What the White House is hiding

On Thursday, former White House deputy chief of staff and top adviser to the president Karl Rove defied a subpoena from Congress and refused to show up at a hearing of a House Judiciary subcommittee.

Mr. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, told the committee that Karl Rove can't be compelled to give congressional testimony related to his official duties as a presidential adviser, which is what White House Counsel Fred Fielding told Mr. Luskin, which is what the Justice Department told Mr. Fielding.

Looks like everybody who works for President Bush is in agreement on this point: The Constitution protects the president from unwelcome questions asked by Congress.

Of course, there's no possibility that they really believe that.

President Bush and his team have demonstrated in the past that they know perfectly well there's no such thing as executive privilege, or any other privilege, that protects the executive branch from oversight by Congress. (See our 2005 post, "Senate Republicans fire the big gun," and our 2006 post "Rep. Heather Wilson pries open the White House.")

The Bush administration is simply luxuriating in the political reality that Democrats don't want to risk the political damage they might incur if they launch aggressive hearings and talk about impeachment.

And Congressional Republicans would rather defend the president than stand up for the institutional authority of the U.S. Congress and the principle that no one is above the law.

That's unfortunate.

Because now the only way you can know what the White House is hiding is to read America Wants To Know.

We think it's all about Jack Abramoff.

On September 4, Jack Abramoff is scheduled to be sentenced for his part in a Washington corruption scandal that has already resulted in the convictions of something like a dozen people, including former Congressman Bob Ney of Ohio, a Republican.

Mr. Abramoff, currently in prison in Maryland for an unrelated Florida casino boat fraud, has been cooperating with investigators.

So has his former partner, Adam Kidan, whose prison sentence for the same fraud case was just cut in half. Prosecutors told U.S. District Judge Paul Huck that Mr. Kidan has been cooperating in several investigations.

And we probably haven't heard the last of Italia Federici, the former Abramoff associate whose decision to cooperate with prosecutors last December won her a sentence of two months in a halfway house instead of prison time and coincided with Senator John McCain's still-unexplained decision to hire criminal defense attorney Bob Bennett.

Speaking of coincidences, there was a fire in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney's political director, Amy Whitelaw, around the same time.

It's not clear how much contact Dick Cheney had with Jack Abramoff and his associates because the White House has refused to turn over visitor logs that would show how many times anyone came to see the president or the vice president or Karl Rove. Earlier visitor logs showed that in April of 2001, Jack Abramoff visited Dick Cheney's assistant for domestic policy, Cesar Conda, and five days later an Abramoff associate was appointed to a powerful job in the Department of Labor.

Cesar Conda is now a lobbyist with a firm called Navigators, and the former Abramoff associate, Patrick Pizzella, is still Assistant Secretary of Labor.

You might not know that Jack Abramoff's former assistant, Susan Ralston, went to work in the White House as an assistant to Karl Rove, and that when she was later asked to testify before a congressional committee, she asked for immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony, citing her right against self-incrimination.

Remember, nobody's being prosecuted for lobbying. The Abramoff investigation is about corruption.

The Washington Post reported back in 2005 that Jack Abramoff had boasted two years earlier of his direct contacts with Karl Rove on behalf of Tyco International, a conglomerate that wanted to remain eligible for federal contracts even though it had relocated to Bermuda to save on taxes.

"A White House spokeswoman, Erin Healy, said Rove 'has no recollection' of being contacted by Abramoff about Tyco's concerns," the Post reported.

It begins to look as if any public relations damage that the Bush administration sustains from stonewalling could be nothing compared to the kind of damage it will suffer if Karl Rove is immunized and forced to testify.

This would explain the White House's blanket refusal to allow any former aide to respond to any kind of Congressional subpoena. By insisting that they can't be ordered to answer questions about anything, they prevent any questions about the specific questions they don't want to answer.

We were going to call in one of our on-staff fortune-tellers to peer into a crystal ball and tell us when the Justice Department will announce new indictments resulting from the testimony of all the cooperating witnesses in the Abramoff investigation, but then we realized a six-year-old child could figure it out.

Expect the indictments right after the November election. Watch for the pardons to be signed on January 19th.

We won't be surprised if Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are both on the list.


Copyright 2008

.