Rove Ignores Subpoena, Refuses To Testify

Former Bush Adviser A No-Show At Hearing On Alleged Political Pressure At Justice Dept.

(CBS/ AP)  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.

Lawmakers subpoenaed Rove in May in an effort to force him to talk about whether he played a role in prosecutors' decisions to pursue cases against Democrats, such as former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, or in firing federal prosecutors considered disloyal to the Bush administration.

Rove had been scheduled to appear at the House Judiciary subcommittee hearing Thursday morning. A placard with his name sat in front of an empty chair at the witness table, with a handful of protesters behind it calling for Rove to be arrested.

A decision on whether to pursue contempt charges now goes to the full Judiciary Committee and ultimately to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

House Republicans called Thursday's proceedings a political stunt and said if Democrats truly wanted information they would take Rove up on an offer he made to discuss the matter informally.

Rove offered to appear in private, with no oath or transcript, but Democrats said no, reports CBS News correspondent Bob Fuss.

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.

The case, involving White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers, is in federal court and may not be resolved before Bush's term ends in January.

The White House has cited executive privilege, arguing that internal administration communications are confidential and that Congress cannot compel officials to testify.

Rove says he is bound to follow the White House's guidance, although he has offered to answer questions specifically on the Siegelman case - but only with no transcript taken and not under oath.

Democrats have rejected the offer because the testimony would not be sworn and, they say, could create a confusing record.

Rove has insisted publicly that he never tried to influence Justice Department decisions and was not even aware of the Siegelman prosecution until it landed in the news.

Siegelman - an unusually successful Democrat in a heavily Republican state - was charged with accepting and concealing a contribution to his campaign to start a state education lottery, in exchange for appointing a hospital executive to a regulatory board.

He was sentenced last year to more than seven years in prison but was released in March when a federal appeals court ruled Siegelman had raised "substantial questions of fact and law" in his appeal.

Siegelman and others have alleged the prosecution was pushed by GOP operatives - including Rove, a longtime Texas strategist who was heavily involved in Alabama politics before working at the White House. A former Republican campaign volunteer from Alabama told congressional attorneys last year that she overheard conversations suggesting that Rove pressed Justice officials in Washington to prosecute Siegelman.

The career prosecutors who handled Siegelman's case have insisted that Rove had nothing to do with it, emphasizing that the former governor was convicted by a jury.

[taotxzen]

International Committee of Red Cross Says Bush Administration Guilty of War Crimes

By: Nicole Belle @ 5:00 PM - PDT


It%u2019s something that has certainly been spoken of within the liberal blogosphere. I%u2019ve seen the random bumpersticker or freeway blogger suggest it as well, but it is no longer something that can be written off as a partisan or extremist view. As Countdown guest host Rachel Maddow and George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley discuss on Friday, the International Committee of the Red Cross sent a report last year to the CIA saying that the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo was unquestionably torture and the Bush administration officials that approved the treatment are war criminals.

Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency%u2019s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.[..]

The book, %u201CThe Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,%u201D by Jane Mayer, who writes about counterterrorism for The New Yorker, offers new details of the agency%u2019s secret detention program, as well as the bitter debates in the administration over interrogation methods and other tactics in the campaign against Al Qaeda.

(cont)

[taotxzen]

(cont)

Citing unnamed %u201Csources familiar with the report,%u201D Ms. Mayer wrote that the Red Cross document %u201Cwarned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.%u201D Red Cross representatives were not permitted access to the secret prisons where the C.I.A. conducted interrogations, but were permitted to interview Abu Zubaydah and other high-level detainees in late 2006, after they were moved to the military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The book says the C.I.A. shared the report, which Ms. Mayer first described last year in less detail in The New Yorker, with President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

[eroosevelt08]

The receipt of a congressonal subpoena is not an invitation to negotiate the terms of subsequent testimony. Karl Rove''s answers to the subpoena are arrogant and clearly in contempt of Congress. Where are the teeth in this Congress?

[eroosevelt08]

The receipt of a congressonal subpoena is not an invitation to negotiate the terms of subsequent testimony. Karl Rove''s answers to the subpoena are arrogant and clearly in contempt of Congress. Where are the teeth in this Congress?

[eroosevelt08]

Karl Rove should face the full consequences for ignoring the congressional subpoena.

[jntlw-2009]

I heard that Rove is out of the Country. How about not letting him back in ever!! Make him give up his citizenship and never be allowed to set foot on American soil or its territories ever again. I like that idea!

[actornaught]

History will look at the w administration as the American Dictatorship, with the freedoms and rights that they took away, and have so far gotten away with it, shameless...

[ajayvee]

I find it so humiliating for Americans in general that a piece of pond-scum like Karl Rove can thumb his nose at Congress and there is nothing American Justice can do to him because being a friend of Mr. Bush makes him above the law. How absolutely shameful!

[rafterman1]

===the demclowns give it to him? By the way, what "business" are you even talking about? When did their approval rating start to fall so low,....hmmmmm?===
Posted by cfin5

The business of the people. But we have no choice but to give in. The Dems don''t have a big enough advantage in Congress. We either do it Bush''s way or do nothing.

[rafterman1]

===OOOOOOO the denial is so thick I can smell it. The LIBS have had control of congress since 2006, you remember, when gas was $2.12/gal. That 9% is all yours buddy. Read it and weap.===
Posted by mbcsmith

Remember when gas was $1.75 in 2003 and then the moron-in-chief invaded Iraq and gas prices skyrocketed?

