Republican, thy name is corruption. And Karl Rove is the poster boy. That doesn’t bother Lieutenant Governor Kinder (pictured at right with fellow corrupt Republican Rod Jetton). Kinder just had Rove to Missouri on Friday for a $2700 a plate fundraiser.
Considering how quickly Kinder lied to cover his behind when his chief of staff got caught, on the job, having online pornographic conversations with a cop he thought was a thirteen year old girl; considering that the replacement Kinder hired for the perv was Richard AuBuchon, currently under investigation for his role in protecting Matt Blunt and his e-mails by torpedoing whistleblower Scott Eckersley; considering that Kinder just got caught using a sham committee to launder money for his campaign chest; and considering that, while Blunt is out of the country and Kinder’s in charge, he could reveal those e-mails that ought to be public–but refuses to, of course–considering all that, Rove seems like … just his kind of guy.
In fact, gonemild says that Rove will “presumably, offer some off-stage advice in how to juggle multiple scandals.” The gist of it will surely be, “Use any dirty trick that serves your purpose because if it gets you elected, you can tell them to go screw themselves. When they call you to testify, you just don’t go.” I don’t know if that philosophy works so well for someone in the middle of a tough election campaign (Yay, Sam Page!), but it’s been working fine for Rove for years now. He’s doing fundraisers all over the country even as Conyers tries fruitlessly to force his testimony.
In addition to Conyers, some folks in Ohio are trying to corner Rove. A lawsuit there charging electoral fraud in the 2004 election is going forward again after an extensive stay. Cliff Arnebeck, the attorney for the plaintiffs, charges that e-voting machines were tampered with and that Rove was part of that conspiracy. Arnebeck’s chief witness is a Republican IT man with multiple ties to the top of the Republican party.
The latest is that Arnebeck wants immunity for the IT guy, Mike L. Connell:
The immunity request from Arnebeck to the Ohio AG was triggered by information from a confidential source that Karl Rove, a kingpin GOP strategist, threatened that if Mike Connell doesn’t go in the tank for cyber-rigging the 2004 election in Ohio, his wife will be sued for lobbying law violations.
It would appear, then, that Rove fears Arnebeck will be able to demonstrate that the election was tampered with and wants to prevent the blame from traveling up the food chain to himself.
Connell has more than likely been involved in other election monkey-business, such as, ever since 2000, coordinating supposedly independent phony grass-roots groups that attacked candidates. Furthermore, his company, Gov Tech Solutions, installed servers behind the firewalls of Congressional computers–firewalls that may have secret security gaps enabling congressional computers to be hacked by Bush/Republican operatives.
And then there’s the e-voting mess in Ohio. Connell was doing IT work for the State of Florida in 2000 and for the Ohio Secretary of State in 2004. Arnebeck says:
“And just think of this: here’s a person who is an instrument of a major presidential campaign simultaneously setting up the hosting of the votes in the Ohio election.”
As for the likelihood that e-voting in Ohio was tampered with, Arnebeck’s chief expert witness is Stephen Spoonamore, who “among other things designs and runs computer programs to analyze and detect fraudulent financial activity for the world’s leading credit card companies.” Spoonamore points to the “Connelly anomaly” in 14 Ohio counties:
in which down-ticket candidates got more votes than John Kerry. The name comes from the candidacy of C. Ellen Connelly, an African-American woman who was running for the Ohio Supreme Court in 2004. She was endorsed by pro-choice and civil rights groups, and was relatively unknown to Ohio voters, in addition to being vastly outspent by her opponent in the campaign. Yet, somehow, Connelly got scores of thousands more votes than did John Kerry at the very top of the ticket.
Arnebeck said that “if you adjust for the [Connelly] anomaly or that situation, it’s enough votes to have changed the outcome of the election. So the focus of our efforts, in cooperation with the Secretary of State, would be to find out who is responsible for that.”
The responsibility apparently goes beyond Connell and his IT work for Secretary of State Blackwell.
Spoonamore continued, “I am extremely confident in [our] analysis of the 2004 election anomalies because of the way the tabulators were programmed, and all were programmed by the Rapp family on Triad systems. So in my opinion, there should be an investigation launched into exactly what happened.
“There was an enormous number of strange activities in which Triad and the Rapp family were running around the state taking hard drives out of computers, putting in new hard drives, and posting poll results. And the reason all this was going on, I’m quite confident, was that the hard drives they were pulling out had fraudulent coding. Simple as that.”
………………
“With the Connelly Anomaly, if that was in a banking environment, instantaneously — instantaneously! — the entire system inside that box would be frozen. Any programmer who reviewed any of that code would be alerted, all the executives assisting in that process would be alerted, the hard drives would be frozen in place, extracted and immediately placed in forensic analysis. ‘Cause somebody did something major.”
Here’s what I hope for: that authorities in Ohio (dare I hope for Missouri?) will take the threat of e-voting fraud seriously this year. Nobody’s going to get Rove, certainly not before November. Maybe under President Obama and an honest Attorney General, maybe then Conyers and Kucinich will get Rove’s testimoney and, more important, his e-mails. I’d love to see that bastard brought to justice.
But I’ll settle for closely monitored elections.