Guest Blogged by The BRAD BLOG's D.C. Correspondent Margie Burns

Those separate email accounts – email accounts held by people working in the White House and the Office of the Vice President, often with security clearances, but not “.gov” accounts – now threaten to become bigger news. Those alternate accounts, as we know now from work done by the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the new report from the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, both potentially and actually allowed WH and DOJ and OVP personnel to communicate ‘off the books’ up to a point. While theoretically still bound by the rules for preserving presidential records (see below) the 88 government officials with email accounts provided by the Republican National Committee could move with electronic fluidity from their official to their partisan political duties, and back again, with remarkably little scrutiny for the entire four years of Bush’s first term.

So any correspondence about --- for example --- Chandra Levy and Gary Condit, 9/11 and Iraq, anthrax mailings and Judith Miller, will remain lost from public view until the advanced technology of un-deleting can sweep it up from the bottom of whatever files it has been submerged in to date.

Tabling for now such topics as political motivation in the firing and hiring of US Attorneys, the immediate question is, exactly how EARLY did administration personnel start using these alternate email accounts?...

Senators Kennedy and Whitehouse have sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales demanding a probe by the DoJ's Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility into "allegations that the Republican National Committee engaged in 'vote caging' during the 2004 elections."

The letter, sent today to Gonzales, also requests an investigation into "whether any Department officials were aware of allegations that Tim Griffin had engaged in caging when he was appointed United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, and whether appropriate action was taken."

The complete letter and a press release sent along with it are posted in full at the end of this article.

"The Republican Party has a long and ignominious record of caging – much of it focused on the African American community," Kennedy and Whitehouse explain in their letter which gives details of the RNC using voting caging tactics to suppress minority voters in both 1981 and 1986. After both incidents, the GOP had signed consent decrees that they would not engage in the activity in the future.

Nonetheless, email evidence has shown that in 2004, Tim Griffin created and sent caging lists on behalf of the Bush 2004 campaign as originally reported by the BBC to little American media fanfare, prior to the election. Griffin, who became an aide to Karl Rove, was later appointed by the Bush Administration as the US Attorney from Arkansas after they had fired Bud Cummins. Griffin has since resigned from the post in the wake of the scandal.

In recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, the now-resigned DoJ liason to the White House, Monica Goodling, admitted that now-resigned Deputy Atty General Paul McNulty was less than forthcoming in his sworn Congressional testimony concerning his knowledge about Griffin's involvement in vote caging during the 2004 campaign.

In her testimony, given under a grant of immunity from prosecution, Goodling said that McNulty "failed to disclose that he had some knowledge of allegations that Tim Griffin had been involved in vote 'caging' during his work on the President's 2004 campaign."

*** Special to The BRAD BLOG by Greg Palast

Boo-hoo! I made Tim Griffin cry.

He cried. Then he lied.

You remember Tim. Karl Rove's right hand (right claw?) man. The GOP's ragin' cagin' man.

Griffin is the Rove-bot exposed by our BBC Newsnight investigations team as the man who gathered and sent out the infamous 'caging' lists to Republican state chairmen during the 2004 election.

Caging lists, BBC discovered, were used secretly as a basis to challenge the right to vote of thousands of citizens - including the homeless, students and soldiers sent overseas. The day after BBC broadcast that the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, sought our evidence on Griffin, Tim resigned his post as US Attorney for Arkansas. That job was a little gift from Karl Rove who made room for his man Griffin by demanding the firing of US prosecutor Bud Cummins.

Last week, our cameras captured Griffin, all teary-eyed, in his humiliating kiss-off speech delivered in Little Rock at the University of Arkansas where he moaned that, "public service isn't worth it."

True. In the old Jim Crow days in Arkansas, you could get yourself elected by blocking African-Americans. (The voters his caging game targeted are - quelle surprise! - disproportionately Black citizens.)

