Tag: Karl Rove (page 3)

Update: Newsweek interviews an expert on whether it's really possible to lose e-mails.

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Original Post

Karl Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, says his client didn't intentionally delete any e-mails and cooperated fully with Fitzgerald's request for e-mail in PlameGate.

Rove's lawyer said the senior presidential adviser had no idea that his e-mails were being deleted from the RNC server. "His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived," Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said.

The prosecutor probing the Valerie Plame spy case saw and copied all of Rove's e-mails from his various accounts after searching Rove's laptop, his home computer, and the handheld computer devices he used for both the White House and Republican National Committee, Luskin said.

The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, subpoenaed the e-mails from the White House, the RNC and Bush's re-election campaign, he added. "There's never been any suggestion that Fitzgerald had anything less than a complete record," Luskin said.

The only deletions Rove made were done to clean up his inbox.

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Things didn't go too well after Karl Rove's appearance at American University in Washington Tuesday night.

Rove was on the campus to talk to the College Republicans, but when he got outside more than a dozen students began throwing things at him and at his car, an American University spokesperson said.

The students then got on the ground and laid down in front of his car as a protest.he students said security officials picked them up and carried them away so Rove could leave.

There were no arrests and police described the protest as "peaceful."

Karl Rove has emerged unscathed in the justice system so far. But the New York Times puts out its claws today and draws blood.

I can't remember a time during PlameGate, the closest Karl Rove came to being indicted, that the New York Times so lambasted Rove.

Whatever the immediate objective, Mr. Rove seems focused on one overarching goal: creating a permanent Republican majority, even if that means politicizing every aspect of the White House and subverting the governmental functions of the executive branch.

....This was, perhaps, the inevitable result of taking the chief operative of a presidential campaign, one famous for his scorched-earth style, and ensconcing him in the White House — not in a political role, but as a key player in the formation of policy. Mr. Rove never had to submit to Senate confirmation hearings. Yet, from the very start, photographs of cabinet meetings showed him in the background, keeping an enforcer’s eye on the proceedings. After his re-election in 2004, President Bush formally put Mr. Rove in charge of all domestic policy.

The Times says Congress shouldn't let Rove skate on testifying under oath at hearings on the fired U.S. Attorneys.

The investigation of the firings of the United States attorneys seems to be closing in on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who should have been fired weeks ago. But Congress should bring equal scrutiny to the more powerful Mr. Rove. If it does, especially by forcing him to testify in public, it will find that he has been at the vortex of many of the biggest issues they are now investigating.

I think Karl Rove's bigger problem is that Bush is now a lame duck and the media figures his lieutenants are now fair game.

The whole bunch of them are about to see their power dwindle.

It's up to us in 2008 to ensure we get a regime change, not just a name change.

As Sen. Patrick Leahy promises subpoenas to testify will issue Thursday to Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and others, Adam Cohen of the New York Times posits that criminal laws may have been broken.

“I do not believe in this ‘We’ll have a private briefing for you where we’ll tell you everything,’ and they don’t,” Mr. Leahy said on “This Week” on ABC, adding: “I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths on this.”

Cohen consulted with Congressional staff and law professor Stephen Gillers and comes up with this list of possible crimes:

• Misrepresentation to Congress: 18 U.S.C. 1505
• Calling Prosecutors: 18 U.S.C. 1512©
• Witness Tampering: 18 U.S.C. 1512(b)
• Firing the Attorneys: 18 U.S.C. 1512©

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It's not only Alberto Gonzales who's in trouble, Karl Rove has some explaining to do as well. As Shakespeare wrote,

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

Dan Froomkin, writing in Friday's Washington Post, The Politics of Distraction, warns us not to miss the forest for the trees. Whether Alberto Gonzales stays or goes, there's more to the story of the U.S. Attorney firings, and Karl Rove is in the midst of the soup.

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Sen. Patrick Leahy was on CNN's The Situation Room. Speaking of Karl Rove, he said (no link, received from show by e-mail):

BLITZER: The White House counsel, Fred Fielding, was up on the Hill today. I don't know if you had a chance to meet with him. But he's not necessarily ruling out allowing some White House staffers, maybe even Karl Rove to come and testify. Do you want Karl Rove to testify before your panel?

LEAHY: I've never met Mr. Fielding. Frankly, I don't care whether he says he's going to allow people or not. We'll subpoena the people we want. If they want to defy the subpoena, then you get into a stonewall situation I suspect they don't want to have.

BLITZER: Will you subpoena Karl Rove?

