• House Majority Whip Tom DeLay’s Policy Analyst – Tom Pyle.
• Majority Chief Counsel and Staff Director for the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice – Garry Malphrus – now Bush’s Deputy Director of the President’s Domestic Policy Council.
• Former Legislative Director to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Rep. Van Hilleary (R-Tenn.) – Roger Morse – now Senior Government Affairs Analyst for Federal Policy Practice (Lobbyist) for Preston Gates & Ellis.
• Regional Political Director for the Bush/Cheney 2000 Campaign, former Chief of Staff for Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) – Matthew Schlapp – now Bush’s Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Political Affairs at the White House.
• House Republican Conference Analyst – Kevin Smith – now Bush’s Senior Communications Counselor for the House Education and Workforce Committee (promoting No Child Left Behind).
• General Counsel to Chairman Don Young (R-Alaska) of the House Resources Committee – Duane Gibson – followed Young to the House Transportation & Infrastructure Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, then brought his Capitol Hill expertise to Greenberg Traurig’s Government Affairs Section (Lobbyist - *Update: Abramoff's law firm).
• Former Legislative Assistant to former Rep. Jim Ross Lightfoot (R-Iowa) – Layna McConkey – now at Steelman Health Strategies, lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry.
and . . .
• **FORMER LAW CLERK FOR SUPREME COURT JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA** and Policy Advisor for Bush/Cheney 2000 – Joel Kaplan – became Bush’s First Special Assistant to the President in the Office of the Chief of Staff, and then Bush’s Deputy Director, Office of Management and Budget (not shown in Washington Post photo but identified by multiple witnesses).
These were not just Pages and Gofers – or Floridians.
To further engender fear in the Miami election administrators (who had just months earlier experienced the stand off and riots over Elian Gonzales), the crowd accused the election officials of deliberately excluding the Cuban dominated precincts (which hadn’t happened). The Spanish language radio station, Radio Mambi, had a reporter there, and the chaotic event and false accusations were on the air. Rumors of 1,000 angry Cubans on their way to storm the building were spread.
[Note: Radio Mambi, a vehemently anti-Castro station, was owned by the Cuban American National Foundation. The CANF was established in 1981 with covert funding from the Reagan/Bush administration, and run by CIA operative Jorge Mas Canosa until his death in 1996. Canosa served under CIA Director George H.W. Bush, and was linked to the Iran-Contra affair.]
That did it. The Board reversed its decision and shut down the recount – for good. Later that day, Bush filed his petition with the U.S. Supreme Court, resulting in his being handed the election.
The next evening, the Republican protestors were rewarded with a Thanksgiving celebration banquet at a Ft. Lauderdale Hotel, where they got treated to a conference call from George W. Bush himself, thanking them, and live entertainment by Wayne Newton, singing "Danke Schoen."
To verify/research, Google: "Bush +rioters +Florida +2000."
* * * * * * *
KNOW BUSH FACT #32
"We can set up all of the oversight possible, at great additional cost to the American taxpayers, and it won’t be worth an Enron pension if the people responsible lie to us, if they take their records and doctor them into falsehoods and if they get away with it."
It’s too bad the 911 Commission Report didn’t say that.
Senator Mark Dayton (D-MN) said it. A week after the release of the 911 Commission Report, at the Senate Hearing on the Commission’s Recommendations, after seeing the differences between the 911 Report and the official NORAD statement of September 18, 2001.
He continued:
"I believe that President Bush must call those responsible for those representations to account. If the Commission’s accounts are correct, he should fire whoever at FAA, at NORAD or anywhere else betrayed the public trust by not telling us the truth – and then he should clear up a few discrepancies of his own."
But the Commission didn’t come to such obvious conclusions. Instead, this is what 911 Commission Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton had to say on July 22, 2004 on the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer after the release of the Report (emphasis is mine):
JIM LEHRER: What do you say to those who say, when you say everybody is to blame, then essentially nobody is to blame?
LEE HAMILTON: The whole mindset of the Commission is very different from the one your question suggests. Our mindset was focused on the future, not on the past...[BBT Note: How can you focus on the FUTURE in an INVESTIGATION?]
We believe that if we had looked back and said, okay, this figure, that figure was responsible for 9/11, it would just have created a firestorm, and we would have had no chance of putting forward recommendations that would be acceptable to the Congress and to the president and to the American people. We would have destroyed any chance of a bipartisan result here.