But today, Griffin can't even get an unemployment check. When he resigned two weeks ago following our broadcast, the cover story was that the voter persecutor-turned-prosecutor had resigned to work for Presidential wannabe Fred Thompson. But when Thompson's staff was asked by a reporter why they would hire the 'cagin' man,' suddenly, the 'Law and Order' star decided associating with Griffin might take the shine off Thompson's badge, even if it is from the props department.

Griffin, instead of saying that public service "isn't worth it," should have said, "Crime doesn't pay." Because, according to experts such as law professor Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 'caging,' when used to target Black voters' rights, is a go-to-prison crime.

By resigning, Tim may not avoid the hard questions about caging - or the hard time that might result. When I passed the first set of documents to Conyers (a real film noir moment, in a New York hotel room near midnight), the soft-spoken Congressman said that, resignation or not, "We aren't done with Mr. Griffin yet..."

If it's Friday, it's time for another Bush Administration resignation or document dump. Looks like resignation is this week's choice, at least for the DoJ, where Attorney Purge heavy Michael Elston takes a dive, according to AP...

I'm on the air now, so happy to refer you to TPM Muck for more details...

Accomplished liar Mark. F. "Thor" Hearne told Jo Mannies at the Post-Dispatch (the only reporter he'll speak to of late) that there is absolutely nothing nefarious behind the continuing attempts by "someone" at his Missouri law firm, Lathrop & Gage, to scrub references to his discredited GOP "voter fraud" group, American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), from his page at Wikipedia, as we discussed Tuesday, and again Wednesday, as the Wiki War continued, and as it became apparent that the ACVR had lied about their involvement in political activities on their federal 990 tax forms.

Mannies asked Thor about the ACVR references, now several times expunged from the page, and about what happened to the amazing, disappearing "voter fraud" hucksters. Incredibly, this is what she reports old Thor as having to say about it...

What will it take for Congress to realize that George W. Bush believes them to be utterly irrelevant? In the latest laugh in the face of Congress, RAW STORY is reporting that un-resigned Attorney General Alberto Gonzales used his stealthily-gained power to appoint interim U.S. Attorneys for one last time before Bush would sign the bill recently passed by Congress revoking that authority.

Congress recently revoked the little-noticed provision of the so-called "PATRIOT Act" which allowed such appointments to be made without Congressional confirmation. The bill had been sitting on Bush's desk for signing until late yesterday, when he finally signed it. But only after Gonzales reportedly named a new interim attorney to replace the fired US Attorney from California's Central District (Los Angeles), Debra Wong Yang.

Note: RAW STORY followed up it's report from yesterday, with another today suggesting that an interim appointment may not have been made after all. The issue is still murky, it seems. Just more fallout from a runaway Bush Administration that believes they are accountable to no one.

The change to the PATRIOT Act, revoking the Bush Administration's ability to appoint interim attorneys at will, was sent to Bush for signing on June 4th. The bill passed the Senate by a 94 to 2 vote, and in the House by 306 to 114. Bush waited until last night, June 14th, to quietly sign the bill.

At the same time, Washington Post is reporting that the Dept. of Justice itself is investigating its own Attorney General's testimony to Congress, in which Gonzales claimed he had not spoken to any "fact witnesses" at the DoJ concerning his involvement in the US Attorney Purge scandal due to Congress's ongoing investigation into the matter. The DoJ's liaison with the White House, Monica Goodling, would later testify under immunity to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee that Gonzales did speak of the matter, to her, in a conversation that she characterized as making her feel "a little uncomfortable." It seems Gonzo may have been hoping to get his/her story straight before testifying about it to Congress.

"It's remarkable that he's under investigation and that he's still attorney general," NYU School of Law professor, Stephen Gillers, told WaPo, underscoring both the obvious, and the Congress's continuing penchant for letting the White House play them for chumps. Why impeachment proceedings for Gonzales (much less Bush) have not already begun is beyond us. But as abused spouses also tend to wait until they're nearly dead before taking action to truly change their predicament, so, it seems will the Congress.

