1 Boring Old Man

Rove Aide Details Broad Political Abuses

By Jason Leopold

In January 2002, at a retreat in West Virginia, Karl Rove gave a PowerPoint presentation to at least 50 managers at the Department of the Interior to discuss polling data, and emphasized the importance of getting Oregon Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican, reelected that year.

The way to get Smith reelected to another term, Rove reportedly told the Interior Department officials, would come via the agency’s support of a highly controversial measure: diverting water from the Klamath River Basin to farms in the area that were experiencing unusually dry conditions, thereby supporting the GOP’s agricultural base.

Details of Rove’s involvement in influencing the Interior Department to reverse its policies with regard to the Klamath River basin have been previously reported. But questions about why a political operative like Rove was influencing agricultural and environmental policy decisions, possibly in violation of the law, and whether he pressured cabinet officials to reverse policy to get Republicans reelected were raised again last month during a sworn deposition Rove’s former executive assistant, Susan Ralston, gave to Congressional investigators probing Rove’s role in the US attorney scandal and his and other White House officials connections with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

A transcript of Ralston’s deposition was released on Monday by Congressman Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

According to Congressional investigators Rove used the PowerPoint presentation at the West Virginia retreat to solicit Republican donors. But Rove’s priority was to ensure that farmers in Oregon got the additional water they wanted from the Klamath River, so Senator Smith would be reelected. President Bush lost Oregon by less than one percent in the 2000 presidential election to Al Gore, according to polling results from the Associated Press.

Laying the groundwork to get Smith reelected, Rove set up a cabinet-level task force on Klamath River issues to specifically study whether diverting water from Klamath River to farmers would hurt the endangered Coho salmon population. The task force Rove set up gave the impression that the administration was going to take an unbiased look at the situation.

According to Michael Kelly, a National Marine Fisheries Service biologist, that wasn’t the case. Kelly spoke out publicly in 2003 alleging that he was subjected to political pressure and ordered to ignore scientific evidence that said the plan would likely kill off tens of thousands of Coho salmon, and to support the Klamath River low-water plan Rove wanted enacted to help farmers, who Rove saw as a crucial part of the Republican constituency in the state.

In March 2002, in a sudden reversal of a long standing policy, then Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton and Senator Smith held a joint press conference in Klamath Falls and opened up the irrigation system releasing thousands of gallons of water to 220,000 acres of farmland. The policy shift left the Klamath River basin with unusually low river flows that summer and ended up killing more than 30,000 endangered Coho salmon – the largest fish kill in the history of the West. But the move, as orchestrated by Rove, ended up getting Smith reelected that November.

Using sophisticated polling results, Rove’s "Shop" identifies areas where races are close calls. Many of the names we’ve recently learned are people who have worked there – Susan Ralston, Sara Taylor, Tim Griffin, Monica Goodling. Once vulnerable races are identified, ant number of strategies are brought into play to direct the outcome – specific things like pandering to a target constituency, like this example. Trade water for votes, the hell with the fish. In other places, voter fraud suits or suits against Democrats are the order of the day. In places with large mninority populations, voter intimidation schemes get rolled out – like the Georgia I.D. Laws. And there’s always pandering to the Christian Right – like today’s veto of Stem Cell Research.

The U.S. Attorney scandal focuses on just one aspect of their activities. These Power Point presentations inside the government are another example of engaging the government itself in the political machinery of the Republican Party. I’ll bet that what we know so far is just the tip of the iceberg. But there’s already enough known to name a gaggle of Special Prosecutors. But, since they’ve taken over the Department of Justice too, at this point all we can do is listen with disbelief to the brazen abuses of power that have become a daily part of our government. It’s hard enough to even keep up with it, it’s coming so fast.

The greatest hero of Mythology, Hercules, was tasked with cleaning the Augean Stables filled with the accumulated manure of thousands of cattle. We could use such a hero now. The shit’s gotten pretty deep in the halls of Washington these days.