Lou Dubose: "Stepping on his d**k: Why Karl Rove should go, why he won't"

Lou Dubose: 'Stepping on his dick: Why Karl Rove should go, and why he won't'

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/51/news-dubose.php

Karl Rove is a brilliant (and brutal) political tactician. Whether or not you accept that Bush won the 2000 election, it was Rove who made a mediocre governor with a second-rate policy mind president of the United States. Rove is also a self-taught American-history scholar (he never finished college). He is a self-made multimillionaire, earning every cent he ever made gaming the American political system. And he is a master of the complex public-policy issues that bore and bewilder Bush.

None of these qualities makes Rove a good defendant or prudently self-interested subject of a criminal investigation. In Washington, until he was caught up in Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name, Rove avoided being put under oath — until his four appearances before the federal grand jury handling the Plame case. Grand-jury proceedings are secret, so little is known about how Rove fared in the questioning that resulted in the indictment of Dick Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby. Yet Rove’s performance under oath in Texas is revealing, and suggests that while testifying before Fitzgerald and the grand jury, Rove might have stepped on his dick (to use a legal term of art from the state of Texas).

In August 1997, Rove responded to a subpoena by attorneys representing five private trial lawyers the state hired to force tobacco companies to pay tobacco-related medical costs incurred by the state. Rove was subpoenaed because while he was working for Governor Bush, he was also receiving a monthly paycheck for consulting work for tobacco giant Philip Morris. The trial attorneys were all Democrats and took on the hugely expensive case on a contingency agreement by which they would be paid only if they prevailed. They suspected Rove was secretly trying to queer the lawsuit, which had been undertaken by a Democratic attorney general.

It was a valid theory. By bringing in more than $17 billion for the state, the five law firms earned more than $3 billion in payments structured over several decades. Rove was Big Tobacco’s guy in Austin — mostly because of his Bush connection. And some of the billions the trial lawyers were paid would undoubtedly be used to rebuild a state Democratic Party that was and remains deader than the political future of Scooter Libby.

He is Political Mafia material. Ruthless, brutal, outside the law, power and money driven. Way to clean up D.C. Dumbya.

This guy has been compiling incriminating stuff on them for decades to cover himself, I am QUITE SURE.

...by Rove, I agree. He could put them ALL away to save his own backside.

And although we will probably never know for SURE, I'm 100% convinced that Rove threw Libby under the bus.

is way over rated.

.