Gillers continued to note the absurdity of DoJ's investigation of itself. "At some point, it can no longer be done internally. This cannot be done by Gonzales's subordinates," he stated, pointing out the need for a Special Prosecutor at the very least.

But Bush doesn't care, of course, and continues to laugh in the face of Congress, which continues to behave politely, hoping everything will run its course in due time, as if they are not dealing with a near-sociopathic entity in the Bush Administration.

Yesterday, ThinkProgress reported that the White House now admits they have "found" some of the four years of "lost" emails sent by White House staffers on RNC email servers which are thought to contain details about the US Attorney purge. The "found" email has previously been politely requested by Congress. The White House, of course, has yet to turn them over to Senate investigators.

Bush's one, clear, continuing message to Congress...

Tim Griffin, former Karl Rove protege, former interim US Attorney from Arkansas and felonious vote cager, finally answered some charges in a speech yesterday in Arkansas. Apparently, he welled up with tears at various points in his presentation --- "crying as he said he had no plans to return to politics," reported AP --- to the point that the person who forwarded us the articles on the matter, said we should "call him a wahhhhmbulance."

We'd never be so cruel as to say or report any such thing, of course. That, despite the thousands of voters that Griffin sought to keep from exercising their franchise in America in 2004. During a time of war, no less. All to benefit his Republican paymasters.

AP reports that Timmy says that he plans to stay in Little Rock to "open a 'bipartisan' public affairs firm." We're sure he does.

Concerning the vote caging charges --- the ones based on the pre-2004 emails he sent, with the subject line "Re: caging," which included spreadsheet attachments with the names of thousands of minority (read: Democratic-leaning) voters he'd hoped the GOP would challenge at the polls, including folks in the military serving overseas, by the way --- Arkansas Business reports the former US Attorney is in denial:

Some evidence for the "made up of whole cloth" charges, including some of Griffin's email, is available in this earlier BRAD BLOG exclusive from Greg Palast, who tells us he may have some more comments for us tomorrow on all of this. (UPDATE: Palast's comments on "Tears of a Clone" now here...)

The audio of Griffin's full speech (bring kleenex) is below...

UPDATE: 6/15/07 ThinkProgress quotes more from Griffin's speech in which he refers to the "Internet stuff" about vote caging, and "made jokes comparing caging to tending zoo animals" [emphasis TP's]:

UPDATE: 6/26/07 Video of part of Griffin's speech is now available at BRAD BLOG.

*** Special to The BRAD BLOG
*** by Libby/CIA Leak Trial Correspondent Margie Burns

From Prettyman Courthouse, DC, for the bail hearing today of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, where I sat in on the hearing on motions for his pending appeal. Those motions, to keep him free on bail, were unsuccessful as the judge ruled against the defendant.

Approximately 11:30 this morning, U.S. District Court in DC, Judge Reggie B. Walton: “In the interest of full disclosure,” Walton says quietly, “and this may be a sign of the times we live in,” in the wake of his ruling which sentenced Libby to prison, “I have received a number of angry, mean-spirited phone calls and letters regarding the sentence” – “including wishing bad things on me or my family.” – “At first I threw them away, but then I got more letters, even more hateful than the others.” So now, “I’m preserving them – in the event that something does happen [some harm to the judge, presumably]” – the perps can be caught.

The times we live in, indeed. Chalk another smarmy mark up for the noise machine.

On to the bail hearing today: the judge refers to a lengthy footnote in the most recent defense motion which lists a number of convicted criminals who are out on bail – “that list of people out on bail, in white-collar crime cases” [everybody from Martha Stewart on down, out on bail while pursuing appeal] – “I hope that footnote is in there not just because of some assumption that people released pending appeal will include all white-collar defendants.” – “I can’t buy in on that,” Walton says, taking the position that white-collar defendants should be treated the same way as blue-collar defendants, and neither kind of defendant should count automatically on being released on bail pending appeal...

