Misc. Items

By Scott Horton

Mitchell Issues a Correction?

On Hardball with Chris Matthews on Monday night, Andrea Mitchell modified her statement from Sunday about a Petraeus briefing of the Republican caucus. Seems it wasn't the Republican caucus he briefed after all, but a group of Democrats and Republicans by closed circuit television. Joan Walsh reports on the correction.

In Struggle over Rove Testimony, Public Sides with Congress

The Washington punditry has been full of comments to the effect that the public doesn't want Karl Rove forced to testify under oath and on the record, and it will harm the Democrats to push the issue. No polling has ever been cited to support this view. Not surprisingly, it turns out, since the polling goes the other way. Zogby International just released numbers showing a strong majority believes that Congress has the power to compel the testimony of presidential aides, on the record and under oath. “Majorities of nearly every demographic group agreed that Congress should be able to put the President’s top aides under oath, including 64% of moderates and 59% of political independents, the survey shows. Among men, 53% agree the top advisors to the President should be forced to tell what they know about the firings, while 57% of women agreed.”

Newsweek: Rove's Role in Iglesias Firing

In the April 9 issue, Newsweek's Mike Isikoff links the decision to terminate New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to his failure to prosecute ACORN, a group which was aggressively registering minority voters. The pressure to shut down the ACORN voter registration drive, and then to remove Iglesias, is linked in both cases to Karl Rove. Money quote:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's ex-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, testified last week that “during the run-up to the midterm elections,” the A.G. told him Rove had “complained” that David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, and two other federal prosecutors, were not doing enough to prosecute voter fraud—a top GOP priority. It was shortly after that, Sampson said, that Iglesias got added to the list of U.S. attorneys to be fired. (Iglesias told NEWSWEEK he had been repeatedly pushed by New Mexico GOP officials to prosecute workers for ACORN, an activist group that was registering voters in minority neighborhoods, but he found no cases worth bringing.) Justice was also forced to correct its earlier assertion that Rove did not play “any role” in replacing the U.S. attorney in Little Rock. Sampson's e-mails showed he had described the replacement as “important to ... Karl.”