Newspaper logo  
 
 
Bookmark and Share
Local News & Opinion

01.26 Local Democrats Invited to Brainstorming Session on Sun., Jan. 31

Ref. : Local Newsbriefs

Travel
Books, Films, Arts & Education

02.04 'The Power of Nightmares': Underwear vs. Reason

Letters

Ref. : Letters to the editor

Open Letters:
Health & Environment

Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries

02.03 Drugmaker Got Kickbacks for Nursing Home Patients

01.18 Drugmaker Got Kickbacks for Nursing Home Patients

Media Watching

02.04 Err-America

02.03 The Right Gets Itself 'Wired'

Ref. : The Daily Howler

Legal Matters

01.25 Thinking About Fictions

01.24 US Democracy's End of the Road

01.22 Editorial: U.S. Supreme Court Nails Down the Coffin of Democracy

01.22 Security Fools

US Politics, Policy & Culture

02.09 Growing Hunger in America

02.08 The US Government has Lost its Reason for Being

02.08 Thinking About Oracles

02.06 No Direction Home: Pakistan and the Imperial Principle

02.04 Howard Zinn and the State of the Union

02.04 The US Supreme Court: Vanguard of Friendly American Fascism?

02.04 The New War Against Money

02.04 David Brooks Goes After Greedy Geezers

02.02 Obama's Budget Ducks Pentagon Cuts

02.02 Budgets, War and Blind Ambition: The Limited Minds of the American Elite

02.01 Thinking About Definitives

02.01 Remembering Howard Zinn (1922 - 2010)

01.29 American History 101: We Are Devo

01.29 Obama's Outreach to Americans: Empty Rhetoric, Business As Usual

01.28 The Supreme Court's Partisanship

01.27 Freeze Frame: Flopsweat and Farce in the Hollow Halls of Power

01.25 Granny D on Campaign Finance Reform

01.25 S.C. Republican’s Plan: Starve the Poor So They’ll Stop “Breeding”

01.23 It's Time for Kucinich, Conyers, Feingold and Other `Progressives' in Congress to Take a Stand

01.21 Massachusetts' Message of Stupid

01.21 Terrorism Defined: Bill Clinton Lights Our Way to Truth

01.21 How Obama Lost His Way

01.21 Political Earthquake Rocks Massachusetts

01.20 Obama Cuts Deal that Will Reduce Social Security, Medicare and all Entitlements

01.20 Critical Mass: Dem Agenda Opens Right-Wing Doors

01.19 Outsourcing War: The Rise of Private Military Contractors

“High Crimes?”

01.25 The Silence and the Shield: Depraved Indifference to the Atrocities of Power

01.19 Dark as a Dungeon: A Brutal System Stripped Bare

Economics & Business Non/Mis/Malfeasance

02.07 AIG-Gate: The World's Greatest Insurance Heist

02.06 The Free Market Fetish

02.04 The Crisis is Not Over

02.03 States Face Worsening Recession with Health Care Funds on the Chopping Block

02.02 Rule by the Rich

01.29 The Battle of the Titans: JPMorgan vs. Goldman Sachs

01.27 State of the Union: Obama’s “Automatic IRA” Plan Could Make Bush’s Wildest Dreams Come True

01.26 Obama, Read Your Reagan on Capital Gains Taxation

01.24 Funding Public Health Care with a Publicly-Owned Bank: How Canada Did It

01.18 Thinking About Accelerants

International

02.08 Aafia Siddiqui: Victimized by American Injustic

02.07 Annals of Liberation: Obama Surge Driving Thousands From Their Homes

02.05 Human Rights Abuses in Israel and Occupied Palestine

02.03 Child Slavery in Haiti

01.30 Blood is His Argument: Tony Blair's Gentle Cuddling at Iraq "Inquiry"

01.28 Obama Ignores Key Afghan Warning

01.27 Haiti's Earthquake: Natural or Engineered

01.26 Helping Haiti’s Elders

01.26 Focus on Israel: Harvesting Haitian Organs

01.25 Focus on Haiti: Washington's Militarized Takeover

01.22 The Lessons of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

01.18 Disaster Capitalism Headed to Haiti

We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
Google
This site Web
  Bush's New US Attorney a Criminal?
Newspaper logo

COMMENTARY:

Bush's New US Attorney a Criminal?