*** Special to The BRAD BLOG
*** by Libby/CIA Leak Trial Correspondent Margie Burns

On November 29, 2005, the Boston Globe ran a nice Letter to the Editor by Mr. Ralph West of Philly, under the headline “REMOVE CANCER IN ADMINISTRATION”:

Mr. West's concerns may now have come to fruition, The BRAD BLOG has learned, as "a Robert Bork" has emerged --- in fact, Robert Bork himself --- along with eleven other law professors from some of the nation's most highly regarded law schools, and Pepperdine, to file an amici brief in the Scooter Libby perjury and obstruction of justice case in order to argue that the Special Prosecutor's assignment to the case was unconstitutional...

Voter Fraud zealot Bradley Schlozman takes his do-over concerning testimony he gave last week to the Senate Judiciary Committee concerning his assertion (made 10 times in all), that it was Craig Donsanto of the Election Crimes division at the DoJ's Public Integrity unit who gave him the go ahead to bring voter fraud charges in Missouri days before last November's election. The indictments were in strict violation of the DoJ's written policies --- written by Donsanto, in fact --- that bar such indictments at times that they may have an impact on an election.

Says Schlozzie, in his freshly-filed and obviously-forced about face: "I want to be clear that, while I relied on the consultation with, and suggestions of, the Election Crimes Branch in bringing the indictments when I did, I take full responsibility for the decision to move forward with the prosecutions related to ACORN while I was the interim U.S. Attorney."

To which Sen. Leahy --- who pressed Schlozman hard on this precise point in a memorably heated exchange during the hearing (see angry video at left)-- says: "It is deeply troubling that after weeks of preparation Mr. Schlozman appears to have misled the Committee and the public about his decision to file an election eve lawsuit in direct conflict with longstanding Justice Department policy."

Also related...Hans von Spakovsky, Schlozman's GOP "voter fraud" partner at DoJ, comes before the Senate tomorrow for a hearing concerning his appointment as chair of the FEC. He had been previously recess-appointed to the position by Bush, but his Get Out of Jail Free Card is now up, and tomorrow he'll finally face questions on his role in gutting the Voting Rights Act at the DoJ against the advice of the decades-long experience of civil rights attorneys in the Voting Unit there. Five of those former DoJ staffers have written a letter to Congress urging them to reject von Spakovsky's nomination.

Paul Kiel at TPM Muck has many more details on both the Schlozman do-over and von Spakovsky's DoJ chicanery in advance of tomorrow's hearing.

(On the imaginary premise that Paris doesn't matter...)

Schlozman may be revising his Senate testimony in which he blamed Craig Donsanto, of DoJ's Public Integrity Unit (responsible for Election Crimes), for giving him the "all clear" to bring indictments for "voter fraud" in Missouri just days before the '06 election. The move was in violation of written DoJ policy which specifies that such cases that may have a political effect on elections are not to be filed until after such elections. In his testimony, Schlozman admitted (great video here) that he could have waited, but didn't.

Background and video on his previous testimony here, with a follow-up including details from a BRAD BLOG DoJ source here.

In not necessarily unrelated news, Bush lawyers up with nine additional attorneys today. Must be gettin' hot in there.

(Hat-tip to TPM for both items!)

McClatchy's Greg Gordon today:

Emails from Von Spakovsky recently revealed that he was also busy strong-arming and attempting "deals" with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) on a number of issues concerning disenfranchising Photo ID poll restrictions around that same time. For his efforts in all of the above, of course, von Spakovsky would later be recess-appointed by Bush to chair the Federal Elections Commission (FEC). We yelled about that appointment back in January of 2006 when nobody was listening.

A sampling of the extraordinary disparity in numbers of voter registrations taken by government agencies under the Clinton DoJ v. Bush DoJ...

