[Sosfbay-discuss] Rove aide resigns over 'vote caging' revelation (Brad Blog; Slate)

[JamBoi]

The Brad Blog
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4620

BLOGGED BY Brad Friedman ON 5/31/2007 9:58PM

House Judiciary Chair Tells Palast in Interview:
'We're Not Through With Griffin by Any Means'

Indicates Caging Operation Could Not Have Been
Done Without Knowledge of Rove, According to
Palast Team...


As reported previously
<http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4608>, investigative
journalist Greg Palast was scheduled to meet with
John Conyers this evening for an on-camera
interview for the BBC. His team, just out from
the interview, sends this dispatch to The BRAD
BLOG...

<< Rove Pick for US Attorney Resigns After
Conyers Seeks Evidence from BBC

Tim Griffin, formerly right hand man to Karl
Rove, resigned Thursday as US Attorney for
Arkansas hours after BBC Television 'Newsnight'
reported that Congressman John Conyers requested
the network's evidence on Griffin's involvement
in 'caging voters.' Greg Palast, reporting for
both BBC Newsnight and Democracy Now, obtained a
series of confidential emails dating from the
2004 presidential election in which the GOP
operative transmitted so-called 'caging lists' of
voters to state party leaders.

Experts have concluded the caging lists were
designed for a mass challenge voters right to
cast ballots. The caging lists were heavily
weighted with minority voters including
African-American homeless men, students and
soldiers sent overseas. 

Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary
Committee investigating the firing of US
Attorneys, met Thursday evening in New York with
Palast. After reviewing key documents, Conyers
stated that, despite Griffin's resignation,
"we're not through with him by any means."

Conyers indicated that he thought it unlikely
that Griffin could carry out this massive
'caging' operation without the knowledge of White
House Deputy Chief of Staff Rove.

Griffin, who was chosen as US Attorney at Rove's
request, has not responded to requests by BBC to
explain the 'caging' memos. >>

For more on the caging lists, see Palast's BRAD
BLOG Exclusive from last week
<http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4594>, just after
Monica Goodling's stunning admissions
<http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4591> concerning vote
caging allegations about Griffin in her House
Judiciary Committee testimony.

Also see our coverage of Slate's article
<http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4619> late this
afternoon as they become the first MSM-ish outlet
to give a serious look at Goodling's
overlooked-by-the-MSM, yet bombshell statement.

Palast first reported on the emails from Griffin
containing vote caging lists for BBC's Newsnight,
prior to the 2004 Presidential Election.


*  *  *  *  *


Raging Caging
What the heck is vote caging, and why should we
care?

By Dahlia Lithwick
Slate, May 31, 2007
http://www.slate.com/id/2167284/


Last week, in her testimony before the House
judiciary committee, Monica Goodling referred
several times to "vote caging" possibly done by
Arkansas' soon to be ex-interim, never-confirmed
U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin. Yet Goodling was
questioned about this almost not at all, nor did
the media do much more than report the words of
the former liaison between the White House and
Alberto Gonzales (why a "liaison" is required
between two institutions with no boundaries
between them is incomprehensible, but perhaps
another story). Meanwhile, liberal talk radio,
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the blogosphere went
nuts. So, which is it: Is vote caging the most
underreported part of this U.S. attorneys scandal
or the most over-hyped? 

One of the reasons the mainstream news reports
(including mine) barely touched the vote-caging
story was that nobody had any idea what Goodling
was talking about. "Vote caging, what's that?" we
e-mailed each other at Slate. The confusion
seemed to extend to Goodling herself. The subject
came up in her testimony about former Deputy
Attorney General Paul McNulty. In saying he had
not been forthright with the House judiciary
committee in his testimony on the firing of the
U.S. attorneys, she cited three areas, one of
which was McNulty's failure "to disclose that he
had some knowledge of allegations that Tim
Griffin had been involved in 'vote caging' in the
president's 2004 campaign," when he spoke to
Congress. 

Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., asked Goodling to
"explain what caging is," clarifying that she was
unfamiliar with the term. Goodling fumbled
around, muttered something about, "it's 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," then made
sure to end with, "I don't 
 I believe that Mr.
Griffin doesn't believe that he, that he did
anything wrong there and there, there actually is
a very good reason for it, for a very good
explanation." Which explanation Goodling did not
then provide.

To recap, Goodling told the judiciary committee
that: 1) Griffin was possibly involved in caging;
2) he doesn't believe he did anything wrong (she
is less certain, it seems); and 3) McNulty lied
under oath when he downplayed his knowledge of
these allegations to the committee. 

That would suggest that vote caging is a big
deal. Is it?

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. >>

Palast supplies evidence linking Tim Griffin,
then-research director for the RNC, to this
caging plot; specifically, a series of
confidential e-mails to Republican Party
muckety-mucks with the suggestive heading "RE:
caging." The e-mails were accidentally sent to a
George Bush parody site. They also contained
suggestively named spreadsheets, headed "caging"
as well. The names on the lists are what Palast's
researchers deemed to be homeless men and
soldiers deployed in Iraq. Here are the e-mails. 

As Palast points out—and Griffin himself has
observed—the American media barely touched this
story, and Griffin has yet to explain the e-mails
or the lists. He did tell The New Yorker's Jane
Mayer last March that "caging is not a derogatory
term. ... [I]t's a direct-mail term. It derives
from caging categories of mail in steel shelves
and files." Still, that hardly explains why he
was allegedly caging only transient
African-American voters in those shelves or
files, which would likely violate the Voting
Rights Act. 

Palast is surely not above overstatement. He is
one of many who have repeated the claim that, "In
an Aug. 24 e-mail, the Justice Department's
Monica Goodling wrote to Sampson, that Griffin's
nomination would face opposition in Congress
because he was involved 'in massive Republican
projects in Florida and elsewhere by which
Republicans challenged tens of thousand of
absentee votes. Coincidentally, many of those
challenged votes were in black precincts.' "
Goodling wrote no such thing. That quote is from
an article circulated by Goodling on Aug. 24.
It's an unfair smear of both Griffin and Goodling
(both of whom have proven amply capable of
smearing themselves).

Still, Palast's vote-caging claims are hardly
unbelievable. Republicans have been
systematically trying to suppress minority votes
for decades, most recently calling it pushback
for rampant liberal voter fraud. Our own former
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist was alleged to
have mastered the art. And while bouncing voters
from the rolls on the basis of their race
violates federal law, it's not beyond imagining
that eager young "loyal Bushies" aren't all that
bothered by federal laws, especially if there's a
way to bend rather than overtly break them. 

>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. 

Why did Goodling choose to shine a beacon on the
vote-caging allegations in her perfectly
rehearsed, highly coached testimony last week?
Having slaved to secure Griffin's U.S. attorney
post, why raise the allegations against him and
then subtly distance herself from him, if there
is nothing to see here? Professor Rick Hasen of
Loyola Law School, who wrote earlier this month
about voter fraud, is my personal voting-law
guru. (Everyone needs one.) When I asked him
whether the mainstream media were making a
mistake in blowing off the vote-caging story, he
said Goodling's mention of it "makes me suspect
that there's something there worth investigating
by the MSM, even if you don't buy into the grand
conspiracy theories."

___________________

JamBoi: Jammy, The Sacred Cow Slayer
The Green Parties' #1 Blogger
http://dailyJam.blogspot.com

"To the brave belong all things"
Celt's invading Etrusca reply to nervous Romans around 400BC

"Live humbly, laugh often and love unconditionally" (anon)


       
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