testimony showed Tuesday that Karl Rove and other senior aides in the Bush White House played an earlier and more active role than was previously known in the 2006 firings of a number of United States attorneys.

Aides to former President George W. Bush have asserted that the Justice Department took the lead in the dismissals, which set off a political firestorm that lasted months. Mr. Rove played down his role in the firings in a recent interview and in closed testimony last month before Congressional investigators.

But the documents, released by the House Judiciary Committee after a protracted fight over access to White House records and testimony, offer a detailed portrait of a nearly two-year effort, from early 2005 to 2007, by senior White House officials, including Mr. Rove, to dismiss some prosecutors for what appear to be political reasons.

The Washington Post quotes House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers:

Under the Bush regime, honest and well-performing U.S. attorneys were fired for petty patronage, political horse-trading, and, in the most egregious case of political abuse of the U.S. attorney corps — that of U.S. attorney Iglesias — because he refused to use his office to help Republicans win elections.

TPM Muckraker reports that National Review editor Rich Lowry offered to help the White House spin the firings. The White House response in hearing that Lowry offered to help: “Anyone better?”

1 Comment

  1. 1
    Eclectic Radical says:

    I think we both wrote about this at around the same time.
     
    My take was how partisan this whole matter is and how the very nature of the criminal conduct at the heart of the matter guarantees that the investigation will serve to exacerbate the political issues rather than really address the questions of criminality at issue. Particularly since most people were aware of the facts being ‘unearthed’ by the investigation before it began.
     
    Democrats are forced to pursue Rove because of political pressure from their constituents to see justice done, and so pleasing their constituents trumps principle. While Republicans are conscious that the crimes committed were committed on their behalf (or the behalf of their colleagues), at their request, and so they must defend Rove regardless of their own principle.
     
    Which just inflates the difficulty of acheiving a genuine criminal reckoning in courts.
     

1 Trackbacks

Leave a comment