Nobody To Root For

So what's going on with this FBI raid of the head of the Office of Special Counsel, Scott Bloch? He was looking into investigations over violations of the Hatch Act by executive branch figures, including Karl Rove (although the punishment for violating the Hatch Act is to lose your executive branch job, so I'm not sure why he's investigating) and Condi Rice. However, his hands aren't exactly clean either, having erased all the files on his computer with the help of Geeks on Call instead of the White House email technicians, and has been accused of improper retaliation against employees who disagreed with his policies. I agree with looseheadprop that this feels like a Mafia turf war, but for my money bmaz had the best take.

Bloch appears to be a bit of a nondescript, but deeply religious, party level toady that they pulled out of the mid-west, to serve as Associate Director and then Deputy Director and Counsel to the Task Force for Faith-based and Community Initiatives at the U.S. Department of Justice. (Why exactly is there even such an office in the DOJ at all???). The Bushies then wanted to plug a Regent like theobot toady into the OSC, and decided Bloch fit the bill. Bloch then went about doing his job, which was effectively to do nothing and fill up the ranks with incompetent theobot types, just like they were doing all over the government and, as we know so well, especially the DOJ. But Bloch got a little ham fisted in his efforts to weed his office of teh gay in the process, which caused an amount of scrutiny and heat.

About that time, Bloch's office started being forced into relevance because of all the Hatch Act violations and other things that the Bushies have done to create whistleblowers that are supposed to fall under Bloch's office's parameters. This created a confluence of events for Bloch; he morally/religiously really believes in his purge of teh gay and, just maybe, he actually has some moral convictions on the impropriety of much of the Bushco creed. So, he starts actually doing his job on the Bushco ills, just a little, both because he knew there were ills and to push back and protect himself for what he had done. Picture a John DiIulio and/or David Kuo that, instead of just leaving, stayed and fought.

Because of the Rove, Doan, and then the USA Purgegate scandals, this little internecine battle erupted into the public consciousness, and neither side backed off. Bloch was preparing some stinging reports that would really be a poke in the eye to the Bushies, and they wanted to squelch those. The Bushies determined that it would be necessary to take out Bloch, but they didn't want it to be alleged that they did it to cover and protect Lurita "Cookies" Doan and wanted it to look like they did it for cause against Bloch. So they cooked Doan (she was a pain in the ass anyway by then, so no loss to them) as a preemptory strike in preparation for going after Bloch. Then, they went after Bloch to put the kabosh, as much as they can, on his reports on Bushco. And that is where we are at now.

Read the whole thing. Sometimes really juicy information comes out of turf wars and hurt feelings like this, so while nobody in this mess is praiseworthy there might be a good yield, so it's worth keeping an eye on.

No Confidence Vote

What many are hearing is that the Senate plans to hold a no confidence vote on Alberto Gonzales. This is fine considering that the vote is likely to be 99-1 against him (oh Orrin Hatch, you lovable holdout), but it does keep the focus on Gonzales and away from Rove and the politicization of the Justice Department coming out of the White House, which I suspect is what Bush wants. Abu G is a firewall.

Of course, if this hastens taking down the firewall, all to the good...

UPDATE: This diary is not very promising about the investigative ability of Scott Bloch, who has some evidence of being a loyal Bushie. In the end, this Office of Special Counsel investigation is still a case of the executive branch investigating itself. So Rove may be safe from that as well. The firewall, I maintain, is Abu G. And the Congress still has to be the prime mover of the investigation.

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.