Just sent to The BRAD BLOG by John Conyers' office...

For Immediate Release: May 22, 2008

Conyers Subpoenas Karl Rove

(Washington, DC)-Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI), issued a subpoena to former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove for testimony about the politicization of the Department of Justice (DOJ), including former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman's case. Yesterday, Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, sent a letter to the Committee expressing that Rove would not agree to testify voluntarily, per the Committee's previous requests.

"It is unfortunate that Mr. Rove has failed to cooperate with our requests," Conyers said.

"Although he does not seem the least bit hesitant to discuss these very issues weekly on cable television and in the print news media, Mr. Rove and his attorney have apparently concluded that a public hearing room would not be appropriate. Unfortunately, I have no choice today but to compel his testimony on these very important matters."

Separately, Chairman Conyers recently received a letter from DOJ's Office of Professional Responibility (OPR) indicating that the office has opened an investigation into allegations of selective prosecution of Siegelman and others.

Included below and attached are the relevant documents:

• Full text of the cover letter sent to Robert Luskin, Karl Rove's attorney (attached and below); [Download here]
• Full text of the subpoena (attached); [Download here]
• Full text of the letter received yesterday from Luskin, declining to provide voluntary testimony (attached); [Download here]
• Letter from OPR regarding new investigation into selective prosecution allegations (attached). [Download here]

More power to you if you can figure out who the actual bad guys are here, versus the actual good guys (if any) in the following news, breaking this afternoon. At this point, the corruption across so many federal agencies has become so pervasive we couldn't even begin to guess at what's actually going on here, and who, if anyone anymore, can be trusted.

Call it the unintended (or, the intended) consequences of the Bush Era of Shame and Criminality.

Wall Street Journal's coverage is posted in full below, since it's otherwise behind their pay wall. Good luck...

As the great voting rights advocate, Rush Limbaugh, trumpeted at the beginning of his radio show this morning, today's 6 to 3 Supreme Court ruling allowing new, modern restrictions regarding which citizens may or may not cast votes at American polling places on Election Day, is "a huge, huge, huge move forward to undercut Democrat efforts to commit voter fraud this fall."

Fortunately, instead of coming in June as expected, this decision on an Indiana Photo ID restriction case comes just in time to prevent massive voter fraud at the polls in Indiana's Democratic Primary two weeks from now, when millions of fraudulent Democratic voters were almost certainly plotting to try and show up to vote on electronic voting systems on which it's impossible to prove one way or another whether they did or didn't vote the way the machines will tell us they did. With voting systems like those in use across the Hoosier State, and elsewhere around the country, it's all the more reason to ensure those Democrats can't show up and commit the fraud they were probably planning to engage in on May 6th!

The news is certainly the most important SCOTUS decision pertaining to elections since the triumphant, well-considered, and much-beloved Bush v. Gore decision of 2000. Today's verdict will undoubtedly be heralded and taught at American institutions of learning for decades to come, with the same reverence as that dedicated to landmark Supreme Court decisions like 1857's Dredd Scott v. Sandford ruling, which thankfully found that "people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants --- whether or not they were slaves --- could never be citizens of the United States, and that the United States Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories."

The Supremes have done it again! But no such important American political battle like that which was won today is ever fought alone. Due thanks must go to the long-fought efforts of countable simple citizens around our nation, concerned about the integrity of voting. We'd be remiss without noting some of the selfless freedom fighters who helped make today's great news a reality: Courageous, unheralded voices, such as those of "longtime advocate of voter rights" and Bush/Cheney '04 Inc. General Counsel Mark F. "Thor" Hearne, tireless Republican "voter fraud" information-wareness man John Fund, and Bush-appointed DoJ Civil Rights Division guardians of the ballot box, like Hans von Spakovsky, Bradley Schlozman and its former Voting Section chief, John "Minorities Die First" Tanner.

Thanks to brave men like them, and Mr. Limbaugh, of course, it'll be a new day at the polling place this fall! One in which, if Republicans legislators around the country hurry up and get on the anti-voter fraud ball, they can assure that millions of Democratic-leaning citizens won't be fraudulently mistaken for actual voters when they show up at their polling places this November.

But are restrictions that may keep just blacks and the elderly from casting a ballot enough to ensure the true integrity of our vote? Shouldn't we keep fighting to ensure that legitimate voters like you and me don't have our voices diluted by even more fraudulent groups out there, like gays, communists, and dead people, who every year change the results of election after election through their insidious anti-American efforts, because I say they do?

Read on for a couple of new ideas. Clearly, today's SCOTUS decision is a good start, but it hardly goes far enough to ensure that the right American voices are heard, as our founders intended! 14th Amendment, equal protection, blah, blah, blah, my ass!...

