A Unifying TheoryA glimpse of the supra-scandal?
The Washington Post‘s front page story today is about a meeting in January between the head of the General Services Administration, Lurita Doan, top agency officials, and Scott Jennings, Karl Rove’s deputy. The topic: how the agency could help “our candidates.”
The GSA is the government’s landlord and heads up nearly $60 billion per year in government contracts. The meeting was about how to turn that buying power to Republican advantage.
The angle of the Post‘s story is that Doan’s eagerness to join the scheme (get Republicans to take credit for the opening of federal facilities around the country, while preventing Democrats like Nancy Pelosi from doing so) seems a blatant violation of the Hatch Act, a law that prevents federal employees for using their positions for politics.
But there’s another lens through which to view the story, a lens that may be helpful in understanding the purging of the U.S. attorneys . I yield the floor to a long-time TPM reader:
….on January 26, Lurita Alexis Doan, the administrator of the government’s contracting agency, sent an e-mail to its top-level political appointees inviting them to attend or videoconference into a presentation by J. Scott Jennings, deputy director of the White House political office. The subject of the presentation? Why, polling data from the 2006 elections. And then, the article (and the indefatigable Rep. Waxman) alleges, the administrator solicited ideas for helping “‘our’ candidates in the next elections.” Doan, of course, denies that such ideas were solicited. The White House explains that it was “a factual assessment of the political landscape.” But just looking at what’s already been admitted – that the conference call took place, and that Jennings presented polling data on the elections – offers prima facie evidence of a Hatch Act violation. Why on earth would regional administrators for the GSA need to be made aware of the political landscape? The White House isn’t even claiming that there’s a policy-driven reason for the presentation. The *defense* here is that Jennings gave an unabashedly political presentation to a group of government officials. Unbelievable.
The reader continues:
It also brings into sharper focus an emerging pattern of misconduct. Note the timing, and the subject of the presentation. The GOP got spanked in the midterm elections. The president lost his congressional majorities. By late fall of 2006, it was clear that the GOP was in a tailspin. The only remaining levers of power in Republican hands were held by the administration, and it had just two years left to reverse the tide. Evidently, Karl Rove decided that he had been insufficiently aggressive in using federal agencies to bolster the chances of Republican candidates. So he dispatched Jennings to convince the minions at GSA to ensure that every new federal project would have a Republican cutting the ribbon. (It’s worth noting that no one has bothered suggesting that Doan invited Jennings. That’s not how this works. Jennings was there because the White House sent him, and Doan went along. She’s likely to take the fall here, but this came straight from the White House.)
One of the puzzling aspects of the US Attorney purge is that it wasn’t completed until after the 2006 elections. So far, most allegations have focused on the notion that these US Attorneys failed to do enough to help Republican candidates win in 2006, by failing to investigate enough Democrats or to pursue scurillous allegations of voter fraud. But it’s looking more and more like what happened here has more to do with 2008 than with 2006. Only two USAs were asked to step down before the elections: Cummins, to make room for a specific Rove disciple, and Chiara, whose office was a mess. The plan to dismiss the rest had festered for well over a year, but it kicked into high gear immediately after the elections. Sampson sent out the formal plan on Nov. 15, marking its importance ‘High’. “An associate of Rove” told the Times that Rove learned of the plan in November. And…wait for it…remember that 18 day gap? It begins on November 15.
What we’re going to find, if Congress succesfully subpoenas officials or their e-mails, is that after the Republicans got routed in November of 2006 a panicked Karl Rove turned up the flame under lots of schemes that had simmered on the back burners for months or years. New orders went out – learn the lessons of the exit polling, and make sure that 2008 brings success. The White House, in its panic, abandoned caution, and got sloppy. It left its fingerprints all over the sorts of things it had generally manipulated at arms-length. And the man who headed up the effort, by all indications, was Karl Rove’s right hand, J. Scott Jennings.
