The Senate Judiciary Committee's leaders today asked the lawyer for White House adviser Karl Rove to voluntarily turn over more e-mails as part of the investigation into the firings of nine U.S. attorneys, The Hill reports. The e-mails had been given to U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald when he was investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.“The (Justice) Department’s response to the Committee ... suggests that these e-mails were not in fact turned over permanently to Mr. Fitzgerald,” wrote Chairman Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont, and ranking Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.
In a related story from outside the mainstream outlets, investigative reporter Greg Palast reported yesterday that he has 500 e-mails the House sought in its probe of the firings but that Rove said were deleted and lost forever.
How did he get them? Rove's "operatives" accidentally sent them to the spoof Web site GeorgeWBush.org back in 2004.
What does Palast say they reveal? A "scheme to steal" the 2008 election through "caging," an illegal form of voter suppression.
Palast writes that in her opening testimony Wednesday regarding the U.S. attorney firings, former Justice Department official Monica Goodling confirmed that "caging" had occurred in 2004, but that House members did not pick up on the disclosure or question her about the claim.
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