-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: June 19, 2007 11:36:31 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Closing In on Turd-Blossom
Palast Exclusive: The Tears of a Clone
Conyers Closes in on Karl and his Rove-bots...
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4696
*** Special to The BRAD BLOG by Greg Palast
Boo-hoo! I made Tim Griffin cry.
He cried. Then he lied.
You remember Tim. Karl Rove's right hand (right claw?) man. The
GOP's ragin' cagin' man.
Griffin is the Rove-bot exposed by our BBC Newsnight investigations
team as the man who gathered and sent out the infamous 'caging'
lists to Republican state chairmen during the 2004 election.
Caging lists, BBC discovered, were used secretly as a basis to
challenge the right to vote of thousands of citizens - including
the homeless, students and soldiers sent overseas. The day after
BBC broadcast that the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, John
Conyers, sought our evidence on Griffin, Tim resigned his post as
US Attorney for Arkansas. That job was a little gift from Karl Rove
who made room for his man Griffin by demanding the firing of US
prosecutor Bud Cummins.
Last week, our cameras captured Griffin, all teary-eyed, in his
humiliating kiss-off speech delivered in Little Rock at the
University of Arkansas where he moaned that, "public service isn't
worth it."
True. In the old Jim Crow days in Arkansas, you could get yourself
elected by blocking African-Americans. (The voters his caging game
targeted are - quelle surprise! - disproportionately Black citizens.)
But today, Griffin can't even get an unemployment check. When he
resigned two weeks ago following our broadcast, the cover story was
that the voter persecutor-turned-prosecutor had resigned to work
for Presidential wannabe Fred Thompson. But when Thompson's staff
was asked by a reporter why they would hire the 'cagin' man,'
suddenly, the 'Law and Order' star decided associating with Griffin
might take the shine off Thompson's badge, even if it is from the
props department.
Griffin, instead of saying that public service "isn't worth it,"
should have said, "Crime doesn't pay." Because, according to
experts such as law professor Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 'caging,' when
used to target Black voters' rights, is a go-to-prison crime.
By resigning, Tim may not avoid the hard questions about caging -
or the hard time that might result. When I passed the first set of
documents to Conyers (a real film noir moment, in a New York hotel
room near midnight), the soft-spoken Congressman said that,
resignation or not, "We aren't done with Mr. Griffin yet..."
Tears Not Truth
Back in Little Rock, when asked about caging, Rove's guy linked a
few fibs to a few whoppers to some malefactious mendacity. That is,
he lied.
"I didn't cage votes. I didn't cage mail," Griffin asserted.
At the risk of making you cry again, Tim, may I point you to an
email dated August 26, 2004. It says, "Subject: Re: Caging." And it
says, "From: Tim Griffin - Research/Communications" with the email
[EMAIL PROTECTED] RNCHQ is the Republican National Committee
Headquarters, is it not, Mr. Griffin? Now do you remember caging mail?
If that doesn't ring a bell, please note that at the bottom is
this: "ATTACHMENT: Caging-1.xls". And that attachment was a list of
voters.
In last week's pathetic farewell, Mr. Griffin averred that the
accusation he was involved in caging voters, "Goes back to one guy
- whose name I won't mention." (FYI, Mr. Griffin: My mother calls
me, "Gregory.")
Yes, I first reported the story for BBC London - back in 2004
which, as Griffin correctly noted, it was ignored by my US press
colleagues until, as Tim put it, "I became embroiled in the US
Attorney thing." By 'the US Attorney thing,' I assume you are
referring to your involvement in firing and smearing honest
prosecutors and grabbing one of their salaries for yourself.
You say, Mr. Griffin, that the unmentionable reporter, "Made [it]
up out of whole cloth." You flatter me, Mr. Griffin. We could not
possibly be so creative at The Beeb as to construct the thousands
of names of voters on your caging lists.
And by the way, we don't have just one of your "caging" emails, but
scores of them.
I want to take this opportunity to thank you for sending them to us
- even if that was not your intent. You copied your caging missives
to '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Mr. Doster was Chairman of the
Florida Bush campaign - but that address was not his but John
Wooden's pretending to be the Bush campaigners. Wooden then sent
your notes to me.
Rove in Range
By the way, Mr. Griffin, if you want an explanation of 'caging
voters,' just read an email dated February 5, 2007 by...Tim Griffin.
In that email, Griffin references the Bush campaigns mailing out
thousands of letters. The letters returned ('caged') as
undeliverable were used as the GOP's supposed evidence that these
were "thousands of fraudulent voter registrations." These voters
were subject to challenge. However, these caging lists of
"fraudulent" addresses, like the 2000 "felon" lists which in fact
contained no felons, contained no fraudulent voters. But that
wouldn't necessarily save them from the massively successful
Republican voter-challenge campaign.
