by Glynn Wilson

With a new day dawning in Washington, D.C., due to the election of Barack Obama as the first black president in American history, who looks determined to govern like Lincoln and make changes in that corrupt town, is it possible that Bush administration officials will totally escape the long arm of justice for their roles in high crimes and misdemeanors more damaging than any corruption in our history?

While former Bush political adviser Karl Rove is still in defiance of a Congressional subpoena to testify under oath and still faces an investigation for destroying e-mails and other documents, obstruction of justice and other civil and criminal infractions for his role in turning the Bush Justice Department into a political arm of the White House, the Washington Post company actually pays him money to write a column for Newsweek magazine advising the Republican Party on how to get itself out of the political wilderness.

There is something very wrong with this picture. It stands journalism ethics on its head to see a political operative of Rove’s mendacity allowed such a prominent voice in a news publication. Perhaps the magazine should suspend the column until we know whether Rove is going to end up behind bars himself, or simply escape justice.

From reading between the headlines and talking to sources in Washington, I find it is now pretty clear there is an intellectual power struggle going on in the Democratic Party over whether to investigate the crimes of the Bush administration or simply “turn the other cheek” and move on to tackle the major problems facing the country and the world once Barack Obama is sworn in as the new president on January 20.

It looks like a major global warming initiative is at the top of Obama’s agenda after the inauguration that could include a bailout of sorts for the U.S. automobile industry, with caveats that General Motors, Ford, and the rest retool their manufacturing plants to make far more efficient vehicles that run on alternative energy sources such natural gas and a couple of different types of batteries.

While the Senate Judiciary Committee issued a new 60-page report this week that includes a resolution holding Rove in contempt, it is not clear whether this has any chance of even making it to the floor of the current lame-duck session in the Senate for a vote — or whether there will be the political will to bring it back up after the new Congress is sworn in next year. [See pdf version of the report here]

The report cites a host of evidence showing that White House and Justice Department officials focused on the political impact of federal prosecutions and pushed for partisan investigations, and that Rove and others at the White House were involved in the firing of federal prosecutors who did not toe the Bush-GOP line. It also suggests that the reasons for the firings were contrived as part of a cover-up, especially on the part of former Bush yes-man Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who has now been indicted in Texas in another case.

The U.S. Justice Department itself already found in an internal report that the White House engineered the firings and that inappropriate political concerns played a role in several of those cases.

But will Rove ever be brought to justice, especially for his role in the investigation of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, who was knocked out of the 2006 race for governor by his indictment and spent nine months in prison as a result of a corrupt political investigation?

According to Erica J. Chabot, press secretary to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont has made it clear that he is not willing to “close the door” next year on the work the committee has done on the investigations under this Congress.

“This is not something the chairman has taken lightly,” she said of the U.S. attorney firings, the Siegelman case, and the investigation of Rove.

“But we have to wait and see what that next Congress is going to look like, what the committee is going to look like, where the priorities fall into place in those first few months,” she said. “Obviously, there are going to be a lot of things that need the committee’s attention right away, like an attorney general nominee. That certainly doesn’t move anything off the priority list, but it just might shuffle the order they show up on that list.”

She said it does not have to be a “one-or-the-other” situation.

“There’s a way to have that forward-looking attitude while examining what did happen and determining whether other courses of action need to happen in the next Congress,” she said. “I think there’s a way to do both. I think right now it’s just a little too early to tell what the 111th Congress or Senate Judiciary Committee is going to do.”

She simply said she didn’t know whether there is a possibility of a full-floor vote on the Rove contempt citation in the current Congress, although a prominent Washington, D.C.-based reporter for one of the most influential newspapers in the country told me it would be “dead on arrival” in this Congress and would be “filibustered to death.”

Even if this Congress were to find the time before the holiday recess at the end of the year to take it up, President George W. Bush would then have an opportunity to pardon Rove, much as he commuted the sentence of former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was convicted for his role in leaking the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame-Wilson to the press after a special prosecutor’s investigation.

It is not even clear at this juncture when Congress will recess for the holidays, Ms. Chabot said. That will depend on the business that has to be done over the next few weeks.

“That’s a question I wish I knew the answer to so I could make some travel plans,” she said, laughing.

Attempts to reach the press secretaries for the House Judiciary Committee and Birmingham Congressman Artur Davis were unsuccessful for this story, perhaps since it looks like Davis is in a fight with state party officials in Montgomery over the future of the Alabama Democratic Party. We’ll have more to report on that later.

Meanwhile, GOP whistle-blower Jill Simpson, the North Alabama lawyer who is largely responsible for the Congressional investigation into the Siegelman case, did have some strong feelings about the investigation when reached at her law office in Rainsville.

“Karl Rove is in complete defiance of Congress and the rule of law by refusing to appear and to turn over all the documents in this case,” she said. “He has withheld evidence and defied Congressional subpoenas. They must get to the bottom of what went wrong at the Department of Justice in order to correct it.”

There is no way they can reach a final conclusion in the case, she said, “until they look in all the drawers and roll up all the carpet and get to the bottom of the facts in this case.”

She also pointed out that the members of the House and Senate “owe a duty to the citizens who have sent them to Washington to uphold the Constitution and show that no man is above the law.”

“King Karl is not above the law,” she said. “They can’t let this go.”

Tags: Don Siegelman, Jill Simpson, Karl Rove, Senate Judiciary Committee

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Alabama Democratic Party, Alabama Politics, Don Siegelman on Trial, Political Justice in America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.