Karl Rove's Least Likely Interrogator: Scott Bloch and the Office of Special Counsel
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Goodling stepped down from her post in April as the controversy over the prosecutor firings reached a boil, promptly invoking her Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying before Congress. The House Judiciary Committee today announced that it is issuing a subpoena and will grant her immunity in exchange for her testimony. (The Senate Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, is considering authorizing a subpoena for Rove deputy Sara Taylor.)
Iglesias himself thinks Goodling's testimony is key to determining the potential role of the White House in the prosecutor firings. "I think Monica Goodling holds the keys to the kingdom," he told Chris Matthews on Hardball last night. "I think if they get her to testify under oath, with a transcript, and have her describe the process between the information flow between the White House counsel, the White House and the Justice Department, I believe the picture becomes a lot clearer."
It appears that the OSC's probe will go well beyond the prosecutor firings, delving into the broader issue of the politicization of federal agencies at the hands of the White House. Among the things OSC investigators will be looking into is a PowerPoint presentation delivered to political appointees at the General Services Administration (GSA) in January by Rove deputy J. Scott Jennings. The 28-page presentation recapped the results of the 2006 election and identified vulnerable seats the GOP is targeting. After the presentation, GSA head Lurita Doan reportedly asked her staff to consider how they could "help 'our candidates' in the next elections." (Yesterday, two Democratic senators called on her to resign.) "I really think something inappropriate took place with the GSA administrator and some high level folks there," the OSC investigator said. "And it sounds like this might have happened at other agencies."
Though the OSC's investigation has the potential to expose a trifecta of political subterfuge (the missing White House emails, the fired U.S. Attorneys, and the extent to which the tentacles of the administration's political machine have infiltrated the federal bureaucracy), Washington-based watchdog groups are already crying foul. They are not opposed to a thorough investigation of the matters at hand, but rather to Bloch's role in it.
"It's hard to believe that the Office of Special Counsel will be able to conduct a thorough investigation into the White House while Scott Bloch is under investigation himself," the Project on Government Oversight's director of investigations, Beth Daley, said in a release yesterday. "You have to wonder if the people's interest will outweigh one person's desire to protect his own skin."
Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, questions whether, under Bloch's direction, the investigation would amount to a whitewash. "Having transformed the OSC into a virtual black hole for legitimate complaints of retaliation, Bloch is decidedly not the right person to tackle the issues of misconduct and illegality that surround top White House officials," she said yesterday. "There is a serious question as to whether Bloch will just provide cover for an administration that has been covering for him."
But this overstates Bloch's coziness with the White House, for whatever relationship he's had with the president who appointed him began to cool some time ago. Early in his tenure, Bloch's attempt to launch a legal review of a statute protecting federal workers from retaliation based on their sexual orientation forced the White House to step in, issuing a rare statement reaffirming that "long standing federal policy prohibits discrimination against federal employees based on sexual orientation."
"President Bush," the statement continued, "expects federal agencies to enforce this policy and to ensure that all federal employees are protected from unfair discrimination at work." Reportedly, the White House has asked Bloch at least once to tender his resignation, a fact that the special counsel would neither confirm nor deny when I spoke with him this winter. By antagonizing his bosses now, Bloch is "committing suicide, except for the real, real, real conservative right, who I'm sure are applauding him," the OSC investigator told me. "Outside of that, he's really going to be ticking off some people."
There is speculation, the investigator said, that Bloch is pursuing the Rove case to show his bona fides—"to provide some protection" for himself, given that an attempt to oust him from OSC now would look like a vendetta. "There's definitely one part of me that thinks it's great that we're taking some initiative to see how politicized the federal employment system has become under this president," he said. "Part of me applauds this. I wish I could take Scott seriously and trust him, but everything he's done at this agency shows that he's untrustworthy and that his motives are suspect. I don't know why we should trust him now. I hope we can, but I really don't."
"This," he added, "is going to be interesting."
Daniel Schulman is an Investigative Reporter for Mother Jones.
