Karl Rove's Coaching Session
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, May 4, 2007; 1:50 PM
Back on March 5, several top Justice Department officials were summoned for an emergency meeting at the White House. On the agenda: Going over "what we are going to say" about why eight U.S. attorneys had been summarily fired.
The reason for the urgency: principal associate deputy attorney general William Moschella was testifying before the House Judiciary Committee the next day.
Deputy White House counsel William Kelley sent an e-mail over to Justice early in the afternoon, saying that he had "been tasked" with pulling the meeting together, and that "we have to get this group together with some folks here asap."
The meeting was held at the White House later that day. And who did Kelley mean by "some folks here"? Well, among others, Karl Rove -- the White House's chief political operative, and the man who may very well have set the unprecedented dismissals in motion in the first place.
But after the coaching session, Moschella went out and told Congress that there was no significant White House involvement in the firings, as far as he knew.
Michael Isikoff writes in Newsweek: "Now some investigators are saying that Rove's attendance at the meeting shows that the president's chief political advisor may have been involved in an attempt to mislead Congress -- one more reason they are demanding to see his emails and force him to testify under oath. . . .
"Although the existence of the White House meeting had been previously disclosed by the Justice Department, Rove's attendance at the strategy session was not -- until both Moschella and deputy attorney general Paul McNulty talked about it in confidential testimony with congressional investigators last week. . . .
"According to McNulty's account, Rove came late to the meeting and left early. But while he was there he spoke up and echoed a point that was made by the other White House aides: The Justice Department needed to provide specific reasons why it terminated the eight prosecutors in order to rebut Democratic charges that the firings were politically motivated. The point Rove and other White House officials made is 'you all need to explain what you did and why you did it,' McNulty told the investigators.
"The problem, according to the Democratic aide, is that Rove and Kelley never told Moschella about the White House's own role in pushing to have some U.S. attorneys fired in the first place. Moschella followed the coaching by Rove and others -- and made no mention of White House involvement in the firings during his March 6, 2007 testimony to House Judiciary. 'They let Moschella come up here without telling him the full story,' said the Democratic staffer."
The White House response to the news? "'It's perfectly natural that he would be there,' said deputy press secretary Tony Fratto. Asked specifically whether Rove had withheld pertinent information to Moschella, and therefore participated in an attempt to mislead Congress, Fratto replied: 'The White House's role was very limited. I'm not commenting about any meetings."
Blogger
Josh Marshall writes: "Remind me. Why do you need to 'agree on clear reasons why each prosecutor was fired' if the reasons were actually clear when you did the firing and if the reasons can be stated publicly? Think about it. Why do Rove and the other heavies from the White House need to tell these guys how important it is to get their stories straight? If I fire someone, I know why I fired them. I don't need to get my story straight unless the real reason can't be stated and I need to come up with a defensible and plausible alternative explanation."
There has already been some indication that administration officials were trying to avoid transparency on the matter. Indeed, it was that very same day, March 5, that Justice spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos sent an e-mail to White House aides explaining one aspect of her communication plan: "We are trying to muddy the coverage up a bit by trying to put the focus on the process in which they were told."
And it's worth noting that to this day, neither the Justice Department nor the White House have gotten their stories straight on why the attorneys were fired. Another reminder of that came yesterday, when former deputy attorney general James Comey, a man widely perceived as having left the Justice Department with his integrity intact, appeared before a House panel.
Paul Kane blogs for washingtonpost.com with a comparison of what Moschella said about the individual firings on March 6 after being prepped by Rove et. al. -- and what Comey said.
Comey's View
Dan Eggen writes in The Washington Post about how Comey "lavished praise yesterday on most of the eight U.S. attorneys who were fired after he left the job, testifying that only one of them had serious performance problems."
Eggen writes that Comey's testimony "further undermines assertions by [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales and his aides that dissatisfaction with the prosecutors' work led to their dismissals. It also underscores the extent to which the firings, which originated in the White House, were handled outside the normal chain of command at Justice."
Marisa Taylor and Margaret Talev write for McClatchy Newspapers that Comey testified "that although it was his responsibility as the department's second-in-command to supervise the nation's top prosecutors, he was never told that the department and the White House had targeted some prosecutors for replacement.
"Comey's successor, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, told congressional investigators last week that he, too, was kept in the dark about the White House's role in the firings.
"Comey's and McNulty's accounts further undermine claims by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other department officials the prosecutors were fired for professional, not political, reasons."
