On Monday, Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) asked the Justice Department to launch an investigation into allegations of “caging” surrounding former U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin. Yesterday, Arkansas Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D) and Mark Pryor (D) joined them, suggesting that a Justice probe is necessary.
My first thought was, “Good. Let’s hope the DoJ takes the requests seriously.” My second thought was, “I better figure out what ‘caging’ means.”
Monica Goodling, with immunity in hand, recently testified about her knowledge of the U.S. Attorney scandal, and made several references to Griffin and caging. During the hearing, Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) said she wasn’t familiar with the term and asked Goodling to clarify. Goodling hemmed and hawed, suggesting that caging is “a direct-mail term, that people who do direct mail, when, when they separate addresses that may be good versus addresses that may be bad.”
I can appreciate Goodling’s hesitation, but that definition is wrong. Dahlia Lithwick explained:
Vote caging is an illegal trick to suppress minority voters (who tend to vote Democrat) by getting them knocked off the voter rolls if they fail to answer registered mail sent to homes they aren’t living at (because they are, say, at college or at war). The Republican National Committee reportedly stopped the practice following a consent decree in a 1986 case. Google the term and you’ll quickly arrive at the Wizard of Oz of caging, Greg Palast, investigative reporter and author of the wickedly funny Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans — Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Palast started reporting allegations of Republican vote caging for the BBC’s Newsnight in 2004. He’s been almost alone on the story since then. Palast contends, both in Armed Madhouse and widely through the liberal blogosphere, that vote caging, an illegal voter-suppression scheme, happened in Florida in 2004 this way:
The Bush-Cheney operatives sent hundreds of thousands of letters marked “Do not forward” to voters’ homes. Letters returned (“caged”) were used as evidence to block these voters’ right to cast a ballot on grounds they were registered at phony addresses. Who were the evil fakers? Homeless men, students on vacation and — you got to love this — American soldiers. Oh yeah: most of them are Black voters.
Why weren’t these African-American voters home when the Republican letters arrived? The homeless men were on park benches, the students were on vacation — and the soldiers were overseas.
This matters in the contest of the purge scandal because Griffin was directly involved with caging efforts in Florida in 2004.
If you put aside the Republicans’ law-breaking, cynicism, racism, and assault on democracy, caging is fairly clever. They target eligible voters for disenfranchisement, send them mail knowing it’ll be returned, and then use the “caged” mail to limit those voters’ access to the polls. This is particularly easy for the GOP when targeting soldiers — remember, that’s the pro-military party — who can’t check their mailboxes.
What does this have to do with Griffin and the prosecutor purge scandal? Well, Griffin was the research director for the RNC in 2004 and sent a series of confidential emails to Republican Party higher-ups with the suggestive heading “RE: caging.” The emails contained spreadsheets with the heading, “Caging,” with lists of homeless men and soldiers deployed in Iraq.
From the point of view of the ongoing DoJ scandal, perhaps what’s most urgent about the vote-caging claims is that they go a long, long way toward explaining why Karl Rove and Harriet Miers were so determined to get Griffin seated in the Arkansas U.S. Attorney’s office, and to do so without a confirmation hearing. If, as the Justice Department has continued to insist, Griffin was eminently qualified for the position, why did he need to be spared the hearing at all costs? And once it became clear that he would undergo a hearing, why did Griffin sideline himself with the colorful observation that undergoing Senate confirmation would be “like volunteering to stand in front of a firing squad in the middle of a three-ring circus?” Griffin — who is now in job talks with the Fred Thompson campaign — sure looks like a guy hiding something, and if vote caging is that something, it becomes even more interesting that the White House was pushing him forward.
Or, put another way, here’s what Congress wants to know: Did senior administration officials at the White House and the Justice Department seek to reward a Rove protege who engaged in illegal voter suppression tactics with a U.S. Attorney position? And did these same officials hope to cover it up by circumventing the confirmation process? And does this help explain the White House’s role in the purge scandal?
This is why senators are demanding an investigation. Stay tuned.