[Vision2020] NY Times: E-Mail Shows Rove's Role in Fate of Prosecutors

Art Deco deco at moscow.com
Thu Mar 29 10:05:11 PDT 2007


  
     


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NY Times  March 29, 2007
E-Mail Shows Rove's Role in Fate of Prosecutors 
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and JIM RUTENBERG
WASHINGTON, March 28 - Almost every Wednesday afternoon, advisers to President Bush gather to strategize about putting his stamp on the federal courts and the United States attorneys' offices.

The group meets in the Roosevelt Room and includes aides to the White House counsel, the chief of staff, the attorney general and Karl Rove, who also sometimes attends himself. Each of them signs off on every nomination.

Mr. Rove, a top adviser to the president, takes charge of the politics. As caretaker to the administration's conservative allies, Mr. Rove relays their concerns, according to several participants in the Wednesday meetings. And especially for appointments of United States attorneys, he manages the horse trading.

"What Karl would say is, 'Look, if this senator who has been working with the president on the following things really wants this person and we think they are acceptable, why don't we give the senator what he wants?' " said one former administration official. " 'You know, we stiffed him on that bill back there.' " 

Mr. Rove's role has put him in the center of a Senate inquiry into the dismissal of eight United States attorneys. Democrats and a few Republicans have raised questions about whether the prosecutors were being replaced to impede or jump-start investigations for partisan goals.

Political advisers have had a hand in picking judges and prosecutors for decades, but Mr. Rove exercises unusually broad influence over political, policy and personnel decisions because of his closeness to the president, tenure in the administration and longstanding interest in turning the judiciary to the right.

In Illinois, Mr. Rove once reprimanded a Republican senator for recommending the appointment of Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a star prosecutor from outside the state, to investigate the state's then-governor, a Republican. In New Jersey, Mr. Rove helped arrange the nomination of a major Bush campaign fund-raiser who had little prosecutorial experience. In Louisiana, he first supported and then helped scuttle a similar appointment.

In the months before the United States attorneys in New Mexico and Washington State were ousted, Mr. Rove joined a chorus of complaints from state Republicans that the federal prosecutors had failed to press charges in Democratic voter fraud cases. While planning a June 21, 2006, White House session to discuss the prosecutors, for example, a Rove deputy arranged for top Justice Department officials to meet with an important Bush supporter who was critical of New Mexico's federal prosecutor about voter fraud.

And in Arkansas, newly released Justice Department e-mail messages show, Mr. Rove's staff repeatedly prodded the department's staff to install one of his protégés as a United States attorney by ousting a previous Bush appointee who was in good standing.

Senate Democrats and a few Republicans have called for Mr. Rove to testify publicly about the dismissals. 

"There is an issue of intrigue, and for better or worse, that surrounds Karl Rove," said Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "It is in the president's interest and the country's interest to have it dispelled or verified, but let's hear it from him." 

The White House, however, is offering only a private interview without a sworn oath.

Congressional Democrats said they were focusing on Mr. Rove in part because the administration appeared to have tried to hide his fingerprints. In a February 23 letter to Senate Democratic leaders that was approved by the White House counsel's office, for example, the Justice Department said that no one in the White House had "lobbied" for any of the eight dismissals, and specifically denied that Mr. Rove had "any role" in the appointment of the protégé, J. Timothy Griffin, a former Bush campaign operative. 

But the Justice Department officials who drafted the letter had corresponded with Mr. Rove's staff just weeks earlier about how to get the nomination done. On Wednesday night, a department official apologized for inaccuracies in the letter.

White House officials said Mr. Rove was just one voice in the approval of federal prosecutors, whose selection is traditionally guided by the recommendations of senior members of the president's party in their states. 

"Our job is to find qualified nominees who can win confirmation and be good public servants," said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman. After the United States attorneys are confirmed, she said, Mr. Rove and others at the White House show "wide deference" to the Justice Department about specific cases.

Some Republicans say they always understood that Mr. Rove had a say in prosecutor appointments. "I basically felt when I was talking to Karl I was talking to the president," said former Senator Peter G. Fitzgerald, an Illinois Republican.

Early in the Bush administration, Mr. Fitzgerald said, he sought to recruit a prosecutor who could investigate Gov. George Ryan of Illinois without fear of influence by the state's political powers. But Governor Ryan and his political ally Speaker J. Dennis Hastert argued to the White House that they should have a voice in the decision and insisted that someone from Illinois get the post. Mr. Fitzgerald, who had hired Mr. Rove as a consultant , called him to settle the question. 