Guest blogged by Ellen Theisen, VotersUnite.Org

Over two years ago, the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit against New York State to force the state to comply with the federal requirement to equip every polling place with voting systems that are accessible to people with disabilities, as mandated by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA).

Meanwhile, the DoJ has taken no action at all to stop any state from using voting equipment that has been proven to violate HAVA’s requirement for accurate vote-counting.

While it's important for every citizen, disabled or not, to be able to vote privately, a private vote is meaningless if that vote is not counted accurately. Despite the equal weight HAVA gave to both important mandates, the federal requirement for accurate vote-counting is being wholly ignored by the states, and even the federal government.

Two recent incidents which have been making headlines --- in New Jersey and Ohio --- illustrate clear, undeniable violations of the federal accuracy requirement. They are impossible to deny or ignore. For the moment, however, federal officials are doing exactly that...

Paging Dan Abrams! Working on several detailed stories for the moment, so not much time for background on this, but we'll try to quickly connect a few dots for you.

Much of it the first part here is so amusing and/or ironical on its own, that I suspect it speaks for itself. At least for anybody who is cursorily familiar with the John "Minorities Die First" Tanner story, as originally broken by The BRAD BLOG's Alan Breslauer, who video-taped the remarks which led, fairly directly, to Tanner's embarassing downfall, sad Congressional testimony and eventual resignation as the head of the DoJ's Civil Rights voting unit. (Our extensive coverage of the entire mess can be perused here.)

This now from AP [emphasis ours]...

Expert on that, indeed.

The article goes on to note that the DoJ is "paying Tanner's salary and benefits to work in Alabama through next spring." About which Bob McCurley, director of the Alabama Law Institute, said, "It's not costing me anything."

And well worth the price at that!

But that's not all that should be taken note of here. There are at least two very important dots that need connecting here between Tanner, Alabama, the Siegelman case and an unprecedented order by the DoJ in 2006 taking away control of elections from the AL Secretary of State and handing it to the Republican Governor who ousted him under, um, less than crystal-clean circumstances...

No, we haven't forgotten. We never do...

For more on all of the above, see the many stories at: https://bradblog.com/SibelEdmonds.

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Art Levine at The American Prospect has a new must read piece titled, “The Republican War on Voting: Using the Department of Justice, friendly governors, and its usual propaganda outlets, the GOP has propagated the myth of voter fraud to purge the rolls of non-Republicans.” Here's a small taste of it...

Levine also draws quite a bit (and links to some) of The BRAD BLOG's years-long exposé coverage of high-ranking Republican vote-suppression cappo Mark F. "Thor" Hearne and his GOP front-group "American Center for Voting Rights" elsewhere in his detailed report.

In related news, John Tanner, the man in charge of the Justice Department's efforts to disenfranchise millions of voters until he was forced to resign after The BRAD BLOG captured and exposed him making crazy offensive comments on video (see below), has a new job, apparently. Tanner is reportedly now a fellow with the Alabama Law Institute - which provides the Legislature with legal expertise in drafting and revising laws.

We admit to being perplexed enough by Matthew Mosk's Sunday article in WaPo, claiming that GOP "voter fraud" zealot Hans von Spakovsky, formerly of the DoJ Civil Rights voting unit, was "cleared" by a U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) inspector general's report, to poke around for a few minutes trying to figure out who this Mosk was, and how the hell he figured the report "cleared" von Spakovsy of anything.

vS was one of the notorious villians at the DoJ who politicized the hell out of the Civil Rights division by turning it into a blunt instrument to keep minority voters from being able to cast their lawful vote in any way he could figure out how to do.

He is also the failed nominee for the FEC who still has yet to show enough grace to remove his name from consideration, as he has singlehandedly succeeded in ensuring that the commission is entirely crippled, unable to vote on anything without a quorum, during an election year.

As the IG's report on whether the EAC was inappropriately influenced, by von Spakovsky and others, to withhold and the re-write a bi-partisan study on voter fraud, the then-chair of the EAC, Paul DiGregorio --- a Republican himself --- said that “too many of [von Spakovsky’s] decisions are clouded by his partisan thinking”...vS “certainly tried to influence...There’s no question about that," and that, the EAC chair felt that "von Spakovsky thought he should use his position (on the EAC commission) to advance the Republican Party position.”

Mosk used his WaPo article then, to quote vS alleging that the "conclusions (of the EAC IG report) represented a personal vindication" for him. Huh?

We got distracted by other business, and were unable to finish our poking around to figure out what Mosk might have been after, and why this article, on a report published three weeks ago suddenly became "news" to the Washington Post, with "clearance" of von Spakovsky as the central meme.