Guest Blogged by BRAD BLOG's D.C. Correspondent Margie Burns

A quick post following up on that Senate Judiciary hearing on Tuesday with witnesses Schlozman and Graves. While I attended the hearing, not many Senators did. While at least half of the Democratic Senators on the committee showed up, no Republican Senators bothered to get there at all during the entire session. It seemed worthwhile to see if I could find out why.

The hearing, which has already been posted about by Brad (here and with a detailed follow up here), was headlined “Preserving Prosecutorial Independence: Is the Department of Justice Politicizing the Hiring and Firing of U.S. Attorneys? --- Part V." The matter under advisement was Missouri – easily the most torqued state in the union, elections-wise.

Witnesses: Bradley J. Schlozman, Associate Counsel to the Director, Executive Office for United States Attorneys, and former Interim U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, among other governmental offices he has held; and Todd Graves, former U.S. Attorney, Western District of Missouri before he got canned by the Bush administration (that appointed him in the first place).

As Brad has already blogged about the hearing and has posted video that adequately demonstrates some of the key witness’s peculiarities; no belaboring needed. Briefly, Graves – the USA yanked from his job, ostensibly to make room for someone else and then criticized in Monica Goodling’s sworn testimony – came off generally sounding more capable, and credible, than Mr. Schlozman. Brad Schlozman has a disconcerting way of speaking that makes it sound as though he honestly had, and has, no conception whatsoever that he could have been doing anything wrong by – for example – indicting members of the political opposition just a few days before a national election when the US Attorneys’ manual says don’t do that.

Perhaps all of the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee felt they knew what Schlozman would say, and didn't feel it necessary even to show up to float softballs to him in support of their home team, because none of them attended the hearing. This is a bit unusual. While the GOP quite often boycotts any hearing it wishes to, usually to quell public discovery, it generally designates one senatorial Republican to sit in, to keep an eye on things and sometimes to bring up extraneous matters. GOP SOP.

But Tuesday's hearing on Missouri elections fraud and DoJ Purge Gate issues had no GOP senators attending from start to finish. This was the first time that had happened to my knowledge during this series of hearings. So I telephoned the offices of the 9 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to ask why they didn’t attend and to see what, if any, comments I could get from them...

Despite the spotlight being shone on the DoJ's politicization of the electoral system in Missouri and similar "swing" states all across the country, and despite a crushing defeat to their frivolous prosecution against the Show-Me State's Sec. of State Robin Carnahan, which was damn near laughed out of court last April, the DoJ has now signed the paperwork to file an appeal in the very same case.

We were tipped off to the appeal by one of our insider DoJ sources who yesterday had referred to Bradley Schlozman's Senate Judiciary Committee testimony as being "on the razor's edge of perjury." We've got some follow up details on that comment in a moment from the source we'll now call DoJ-Throat.

But as to the Missouri case --- in which Schlozman and the DoJ charged improper voters on the registration rolls, and "voter fraud" of all un-evidenced sorts --- rising yet again from the dead, there is little reported so far, other than a blog in Columbia, MO, quoting SoS Carnahan decrying the appeal.

"The judge who heard this case was clear and unequivocal that the Office of Secretary of State had done its job," says Carnahan, according to the Politics Blog at the Columbia Tribune.

Indeed, as we reported last April, after the case was dismissed, U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey pulled few punches in her criticism of the case. "It is also telling that the United States has not shown that any Missouri resident was denied his or her right to vote as a result of deficiencies alleged by the United States," Laughrey decided. "Nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred."

But, as Republicans are wont to do, apparently, it's time to fire up the judicial system yet again for more partisan, frivolous litigation, we suppose. They refuse to go away. Like Jason, in yet another bad Friday the 13th movie. If they continue their forum shopping all the way up to the Supreme Court perhaps they'll find some Bush-appointed judges who are more friendly to the Bush-appointed US Attorneys bringing the action.

