I remember a couple years back when Karl Rove was in the cross-hairs of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. Rove has a knack of getting his fingers into everything dirty in Washington, but he got off that time and escaped the prosecution/jail time he deserves. He left his post at the White House last summer, supposedly thinking he'd be out of the spotlight and could avoid any responsibility (like his ex-boss still does). Well now that ex-Governor Don Siegelman is out of jail (thanks in large part to Karl Rove), karma is looking to get the Republican henchman and he is trying to run from his fate as fast as he can.
From AfterDowningStreet:
Rove has been described to me (Scott Horton) by several of my GOP sources in Alabama as being in a state of panic. He has been pressing senior Alabama GOP figures to speak out for him and to attack me and Jill Simpson, as well as CBS and MSNBC. But they're keeping quiet, which shows more political smarts than Rove, frankly. Of course Rove has a simple objective here. He wants to know all the underlying evidence that has been accumulated to make a case against him and he's desperate to know it before he speaks any more about it. Which is precisely why CBS, MSNBC and others will keep things close to the vest.
But just to show you how ridiculous his tantrum is. He asks how I "know" he was involved in strategizing and fundraising. Of course he wants the names of my sources in Alabama so he can have them pressured and pilloried. But his involvement is established just by looking at the White House website. The key fundraising event of the campaign was the July 15, 2002 fundraiser for Riley in Birmingham - it brought in $4 million. It was arranged by Karl Rove, working closely with Bill Canary. President Bush was the featured draw. How can he deny he was involved in fundraising and strategizing? The very effort is absurd.
The evidence linking him to the use of the Siegelman case as a technique is of course thinner. That's because this is a felony, and those involved in it are not going to speak voluntarily. Which is why his denial should be under oath and subject to crossexamination, just as Jill Simpson's was.
Oh he can panic all he wants, I just want to see him sitting in that chair next to the judge. He'd probably lie under oath, the man has no morals whatsoever, but it would be a start and as the story gets more publicity, Karl will lose enough friends for one of them to broker immunity to get him convicted.
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