Blogged by Brad Friedman on 7/24/2008 3:59PMRove Threatened GOP IT Guru If He Does Not 'Take the Fall' for Election Fraud in Ohio, Says AttorneyLetter Sent to Attorney General Mukasey Requesting 'Protection for Mr. Connell and His Family From This Reported Attempt to Intimidate a Witness' After Tip from 'Credible Source'UPDATE: OH AG Reportedly Asked to Provide Immunity Protection...
Karl Rove has threatened a GOP high-tech guru and his wife, if he does not "'take the fall' for election fraud in Ohio," according to a letter sent this morning to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, by Ohio election attorney Cliff Arnebeck.
The email, posted in full below, details threats against Mike Connell of the Republican firm New Media Communications, which describes itself on its website as "a powerhouse in the field of Republican website development and Internet services" and having "played a strategic role in helping the GOP expand its technological supremacy."
Connell was described in a recent interview with the plaintiff's attorneys in Ohio as a "high IQ Forrest Gump" for his appearance "at the scene of every [GOP] crime" from Florida 2000 to Ohio 2004 to the RNC email system to the installation of the currently-used Congressional computer network firewall.
Connell and his firm are currently employed by the John McCain campaign, as well as the RNC and other Republican and so-called "faith-based" organizations.
In a phone call this afternoon, Arnebeck could not publicly reveal specific details of the information that triggered his concern about the threats to Connell. The message to the IT man from Rove is said to have been sent via a go-between in Ohio. That information led Arnebeck to contact Mukasey after he found the reports to be credible and troubling.
"If there's a credible threat, which I regard this to be," he told The BRAD BLOG, "I have a professional duty to report it."
Attempts to reach Connell for comment late this afternoon were not successful.
The disclosure from Arnebeck comes on the heels of a dramatic announcement last week, made at a Columbus press conference, announcing Arnebeck's motion to lift a stay on the long-standing King Lincoln Bronzwell v. Blackwell federal lawsuit, challenging voting rights violations in the 2004 Presidential Election in Ohio.
The motion was made following the discovery of new information, including details from a Republican data security expert, leading Arnebeck towards seeking depositions of Rove, Connell, and other GOP operatives believed to have participated in the gaming of election results in 2004. A letter [PDF] was sent to Mukasey at the same time last week, asking him to retain email and other documents from Rove...
"Mr. Rove's e-mails from the White House to the Justice Department, the FBI, the Pentagon, Congress and various federal regulatory agencies are obviously relevant to the factual issues that we intend to address in this case," Arnebeck wrote last week to the Attorney General. "We are concerned about reports that Mr. Rove not only destroyed e-mails, but also took steps to destroy the hard drives from which they had been sent."
In his email to Mukasey today, Arnebeck writes: "We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio, that if he does not agree to 'take the fall' for election fraud in Ohio, his wife Heather will be prosecuted for supposed lobby law violations."
"This appears to be in response to our designation of Rove as the principal perpetrator in the Ohio Corrupt Practices Act/RICO claim with respect to which we issued document hold notices last Thursday to you and to the US Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform," the Ohio attorney writes, before going on to link to The BRAD BLOG's coverage of his press conference last week and requesting "protection for Mr. Connell and his family from this reported attempt to intimidate a witness."
The complete, short email, sent today from Arnebeck to AG Mukasey, follows in full below...
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2008 10:51 AM
To: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Subject: Report of Rove threats against witness Michael ConnellDear Attorney General Mukasey:
We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio, that if he does not agree to "take the fall" for election fraud in Ohio, his wife Heather will be prosecuted for supposed lobby law violations.This appears to be in response to our designation of Rove as the principal perpetrator in the Ohio Corrupt Practices Act/RICO claim with respect to which we issued document hold notices last Thursday to you and to the US Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform. See: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6189 and http://www.archive.org/d...tionFraudInOhioCourtCase.
I have informed court chambers and am in the process of informing the Ohio Attorney General's and US Attorney's offices in Columbus for the purpose, among other things, of seeking protection for Mr. Connell and his family from this reported attempt to intimidate a witness.
