Recently, the duo at Firedoglake got onto Libby’s Defense Fund director, Barbara Comstock. Emptywheel at the Next Hurrah has a follow up post, Why Did Comstock Blackball Eric Lichtblau? that looks into her tenure as Ashcroft’s spokesperson at the DoJ. All of that leads to a pdf from Watching Justice entitled OPEN GOVERNMENT IN THE ASHCROFT ERA: WHAT WENT WRONG, AND HOW TO MAKE IT RIGHT. It’s 46 pages, but well worth the read because it not only fleshes out who Barbara Comstock is, it puts the essence of what’s wrong in Washington in bas relief – departments of ideology rather than government.
Barbara Comstock turned the Public Relations section of the Department of Justice into a propoganda/Spin machine for the Republican Agenda, complete with dirty tricks. It makes clear that what happened in Washington [what is still happening in Washington] is that political operatives like Comstock [who has earned the right in spades to be called ‘unscrupulous’] quickly grabbed control of the flow of information to the Press and molded it in the ‘Republican’ way. The outrageous performance of Gonzales in the N.S.A. hearings as defender of the faith rather than U.S. Chief Prosecutor has it’s roots in Ashcroft’s reign with Comstock as his Mistress of Propoganda. She left shortly after the Plame prosecution got underway as has been pointed out. But it was also after the collected reporters revolted and wrote Ashcroft. She may well have been fired because the Press was so disgusted with their treatment. She was clearly an RNC operative, not a U.S. Government Official.
Comstock is a big story. I hope people who have some access to investigative resources can continue to dig. I’d bet big bucks that her hands are dirty, dirty, and connected to the devious dealings like those that became the Plame and N.S.A. scandals.
The sad thing about the report is that the title’s second part, HOW TO MAKE IT RIGHT, hasn’t quite caught on.
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