J. Gerald Hebert, over at the Campaign Legal Center Blog seems to have come away with the same perplexed reaction, opening his article yesterday with...

-- By Brad Friedman

In a statement given to the media last week, in response to a federal fraud/false claims act qui tam suit finally unsealed last week, a representative from the defendant, voting machine company, Hart InterCivic, alleged the suit's whistleblower, William Singer, was a "disgruntled employee."

Employee "Performance Evaluation" records written by company management, included in the complaint itself, however, would seem to strongly contradict the claims of company spokesperson Pete Lichtenheld, as given to a reporter last week.

Additional claims by Lichtenheld, as reported by Kim Zetter at Wired's Threat Level blog on Thursday, are also dispelled by a document from the U.S. Dept. of Justice, obtained by The BRAD BLOG. The DoJ, after requesting and receiving extensions for two years, has finally decided against joining the federal qui tam suit, for the time being, allowing it to become unsealed last week, so that it may now move forward in federal district court.

The lawsuit, posted in full by The BRAD BLOG after it became unsealed last Thursday, details an extraordinary list of fraudulent behavior by Hart InterCivic, as related by one-time employee Singer, who alleges the company deceived Election Officials in Texas, Ohio, Colorado, and elsewhere in hopes of receiving federal monies as distributed via the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

Allegations made in the suit include stunning revelations that Hart failed to test its products properly, and frequently at all, withheld information from prospective clients about the potential loss of votes in its voting systems, dummied-up machines, reports, and test results presented to clients in sales presentations, and much more in an attempt to win state and county contracts.

Much of the response to the suit by company spokesperson Lichtenheld, however, is easily dismissed upon examination of the evidence so far available in the case...

Blogged by Brad Friedman from Phoenix, AZ...

For all the Bush Administration and Republican Party's phony sturm and drang about a supposed epidemic of "voter fraud" at the polling place, the DoJ refused to offer a representative to testify at a Senate hearing today on the topic.

According to a statement from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who chaired the hearing this morning in the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, the DoJ refused to allow testimony from the William Welch, Chief of the Public Integrity Section, which has "responsibility for civil and criminal enforcement of such voter fraud to discuss what the Department has found and to help quantify the problem of voter fraud at the polls."

"Only after extensive back and forth between my staff and the Department," Feinstein says, "did they finally send a letter stating that at some future date they would provide an unspecified witness." The full press release, including her opening statement today, is posted at the end of this article.

"In the void left by the Justice Department," Feinstein said, former US Attorney David Iglesias was called as a witness today. As The BRAD BLOG reported in some detail when the hearing was announced several days ago, Iglesias was fired during the U.S. Attorney Purge after he'd refused to bring phony "voter fraud" charges despite pressure from both Republican operatives and elected officials alike.

It's little wonder the DoJ was not allowed to participate in the hearings, despite the well-funded White House and Republican efforts to use discredited "evidence" of "voter fraud" in order to require Photo ID restrictions at the polling place which would succeed in disenfranchising millions of legal, largely Democratic voters, who do not have such ID...

Blogged by Brad Friedman from the road...

The insidious nexus between phony GOP charges of "voter fraud" and the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal will finally be explored in a Senate Hearing on "In-Person Voter Fraud: Myth and Trigger for Disenfranchisement?" this Wednesday in Sen. Dianne Feinstein's (D-CA) Rules Committee. The complete witness list and press release from Feinstein's office, announcing the hearings, is posted at the end of this article.

Witnesses will include, among others, former NM U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, believed to have been fired for his unwillingness to bring phony voter fraud charges in the state despite pressure from folks such as Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM), Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM), and a representative of Republican operative Thor Hearne's now-defunct "American Center for Voting Rights," (ACVR) which The BRAD BLOG originally outed as a White House/GOP front group in a long series of investigative reports dating back to 2005, which began just after the supposedly non-partisan group (co-founded by two very high level White House/GOP operatives) first appeared on the scene...

[Updated Post-Show. Audio now available below...]

During my regular weekly Friday guest appearance on the syndicated Peter B. Collins Show at 5pm PT tonight (that's 6pm in Albuquerque), we were joined by guests...

• Laura MacCallum (now-resigned KKOB reporter who broke the Heather Wilson Vote-Buying stories before they were spiked by her own station after complaints from Wilson)
• Gov. David Cargo (former Republican NM Governor, one of several officials who made the initial allegations)
• David Iglesias (the former US Attorney from NM who was fired in the U.S. Attorney Purge after receiving inappropriate phone-calls from Heather Wilson, and Pete Domenici was not able to make it after all)

As you may have guessed, there continues to be much developing on this story. The trick will be continuing to cover it all as I must head out to the road again beginning tomorrow, for a couple of weeks. As always, I'll do our best, even from there, to continue coverage. Your help is much appreciated! (See bottom of this post for one way you can help us immediately!)

