The War Room: A meeting with Karl

[maddezmom]

A meeting with Karl
One more reason Congress might want to see Karl Rove's e-mails about the prosecutor purge: Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey has told a House Judiciary subcommittee that Rove attended a meeting with Justice Department officials on March 5, 2007, in which White House officials told the folks from Justice that they'd need to agree on clear reasons for why they fired eight U.S. attorneys and then convey those reasons to Congress.

Josh Marshall asks the obvious question: "Why do you need to 'agree on clear reasons why each prosecutor was fired' if the reasons were actually clear when you did the firing ...?"

We've known about this meeting before. E-mail messages provided to the House Judiciary Committee mention the meeting, which was scheduled for the evening before Deputy Attorney General William Moschella was to testify on the firings before the committee. Its purpose, according to the pre-meeting e-mail traffic: "To go over the administration's position on all aspects of the US Atty issue and why the US Attys were asked to resign."

What we didn't know was that Rove himself was in attendance. As Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reports, this new piece of the puzzle has "some investigators" saying that it now appears "the president's chief political advisor may have been involved in an attempt to mislead Congress -- one more reason they are demanding to see his emails and force him to testify under oath."

more:http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2007/05/04/rove/index.html

[maddezmom]

1. Froomkin: Karl Rove's Coaching Session

Karl Rove's Coaching Session

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, May 4, 2007; 1:50 PM

Back on March 5, several top Justice Department officials were summoned for an emergency meeting at the White House. On the agenda: Going over "what we are going to say" about why eight U.S. attorneys had been summarily fired.

The reason for the urgency: principal associate deputy attorney general William Moschella was testifying before the House Judiciary Committee the next day.


Deputy White House counsel William Kelley sent an e-mail over to Justice early in the afternoon, saying that he had "been tasked" with pulling the meeting together, and that "we have to get this group together with some folks here asap."

The meeting was held at the White House later that day. And who did Kelley mean by "some folks here"? Well, among others, Karl Rove -- the White House's chief political operative, and the man who may very well have set the unprecedented dismissals in motion in the first place.

read all 4 pages: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/05/04/BL2007050401202_4.html?hpid=opinionsbox1