David Johnston writes in the New York Times: "Mr. Comey testified a day after Justice Department officials said the agency had opened an internal inquiry into whether Monica M. Goodling, a former senior aide to Mr. Gonzales, had sought to screen applicants for jobs as career prosecutors to determine their political loyalty to the Bush administration.
"In his testimony, Mr. Comey said that the accusation, if true, would be a severe blow to the department.
"'That is the most, in my view, the most serious thing I have heard come up in this entire controversy,' Mr. Comey said. 'If that was going on, that strikes at the core of what the Department of Justice is. You just cannot do that. You can't hire assistant United States attorneys based on political affiliation. It deprives the department of its lifeblood, which is the ability to stand up and have juries of all stripes believe what you say and have sheriffs and judges and jailers -- the people we deal with -- trust the Department of Justice.'
"And Then There Were Nine?Adam Cohen writes in a New York Times opinion piece: "There is yet another United States attorney whose abrupt departure from office is raising questions: Debra Wong Yang of Los Angeles. Ms. Yang was not fired, as eight other prosecutors were, but she resigned under circumstances that raise serious questions, starting with whether she was pushed out to disrupt her investigation of one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress. . . .
"Ms. Yang was investigating Jerry Lewis, who was chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee. . . .
"Ms. Yang says she left for personal reasons, but there is growing evidence that the White House was intent on removing her. Kyle Sampson, the Justice Department staff member in charge of the firings, told investigators last month in still-secret testimony that Harriet Miers, the White House counsel at the time, had asked him more than once about Ms. Yang. He testified, according to Congressional sources, that as late as mid-September, Ms. Miers wanted to know whether Ms. Yang could be made to resign. Mr. Sampson reportedly recalled that Ms. Miers was focused on just two United States attorneys: Ms. Yang and Bud Cummins, the Arkansas prosecutor who was later fired to make room for Tim Griffin, a Republican political operative and Karl Rove protoge?.
"It is hard to see what put Ms. Yang on the White House list other than her investigation of Mr. Lewis, which threatened to pull in well-connected lobbyists, military contractors and Republican contributors. . . .
"Congress is conducting closed-door interviews with Justice Department officials. That is important, but hardly enough. It is looking more and more as if the United States attorney dismissals were managed out of the White House. The way to put to rest the questions about Ms. Yang's suspicious departure, and the firings of the other prosecutors, is to require that Ms. Miers, Mr. Rove and other White House officials tell what they know, in public and under oath.
Or Maybe Ten?
Frank Morris reports for NPR: "The Justice Department's push to remove U.S. attorneys in 2006 might have been larger than the eight cases that have been discussed in Congress. Other U.S. attorneys' names were on a list the agency compiled in January 2006 -- the prosecutor who replaced one of them was the first to be named under the Patriot Act.
"One of the federal prosecutors on the list was U.S. Attorney for Western Missouri Todd Graves. Graves resigned last year, before the forced dismissals took place. He left several months after refusing to sign off on a voter-registration lawsuit that was filed against the state of Missouri by an acting assistant attorney general, Bradley Schlozman.
"Less than two weeks later, Schlozman was installed to replace Graves under a Patriot Act provision allowing President Bush to place Schlozman in the job without Senate confirmation."
Greg Gordon writes for McClatchy Newspapers: "Before the 2006 mid-term elections, Republicans in Missouri talked a lot about voter fraud.
"They filed voter-registration lawsuits, passed a law in Jefferson City requiring voters to show ID cards and fretted that dead people might vote.
"Even White House political guru Karl Rove weighed in, telling a talk-show host a couple of days before the election that he had just visited Missouri, where GOP strategists said they were 'well aware of' the threat of voter fraud.
"The threat to the integrity of the election was seen as so grave that Bradley Schlozman, the acting chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and later the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, wielded the power of the federal government to protect the ballot.
Now, disclosures in the wake of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys have led to allegations that that Republican campaign was not as it appeared.
"The preoccupation with Missouri was part of a wider effort in several states, critics charge, aimed at protecting the GOP hold on Congress by dampening Democratic turnout. That effort included purges of names from lists of registered voters and tight policing of get-out-the-vote drives by Democrats.
"The Bush administration denies those claims. But they've gotten traction recently because three of the U.S. attorneys ousted by the Justice Department say they lost their jobs because they failed to prove voter fraud allegations."
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....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
The White House appeared set for an expanded showdown with congressional investigators in the probe of the firing of eight US Attorneys over the weekend. 
