WASHINGTON - Former White House adviser Karl Rove defied a congressional subpoena and refused to testify Thursday about allegations of political pressure at the Justice Department, including whether he influenced the prosecution of a former Democratic governor of Alabama.Rep. Linda Sanchez, chairman of a House subcommittee, ruled with backing from fellow Democrats on the panel that Rove was breaking the law by refusing to cooperate — perhaps the first step toward holding him in contempt of Congress.
The House already has voted to hold two of President Bush's confidants in contempt for failing to cooperate with its inquiry into whether the administration fired nine federal prosecutors in 2006 for political reasons.
I never paid attention to this clown until I heard the news report that, while working under the Bush administration, he got caught for using a jet for personal use. Douche bag. And nothing was done. Now I couldn't find anything on the Internet to back up this story but it has to be true because it was the only reason I hated this guy. He LOOKS guilty of something, doesn't he?
So Rove ignores a subpoena. If you or I did that we'd be arrested. Cocksucker. Now if you look back over Rove's political career, it's chalk full of crap he was involved in or allegedly involved in - so much so that I can't begin to fathom why he is still hanging around American politics or how he finagled his way into the Bush administration (good ole boy, Texas connection is how). Or how he's avoided jail.
Wanna delve a bit deeper into his how slim shady this jerk is? Read on. Way too many incidences of Rove being accused and investigated - "alleged" or not - to ignore.
Rove was an active participant in Richard Nixon's 1972 Presidential campaign (which is fine). He was a protégé of Donald Segretti (there's a red flag for ya), who was later convicted as a Watergate conspirator, helping to paint Nixon opponent George McGovern as a "left-wing peacenik", in spite of McGovern's World War II stint piloting a B-24.
Former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean, who was implicated in the Watergate break-in and became the star witness for the prosecution, has been quoted as saying that "Based on my review of the files, it appears the Watergate prosecutors were interested in Rove's activities in 1972, but because they had bigger fish to fry they did not aggressively investigate him."
If Rove's "involvement" in Watergate isn't enough to warrant questioning of Rove's character, let me continue.
1) On September 6, 1973, three weeks after announcing his intent to investigate the allegations (regarding Watergate) against Rove, George Bush Sr. chose Rove to be chairman of the College Republicans.
2) In early October 2005, a resident of Kerr County filed a complaint with the District Attorney of the county to request an investigation into whether Rove and his wife violated Texas state law by illegally registering as voters in Kerr County, since neither had ever lived there. Texas law defines a residence, for voting purposes, as "one's home and fixed place of habitation to which one intends to return after any temporary absence." On November 3, 2005, Rex Emerson, the District Attorney, announced that he had determined there was insufficient evidence to prosecute either Rove or his wife, and that his office would close the case without further action.
3) In 1977, Rove was the first person hired by George H. W. Bush for his unsuccessful 1980 presidential campaign, which ended with Bush as the vice-presidential nominee. Reagan and Bush won the election, but Rove was fired in the middle of the campaign for leaking information to the press (no shit?).
4) Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fundraising chief Robert Mosbacher Jr. (Esquire Magazine, January 2003). Novak provided some evidence of motive in his column describing the firing of Mosbacher by former Senator Phil Gramm: "Also attending the session was political consultant Karl Rove, who had been shoved aside by Mosbacher." Novak and Rove deny that Rove was the leaker, but Mosbacher maintains, "Rove is the only one with a motive to leak this. We let him go. I still believe he did it." During testimony before the CIA leak grand jury, Rove apparently confirmed his prior involvement with Novak in the 1992 campaign leak, according to National Journal reporter Murray Waas.
5) In 1993, during George Dubya's campaign to become governor of Texas, Rove had been accused of using the push poll technique to call voters to ask such things as whether people would be "more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if [they] knew her staff is dominated by lesbians." Rove has denied having been involved in circulating these rumors about Richards during the campaign, although many critics nonetheless identify this technique, particularly as utilized in this instance against Richards, as a hallmark of his career.
6) 1996 Harold See's campaign for Associate Justice, Alabama Supreme Court, former campaign worker charged that, at Rove's behest, he distributed flyers that anonymously attacked Harold See, their own candidate. This put the opponent's campaign in an awkward position; public denials of responsibility for the scurrilous flyers would be implausible. Professor See, the challenger and Rove's client, was elected.
7) During the 2000 Republican primary, a South Carolina push poll used racist innuendo intended to undermine the support of Bush rival John McCain: "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" The authors of the 2003 book and subsequent film Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, allege that Rove was involved.
8) In 2002 and 2003 Rove chaired meetings of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a secretive internal White House working group established by August 2002, eight months prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. According to CNN and Newsweek, WHIG was charged with developing a strategy for publicizing the White House's assertion that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States. WHIG's existence and membership was first identified in a Washington Post article by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus on August 10, 2003; members of WHIG included Bush’s Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Rice, her deputy Stephen Hadley, Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby, legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio, and communication strategists Mary Matalin, Karen Hughes, and James R. Wilkinson. Quoting one of WHIG's members without identifying him or her by name, the Washington Post explained that the task force's mission was to “educate the public” about the threat posed by Saddam and (in the reporters' words) “to set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad.” Rove's "strategic communications" task force within WHIG helped write and coordinate speeches by senior Bush administration officials, emphasizing in September 2002 the theme of Iraq's purported nuclear threat.
The White House Iraq Group was “little known” until a subpoena for its notes, email, and attendance records was issued by CIA leak investigator Patrick Fitzgerald in January 2004, a legal move first reported in the press and acknowledged by the White House on March 5, 2004.
