Subpoena Powerful

Henry Waxman is on a roll. He obtained documents from the White House related to their contract with MZM, the company which bribed Duke Cunningham.

At issue is a $140,000 contract awarded to MZM Inc. in July 2002 by the Executive Office of the President. MZM was run by Mitchell Wade, who is cooperating with federal prosecutors. He pleaded guilty in February 2006 to bribing Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif., in exchange for more than $150 million in government contracts for MZM.

Cunningham is serving a prison sentence for taking more than $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors.

When he requested information about the contract in March, Waxman noted “serious irregularities” with other MZM work and said his inquiry was part of an ongoing investigation into waste, fraud and abuse in government contracting.

Waxman's also getting subpoenas for the RNC and Condi Rice for various investigations. Rice has suggested that she won't honor the subpoena:

The subpoena issued to Rice seeks to force her testimony about the claim that Iraq sought to import uranium from Niger for its nuclear weapons program. President Bush offered that as a key rationale for the war in his 2003 State of the Union address. The subpoena was approved by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee along party lines, 21 to 10. [...]

"A subpoena is not a request; it's a demand for information," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House oversight committee that issued the bulk of yesterday's subpoenas. "They ought to understand it's no longer a request, it's no longer an option." [...]

The demand for Rice's testimony would put a spotlight on her role as national security adviser in promoting discredited administration claims that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

"There was one person in the White House who had primary responsibility to get the intelligence about Iraq right -- and that was Secretary Rice, who was then President Bush's national security adviser," Waxman said. "The American public was misled about the threat posed by Iraq, and this committee is going to do its part to find out why."

Rice, in Oslo for a meeting with NATO foreign ministers, said on Thursday she was not inclined to appear before the committee, saying her advice to the president as National Security Adviser was privileged, the Associated Press reported. She said that she had answered many of the same questions in her confirmation hearings for secretary of state, and said she would respond to this round of inquiry in writing -- but not in person.

Like Waxman said, it's a demand. He's been asking Rice for this information for months, if not years, and she has replied by shoe-shopping. Of course, compelling testimony will result in going to the US Attorney for DC to enforce the subpoena. Whatta Catch-22.

The RNC subpoena concerns the Rovian plot to politicize federal agencies and mobilize them to work for Republican candidates. The Lurita Doan hearing was just the tip of the iceberg.

White House officials conducted 20 private briefings on Republican electoral prospects in the last midterm election for senior officials in at least 15 government agencies covered by federal restrictions on partisan political activity, a White House spokesman and other administration officials said yesterday.

The previously undisclosed briefings were part of what now appears to be a regular effort in which the White House sent senior political officials to brief top appointees in government agencies on which seats Republican candidates might win or lose, and how the election outcomes could affect the success of administration policies, the officials said.

The existence of one such briefing, at the headquarters of the General Services Administration in January, came to light last month, and the Office of Special Counsel began an investigation into whether the officials at the briefing felt coerced into steering federal activities to favor those Republican candidates cited as vulnerable.

All of the information is on the table now. It's just a matter of connecting the dots. Rove's shop was clearly steering federal agencies to aid political candidates. The Justice Department, through its punitive use of investigations, was doing the same thing. Even the topic of Rice's subpoena, the Niger forgeries, were used in a political way, and remember that Rove was part of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), the group tasked with marketing the war. There only seems like there are a lot of scandals. In fact they're all related. And they tie back to one philosophy: a permanent Republican majority at all costs. It's crashing on the rocks now, and the illegalities used to try and secure it are plain to see.

Stay tuned.