The Office of Special Counsel

At the end of Bush's press conference this morning, somebody yelled out "Office of Special Counsel" as he walked away, and having not read this story yet I hadn't understood what it meant. But this could be enormous:

Most of the time, an obscure federal investigative unit known as the Office of Special Counsel confines itself to monitoring the activities of relatively low-level government employees, stepping in with reprimands and other routine administrative actions for such offenses as discriminating against military personnel or engaging in prohibited political activities.

But the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.

I think the DC media will confuse the Office of Special Counsel with special counsels like Ken Starr and Patrick Fitzgerald and give this agency a lot of attention. Somebody already yelled out the name to the President.

So what are they investigating?

The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.

First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part.

"We will take the evidence where it leads us," Scott J. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview Monday. "We will not leave any stone unturned." [...]

The question of improper political influence over government decision-making is at the heart of the controversy over the firing of U.S. attorneys and the ongoing congressional investigation of the special e-mail system installed in the White House and other government offices by the Republican National Committee.

All administrations are political, but this White House has systematically brought electoral concerns to Cabinet agencies in a way unseen previously.

For example, Rove and his top aides met each year with presidential appointees throughout the government, using PowerPoint presentations to review polling data and describe high-priority congressional and other campaigns around the country.

Some officials have said they understood that they were expected to seek opportunities to help Republicans in these races, through federal grants, policy decisions or in other ways.

I mean, that's an open-and-shut case. That embarrassing hearing Henry Waxman held with Lurita Doan of the General Services Administration proved fairly easily that Karl Rove's shop was holding PowerPoint presentations about 2008 Republican candidates, in violation of the Hatch Act, and that wasn't done just to keep GSA officials abreast of the latest news. It was meant to set priorities for how they could help these candidates. These same briefing happened in the Interior Department and throughout the government. And it was illegal. Executive branch agencies are not an extension of the RNC.

And like the article says, this will be a unified investigation. The US Attorneys scandal appears to reach into the White House, since nobody at the Justice Department can explain how the names of those to be fired got on the list. The RNC is taking the cues from the White House on what emails to release to Waxman's committee, and the very act of government officials using non-governmental emails is a violation of the Presidential Records Act, and designed to circumvent Hatch Act violations.

So what is being investigated by the OSC is nothing less than the entire method of Bush-Rove era governance. I hope that this Scott Bloch guy doesn't start his own car.