For Justice Department officials, testifying before Congress should be fairly easy, even when it comes to a scandal like the prosecutor purge. A witness has plenty of time to prepare, go over his or her notes, and review relevant documents. In fact, committees let witnesses know in advance lawmakers’ areas of interest, so they’ll be prepared to give accurate testimony.
The only time witnesses have to worry is when there’s actual wrongdoing involved. If so, they have to decide whether to tell the truth, whether previous comments were accurate, whether they’ll contradict others’ testimony, and how often they can get away with “I don’t recall.”
In the case of the Justice Department and the purge scandal, witnesses got a little help — from Karl Rove, who took on the role of testimony coach.
Deputy chief of staff Karl Rove participated in a hastily called meeting at the White House two months ago. The subject: The firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year. The purpose: to coach a top Justice Department official heading to Capitol Hill to testify on the prosecutorial purge on what he should say.
Now some investigators are saying that Rove’s attendance at the meeting shows that the president’s chief political advisor may have been involved in an attempt to mislead Congress — one more reason they are demanding to see his emails and force him to testify under oath.
As Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff explained, Rove’s role in these coaching sessions was helping witnesses keep their stories straight. Specifically, Rove encouraged principal associate deputy attorney general William Moscella and deputy attorney general Paul McNulty to explain “what you did and why you did it.”
Except Rove didn’t reveal pertinent information about the White House’s role in the purge.
The problem, according to the Democratic aide, is that Rove and Kelley never told Moscella about the White House’s own role in pushing to have some U.S. attorneys fired in the first place. Moscella followed the coaching by Rove and others — and made no mention of White House involvement in the firings during his March 6, 2007 testimony to House Judiciary. “They let Moscella come up here without telling him the full story,” said the Democratic staffer.
Moscella at one point even appeared to specifically deny that Rove pushed to have one of his former aides, Timothy Griffin, installed at a top job at Justice. “I don’t know that he played any role,” Moscella said when asked by one committee member what Rove played in recommending Griffin to Justice. Since then, the Justice Department turned over to Congress a department email that showed Griffin was installed as U.S. attorney in Arkansas because it was viewed as “important” to Rove and then White House counsel Harriet Miers.
Asked specifically whether Rove had withheld pertinent information to Moscella, deputy White House press secretary Tony Fratto said, I’m not commenting about any meetings. If the Committee wants to learn about it, they can accept our offer.” (The offer, of course, being Rove talking to the Senate Judiciary Committee in private, without an oath, and without a transcript.)
We peel a layer and find another, each looking worse than the last. In this case, Rove appears to have coached witnesses to mislead Congress. Moreover, as Josh Marshall noted, it raises an even more basic question.
Why do you need to ‘agree on clear reasons why each prosecutor was fired’ if the reasons were actually clear when you did the firing and if the reasons can be stated publicly? Think about it. Why do Rove and the other heavies from the White House need to tell these guys how important it is to get their stories straight? If I fire someone, I know why I fired them. I don’t need to get my story straight unless the real reason can’t be stated and I need to come up with a defensible and plausible alternative explanation.
The irony of this scandal is that it should be the easiest controversy in the world to explain away. The Bush gang initiated an unprecedented purge of U.S. Attorneys. All they need to do is explain why — and then this whole mess goes away.
And yet, five months later, they can’t. For that matter, they need Karl Rove to coach them on keeping their stories straight, and they still can’t.
They’ve had to make a decision about which is worse — pretending not to know the truth or admitting the truth. The fact that the Bush gang prefers the prior tells us just how bad the truth must be.