2007 Congressional Testimony Video Shows that Bush's CCR Had Gone Rogue Long Ago...
By Brad Friedman on 8/25/2008, 8:00am PT  

Blogged by Brad Friedman from Boulder, CO...

Just as I went off the grid late last week, this news came in, so some of you may be ahead of me on this one. In either case, it's still worth noting that GOP/DoJ vote suppressor, Hans von Spakovsky was secretly hired by Bush's bad joke of a "Commission on Civil Rights" to oversee the '08 elections, as reported by TPMMuckraker's Kate Klonick late last week.

While the story is mindblowing, it's not all together surprising given the CCR's embarrassing track record under Bush. See the amazing flashback video of the CCR's Peter Kirsanow testifying to Congress in 2007, as posted below after Klonick's lede, and everything will likely make "sense"...

It looks like Hans von Spakovsky, an old TPM favorite, is back in business. The former Justice Department official, whose nomination to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) was thwarted when Democrats objected to his long record of support for restrictions on voting rights, has been hired as a "consultant and temporary full-time employee" at the ostensibly bi-partisan U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) the agency confirmed to TPMmuckraker.

If Spakovsky's history of backing efforts to make voting more difficult strikes you as a poor fit with the Commission's mission of defending voter rights, consider that of the eight current commissioners at the agency, only two are registered Democrats, a politicization that the New York Times' Charlie Savage brought to light last year.

Among Spakovsky's duties will be overseeing the USCCR's report on the Justice Department's monitoring of the 2008 presidential elections, a source inside the USCCR told TPMmuckraker.

Spakovsky's hiring is at the request of Commissioner Todd Gaziano, who works for the conservative Heritage Foundation on FEC issues and has defended Spakovsky in the press before. According to a federal government source, Gaziano has recommended Spakovsky at the government's highest payscale --- which would work out to about $124,010 annually if Spakovsky was to stay for an entire year.


As the rest of Klonick's piece notes, the Commission tried to keep von Spakovsky's hiring a secret. But the wholly-compromised CCR's love affair with the entire, phony GOP "voter fraud" scam is nothing new. Back in 2007, commissioner Peter Kirsanow repeated the entire White House/GOP/Thor Hearne "voter fraud" mantra, at lightning speed, and by rote, to a Congressional panel, even unabashedly naming Hearne by name (as "Mark Hearne") in his testimony. (See the stunning video of his testimony at right, as we ran it with this article in June of '07.)

Kirsanow's testimony even came after Hearne's ACVR scam had to be shut down when the "non-partisan" GOP front group was named as being at the heart of the U.S. Attorney Purge scandal. Didn't stop the shameless Kirsanow, of course, from proudly and publicly associating with Hearne. Much as von Spakovsky's track record as a vote suppressor didn't stop the laughable-were-it-not-all-so-sad Bush "Commission on Civil Rights" from giving him a job, and thousands of your tax dollars to keep up the suppression, all on a government salary and with and official "U.S. Government stamp of approval."

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Article Categories: ACVR, Election Fraud, Election 2008, Dept. of Justice, Voter Registration, Hans Von Spakovsky