Scott Jennings, Rove's deputy, is clearly tied to the prosecutors' purge

Even though it was denied last month:

Emails released today show that Karl Rove’s deputy Scott Jennings was involved in the effort to purge Arkansas U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins in favor of Rove “protege” Tim Griffen, despite claims from the Justice Department to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) last month that Rove had “no role” in Griffin’s appointment.

Furiously rewriting history

For those who are not paying attention:

Rove busy shaping Bush’s legacy. “In an interview this week in his windowless West Wing office, Karl Rove said that there is ‘very little’ discussion about President Bush’s legacy at the White House these days,” the Washington Post reports. But behind the scenes, Rove “has begun trying to put his own distinctive spin on current events and the longer historical view,” specifically asserting that the “Bush doctrine” will be adopted by future U.S. presidents.

...Suckers!!

Greg Palast exposes the mini-Rovian tactics of Timothy Griffin, a new US Attorney thanks to the Patriot Act

Greg Palast:

There was one big hoohah in Washington yesterday as House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers pulled down the pants on George Bush's firing of US Attorneys to expose a scheme to punish prosecutors who wouldn't bend to political pressure.

But the Committee missed a big one: Timothy Griffin, Karl Rove's assistant, the President's pick as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Griffin, according to BBC Television, was the hidden hand behind a scheme to wipe out the voting rights of 70,000 citizens prior to the 2004 election.

Key voters on Griffin's hit list: Black soldiers and homeless men and women. Nice guy, eh? Naughty or nice, however, is not the issue. Targeting voters where race is a factor is a felony crime under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In October 2004, our investigations team at BBC Newsnight received a series of astonishing emails from Mr. Griffin, then Research Director for the Republican National Committee. He didn't mean to send them to us. They were highly confidential memos meant only for RNC honchos.

However, Griffin made a wee mistake. Instead of sending the emails - potential evidence of a crime - to email addresses ending with the domain name "@GeorgeWBush.com" he sent them to "@GeorgeWBush.ORG," a website run by prankster John Wooden, who owns "GeorgeWBush.org." When Wooden got the treasure trove of Rove-ian ravings, he sent them to us.

And we dug in, decoding, and mapping the voters on what Griffin called "Caging" lists, spreadsheets with 70,000 names of voters marked for challenge. Overwhelmingly, these were Black and Hispanic voters from Democratic precincts.

The Griffin scheme was sickly brilliant. We learned that the RNC sent first-class letters to new voters in minority precincts, marked "Do not forward." Several sheets contained nothing but soldiers, other sheets, homeless shelters. Targets included the Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida and that city's State Street Rescue Mission. Another target, Edward Waters College, a school for African-Americans.

If these voters were not currently at their home voting address, they were tagged as "suspect" and their registration wiped out or their ballot challenged and not counted. Of course, these 'cages' captured thousands of students, the homeless and those in the military though they are legitimate voters.

But it is illegal to challenge voters en masse where race is an element in the targeting. So several lawyers told us, including Ralph Neas, famed civil rights attorney with People for the American Way.

Griffin himself ducked our cameras, but his RNC team tried to sell us the notion that the caging sheets were, in fact, not illegal voter hit lists, but a roster of donors to the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign. Republican donors at homeless shelters?

Over the past weeks, Griffin has said he would step down if he had to face Congressional confirmation. However, the President appointed Griffin to the law enforcement post using an odd little provision of the USA Patriot Act that could allow Griffin to skip Congressional questioning altogether.

Waxman opens up hearings on the White House's outing of Valerie Plame

Cheney, Rove, Bush? Raise your right hand please...

Chairman Henry A. Waxman announced a hearing on whether White House officials followed appropriate procedures for safeguarding the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. At the hearing, the Committee will receive testimony from Ms. Wilson and other experts regarding the disclosure and internal White House security procedures for protecting her identity from disclosure and responding to the leak after it occurred. The hearing is scheduled for Friday, March 16.

In addition, the Committee today sent a letter to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald commending him for his investigation and requesting a meeting to discuss testimony by Mr. Fitzgerald before the Committee.

The flow chart of impeachable offenses

Via Bryan at Why Now? Juan Cole has the timeline and photos of the Bush administration as they furiously beat the drum for war.

Excellently well done.

Scooter Libby goes under the bus

Yet mysterious laughter is heard....

Oops...wrong picture. ...mysterious laughter is heard...

As a voice declares.... you'll never catch me!

Secret Iranian proposal for peace was ignored by Bush in 2003

Because Bush doesn't talk to them evildoers no how:

WASHINGTON, May 24 (IPS) - Iran offered in 2003 to accept peace with Israel and to cut off material assistance to Palestinian armed groups and pressure them to halt terrorist attacks within Israel's 1967 borders, according to the secret Iranian proposal to the United States.

The two-page proposal for a broad Iran-U.S. agreement covering all the issues separating the two countries, a copy of which was obtained by IPS, was conveyed to the United States in late April or early May 2003. Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iranian foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies who provided the document to IPS, says he got it from an Iranian official earlier this year but is not at liberty to reveal the source.