During the appearance he made in Arkansas last week, Griffin said
he'd never heard of 'caging.' "I had to look it up," he said.
Griffin discovered that "caging" is "a direct mail term."
I don't doubt Griffin's ignorance. Griffin's just a good ol' boy, a
former military lawyer, who wouldn't know direct mail terminology
from a hole in the ground. Until he went to work for the RNC.
So where did Tim get this direct mail term he used in his emails?
Well, before Karl Rove signed on with George W. Bush, he owned Karl
Rove & Co....a direct mail firm. Rove made millions making up lists
of voters, doing more 'caging' than a zoo-keeper.
Am I saying caging-expert Rove had something to do with the
allegedly illegal caging games of his boy Griffin? Does a bear...?
Mr. Griffin wouldn't answer BBC's requests for comment. So I
suggested to an Arkansas local, Luther Lowe, a former army
reservist and himself a victim of a challenge to his vote, that at
the Little Rock send-off for Griffin, he ask the fallen US Attorney
about Rove's involvement in caging. Lowe did so, politely. Griffin
wove, ducked, blathered and blubbered. But wouldn't answer.
Unless Griffin joins Alberto Gonzales in Club Amnesia, Griffin has
a lot to tell us about Mr. Rove and targeting Black voters.
Maybe a subpoena would encourage a Griffin response. And a grant of
immunity from the Conyers committee. That's Rove's nightmare.
Because unless Griffin joins Alberto Gonzales in Club Amnesia,
Griffin has a lot to tell us about Mr. Rove and targeting Black
voters.
Will he? It's not Conyers' style to hunt down Rove. The congressman
is not, despite what Republicans say, a partisan hit man. He is,
however, one tenacious legislator who told me he would like his
committee, "to follow where the evidence leads."
But that's not necessarily going to happen. Conyers told me he sees
the evidence in the prosecutor firing investigation leading to the
much bigger, nastier issue of voter suppression - in simpler terms,
fixing elections.
Unfortunately, many on his committee from both parties see the
hearings as limited to the single issue of the firing of
prosecutors. They want to scrutinize the elephant's trunk but
refuse to acknowledge it's attached to an elephant: election
rigging. Racially poisoned, direct-mail driven, computer
implemented election rigging.
But Conyers may get there yet, to the issue of elections
manipulation. I didn't get that from the Chairman (too circumspect
to let his future intensions slip out). I got it from the Big
Bubba. When I ran into Ol' Silver Eyes himself at an Air America
soiree, Bill Clinton (man, he's gotten thin!) told me, "When we
really get going on these prosecutor hearings, when we really dig
deep, we're going to get right to the issue of voter suppression."
But what do you mean "we," Bill? Conyers is dean of the
Congressional Black Caucus, which has an abiding concern and
painful experience with illegal vote suppression of all types:
caging, purging, challenging, lynching. But whether Conyers can
convince his committee, mostly members of the Congressional White
Caucus, to "dig deep" on vote suppression, is an open question.
In the meantime, Conyers has convinced his committee to drop
subpoenas on Harriett Miers (the lady tight with Griffin, Rove and,
notably, George W. Bush) and Sara Taylor, Rove's Gal Friday.
Conyers, methodically, determinedly, is circling in on Rove,
"Bush's Brain," a man known to surrender the corpses of his allies
in place of his own (eh, Mr. Libby?). No wonder Griffin's in tears.
So here's a hanky, Mr. Griffin. This unnamable reporter would
rather you save your tears for Randall Prausa. The African-American
soldier was on active military duty when he ended up on one of your
caging lists, what you term a suspected 'fraudulent' voter subject
to GOP challenge because he was not home to get his fraudulent,
'Welcome, voter,' letter from the GOP.
Can you guess, Mr. Griffin, why Prausa wasn't at home? Well, unlike
Messrs. Rove and Bush, Prausa was serving his country overseas.
And that's what caging is all about. If you're Black, you get
shipped to Baghdad and you lose your vote. Mission Accomplished,
Mr. Griffin. Mission Accomplished, Mr. Rove.
===
The confidential Griffin e-mail, "Subject: Re: Caging," is
reproduced in Greg Palast's New York Times bestseller, ARMED
MADHOUSE: Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone
Wild. Available at www.GregPalast.com
Also: Catch the film of Randi Rhodes and Greg Palast on "Bush's and
Giuliani's favorite vultures," the men with connections to the Bush
Administration who have siphoned off the money meant for Africa's
poorest. Video online here.
See what's free at AOL.com.
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