All Roads Lead to Rove

By Scott Horton

We're now three months into the scandal over the politicization of the U.S. attorney's office, and the available evidence continues to point in the same direction: this entire scheme was hatched in the mind of Karl Rove. It has the basest political purposes. It was tightly overseen by Rove from the beginning. Much of it was done while Rove was the target of a criminal investigation led by a U.S. attorney he dearly wanted to injure or dismiss.

Here are some of the most recent indicators of Rove's focal role:

• As the Los Angeles Times reports, an Office of Special Counsel inquiry has been opened into Karl Rove and his involvement in the scheme to subvert the U.S. attorneys service fro purposes of a partisan political project. Last night on Hardball with Chris Matthews (transcript), we learned a little more about the background of this investigation. It was launched by a complaint filed by David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, who put Rove at the top of a massive conspiracy to circumvent the Hatch Act by pressuring U.S. attorneys to abuse their offices for partisan political purposes. Iglesias spelled out the evidence derived from his own case. Since that time, of course, we have seen the same pattern emerge across the country: Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Grand Rapids, Little Rock, Kansas City, Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Anchorage. These are only the cases to emerge so far—there is every indication of many, many more. And in every case, a link to Karl Rove lurks just beneath the surface. On the other hand, there is no reason to have any confidence in the OSC inquiry. The man in charge, Scott Bloch, was praised by Iglesias but has a background suggesting political hackery. Among other things he failed to act on complaints about security lapses in the White House and refused to enforce Clinton-era rules banning discrimination based on sexual preference.
• Alberto Gonzales has not resigned and indeed, the White House is sending every signal that he will stay on—notwithstanding the total loss of confidence in his conduct as attorney general even among Republicans. Why? Analysts increasingly see this as a maneuver to protect Karl Rove. As Peter Canellos reasons in the Boston Globe, these tactics cannot ultimately save Gonzales. He will be the subject of a vote of no confidence in the next few days, and over the coming weeks more and more of his testimony will be revealed to be dishonest or evasive. Gonzales will be out one way or the other. The decision to have him cling to power is designed to protect Karl Rove, to keep the spotlight on Fredo and away from the real author of the U.S. attorneys scheme, Karl Rove.
• Karl Rove's self-appointed shills, men like Time's Jim Stengel and the Washington Post's David Broder, have acted pre-emptively to suggest that the attention on Rove is a “political” show, and to claim that it is a “tactical mistake” on the part of the Democratic Party. In fact, this is all about partisan politics—Karl Rove's abuse of the apparatus of the Justice Department to achieve political objectives.
• Those missing emails. Nothing is more telling about the current investigation than the tactical response of the White House. It has contradicted itself with regularity over the last three weeks—five million emails were lost, then perhaps not lost, then perhaps in the hands of the RNC. Absolutely preposterous defences have been put up, including a claim that the RNC is entitled to assert Executive Privilege—as if the Republican Party were fused with the office of the President. I've now heard repeatedly from legal sources within the administration that White House counsel Fred Fielding is extremely uncomfortable with this entire posture—that he has advised the White House to lay off the gamesmanship and cooperate. But he's running into a brick wall named Karl Rove, and President Bush is determined to protect his “Turd Blossom” at all costs.

This struggle is all about the parameters of partisan politics. What separates the American Republic from a banana republic? In the end it's simple. We have kept partisan politics within narrow bounds, and we have insulated our essential institutions from the corrosive effects of partisan politics. Under Karl Rove, we have witnessed the most widespread and malicious politicization of our institutions in modern time. If he is not held to account for his conduct, and if his scheme is not shut down, then we're accepting a corruption of our democratic institutions. This won't be George Washington's and Abraham Lincoln's America; it will be something much less.