"Peter, it is your pick," Mr. Rove told Mr. Fitzgerald, the former senator recalled. "But we don't want you to pick anybody from out of state. For your Chicago guy, it has to be from Chicago."

Undeterred, Mr. Fitzgerald sidestepped the White House. He made only one recommendation - Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a New York prosecutor - announced it publicly, and drew public acclaim that made it unstoppable. Some time after the appointment, the former Senator Fitzgerald said, Mr. Rove "kind of yelled at me," telling him, "The appointment got great headlines for you but it ticked off the base"- a phrase that the senator took to refer to the state's Republican establishment.

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said Mr. Rove was simply pushing a general administration goal to appoint home-state prosecutors.

Democrats have seized on a connection to Mr. Rove to attack a prosecutor's credibility. In New Jersey, William Palatucci, a Republican political consultant and Bush supporter, boasted of selecting a United States attorney by forwarding Mr. Rove the résumé of his partner, Christopher J. Christie, a corporate lawyer and Bush fund-raiser with little prosecutorial experience. 

Mr. Christie has brought public corruption charges against prominent members of both parties, but his most notable investigations have stung two Democrats, former Gov. James E. McGreevey and Senator Robert Menendez. When word of the latter inquiry leaked to the press during the 2006 campaign, Mr. Menendez sought to dismiss it by tying Mr. Christie to Mr. Rove, calling the investigation "straight out of the Bush-Rove playbook." (Mr. McGreevey resigned after admitting to having an affair with a male aide and the Menendez investigation has not been resolved.)

Mr. Rove initially supported the 2002 nomination of Fred Heebe, a lawyer turned developer and a major Bush donor, for United States attorney in Louisiana. But after former romantic partners of Mr. Heebe raised accusations of abuse, which he denied, the White House backed off. Gov. Mike Foster publicly blamed Mr. Rove for the reversal. Local Republican women sent Mr. Rove's fax machine letters supporting Mr. Heebe, to no avail.

Mr. Rove acts as a conduit to the White House for complaints from Republican officials around the country, including gripes about federal prosecutors. During the tight 2004 governor's race in Washington State, for example, Chris Vance, then chairman of the state's Republican party, complained to a member of Mr. Rove's staff about what he considered Democratic voter fraud. 

"When you are a state party chairman, the White House regional political director is just part of your life," Mr. Vance recalled. Mr. Vance said he never complained specifically about the United States attorney John McKay, who has been dismissed. Mr. Vance said he did not know if Mr. McKay had started an investigation.

But in New Mexico, Mr. Vance's counterpart as well as the state's senior Republican, Senator Pete V. Domenici, both complained to Mr. Rove that the United States attorney David C. Iglesias was not prosecuting Democratic voter fraud. 

Mr. Rove readily took up their alarms. In an April 2006 speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association, he detailed accusations about Democratic abuses in several locations, including New Mexico and "the spectacle of Washington State." He also relayed the complaints to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and the White House counsel, Harriet E. Miers, and possibly Mr. Bush, the administration has recently acknowledged. The prosecutors in those two states, who have said they could not prove accusations of voter fraud, were among those ousted last year.

In Arkansas, Representative John Boozman, the state's highest ranking Republican in Congress, said he recommended Mr. Rove's protégé, Mr. Griffin, for a United States attorney vacancy in 2004, in part because of his ties to Mr. Rove. 

A prosecutor in the Army Reserves, Mr. Griffin worked for Mr. Rove as an opposition researcher attacking Democratic presidential candidates in 2000. In between, for six months, the Justice Department had dispatched him to Arkansas to get experience as a prosecutor. 

"I have been in situations through the years where Tim and Karl were at," Mr. Boozman recalled. "I could tell that Karl thought highly of him." -

Mr. Griffin dropped out of the running in 2004 when he accepted a campaign job for Mr. Rove, then became his deputy in the White House. But last summer, the department asked United States Attorney H. E. Cummins III to resign to make room and Mr. Rove's staff began talking with department officials about how to install Mr. Griffin despite Senate opposition, internal e-mail shows.

Republican defenders of the Griffin appointment said it is hardly unheard of for a prominent official like Mr. Rove to call in such a favor. 

Ultimately, United States attorneys know they are political appointees, said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, who is close to Mr. Rove.

"To suggest that these folks do not know or understand the process by which they are appointed, confirmed and retained," Mr. Cornyn said, "is to suggest that they are naïve." 
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