Concurrently herewith, I am informing Mr. Conyers and Mr. Kucinich in connection with their Congressional oversight responsibilities related to these matters.
Because of the serious engagement in this matter that began in 2000 of the Ohio Statehouse Press Corps, 60 Minutes, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, C-Span and Jim VandeHei, and the public's right to know of gross attempts to subvert the rule of law, I am forwarding this information to them, as well.
Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney
###-###-####
Cell ###-###-####cc: Robert Fitrakis, Esq.
Blackwater Seeps Into the Campaign
By Jeremy Scahill
The NationTuesday 18 March 2008
Hillary Clinton has just become the most significant US political figure to come out in favor of banning Blackwater and other armed private security contractors from operating in Iraq. "When I am President I will ask the Joint Chiefs for their help in reducing reliance on armed private military contractors with the goal of ultimately implementing a ban on such contractors," she declared in a major policy speech on Monday.
Her position is a welcome development for those in the Congress, such as Illinois Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who have long sought to rein in private security contractors.
In her speech, Clinton slammed Obama on this issue, saying, "Senator Obama and I have a substantive disagreement here. He won't rule out continuing to use armed private military contractors in Iraq to do jobs that historically have been done by the US military or government personnel." The Clinton campaign wants voters to believe it is that simple. It is not.
First, Clinton's timing is suspect. She has served for five years on the Senate Armed Services Committee and has done nothing to end the use of Blackwater and other private security forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. In the aftermath of the September 2007 Nisour Square massacre, during which Blackwater operatives gunned down seventeen Iraqi civilians, Clinton condemned the company's conduct but declined to sign on as a co-sponsor to legislation introduced by Sanders and Schakowsky in November 2007 seeking to ban Blackwater and other mercenary companies.
Instead, she chose to do it in late February, after The Nation published the comments of a senior foreign policy advisor to Obama who said, "I can't rule out, I won't rule out, private security contractors" in Iraq if Obama becomes president and that Obama does not intend to sign onto the Sanders-Schakowsky legislation. The next day, after refusing for over a week to provide a comment to The Nation on the issue, Clinton's staff released a statement saying she would endorse the Stop Outsourcing Security Act to "ban the use of Blackwater and other private mercenary firms in Iraq." Clinton declared, "The time to show these contractors the door is long past due." The statement was released five days before the make-or-break primaries in Texas and Ohio, when the New York Senator was on the ropes.
On Monday, Clinton said, "I believe what matters in this campaign is not just the promises we've made to end the war; what matters is what we've actually done when it came time to match words with action. Because more than anything else, what we've done is an indication of what we'll do." On the issue of Blackwater, Clinton has been MIA for years.
Clinton's campaign is well aware that Obama has been ahead of the curve on the issue of armed private contractors in Iraq-and certainly ahead of her. In October 2007, Clinton claimed she was unaware that Bush had granted Blackwater and other contractors immunity in 2004. "Maybe I should have known about it; I did not know about it," she said.
On Monday, Obama struck back. "Now, let me be clear: I actually introduced legislation in the Senate before Senator Clinton even mentioned this that said we had to crack down on private contractors like Blackwater because I don't believe that they should be able to run amok and put our own troops in danger, get paid three or four times or ten times what our soldiers are getting paid. I am the one who has been opposed to those operators. Senator Clinton is a late comer to that. But you know this is what happens during political season and I understand it."
In February 2007, Obama introduced contractor reform and oversight legislation that has become the Democrats' major plan in the Congress. Obama's bill seeks to make all contractors subject to prosecution in US civilian courts for crimes committed on a foreign battlefield. The bill is not without its problems. In theory, FBI investigators would deploy to the crime scene, gather evidence and interview witnesses, leading to indictments and prosecutions.
Apart from the fact that it would be impossible to effectively police such an enormous deployment of private contractors (at present basically equal to the number of active duty US troops in Iraq), the legislation would give the private military industry a tremendous PR victory. The companies could finally claim that a legally accountable structure governed their operations, yet they would be well aware that such legislation would be nearly impossible to enforce. Perhaps that is why the industry has passionately backed this approach.