The two-page document contradicts the official line of the George W. Bush administration that Iran is committed to the destruction of Israel and the sponsorship of terrorism in the region.

Parsi says the document is a summary of an even more detailed Iranian negotiating proposal which he learned about in 2003 from the U.S. intermediary who carried it to the State Department on behalf of the Swiss Embassy in late April or early May 2003. The intermediary has not yet agreed to be identified, according to Parsi.

The Iranian negotiating proposal indicated clearly that Iran was prepared to give up its role as a supporter of armed groups in the region in return for a larger bargain with the United States. What the Iranians wanted in return, as suggested by the document itself as well as expert observers of Iranian policy, was an end to U.S. hostility and recognition of Iran as a legitimate power in the region.

Think Progress points out that Karl Rove received a copy while he was just a senior political advisor to the White House not a deputy chief of staff as is stated:

Inter Press Service reports that, in early May 2003, Karl Rove received a copy of a secret Iranian proposal for negotiations with the United States from former Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) — who is now serving 30 months in prison for his role in a corruption scandal.

And in the same post, just look who 'forgot' about this:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — who served as National Security Adviser in 2003 — and Eliot Abrams — the deputy National Security Adviser — have claimed that they do not remember receiving the Iranian proposal. Newsweek recently revealed the contents of the proposal, which were communicated through a Swiss intermediary in May 2003.

And who do we owe this all to?:

WASHINGTON, Mar 28 (IPS) - The George W. Bush administration failed to enter into negotiations with Iran on its nuclear programme in May 2003 because neoconservative zealots who advocated destabilisation and regime change were able to block any serious diplomatic engagement with Tehran, according to former administration officials.

The same neoconservative veto power also prevented the administration from adopting any official policy statement on Iran, those same officials say.

Lawrence Wilkerson, then chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, says the failure to adopt a formal Iran policy in 2002-2003 was the result of obstruction by a "secret cabal" of neoconservatives in the administration, led by Vice Pres. Dick Cheney.

"The secret cabal got what it wanted: no negotiations with Tehran," Wilkerson wrote in an e-mail to IPS.

Update: Wow. Nice we have Cheney to look out for us. Everything he and his PNAC pals have been involved in has worked out so well:

When Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his top officers gathered in August 2002 to review an invasion plan for Iraq, it reflected a decidedly upbeat vision of what the country would look like four years after Saddam Hussein was ousted from power.

A broadly representative Iraqi government would be in place. The Iraqi Army would be working to keep the peace. And the United States would have as few as 5,000 troops in the country.

Military slides obtained by the National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act outline the command's PowerPoint projection of the stable, pro-American and democratic Iraq that was to be.

The general optimism and some details of General Franks's planning session have been disclosed in the copious postwar literature. But the slides from the once classified briefing provide a firsthand look at how far the violent reality of Iraq today has deviated from assumptions that once laid the basis for an exercise in pre-emptive war.

Update 2/27: Democracy Now! interviews the National Iranian American Council's Trita Parsi, a former aide to Republican congressman Bob Ney.

Ex-Congressional Aide: Karl Rove Personally Received (And Ignored) Iranian Peace Offer in 2003.

The Great Undoing

The Bush administration, peopled as it is with ex-Nixon/Ford staffers, has done a wonderful play-by-play of Watergate. It isn't the crime, it's the cover-up that gets you.
Mustang Bobby:

For those of us who remember Watergate, it wasn't the "third-rate burglary" that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon. It wasn't even the hush money paid to the burglars or the dirty tricks planned at the hands of G. Gordon Liddy in order to undermine the Democrats in the 1972 election. It was the cover-up that did them all in; the lying to the FBI, lying to Congress, and the obstruction of justice in the investigations that did it. The initial incident was nothing compared to the attempt to kill the result.

The same is true here. The leak of Valerie Plame's name, as odious and craven as it was in the attempt by the Bush administration to get back at someone for embarrassing the White House for calling them out on the infamous sixteen words, turns out to have been an inadvertant slip of the tongue by Richard Armitage, an innocuous public servant who, as far as anyone can tell, had no political motives when he did it. He just plain goofed. But given the paranoia and revenge-filled mindset of this White House, led by a president who can never make mistakes and enabled by willing toadys like Karl Rove within and the right-wing orcosphere without, it is not surprising that suspicion immediately fell on the higher-ups like Rove, Cheney, and even the president himself.

For a front row seat at the Great Undoing of the Glorious Neocon Rule, go to Firedoglake for the liveblogging of the Libby Trial.

Fleischer has immunity and Rove and Bartlett have been supoenaed

by Scooter Libby's lawyers:

Both Rove and Bartlett have already received trial subpoenas from Libby’s defense lawyers, according to lawyers close to the case who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters. While that is no guarantee they will be called, the odds increased this week after Libby’s lawyer, Ted Wells, laid out a defense resting on the idea that his client, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, had been made a “scapegoat” to protect Rove.