POST-SHOW UPDATE: Was a great hour, I think. Both MacCallum and Cargo did a great job of covering the meat and potatoes of it all, along with the always top-notch PBC. I was on live from the California State Ronald Reagan building downtown where I just finished attending and testifying at a hearing on the L.A. County "Double Bubble" ballot debacle. More on that when I can catch my breath (which you'll see I'm quite out of, at the beginning of the hour).

Here's the full hour, which is actually 42 minutes with commercials removed (courtesy of Green960's podcast archive.) Download MP3, or listen online right here...

PBS' Bill Moyers Journal takes a baby step --- a very baby step --- into the Sibel Edmonds story. Reporter Rick Karr offers a video "Web Exclusive" report (presumably meaning it won't even air on Moyers' actual show) on "Government Secrecy." He covers the cases of the Bush Administration's assault on the NY Times report, James Risen's coverage of warrantless domestic wiretapping, as well as the "retroactive classification" of Sibel Edmonds' testimony before Congress back in 2002.

While it's nice to see the basics of the Edmonds case mentioned, out loud, by a mainstream U.S. broadcast journalist, Karr still manages to offer his colleagues in the U.S. corporate mainstream media --- and even himself, for that matter --- a get out of jail free card in his report, for their inexcusable lack of coverage of the former FBI translator's startling allegations concerning the sale of nuclear secrets to the foreign black market by high-ranking U.S. officials.

"U.S. journalists have found it nearly impossible to look into her claims," Karr alleges, due to the DoJ's retroactive classification of virtually everything having to do with her case, including even a 2002 60 Minutes segment which covered her story back before they had been effectively neutered entirely.

Funny, but the UK's Sunday Times doesn't seem to have "found it impossible to look into her claims." Though that may be because they actually bothered to do so. Three times, so far, with another chapter, we're told, still to come in the weeks ahead.

Indeed, Karr seems to have found it so "impossible to look into her claims" that he was even unable to find out that her name is actually "Sih-BELL," rather than "SIH-bul." But perhaps we're just being petty and our standards for accuracy are higher than PBS'.

For links to all three UK Times stories, The BRAD BLOG exclusive in which Edmonds offered her story in full to news organizations like Moyers', and the rest of our years-long coverage featuring detailed, not-impossible-to-report articles and exclusives on the Edmonds case, please peruse the stories at https://bradblog.com/SibelEdmonds.

MSNBC's Dan Abrams continued, for the third day in a row, on the Don Siegelman beat today. The former Democratic Alabama Governor, who still sits in jail pending an appeal for his non-violent crime, is alleged to have been railroaded by Karl Rove and political operatives in the state while running for re-election in 2006.

In 2002 he had won his election, according to the announced results on Election Night, only to wake up the next morning to find that a Republican election director claimed to have discovered a "glitch" (sound familiar, regular BRAD BLOG readers?) in the electronic vote counts overnight, resulting in Siegelman's loss. He was never allowed a recount after the vote tallies somehow changed on the electronic voting machines due to the "glitch," as it was described officially, by court probate officers.

In this rarely seen, 2004 video interview with Siegelman (see approx. half-way through that linked article), he alleges: "Somebody electronically manipulated the election results…This election was stolen…There is no other kind, or sugar-coated way to say it."

Neither the 60 Minutes report on Siegelman from Sunday, nor any of Abrams' reports so far this week (here's Tuesday's and Wednesday's) including today's, as posted at the end of this article, have yet delved, with any depth, into that aspect of what seems clearly to have been a well-run political frame-up --- or, yes, a conspiracy --- to do away with the one Democrat who had been able to win statewide elections in an otherwise very Republican-leaning state.

We hope to have more on that aspect of the case soon.

On today's MSNBC "Bush League Justice" report, Abrams spoke with both Siegelman's attorney, Vince Kilborn, as well as Grant Woods, the former Republican Attorney General from Arizona who has been among the most outspoken of the 52 former Republican and Democratic Attorneys General who have called on Congress for an investigation and a special prosecutor to be named in the case.

Abrams repeated his call, from yesterday, for the immediate release of Siegelman from prison, pending appeal of his case, as would be customary in other similar, non-violent cases. Abrams enumerated his chief concerns about the prosecution and the trial as run by federal judge Mark Fuller, as follows...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer