2 posts tagged “karl rove”
One of the lower profile parts of the US Attorneys scandal which was in the news awhile ago was the role of Pete Domenici, the republican Senator from New Mexico. We all know about how Alberto Gonzales worked as a loyal Bushie to politicize the Justice Department. We know how Karl Rove worked to install croneys there, and at all Federal government agencies, and use them to republican political advantage. What many people are not aware is that one of the incidents which started the whole ball rolling of getting this in the news was when Sen. Domenici directly called a US Attorney, and pressured him to begin a bogus investigation of Democratic politician in the middle of an election.
One would think that this is really, really, a criminal abuse of power. A sitting Senator, directly calls a US Attorney, and puts major pressure on him to use the courts to smear an opponent. No real question right? Well, in this topsy-turvey Bush black is white and white is black world, you'd be wrong...
Ooh, that must sting. For ringing up his state's U.S. attorney at bedtime to interrogate him about whether that high-profile corruption case against a prominent state Democrat will result in an indictment before the election, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) has been branded with the dreaded QA: that's right, qualified admonition.
The Senate ethics committee says it left no stone unturned in coming to this conclusion, including interviewing "current and former executive branch officials and attorneys," but that the "Committee finds no substantial evidence to determine that [Domenici] attempted to improperly influence an ongoing investigation." The key word there being "substantial."
The U.S. attorney, David Iglesias, who was of course fired a little more than a month after Domenici's call, testified that the call made him sick. And so the committee says that Domenici "should have known" better -- that such a call would create an "appearance of impropriety." But appearance of impropriety aside, maybe the good senator was just looking for an update. You know, just ringing up the local prosecutor at home to see how things are going.
What would you do with a guy who spent the main part of his career working to disenfranchise legitimate (Democratic) voters? Well, if you are the Bush administration, you'd put him in charge of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights voting rights section. While there, he would help transform the section's "historic mission to enforce the nation's civil rights laws without regard to politics, to pursuing an agenda which placed the highest priority on the partisan political goals of the political appointees who supervised the section." Do you think Alberto Gonzales was alone in wrecking the DOJ, and turning it into a partisan republican machine? This guy, Hans von Spakovsky (no, I'm not making that name up!), was one of the guys making the Karl Rove nightmare become reality. As this Slate story explains:
Among his numerous accomplishments at the Voting Section at DoJ, von Spakovsky can take credit for approving the Tom DeLay-sponsored midcensus redistricting in Texas—part of which was later deemed by the Supreme Court to have violated the Voting Rights Act. (To do so, von Spakovsky overrode a 73-page memo written by seven voting-rights experts finding that the DeLay scheme violated the Voting Rights Act by reducing minority voting strength in Texas.) Von Spakovsky similarly pushed for approval of Georgia's restrictive voter-ID law, again over the four-to-one objection of staff lawyers who (in a 51-page memo this time) felt the new law would disenfranchise black voters. State and federal courts later found that statute unconstitutional.
So, given that, what would you do with this guy? Well, if you were any sane person, you'd prosecute him... but Bush has instead given him the Medal of Freedom nominated him to the Federal Election Commission. Oh yeah, by the way, he taped a big "Fuck You Democrats!" note on the nomination. Of course the Democrats control the Senate, and are aware of this joker, so you'd think that they would simply tank his nomination. Once again, you'd be wrong. One Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), voted to allow this jackass out of committee. So now his nomination is going to go to a vote by the full Senate. Damnit, I'm going to be pretty pissed if this guy gets a six year job on the Federal Election Commission after all he has done to undermine voting rights in this country.
Footnote: If you're interested you can read about von Spakovsky's attempts to intimidate Justice Department employees, stifle their appeals, single-handedly disenfranchise thousands of Arizonans and then give false testimony (later modified in written answers) to the committee about it, you can read Dahlia Lithwick's take at Slate and ThinkProgress' rundown of von Spakovsky's past.
