Watchdog: Doc Shows Bloch Ginned Up White House Investigation to Protect HimselfSince 2005, Special Counsel Scott Bloch, whose office is charged in part with protecting federal whistleblowers, has been under investigation for retaliating against whistleblowers in his own office and generally politicizing the OSC.
Now government watchdog POGO says they’ve discovered evidence that Bloch’s apparent motivation for launching a very well publicized probe was to make himself invulnerable:
An extraordinary document obtained by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) from inside the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) reveals that Special Counsel Scott Bloch created a special task force to investigate sensitive and high-profile matters and then ignored virtually every recommendation made by it. The document lends support to POGO’s theory that Bloch used the task force to launch an investigation of the White House, issuing demands for documents termed by his own task force as “overly broad,” to create the appearance of a conflict of interest with an ongoing investigation into allegations that Bloch himself had engaged in misconduct.
POGO has posted the document here (pdf). As they say, the document shows that Bloch worked to maximize the probe of Karl Rove and other White House aides against the recommendation of his own advisors. You might say that shows he was just being aggressive, but his task force evidently thought they were wasting their time by getting into matters the OSC had no authority to investigate.
