Time managing editor Rick Stengel speaks: Dems should be wary of aggressively probing Karl Rove, lest they be seen as “obsessively concerned with settling scores.”
Dems make another approach to the White House for discussions over the U.S. attorney investigation.
Behold! Karl Rove’s list of targeted House and Senate races for 2008.
New mini-document dump just out from the Department of Justice — and just in time for tomorrow’s Kyle Sampson testimony.
They appear to clearly show that Sampson attempted to mislead Congress by proxy — that is to say, he gave false information to DOJ officials who were preparing to provide information to Congress.
Update: And it looks like those false statements were cleared by the White House.
According to the AP, in his prepared remarks, Kyle Sampson will tell the senate Judiciary Committee: “The distinction between ‘political’ and ‘performance-related’ reasons for removing a United States attorney is, in my view, largely artificial.”
Interesting. In Newsweek, Mike Isikoff notes that Karl Rove is one of the recipients of an email Sen. Domenici’s Chief of Staff, Steve Bell, sent on January 8th thanking Rove and two other White House aides for help getting Iglesias replaced. “Thanks for everything,” writes Bell.
The direct reference in the email is to Iglesias’s possible successors. But the context definitely suggests a role in the firing itself.
Here’s the email Isikoff is talking about.
Hmmm. Looks like the new document dump may contain some bad emails for the White House. More soon.
Not good, not good. The White House Counsel’s Office gave explicit sign off to the DOJ’s letter falsely claiming Rove and Miers played no role in Tim Griffin’s appointment as US Attorney. And the sign off came from Chris Oprison, the guy at the Counsel’s office who Sampson had told about Rove’s and Miers’ role only a couple months earlier.
GQ gets a Q&A with canned New Mexico US Attorney David Iglesias.
A few choice nuggets: Mike Battle, the apparently apolitical former Director of the Executive Office of the United States Attorney, was the one who actually placed the firing calls to the seven US Attorneys. During Iglesias’s call, Iglesias asked Battle what was going on. “I don’t know, and I don’t wanna know. All I know is that this came from on high,” Battle told Iglesias.
Battle resigned his post in early February.
One telling question and answer …
Q: Do you feel as if this scandal is of a piece with how the White House seems to view executive power? There’s been the unitary executive theory, the suspension of habeas corpusâ¦
A: Which you can do during wartime and not get the court’s restrictive powers. You can do that when your party has the House and Senate. Butâand I don’t think the White House factored this in enoughâthere was a significant sea change when the Democrats came back to power last November. The White House wasn’t used to any real Congressional oversight because there hadn’t been for any for six years.
And another …
Q: Do you still consider yourself a Republican?
A: Yes.
Q: Do you consider the people in the White House to be Republicans?
A: I think they’ve lost their way. They’ve lost their moral compass. On paper, we would probably be in agreement on most of the major issues, but in terms of actual practice and treating people fairly and respectfully and decently, I’ve lost my faith in our leadership.