Voter fraud complaints drove attorney purge

Many of the fired US Attorneys were fired because they weren't sufficiently responsive to GOP accusations of voter fraud against Democrats:

Nearly half the U.S. attorneys slated for removal by the administration last year were targets of Republican complaints that they were lax on voter fraud, including efforts by presidential adviser Karl Rove to encourage more prosecutions of election- law violations, according to new documents and interviews.

Of the 12 U.S. attorneys known to have been dismissed or considered for removal last year, five were identified by Rove or other administration officials as working in districts that were trouble spots for voter fraud -- Kansas City, Mo.; Milwaukee; New Mexico; Nevada; and Washington state. Four of the five  prosecutors in those districts were dismissed. [WaPo]

We've known for a long time that voter fraud allegations were a factor in the purge, but the Washington Post is now concluding that the issue was "more central than previously known."

According to the WaPo article, AUSA Steve Biskupic of Wisconsin came within a hair's breadth of termination because Karl Rove deemed him insufficiently responsive to Republican fraud allegations.

As you may recall, Biskupic was responsible for sending Georgia Thompson to prison on trumped up corruption charges. The apolitical Ms. Thompson worked for Wisconsin's Democratic governor. Biskupic alleged that Thompson gave a contract to a particular firm because that firm's CEO gave to the governor's campaign. In fact, the firm submitted the lowest bid. The 56-year-old spent four months in prison and lost her home before a court reversed her conviction.

Comments

[Disgusted Beyond Belief]

Karl Rove is a scumbag of the highest order. I just feel compelled to say that whenever I see an article about this. It is almost impossible not to type those words.

[swampcracker]

In many ways, the Gonzo-Gate scandal is a replay of what Rove did in Texas when GWB was governor: Engage in whisper campaigns and disinformation to the press about pending indictments of Dem candidates to create an aura of suspicion. After the election, which the Dem would invariably lose due to the bad publicity, the indictments would disappear or never happen.

Gonzo-Gate is the same thing on a national scale. To borrow from John Dean, Gonzo-Gate is "Worse than Watergate."

This so-called obsession with "election fraud" started immediately after the Nov 2006 losses. Stupid thing about Rove, however: How could he think there would be no Congressional oversight of a Dem-controlled Congress (or was he blind-sighted by his own arrogance and inflated sense of invincibility)?

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Agreed, swampcracker. This is Rove's MO writ large.

[cfrost]

As you may recall, Biskupic was responsible for sending Georgia Thompson to prison on trumped up corruption charges

No, I don’t recall, and didn’t know to begin with. In a river of GOP sewage, it’s impossible to spot and track every rat and turd floating past. Thanks, Lindsay, for alerting us to this heartwarming story of Republican apparatchik vermin screwing an innocent woman out of house and liberty.

This so-called obsession with "election fraud" started immediately after the Nov 2006 losses.

I remember Rush Limbaugh ranting and sweating about “election fraud” at least three or four years ago. I figured at the time the oxycontin hadn’t kicked in yet, or the viagra hadn’t worked the night before, and thought nothing more of it. Silly me, I should know better: Rush works from a script. Duh.

The Bushbabies falling into the cesspool of their own fantasies is hardly a new story. A certain amount of true-believer magical thinking evidently convinced these clowns that if they all believed in fairies and clapped their hands, Tinkerbell in a prosecutor’s suit would uncover a vast conspiracy of nefarious Democratic ballot-box stuffers. These are the “Office of Faith Based Initiatives” folks after all. The same sort of delusional mentality seized not just the GOP, but the press and an alarmingly large portion of the public when they all persuaded themselves that Saddam Hussein was about to obliterate Western Civilization, and that we could just sprinkle the Middle East with magic, sparkly peace dust (or peace bombs) to fix the problem.

That Rove, Gonzales, inter alia, apparently thought that using the DOJ for dirty trick operations a la Nixon’s plumbers was a good and practicable idea is sufficient evidence that they are either outright crazy, or so reckless that the line between expediency and madness has been blurred to the point that they are literally not fit to roam the streets at large. The kind of arrogant, optimistic hallucinations coming from the Bush White House are the same sort of idiotic fantasma that drove French and German armies into Russia.