Waxman Continues Investigation of Rove SchemeKarl Rove made sure that agency and department officials were busy, busy, busy come election time, The Washington Post reported this weekend. And now House oversight committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) wants to figure out just how busy.
Waxman sent out a request to 19 different agencies/departments today (take a deep breath: Departments of Justice, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, Labor, State, Agriculture, Commerce, Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration, General Services Administration, United States Agency for International Development, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy), all of which apparently took part in Rove’s scheme to use agency officials to help vulnerable Republicans.
As the Post detailed Sunday, agency heads or officials who traveled only a handful of times on off years suddenly found themselves whipped into service in an election year. The crucial months before an election were a blur of photo ops. The Post used Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT) as a test case, who very narrowly won reelection last year:
Between April 2006 and Election Day, Shays was able to announce at least 25 new federal grants or projects totaling more than $46 million, including a new veterans medical facility and a long-awaited installment of federal money for ferry service, according to a Post analysis of his news releases. Seven different Bush administration officials, including two Cabinet secretaries and the chief of the highway administration, visited his district during that time.
In contrast, Shays announced just $39 million in grants and got just one visit by a federal official in the prior 15 months, the analysis shows.
Behind this effort was a group in Rove’s shop (the White House Office of Political Affairs) that was planning all this — apparently known as the “asset deployment” team. In his letter today, Waxman confirms the existence of such a group, and quotes one such asset deployer in an email. From Waxman’s letter:
In June 2006, the White House Surrogate Scheduler asked 18 federal agencies to provide press clippings from events that the agency heads did at the suggestion of the White House Office of Political Affairs, writing:
WH Liaisons â
If you could, please have your press shops send me any good clips from the media on surrogate events your principals have done (Secretary and Sub-Cabinet), especially if they were as a result of an OPA request.
Folks over here get very excited when they see the results of all the hard work you and your agencies do on these events.
Waxman, through his letters, is trying to get a sense of all that hard work. His letter asks for a list of all the events that appointees attended with candidates and whether taxpayer funds were used to travel to the event.
