Since the Republicans couldn't find such criminals, they had to make them up. Force prosecutors to bring false charges against innocent voters (one did just that in Wisconsin) or at least claim they were hot on the trail of the fraudulent voters.
Iglesias, though a Republican, wouldn't bring bogus charges. And he wouldn't lie about active investigations that didn't exist except in Rove's imagination.
That was his mistake.
Griffin himself, after the December 7 firings, was appointed by Attorney General Gonzales, at Rove's personal request, to one of the newly-vacated slots as US Attorney for Arkansas. The sleeper cell of Rove-bot US attorneys is now in place to bless voter suppression games in 2008.
I've previously reported for BBC that Griffin was the Man in the Memos who directed the massive, wrongful purge of African-American soldiers in 2004 -- the 'caging' list scam. Based on that expose, voting rights lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said, "Griffin and Rove should be in jail, not in office." That, too is another story -- [hyperlink to 'Bush’s New US Attorney a Criminal?'] But the important thing to pick up here is
1. It's all about the 2008 election.
2. It's not about Gonzales.
We've been here before. Gonzales is getting Libby'd. Takes the bullet for Karl Rove and the White House. If you wondered why the Republican jackals like the sinister Senator Specter piled on Gonzales -- it's because they were told to.
These guys learned from Richard Nixon. In 1973, when Nixon was getting hammered over Watergate, he threw the Senate Committee his Attorney General, a schmuck named Kleindeist. Famously, Nixon's own Rove, a devious creep named John Erlichman, told Nixon to leave the Attorney General, "twisting slowly in the wind."
Rove and Bush are doing the Nixon Twist on Gonzales.
Look, I have no sympathy for Alberto the Doomed. He's guilty of a crime I employed in racketeering cases: "Willful failure to know." It's a kind of fraud; Alberto was going way out of his way to not know what he had to know, that Rove and the President were toying with prosecutors.
Gonzales is their glove-puppet. Why fire him? The nation watches these hearings and wants to kill something. But why shoot the puppet? It's time to fire the puppeteer. Eh, Mr. Rove?
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Based on "The Theft of 2008" from the new, expanded edition of Armed Madhouse: From New Orleans to Baghdad - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild, released this week by Penguin. Get it at www.gregpalast.com/order-the-book
For more information on the Armed Madhouse tour, go to www.GregPalast.com
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