The past couple of weeks, we’ve leaned about White House efforts to shamelessly politicize the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the General Services Administration, and the Office of the Surgeon General, agencies that no one ever really thought of as arms of a campaign machine.
Today, the Washington Post moves the ball forward even further. Karl Rove’s office, which reportedly isn’t supposed to be involved with foreign policy, apparently delivered detailed political briefings to diplomats and officials who help shape the administration’s international affairs.
White House aides have conducted at least half a dozen political briefings for the Bush administration’s top diplomats, including a PowerPoint presentation for ambassadors with senior adviser Karl Rove that named Democratic incumbents targeted for defeat in 2008 and a “general political briefing” at the Peace Corps headquarters after the 2002 midterm elections.
The briefings, mostly run by Rove’s deputies at the White House political affairs office, began in early 2001 and included detailed analyses for senior officials of the political landscape surrounding critical congressional and gubernatorial races, according to documents obtained by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The documents show for the first time how the White House sought to ensure that even its appointees involved in foreign policy were kept attuned to the administration’s election goals. Such briefings occurred semi-regularly over the past six years for staffers dealing with domestic policy, White House officials have previously acknowledged.
When the Bush gang politicized, for example, the Faith-Based Office, at least there was a logical rationale behind it. The White House wanted to corrupt a federal agency to help Republicans, so it manipulated the office into intervening in specific political campaigns. It’s probably illegal, but at least it makes some sense — the Faith-Based Office had grants it could it distribute with political ends in mind.
But in this case, Rove wanted ambassadors, USAID officials, aides at the State Department, and even Peace Corps officials to know which GOP candidates needed their help.
It’s hardly a secret that the White House is run by inept and corrupt clowns, but this is just embarrassing.
On Jan. 4, just after the 2006 elections tossed the Republicans out of congressional power, Rove met at the White House with six U.S. ambassadors to key European missions and the consul general to Bermuda while the diplomats were in Washington for a State Department conference.
According to a department letter to the Senate panel, Rove explained the White House views on the electoral disaster while Sara M. Taylor, then the director of White House political affairs, showed a PowerPoint presentation that pinned most of the electoral blame on “corrupt” GOP lawmakers and “complacent incumbents.” One chart in Taylor’s presentation highlighted the GOP’s top 36 targets among House Democrats for the 2008 election.
In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, asked whether the briefings inappropriately politicized the diplomatic agencies or violated prohibitions against political work by most federal employees.
“I do not understand why ambassadors, in Washington on official duty, would be briefed by White House officials on which Democratic House members are considered top targets by the Republican party for defeat in 2008. Nor do I understand why department employees would need to be briefed on ‘key media markets’ in states that are ‘competitive’ for the president,” Biden wrote.
I’m going to assume Biden was being intentionally coy, because he’s certainly clever enough to know full well why these briefings were occurring. The Bush gang, which looks more and more like an organized crime family with each passing scandal, believes the levers of government are just tools to be exploited in the building of a Permanent Republican Majority. That laws are in place to prevent this is entirely irrelevant; Rove has federal agencies to exploit and can’t be bothered with pesky details like criminal behavior.
The Hatch Act strictly prohibits executive-branch employees from using their positions for political purposes. The White House defense for all of this is transparently ridiculous. A White House hack said the briefings were simply to offer foreign policy officials an “understanding of the political landscape.”
Ambassadors and Peace Corps officials? Why do they need a briefing from the White House on the political landscape?
The answer, of course, is that Rove’s office considers everything in the executive branch — literally, every office and every official — a partisan instrument to be exploited.