But despite the measure's significant flaws, Obama did introduce it eight months before Nisour Square, at a time when Clinton was largely inactive on the issue, despite her significant Congressional influence.
In response to Clinton's speech Monday, Obama spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said, "Hillary Clinton is attacking Barack Obama on an issue where he has led and she did nothing until her campaign fell behind."
Beyond the rhetoric, how serious is Hillary Clinton about stopping Blackwater and other armed private security forces in Iraq? Obama's campaign made a difficult admission, likely at odds with many of his supporters, by saying he wouldn't rule out using these forces because they will be needed, at least at first, to implement his Iraq plan. The State Department does not have the official security agents available to protect the massive army of diplomats in Iraq, which Obama intends to maintain and, perhaps, increase. The campaign says Obama wants to change that and to make all security personnel official US Diplomatic Security agents, but that could take years, according to the State Department.
Like Obama, Clinton has an Iraq plan that will keep thousands of officials and others who require diplomatic security in Iraq. If she thinks the military wants to do that job, she hasn't been reading the papers. If she thinks there are enough official State Department agents to do it right away, she hasn't been looking at the numbers: Blackwater has almost as many security operatives working in Iraq (nearly 1,000) as the State Department has available in the rest of the world combined (1,450).
At the end of the day, both Obama and Clinton have Iraq plans that for the foreseeable future will necessitate using private armed security forces. While Obama's campaign has acknowledged that fact, Clinton has seized it as an opportunity to attack Obama. Short of dramatically shrinking the size of the US civilian and diplomatic presence in Iraq, the next president may have no choice but to continue the current contracting arrangements. If, as President, Obama or Clinton did order the military to take over the protection of diplomats, that would result in an increase of US military convoys on the streets of Iraq, regularly placing US soldiers in direct-and likely lethal-contact with Iraqi civilians and vehicles.
In the bigger picture, the most disturbing aspect of this is that neither Clinton nor Obama have real plans to end the occupation. Their "withdrawal" plans will keep thousands of US military forces in Iraq, along with the Green Zone, the massive US embassy and the Baghdad airport. This could add up to as many as 80,000 troops, not including the armed security for diplomatic convoys currently provided by Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp.
If Hillary Clinton expects any credibility on this issue, especially after her recent condemnation of Blackwater and the pledge to ban private security forces in Iraq, it would mean radically revising her Iraq plan to one of complete withdrawal. That means no residual forces, "strike forces," or the army of "diplomats" necessitating security, which regularly proves fatal for Iraqi civilians. At the same time, if either Obama or Clinton really wants to end the occupation, it means a pledge to swiftly withdraw all US troops and contractors. At this point, neither seems willing to do that.
Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the best-selling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!.
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 16, 2008; A01
The Bush administration is on the verge of implementing new air quality rules that will make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas, according to rank-and-file agency scientists and park managers who oppose the plan.
The new regulations, which are likely to be finalized this summer, rewrite a provision of the Clean Air Act that applies to "Class 1 areas," federal lands that currently have the highest level of protection under the law. Opponents predict the changes will worsen visibility at many of the nation's most prized tourist destinations, including Virginia's Shenandoah, Colorado's Mesa Verde and North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt national parks.
Nearly a year ago, with little fanfare, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed changing the way the government measures air pollution near Class 1 areas on the grounds that the nation needed a more uniform way of regulating emissions near protected areas. The agency closed the comment period in April and has indicated it is not making significant changes to the draft rule, despite objections by EPA staff members.
Jeffrey R. Holmstead, who now heads the environmental strategies group at the law firm Bracewelll & Giuliani, helped initiate the rule change while heading the EPA's air and radiation office. He said agency officials became concerned that the EPA's scientific staff was taking "the most conservative approach" in predicting how much pollution new power plants would produce.
"The question from a policy perspective was: Do you need to have models based on the absolute worst-case conditions that were unlikely to ever occur in the real world?" Holmstead said in an interview Thursday. "This has to do with what [modeling] assumptions you're required to do. This is really a legal issue and a policy issue."
