Gonzogate Update

Josh Marshall gives a nice rundown of what's ahead in the US Attorney scandal. The President amusingly complained that the investigation is being dragged out for "political reasons." To which I say: exactly. For political reasons, the Justice Department is hiding what they know and resisting all efforts to obtain documents to finish the process.

But onward it goes. The Inspector General of the Justice Department is expanding its investigation to include those political, illegal hiring practices that Monica Goodling discussed in her testimony. But it's actually bigger than Goodling.

Goodling admitted last week to improperly taking poltiical considerations into account in the hiring of assistant U.S. attorneys, immigration judges and appointments to the Board of Immigration Appeals. But the IG and OPR's investigation appears to go far beyond Goodling.

Allegations concerning political hiring for the Honors Program -- the Department's historically rigorous program for hiring entry-level lawyers -- have centered on Michael Elston, the chief of staff to the deputy attorney general. A group of anonymous Justice Department employees raised alarms with Congress last month, complaining that Elston rejected hundreds of potential applicants to the program last year seemingly based on their political backgrounds.

And Goodling also hasn't been implicated in allegedly political hiring practices in the Department's Civil Rights Division. Those allegations have centered on Bradley Schlozman, the former #2 at the division, who has been accused of recruiting Republicans for career spots and then asking them to scrub mentions of their GOP bona fides from their resumes. Schlozman subsequently was appointed as an interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City -- and returned to main Justice to work in the Executive Office of United States Attorneys after he was replaced by a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney. He's scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee this coming Tuesday.

On June 5, Bradley Schlozman and his predecessor in the USA for Missouri slot, Todd Graves, will be testifying to Congress, which should be very interesting. Schlozman is the Zelig of this scandal, appearing at virtually every spot, particularly where voter fraud cases are concerned. We know that the central rationale for firing these federal prosecutors, and for politicizing the Justice Department in general, was to push bogus voter fraud investigations in order to inavalidate and intimidate potential voters, and suppress turnout. We know that this hue and cry served to curb legitimate voting:

During four years as a Justice Department civil rights lawyer, Hans von Spakovsky went so far in a crusade against voter fraud as to warn of its dangers under a pseudonym in a law journal article [...]

Now, amid a scandal over politicization of the Justice Department, Congress is beginning to examine allegations that von Spakovsky was a key player in a Republican campaign to hang onto power in Washington by suppressing the votes of minority voters.

"Mr. von Spakovsky was central to the administration's pursuit of strategies that had the effect of suppressing the minority vote," charged Joseph Rich, a former Justice Department voting rights chief who worked under him.

He and other former career department lawyers say that von Spakovsky steered the agency toward voting rights policies not seen before, pushing to curb minor instances of election fraud by imposing sweeping restrictions that would make it harder, not easier, for Democratic-leaning poor and minority voters to cast ballots.

Those four paragraphs tell pretty much the entire story of this scandal. The idea was to use voter fraud cases as a pretext to impose draconian voting laws that would suppress Democratic turnout. This is an ongoing, decades-long project, where fake grassroots "voting rights" groups just appear and disappear at opportune moments, when it's useful to powerful interests to have a cabal yelling from the outside.

The American Center for Voting Rights... has literally just disappeared as an organization... With no notice and little comment, ACVR—the only prominent nongovernmental organization claiming that voter fraud is a major problem, a problem warranting strict rules such as voter-ID laws—simply stopped appearing at government panels and conferences. Its Web domain name has suddenly expired, its reports are all gone (except where they have been preserved by its opponents), and its general counsel, Mark "Thor" Hearne, has cleansed his résumé of affiliation with the group. Hearne won't speak to the press about ACVR's demise. No other group has taken up the "voter fraud" mantra.

The death of ACVR says a lot about the Republican strategy of raising voter fraud as a crisis in American elections. Presidential adviser Karl Rove and his allies, who have been ghostbusting illusory dead and fictional voters since the contested 2000 election, apparently mounted a two-pronged attack. One part of that attack, at the heart of the current Justice Department scandals, involved getting the DoJ and various U.S. attorneys in battleground states to vigorously prosecute cases of voter fraud. That prong has failed. After exhaustive effort, the Department of Justice discovered virtually no polling-place voter fraud, and its efforts to fire the U.S. attorneys in battleground states who did not push the voter-fraud line enough has backfired.

And this is why the investigations will be as slow as molasses. The Republicans do not want this criminal enterprise to really get into the consciousness of the electorate. They would rather it remain the stuff of he said-she said, the sturm und drang of modern politics. The truth is that this was a systematic effort to disenfranchise Democrats.

UPDATE: President Pissypants, on Rove:

Q How central a role did Rove play in the U.S. attorney business? That's what everybody wants to know. Was he the main guy drawing up the list?

THE PRESIDENT: Just look at the facts as they've come out.

Q It's unclear.

THE PRESIDENT: There has been plenty of testimony, plenty of hearings, plenty of statements. And one thing is for certain, that there was no wrongdoing done. And --

I believe it's cut off because the interviewer's head exploded and Bush was unsure of whether or not to continue.