National Journal’s investigative reporter Murray Waas has been digging into the White House’s role in covering up its involvement in the prosecutor purge. This one looks like a doozy.
The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protege of Rove’s, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.
The withheld records show that D. Kyle Sampson, who was then-chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, consulted with White House officials in drafting two letters to Congress that appear to have misrepresented the circumstances of Griffin’s appointment as U.S. attorney and of Rove’s role in supporting Griffin.
The details of the White House’s role are explained in emails that the Justice Department has, but has withheld from Congress as part of an apparent cover-up.
Several of the e-mails that the Bush administration is withholding from Congress, as well as papers from the White House counsel’s office describing other withheld documents, were made available to National Journal by a senior executive branch official, who said that the administration has inappropriately kept many of them from Congress.
The senior official said that Gonzales, in preparing for testimony before Congress, has personally reviewed the withheld records and has a responsibility to make public any information he has about efforts by his former chief of staff, other department aides, and White House officials to conceal Rove’s role.
“If [Gonzales] didn’t know everything that was going on when it went down, that is one thing,” this official said. “But he knows and understands chapter and verse. If there was an effort within Justice and the White House to mislead Congress, it is his duty to disclose that to Congress. As the country’s chief law enforcement official, he has a higher duty to disclose than to protect himself or the administration.”
So, which documents is the Justice Department sitting on?
Paul Kiel explains:
The story deals with two separate letters that the Justice Department sent to Congress about the firings.
The first was a January 31 letter to Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AK) assuring him that “not once” had the administration considered using the Patriot Act provision to install Tim Griffin, Karl Rove’s former aide, as the U.S. attorney for Little Rock. The provision allowed the attorney general to appoint interim U.S. attorneys indefinitely without Senate confirmation.
Of course, Kyle Sampson had been pushing to use the provision for months — and had communicated the plan to the White House.
But when it came time to answer questions about it, the White House signed off on a letter saying that they had never contemplated such a thing. And the withheld documents show that Christopher Oprison was the White House official who signed off on the letter — that’s funny because Kyle Sampson had layed out the plan to use the Patriot Act provision to appoint Griffin in an email to Oprison just a month before.
The second letter in the piece is a February 23rd letter to Congress that claimed that Karl Rove hadn’t had any role in appointing Griffin. Fittingly, Oprison also signed off on that one — even though Sampson had written him in an email in December that Griffin’s appointment was “important to Karl.”
Naturally, the White House insists Oprison “did not recall Karl’s interest when he reviewed the letter,” which seems hard to believe. For that matter, a White House spokesperson added that they have “no record of that letter ever leaving the White House counsel’s office.”
As Kiel summarized, “In other words, they never bothered to ask Karl Rove or any one in his office to check whether the statement was true. And they just forgot that Sampson earlier had boasted about Rove’s interest. Huh.”
Huh, indeed. Gonzales is “confident” that he’s “weathered the storm“? Sounds to me like he’s just in the eye of the hurricane, and doesn’t realize the rest of the storm is on the way.