Henry Says: Give Us the Emails
Hey, whose job was it to tell Henry Waxman that he’s supposed to be on recess this week? Because he’s still churning out letters, closing in on Republican chicanery. This one is, ostensibly, a request to the head of the RNC, Mike Duncan, for any emails relating to the political "team building" events Karl Rove has been doing on the public dime (no link yet–will update with it later):
I am writing to request e-mail communications stored on Republican National Committee servers that relate to the use of federal agencies and federal resources for partisan political purposes.
Last week, the Committee held a hearing into allegations of misconduct at the General Services Administration. One of the issues examined at the hearing involved a partisan political presentation that White House Deputy Director of Political Affairs, J. Scott Jennings, made to the GSA Administrator, Lurita A. Doan, and approximately 40 GSA appointees in the GSA headquarters building on January 26, 2007.
[snip]
In communicating with GSA about the presentation, Mr. Jennings and his assistant used "gwb43.com" e-mail accounts maintained by the RNC rather than their official White House e-mail accounts. In their e-mails, they described the presentation as a "close hold" and said that "we’re not supposed to be emailing it around."[3]
But this is a somewhat broadly written request. Look at how Waxman asks for the actual emails:
To assist the Committee in its investigation of these issues, I request that you provide any electronic messages sent or received by Karl Rove, J. Scott Jennings, or any other White House officials using accounts maintained by the RNC that relate to (1) the January 26, 2007, PowerPoint presentation at GSA, (2) the presentation of any similar political briefings at other federal agencies or to other federal employees, or (3) the use of federal agencies or resources to help Republican candidates.
Domestic Spying and Opposition Research
Digby has been demonstrating how the DOJ got taken over by a bunch of hack opposition researchers (see also this post).
And again, what were the Pat Robertson’ U grad Goodling’s primaryqualifications before joining the Department of Justice? She workedwith Barbara Comstock and Timothy Griffin (the US Attorney fromArkansas who Rove pushed through under the patriot act) at the BushCheney oppo research department in 2000.
It doesn’t automatically make her a criminal, but it sure stinks of unethical politicization of the Justice Department.
She goes onto make what seems to be a generalized comment.
Many of us were told to pipe down when we complained that the JusticeDepartment and the NSA had been involved in spying on Americans with nooversight.But now that we know that Barbara Comstock, Monica Goodling and TimGriffin, Karl Rove’s personal smear artists, were promoted to thehighest reaches of the federal police agencies with access to recordson their political opponents and every other American, then it’s clearthat we weren’t suspicious enough. At this point, I think we have toassume that with these people in charge and having the use of all thenew powers of the Patriot Act, there have been no limits at all on thepartisan, political use of the government’s investigative powers.
To which I’d like to raise a specific example. MZM. MZM, you see, was contracted to engage in some of the most abusive domestic spying under DOD’s CIFA program (contracted through the part of DOD, incidentally, where Mitch Wade first got his start under Dick Cheney in the early 1990s). And Carol Lam got fired for getting too close to Brent Wilkes’ and Dusty Foggo’s ties to Duke Cunningham’s pocketbook. Not to mention getting to close to Jerry Lewis, who as Chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee approved the key contracts to MZM. So I’d like to suggest that these issues–the politicization of DOJ, the firing of Carol Lam, and the interruption of the investigation into Lewis and Foggo and Wilkes may be more closely related than we know.