Dems keep bringing bills (more in two years than Repubs did the previous 6) and Repubs keep stalling. That 9% is motly yours.

[hungry1968]

Whose in control of the congress?

Posted by anecdote1 at 09:55 AM : Jul 11, 2008




He knows. It''s been explained to him DOZENS of times, and he KNOWS he''s wrong.

He just has NO LOGICAL argument or response to the Bush incompetence and failed policy issues, so he ALWAYS (incorrectly) falls back on this argument.

And still, no one believes it!!

[anecdote1]

attaboy Karl. Give those 9% approval LIBS helll!
Posted by mbcsmith at 08:53 AM : Jul 11, 2008

Let''s just go over the numbers one more time:
Senate:
49 republicans
49 democratics
2 independents
tiebreaking vote: republican vice president.

House:
200 Republicans
235 Democratics
288 amount of votes needed for republican presidential veto override.

Whose in control of the congress?

[cfin5]

taotxzen,.....I have an easier way for you to get past these shallow renditions of the "whats" into the deeper "whys". Just google "Leo Strauss" for neoconervative faults and "Saul Alinsky" for neoliberal faults. When your done, you''ll find that BOTH of these fellows are UN-AMERICAN as well as the ones in government who follow their unconstitutional illogics. One takes one way around the barn of the Constitution and Bill of Rights,.....the other takes the other way. The end result is the same. Thats why I joined the "CONSTITUTION PARTY" (constitutionparty.com).

[taotxzen]

Why Right Winged Authoritaian Followers are Dangerous to America

Authoritarian followers aren%u2019t going to question, they%u2019re going to parrot. After all, in the ethnocentric mind %u201CWe are the Good Guys and our opponents are abominations%u201D--which is precisely the thinking of the Islamic authoritarian followers who become suicide bombers in Iraq. And if we turn out not to be such good guys, as news of massacres and the torture and murder of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers, by the CIA, and by the arms-length %u201Ccompanies%u201D set up to torture prisoners becomes known, authoritarian followers simply don%u2019t want to know. It was just a few, lower level %u201Cbad apples.%u201D Didn%u2019t the president say he was sickened by the revelations of torture, and all American wrong-doers would be punished?

Sitting in the jury room of the Port Angeles, Washington court house in 1989, Mary Wegmann might have felt she had suddenly been transferred to a parallel 76 universe in some Twilight Zone story. For certain fellow-jury members seemed to have attended a different trial than the one she had just witnessed. They could not remember some pieces of evidence, they invented evidence that did not exist, and they steadily made erroneous inferences from the material that everyone could agree on.

(cont)

[leftyintexas]

attaboy Karl. Give those 9% approval LIBS helll!

Posted by mbcsmith at 08:53 AM : Jul 11, 2008

As reported on Faux News...''We make it up, you decide.''

[taotxzen]

(cont)

Encountering my research as she was later developing her Ph.D. dissertation project, she suspected the people who %u201Cgot it wrong%u201D had been mainly high RWAs. So she recruited a sample of adults from the Clallam County jury list, and a group of students from Peninsula College and gave them various memory and inference tests. For example, they listened to a tape of two lawyers debating a school segregation case on a McNeil/Lehrer News Hour program. Wegmann found High RWAs indeed had more trouble remembering details of the material they%u2019d encountered, and they made more incorrect inferences on a reasoning test than others usually did. Overall, the authoritarians had lots of trouble simply thinking straight.

Intrigued, I gave the inferences test that Mary Wegmann had used to two large samples of students at my university. In both studies high RWAs went down in flames more than others did. They particularly had trouble figuring out that an inference or deduction was wrong. To illustrate, suppose they had gotten the following syllogism:

All fish live in the sea.
Sharks live in the sea..
Therefore, sharks are fish.

[leftyintexas]

Karl Rove reminds me of that fat porker in the movie ''Deliverance''. Only I think Rove would actually enjoy being in that situation in real life. He''s a shining example of a Republicon toe tapper.

[taotxzen]

(cont)

The conclusion does not follow, but high RWAs would be more likely to say the reasoning is correct than most people would. If you ask them why it seems right, they would likely tell you, %u201CBecause sharks are fish.%u201D In other words, they thought the reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right. Or to put it another way, they don%u2019t %u201Cget it%u201D that the reasoning matters--especially on a reasoning test.

[taotxzen]

For Richer or for Poorer

Inequality widens under Republicans and shrinks under Democrats.

By Larry M. Bartels

The most important issue rarely mentioned on the campaign trail this year is the gap between rich and poor in America. It is important for two reasons: The gap has been growing, and the choice between John McCain and Barack Obama likely will affect whether it narrows or expands.

That is the conclusion of Unequal Democracy, a provocative new book by Princeton professor Larry M. Bartels, one of the country''s leading political scientists. His most significant finding is that there is a partisan pattern to the size of the gap between the rich and the poor. Over the past half-century, he concludes, Republican presidents have allowed income inequality to expand, while Democratic presidents generally have not.

(cont)

[taotxzen]

(cont)

Lest anyone think this book is a partisan hit job by a left-wing academic, Bartels goes to great pains in his introduction to preempt the counterattack he expects from critics on the right. "I began the project as an unusually apolitical political scientist," he writes, noting that the last time he voted was in 1984, "and that was for Ronald Reagan." He adds that in doing this work, "I was quite surprised to discover how often and how profoundly partisan differences in ideologies and values have shaped key policy decisions and economic outcomes. I have done my best to follow my evidence where it led me."