As a helpful companion piece to the McClatchy article from yesterday, the Washington Post moves the ball forward today on Rove & Co.’s legally dubious, partisan political briefings, with an informative front-page piece.
With a few details we haven’t seen before, the Post explained that Rove established an “asset deployment” team in the White House early in Bush’s first term that was responsible for coordinating official announcements, high-visibility administration trips, and declarations of federal grants based on Republican congressional candidates in need of a boost.
Investigators, however, said the scale of Rove’s effort is far broader than previously revealed; they say that Rove’s team gave more than 100 such briefings during the seven years of the Bush administration. The political sessions touched nearly all of the Cabinet departments and a handful of smaller agencies that often had major roles in providing grants, such as the White House office of drug policy and the State Department’s Agency for International Development.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel and the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee are investigating whether any of the meetings violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from using federal resources for election activities. They also want to know whether any Bush appointees pressured government for favorable actions such as grants to help GOP electoral chances.
“What we are seeing is the tip of a whole effort to make the federal government a subsidiary of the Republican Party. It was all politics, all the time,” Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the oversight committee, said last week.
Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), the 2002 chairman of the NRCC’s efforts, said Rove “didn’t do these things half-baked. It was total commitment.” Davis added, “We knew history was against us [in ’02], and he helped coordinate all of the accoutrements of the executive branch to help with the campaign, within the legal limits.” It was good of Davis to add those last four words, wasn’t it?
The Gavel has more on this today.
