Chicago Court Orders Discovery of DOJ Political Prosecutions (related to Edwards doners)

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http://harpers.org/archive/2007/10/hbc-90001405

Chicago Court Orders Discovery of DOJ Political Prosecutions

BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED October 13, 2007

In civil litigation connected to one of a substantial number of federal prosecutions of campaign funding of contributors to Democratic candidate John Edwards, a federal court has directed the Department of Justice to submit to discovery to ascertain whether improper political motivations stood behind its management of the case. The litigation, entitled Beam v. Gonzales, questions the actions of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Federal Elections Commission chair Robert Lenhard in going after a group of Edwards fundraisers. At the time of the actions taken, Gonzales was counsel to George W. Bush and was heavily (and improperly) involved in shaping and directing Department of Justice prosecutions, and the head of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) was Michael Toner. Before his appointment, Toner was Chief Counsel to the Republican National Committee, and prior to that Toner served as General Counsel of the Bush-Cheney Transition Team and General Counsel of the Bush-Cheney 2000 Presidential Campaign.

Senior Republican operatives appear to have targeted John Edwards early in the process of the 2004 presidential election as the most likely Democratic nominee and opponent of the Bush-Cheney reelection effort; extensive efforts were apparently launched within both FEC and DOJ to go after Edwards’s campaign funding resources, with a particularly ferocious focus on trial lawyers. At the same time, the Justice Department took quite extraordinary steps to camouflage its conduct, for fairly obvious reasons—it was sensitive to the potentially adverse consequences for the Bush Administration and its re-election efforts that would result from the disclosure of its use of the machinery of the criminal justice process to attack a political adversary.

But the camouflaging may have been driven by even darker motives. Evidence recently provided by a Republican attorney deeply involved in a gubernatorial campaign in Alabama provides the most explicit evidence so far of how schemes like the attack on the Edwards donors were coordinated and implemented. In connection with the probe of the politically motivated prosecution of former Governor Don E. Siegelman in Alabama, Dana Jill Simpson, an attorney right in the middle of G.O.P. campaign efforts in the state, describes here how Karl Rove manipulated criminal investigations by calling senior DOJ officials to direct the allocation of resources to target certain matters.

Q: Okay. And did Rob give you the name of the person at — I’m just going to call it Public Integrity — that he thought he understood Karl Rove had spoken to? .........

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1. Jill Simpson describes how Rove manipulated criminal investigations:

Senior Republican operatives appear to have targeted John Edwards early in the process of the 2004 presidential election as the most likely Democratic nominee and opponent of the Bush-Cheney reelection effort; extensive efforts were apparently launched within both FEC and DOJ to go after Edwards’s campaign funding resources, with a particularly ferocious focus on trial lawyers. At the same time, the Justice Department took quite extraordinary steps to camouflage its conduct, for fairly obvious reasons—it was sensitive to the potentially adverse consequences for the Bush Administration and its re-election efforts that would result from the disclosure of its use of the machinery of the criminal justice process to attack a political adversary.

But the camouflaging may have been driven by even darker motives. Evidence recently provided by a Republican attorney deeply involved in a gubernatorial campaign in Alabama provides the most explicit evidence so far of how schemes like the attack on the Edwards donors were coordinated and implemented. In connection with the probe of the politically motivated prosecution of former Governor Don E. Siegelman in Alabama, Dana Jill Simpson, an attorney right in the middle of G.O.P. campaign efforts in the state, describes here how Karl Rove manipulated criminal investigations by calling senior DOJ officials to direct the allocation of resources to target certain matters.

Q: Okay. And did Rob give you the name of the person at — I’m just going to call it Public Integrity — that he thought he understood Karl Rove had spoken to?

A: No, he said it was the head guy there and he said that that guy had agreed to allocate whatever resources, so evidently the guy had the power to allocate resources, you know.