For clarity, this is not the "voter fraud" case that Schlozzie brought just days before the '06 election against several ACORN workers in Missouri. You know, the one which was brought in violation of the DoJ's own written rules mandating such cases not be brought when they might have a political impact on elections. The one which was made to look as if ACORN had done something wrong when, in fact, it was ACORN themselves who had alerted the state to concerns about registration forms submitted by their own workers, and with which nobody had ever actually cast a fraudulent vote. That's the case which Schlozzie admitted, in his testimony yesterday to Sen. Patrick Leahy, could have just as well been brought two weeks after the election instead of just days before it. (If you haven't seen the video of the Leahy/Schlozman exchange on this, we strongly recommend it.)

Rather, the case being appealed by DoJ is the one which former Missouri USA Todd Graves refused to bring in 2005, but which Schlozman insisted on bringing. The one alleging improper maintenance of the voter registration rolls by the state, no doubt, at the recommendation of the GOP's St. Louis "voter fraud" scammer in chief, Thor Hearne of the ACVR, as NPR finally reported on this morning.

As to the former "voter fraud" zealot/chipmunk Schlozman --- who moved from his inappropriate position overseeing the DoJ Voting Rights unit to his inappropriate position replacing Graves as US Attorney for Missouri's Western District in order to bring more frivolous and inappropriately timed "voter fraud" cases in to intimidate Democratic voters during a very close Senate election last year --- our DoJ source had some additional thoughts after yesterday's "razor's edge of perjury" testimony in the Senate...

Much more rolling still as the story continues to build on Thor Hearne and the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR) scam that we've been covering since March of 2005 here at The BRAD BLOG.

Today NPR finally jumped into the game on the heels of last week's superb and detailed exposé of Hearne by Murray Waas at National Journal. (We've yet to cover that report, and some other ACVR items of late in detail, but we hope to soon).

I was contacted last week by NPR's Peter Overby and spoke to him on the record for about 30 minutes. Part of that interview was used in a report today on NPR's Morning Edition.

"One of the administration's staunchest advocates in the voter-fraud debate has simply disappeared," begins the report that details the ACVR's "short but busy life" and includes an interview with "Liberal blogger Brad Friedman [who] has been following the center since March 2005."

Overby was unable to get any of ACVR's formerly media-friendly spokesmen to speak to them on the record, and they report how the group seems to have scurried back underground since the U.S. Attorney purge scandal began to shine a spotlight on their vote-suppression activities and direct connections to the White House. NPR also notes purged NM US Attotrney David Iglesias's claims that ACVR "worked with the White House to forward allegations of voter fraud" and quotes Loyola election law professor Rick Hasen, who picked up on much of our reporting for his own widely-noted recent article on "The incredible, disappearing American Center for Voting Rights" as published last month by Slate.

Click below to listen to the NPR report in full, which is just over 4 minutes...

And again, we'll have much more on ACVR and Thor soon, as I was contacted today by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which ran a story on them today with references to "Some of Hearne's most vocal critics also are Web-based liberal blog sites, which several months ago began pointing to his ties to Blunt and a link to one of the fired U.S. attorneys — Bud Cummins of Arkansas."

Can't imagine which "Web-based liberal blog sites" they may be referring to, but, oh, wait...yes, we can. Post reporter Jo Mannies says Hearne complained about us by name, and though she wasn't able to contact me for comment before today's report, she hopes to have more on all of this tomorrow. And, most likely, so will we.

Until then, here's one of our initial reports connecting Thor to the Bud Cummins slice of the U.S. Attorney purge. It hardly takes a "Web-based liberal blog site" to connect the dots. But whatever they need to say is fine by us, as long as they bother to report it. At least it hasn't taken two and a half years this time.

For more information on the "non-partisan" tax-exempt ACVR "Voter Fraud" scam and the snakeoil salesmen who invented it, Bush/Cheney '04 National General Counsel Mark F. "Thor" Hearne, and RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, please see BRAD BLOG's full Special Coverage of the "American Center for Voting Rights" at https://BradBlog.com/ACVR.