LEAHY: Yes. He can appear voluntarily if he wants. If he doesn't, I will subpoena him. The attorney general said, Well, there are some staff people or lower level people -- I'm not sure whether I want to allow them to testify or not. I said, Frankly, Mr. Attorney General, it's not your decision. It's mine and the committee's. We will have subpoenas. I would hope that they wouldn't try to stonewall subpoenas.

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Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post brings us up to speed on Karl Rove, whom he aptly notes, was up to his ears in PlameGate, but unlike Scooter Libby, talked his way out of getting indicted.

It turns out he's alive and well and plotting in his windowless West Wing office just how to spin Bush's greatest weakness into a great strength -- and in that way burnish his boss's legacy.

What's he pushing? The Bush Doctrine.

The Bush Doctrine...maintains that regimes that harbor terrorists are as culpable as the terrorists themselves and that the U.S. is entitled to take preventative military action to neutralize potential threats before they have materialized.

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Well, he was in Colorado this weekend, but this is a fun rap video about Karl Rove.

Update 3/4: "Rove 2", Dick Wadhams, was unanimously elected to lead the state's Republican party.

Presidential advisor and Republican strategist Karl Rove was in Colorado yesterday, urging Republians to choose Dick Wadhams as chairman of the Colorado Republican Party. Here's what he had to say about the Republican loss in 2006:

During a "repaint the state red dinner," Rove said Republicans suffered a significant defeat in the November elections, but he said he takes a longer view of history and predicted voters will again turn to Republicans for leadership.

"We had a defeat. Can't dress up that pig. We pick ourselves up off the mat, we stand on principle and we get back in the fight," he told a cheering crowd of hundreds of supporters.

Wadhams took some lumps last year when he couldn't save his Virginia senatorial candidate George Allen from self-destruction:

I am all in favor of amnesty for undocumented residents. President Bush's plan is neither amnesty nor open borders, but in response to critics who say it is, Karl Rove reportedly gave this ridiculous justification for Bush's plan at a women's luncheon this week:

According to a congressman's wife who attended a Republican women's luncheon yesterday, Karl Rove explained the rationale behind the president's amnesty/open-borders proposal this way: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."

The Corner's Mark Krikorian responds:

There should be no need to explain why this is an obscene statement coming from a leader in the party that promotes the virtues of hard work, thrift, and sobriety, a party whose demi-god actually split fence rails as a young man, a party where "respectable Republican cloth coat" once actually meant something. But it does seem to be necessary to explain.

Rove's comment illustrates how the Bush-McCain-Giuliani-Hagel-Martinez-
Brownback-Huckabee approach to immigration strikes at the very heart of self-government. It is precisely Rove's son (and my own, and those of the rest of us in the educated elite) who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they're young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government. It's not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don't want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them.

[hat tip Raw Story.]

Last week, Karl Rove gave a speech on foreign policy at the annual Churchill Dinner sponsored by Hillsdale College at the Mayflower Hotel.

Via Lexis.com (subscription only), which has a copy of his speech, in answer to a question about redistricting, which he criticized, he said:

....I say this as a former political consultant who liked competitive races when I was in the business. I won't be returning to the business.

The Evans and Novak Report says this means Rove is retiring from politics when Bush's term ends.

As TalkLeft readers know, I try to stick to analyzing news rather than breaking news. I'm just not that kind of journalist. But Jason Leopold's article today reporting Rove has been indicted was filled with such unique detail (analysis here) I wanted to know if it was true. Who better to ask than Robert Luskin, even though I don't know him from Adam. I got his phone number from Jason, and here's what happened. Shorter version: I doubt I'll ever do this again.

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7:55 pm. I just got off the phone with Rove's lawyer Robert Luskin. I'm sure I made a new enemy. I called at 7:47 pm my time which is 9:47 his time. In a run-on sentence, I introduced myself as a criminal defense lawyer and said I was calling about Jason Leopold's article because if it wasn't true, I wanted to write that it wasn't true. He said, "Why are you calling me at 10:00 on a Saturday night. It's so inappropriate." I apologized and said because it's an important story and if it's not true I wanted to say so. I looked at the clock on my computer and saw it was 9:48 or so his time.

He said something like "It's completely not true and you shouldn't be calling me at 10:00 on a Saturday night. You should be calling Mark Corallo [Rove's media strategist.]

But here's the thing. I didn't even have a chance to explain which of Jason's articles I was writing about or that Jason had reported Rove was indicted. For all I know, Luskin hasn't seen that article and his denial pertained to an earlier article written by Jason.

Luskin continued to chastise me for calling so late on a Saturday night, saying "This is Washington, you don't call people at 10:00 on a Saturday night." I apologized again and said I was in Denver and it was two hours earlier and it hadn't occurred to me that it would be too late to call Washington. He said "Well it should have occurred to you." I asked if I could call him tomorrow. He said "No" and hung up.