9) In March 2001, Rove met with executives from Intel and successfully advocated a merger between a Dutch company and an Intel company supplier. Rove owned $100,000 in Intel stock at the time but had been advised by Fred Fielding, the White House's transition counsel, to defer selling the stock in January to obtain ethics panel approval. Rove offered no advice on the merger which needed to be approved by a joint Pentagon-Treasury Department panel since it would give a foreign company access to sensitive military technology. In June 2001, Rove met with two pharmaceutical industry lobbyists. At the time, Rove held almost $250,000 in drug industry stocks. On June 30, 2001, Rove divested his stocks in 23 companies, which included more than $100,000 in each of Enron, Boeing, General Electric, and Pfizer. The same day, the White House confirmed reports that Rove had been involved in administration energy policy meetings while at the same time holding stock in energy companies including Enron.
10) During Bush's 2004 presidential campaign, critics alleged that Rove had professional ties to the producers of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth television ads that criticized Kerry's Vietnam-era military service and public testimony against American soldiers, although no evidence of Rove's direct involvement was ever produced. A few months after the election, Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) publicly alleged that Rove engineered the Killian documents controversy during the 2004 campaign, by planting fake anti-Bush documents with CBS News to deflect attention from Bush's service record during the Vietnam War. Other than Rove's supposed motive, however, no evidence supporting this speculation has ever been publicized. Rove himself has denied any involvement, and Hinchey himself admitted he had no evidence to support this claim.
11) On August 29, 2003, retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV claimed that Rove leaked the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee, in retaliation for Wilson's op-ed in The New York Times in which he criticized the Bush administration's citation of the yellowcake documents among the justifications for the War in Iraq enumerated in Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address.
Time reporter Matthew Cooper in the days following the publication of Wilson's op-ed piece. Writing to TIME bureau chief Michael Duffy on July 11, 2003, three days before Novak's column was published, Cooper recounted a two-minute conversation with Karl Rove "on double super secret background" in which Rove said that Wilson's wife was a CIA employee: "it was, KR [Karl Rove] said, Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD issues who authorized the trip". In a TIME article released July 17, 2005, Cooper says Rove ended his conversation by saying "I've already said too much." Cooper testified before a grand jury on July 13, 2005, confirming that Rove was the source who told him Wilson's wife was an employee of the CIA. In the July 17, 2005 TIME article detailing his grand jury testimony, Cooper wrote that Rove never used Plame's name nor indicated that she had covert status, although Rove did apparently convey that certain information relating to her was classified.
"As for Wilson's wife, I told the grand jury I was certain that Rove never used her name and that, indeed, I did not learn her name until the following week, when I either saw it in Robert Novak's column or Googled her, I can't recall which,... [but] was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes. Did Rove say that she worked at the 'agency' on 'W.M.D.'? Yes. When he said things would be declassified soon, was that itself impermissible? I don't know. Is any of this a crime? Beats me."
On June 13, 2006, prosecutors determined there was no reason to charge Rove with any wrongdoing. Fitzgerald stated previously that "very rarely do you bring a charge in a case that's going to be tried in which you ever end a grand jury investigation. I can tell you that the substantial bulk of the work of this investigation is concluded." In late August 2006 it became known that Richard L. Armitage was responsible for the leak. The investigation led to felony charges being filed against Lewis "Scooter" Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice. Eventually, Libby was found guilty by a jury. One juror announced that she felt that Libby was being used as a scapegoat and wondered why Rove himself wasn't charged. Washington Post columnist and prize-winning political reporter David Broder called on the more vocal members of the media who were hyping Rove's involvement to apologize to him. On August 13, 2005, journalist Murray Waas reported that Justice Department and FBI officials had recommended appointing a special prosecutor to the case because they felt that Rove had not been truthful in early interviews, withholding from FBI investigators his conversation with Cooper about Plame and maintaining that he had first learned of Plame's CIA identity from a journalist whose name Rove could not recall.
Following the revelations in the Libby indictment, sixteen former CIA and military intelligence officials urged Bush to suspend Rove's security clearance for his part in outing CIA officer Valerie Plame.
12) In emails released by Congress on March 15, 2007, Rove raised the idea of firing all 93 attorneys in early January 2005. On July 26, 2007, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced that the committee was issuing a subpoena for Rove to appear personally before the committee and testify, following the testimony of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on the U.S. Attorney dismissal controversy and other matters. Due to investigations into White House staffers' e-mail communication related to the controversy over the dismissal of United States Attorneys, it was discovered that many White House staff members, including Rove, had exchanged documents using Republican National Committee e-mail servers such as gwb43.com, or personal e-mail accounts with third party providers such as BlackBerry, considered a violation of the Presidential Records Act. Over 500 of Rove's emails were mistakenly sent to a parody web site, who forwarded them to an investigative reporter.
13) On April 24, 2007, it was revealed that Rove is being investigated by the Office of Special Counsel for his involvement in the email scandal, the firing of US attorneys, and for "improper political influence over government decision-making." In response to this investigation and other pending complaints, 2004 Democratic candidate for U.S. Vice President and former 2008 presidential hopeful John Edwards initiated a petition drive calling for Bush to fire Rove. After Rove announced his resignation, Edwards' reply was "good riddance".
14) Former Democratic Governor of Alabama Don Siegelman was convicted in 2006 of bribery, conspiracy and mail fraud. However, some people have suggested that he was a victim of politically-directed trial led by Karl Rove. Siegelman was convicted of accepting $500,000 from Richard M. Scrushy, then the chief executive of the HealthSouth Corporation, in return for appointing Mr. Scrushy to the state hospital licensing board. Siegelman is currently serving a seven-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. There are rumors that the U. S. Department of Justice and Rove, as chief GOP political strategist, manipulated the court and the prosecution of Siegelman to destroy him politically.
How many incidences and questions have to pop up on ONE person before you start to think, "this guy's bad news any way you flip him?". He needs to just disappear.
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