Cheney is expected to provide the most crucial testimony to back up Wells’s assertion, one of the lawyers close to the case said. The vice president personally penned an October 2003 note in which he wrote, “Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the other.” The note, read aloud in court by Wells, implied that Libby was the one being sacrificed in an effort to clear Rove of any role in leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq war critic Joe Wilson. “Wow, for all the talk about this being a White House that prides itself on loyalty and discipline, you’re not seeing much of it,” the lawyer said.
[snip]
An equally embarrassing conflict could emerge next week when former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer takes the stand. Fleischer has been one of the most mysterious figures in the case, making virtually no public comments about it since he left the White House in July 2003. In the past he has insisted he wasn’t even represented by a lawyer. But it emerged during court arguments this week that Fleischer originally invoked his Fifth Amendment privileges to avoid testifying and then only agreed to do so after he was given an immunity deal by Fitzgerald—an arrangement that normally requires extensive bargaining among attorneys. Fleischer’s testimony is critical to Fitzgerald’s case: as the prosecutor laid out this week in his opening statement, Fleischer has said that Libby told him over a White House lunch on July 7, 2003, that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and made a point of describing this information as “hush and hush.” Fitzgerald used that account to undercut Libby’s grand-jury assertion that he was surprised and “taken aback” just three or four days later when, he claims, Russert told him about Wilson’s wife. “You can’t learn something startling on Thursday that you’re giving out Monday and Tuesday of the same week,” Fitzgerald said. Fleischer has also testified that Bartlett also later told him about Wilson’s wife and, after hearing it from both Libby and Bartlett, the then-White House press secretary disclosed the information to NBC reporter David Gregory.

On its face, Fleischer’s account seems to contradict the repeated public assertions of his immediate successor, Scott McClellan, in October 2003 that nobody at the White House was in any way involved in the leak of Plame’s identity. It also potentially puts Bartlett, one of the president’s senior and most trusted advisers, on the hot seat. If Bartlett backs up Fleischer, it suggests he himself played a role in passing along radioactive information that triggered a criminal investigation that has plagued the White House for more than four years. If he contradicts Fleischer, it raises questions about the credibility of a man who was President Bush’s chief spokesman for the first two and a half years of his presidency. His lawyer declined to comment on what Bartlett will say.

But either way, it’s not a scenario that anybody at the White House can be looking forward to.

The person everyone had to protect and lie for was Karl Rove.

Libby, it was widely thought by legal experts, was going to be the good soldier. He would play it safe at his trial in order to preserve his options; mainly, if convicted, to seek a presidential pardon before Bush leaves office.

But no sooner did he start his opening statement Tuesday morning than defense lawyer Ted Wells shocked the courtroom and all but tossed the “pardon strategy” out the window. Seeking to rebut Fitzgerald’s contention that Libby had lied about his knowledge of Plame’s CIA employment in order to save his job with Cheney, Wells shot back: “Mr. Libby was not concerned about losing his job in the Bush administration. He was concerned about being set up, he was concerned about being made the scapegoat.”

According to Wells, the chief culprit, or at least the beneficiary of the plot was Rove, described by the defense lawyer as “the president’s right hand man,” whose survival was essential for the president’s re-election. As related by Wells, his client was so worried that Rove’s fate was taking priority over his that Libby went to his boss, Cheney, in October 2003 and complained: “I think people in the White House are trying to set me up. People in the White House are trying to protect Karl Rove.”

Well’s argument was both brilliant and complex-and perhaps difficult for non-news hounds on the jury to follow. But it raised the prospect that the Libby trial will now turn into a horror show for the White House, forcing current and former top aides to testify against each other and revealing an administration that has been in turmoil over the Iraq war for more than three years.

Being set up by Bush

To take the fall is a family pastime. If you are no longer protecting the boy king, you get thrown under the bus. After six years, there are a lot of bodies under there.

Attorney Wells for Libby:

Attorneys for former White House aide ``Scooter'' Libby said Tuesday that Bush administration officials tried to blame him for the leak of a CIA operative's name to cover up for Bush political adviser Karl Rove's own disclosures.

Attorney Theodore Wells, in the opening statements of I. Lewis Libby's perjury trial, said Libby went to Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 and complained that the White House was subtly blaming him for leaking Valerie Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak.

``They're trying to set me up. They want me to be the sacrificial lamb,'' Wells said, recalling the conversation between Libby and Cheney. ``I will not be sacrificed so Karl Rove can be protected.''

Well...You got caught, Scooter. Now watch this drive...

Can an idea be a crime?

When Bush thinks it, yes. Poputonian over at Hullabaloo explains:
"The notion of Iraq as the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history is rapidly gaining currency in the MSM, but it really is much worse than that. When the policy itself is fundamentally built upon a fraud, it should more appropriately be called a crime. The Bush administration even admitted (see Wolfowitz, Vanity Fair) that they sequenced through various rationales for war before selecting WMDs as what they thought would be the most palatable to the American people. By doing this, they misrepresented their real intentions and masked the policy's real goal and purpose, which was to conquer a foreign sovereign and remake the politics of Middle East. That was the ideological IDEA behind the Iraq war, and when that idea was acted upon, the administration moved beyond the realm of policy flub, and into the realm of international tyranny. When ideas are put into action, they have consequences. A famous Republican once said so."