The initiative is the latest in a series of administration efforts going back to 2003 to weaken air quality protections at national parks, including failed moves to prohibit federal land managers from commenting on permits for new pollution sources more than 31 miles away from their areas and to protect air resources only for parks that are big and diverse enough to "represent complete ecosystems."
For 30 years, regulators have measured pollution levels in the parks, over both three-hour and 24-hour increments, to capture the spikes in emissions that occur during periods of peak energy demand. The new rule would average the levels over a year so that spikes in pollution levels would not violate the law.
A slew of National Park Service and EPA officials have challenged the rule change, arguing that it will worsen visibility in already-impaired areas, according to internal documents obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
In one set of comments, the EPA's regional computer modeling staff wrote that the proposal "would allow for significant degradation" of the parks' air quality. An e-mail from National Park Service staff called aspects of the plan "bad public policy" that would "make it much easier to build power plants" near Class 1 areas, which include some Fish and Wildlife Service-protected land.
When the committee chairman, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), asked the EPA whether the rule would facilitate construction of more power plants near protected areas, Robert J. Meyers, principal deputy assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, replied in an April 24 letter that this was not the intention of the rule but that he could not rule it out.
"We developed this proposal based on the need to clarify how increment consumption must be addressed, and not whether or not it would be easier to build power plants," Meyers wrote. "In the absence of any data or evidence provided by the National Park Service, we are unable to conclusively confirm or deny their suggestion."
Yesterday, the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, issued a report estimating that the rule would ease the way for the construction of 28 new coal-fired power plants within 186 miles of 10 national parks. In each of the next 50 years, the report concludes, the new plants would emit a total of 122 million tons of carbon dioxide, 79,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, 52,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, and 4,000 pounds of toxic mercury into the air over and around the Great Smoky Mountains, Zion and eight other national parks.
"It's like if you're pulled over by a cop for going 75 miles per hour in a 55 miles-per-hour zone, and you say, 'If you look at how I've driven all year, I've averaged 55 miles per hour,' " said Mark Wenzler, director of the National Parks Conservation Association's clean-air programs. "It allows you to vastly underestimate the impact of these emissions."
Don Shepherd, an environmental engineer at the Park Service's air resources division in Denver, said of the new rule, "I don't know of anyone at our level, who deals with this day to day, that likes it or thinks it's going to make sense.
"We really want to have clean air at national parks all the time, and not just at average times," Shepherd said in a telephone interview. "All of our national parks have impaired visibility. . . . It would really be a setback in trying to make progress."
While the government has made progress in reducing haze-producing sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide pollution in recent decades, many of the nation's best-known parks still have poor visibility and air quality.
In October, the Park Service published a 10-year analysis of air quality trends that found that sulfate concentrations in precipitation have declined on the East Coast because of the federal acid rain program, but that Western parks have not experienced similar reductions. The concentrations of ozone smog over an eight-hour period are worsening across almost all of the interior West, including "some of the most remote places in the nation," said Vicki Patton, deputy general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund.
Jim Renfro, an air resources specialist at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, said the park is suffering from a host of pollution problems, including smog and sulfur and nitrogen deposition. Visibility on summer days is 15 miles, rather than the nearly 80 it used to be, and the park now does not meet federal smog standards.
"There are some days when it's unhealthy to breathe at the park, so that's a major concern. People come here to get away, and they can't believe that sometimes they're better off where they came from," Renfro said. "We've got a long way to go."
Power plant emissions are also affecting vegetation and wildlife, making streams in Shenandoah more acidic and stripping nutrients out of the soil that sustains spruce firs at the Great Smoky Mountains' higher elevations. The Great Smokies have the highest levels of acid deposition of any monitored area in North America.
Georgia Murray, a staff scientist at the Appalachian Mountain Club, an outdoor recreation and advocacy group, said emissions will have to drop significantly for ecosystems on the East Coast to improve. "It's the type of pollution that takes years to recover from," she said.
Holmstead, however, said the administration's Clean Air Interstate Rule, implemented in 2005, will ultimately reduce pollution nationwide.
"What you want to do is reduce the total amount that comes out of these power plants," Holmstead said. "There's no Class 1 area in the country that is