Committees Subpoena Former Rove Aide, MiersThe House and Senate judiciary committees will issue subpoenas to former Karl Rove aide Sara Taylor and former White House counsel Harriet Miers this morning, the AP is reporting.
The subpoenas follow fast on Justice Department emails turned over to Congress last night that fattened the already substantial case that the White House was intimately involved in installing Timothy Griffin, a former aide to Karl Rove as the U.S. attorney in Little Rock.
The Justice Department, in a letter vetted by the White House, wrote Congress back in February that Karl Rove didn’t play “any role” in Griffin’s nomination — a statement the Department has since admitted was false. And how: emails have shown that Rove’s aides worked closely with Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson at the Justice Department to get Griffin in the spot, and that Sampson, working with Rove’s aides, plotted to keep Griffin in place despite objections from Arkansas’ senators, stringing them along with the promise that another nomination would be made if Sens. Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) objected. A little-noticed provision in the USA PATRIOT Act enabled the attorney general to appoint U.S. attorneys for indefinite terms without Senate confirmation.
Sampson testified to congressional investigators that Taylor, formerly Rove’s top aide (she resigned last month), was “upset” when Alberto Gonzales finally decided not to follow Sampson’s plan in January. From a January 25th email, it appears that Taylor was still committed to Sampson’s plan of stringing the senator’s along at that late date. Reacting to a draft of a Justice Department letter to Sen. Pryor, Taylor wrote “I’m concerned we imply that we’ll pull down Griffin’s nomination should Pryor object.”
The emails released last night show how worked up Taylor was about Griffin’s nomination.
“Tim was put in a horrible position; hung to dry w/ no heads up,” Taylor wrote to Sampson the day that Griffin announced that he would not stand for confirmation before the Senate — Griffin had forwarded the news article about his announcment to Rove, Taylor and other Rove aides that morning. “You forced him to do what he did; this is not good for his long-term career.” Taylor then went on to castigate Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty for testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Griffin’s predecessor, Bud Cummins, had been forced to resign for no other reason than to install Griffin. “Bud runs a campaign and McNulty refuses to say Bud is lazy — which is why we got rid of him in the first place.” It’s a telling use of the first person.
Here’s ThinkProgress, The Washington Post, and McClatchy on the emails.