BBC Television had exposed 2004 voter attack scheme by appointee Griffin, a Rove aide. Black soldiers and the homeless targeted.

by GREG PALAST
Timothy Griffin, according to BBC Television, was the hidden hand behind a scheme to wipe out the voting rights of 70,000 citizens prior to the 2004 election.
March 7, 2007—There's only one thing worse than sacking an honest prosecutor. That's replacing an honest prosecutor with a criminal.

There was one big hoohah in Washington yesterday as House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers pulled down the pants on George Bush's firing of US Attorneys to expose a scheme to punish prosecutors who wouldn't bend to political pressure.

But the Committee missed a big one: Timothy Griffin, Karl Rove's assistant, the President's pick as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Griffin, according to BBC Television, was the hidden hand behind a scheme to wipe out the voting rights of 70,000 citizens prior to the 2004 election.

Key voters on Griffin's hit list: Black soldiers and homeless men and women. Nice guy, eh? Naughty or nice, however, is not the issue. Targeting voters where race is a factor is a felony crime under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Targeting voters where race is a factor is a felony crime under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In October 2004, our investigations team at BBC Newsnight received a series of astonishing emails from Mr. Griffin, then Research Director for the Republican National Committee. He didn't mean to send them to us. They were highly confidential memos meant only for RNC honchos.

However, Griffin made a wee mistake. Instead of sending the emails—potential evidence of a crime—to email addresses ending with the domain name "@GeorgeWBush.com" he sent them to "@GeorgeWBush.ORG"—a website run by prankster John Wooden, who owns "GeorgeWBush.org." When Wooden got the treasure trove of Rove-ian ravings, he sent them to us.


And we dug in, decoding and mapping the voters on what Griffin called "Caging" lists—spreadsheets with 70,000 names of voters marked for challenge. Overwhelmingly, these were Black and Hispanic voters from Democratic precincts.

The Griffin scheme was sickly brilliant. We learned that the RNC sent first-class letters to new voters in minority precincts marked, "Do not forward." Several sheets contained nothing but soldiers; other sheets, homeless shelters. Targets included the Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida and that city's State Street Rescue Mission. Another target: Edward Waters College, a school for African-Americans.

If these voters were not currently at their home voting address, they were tagged as "suspect" and their registration wiped out, or their ballot challenged and not counted. Of course, these 'cages' captured thousands of students, the homeless and those in the military, though they are legitimate voters. We telephoned those on the hit list, including one Randall Prausa. His wife admitted he wasn't living at his voting address: Randall was a soldier shipped overseas.

Randall and other soldiers like him who sent in absentee ballots, when challenged, would lose their vote. And they wouldn't even know it.

And by the way, it's not illegal for soldiers to vote from overseas—even if they're Black.

But it is illegal to challenge voters en masse where race is an element in the targeting. So several lawyers told us, including Ralph Neas, famed civil rights attorney with People for the American Way.

Griffin himself ducked our cameras, but his RNC team tried to sell us the notion that the caging sheets were, in fact, not illegal voter hit lists, but a roster of donors to the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign. Republican donors at homeless shelters?

Over the past weeks, Griffin has said he would step down if he had to face Congressional confirmation. However, the President appointed Griffin to the law enforcement post using an odd little provision of the USA Patriot Act that could allow Griffin to skip Congressional questioning altogether.

Therefore, I have a suggestion for Judiciary members. Voting law expert Neas will be testifying today—March 7— before Conyers' Committee on the topic of illegal voter "disenfranchisement"—the fancy word for stealing elections by denying voters' civil rights.

Maybe Conyers should hold a line-up of suspected vote thieves and let Neas identify the perpetrators. That should be easy in the case of the Caging List Criminal. He'd only have to look for the guy wearing a new shiny lawman's badge.


Read the full story, "Caging Lists: Great White Republicans Take Voters Captive" in Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse: Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales from a White House Gone Wild. The new edition, with a new chapter on "Theft of the Election," will be released April 24th (by Penguin/Plume in paperback). See the original BBC Television story here; and see Palast's new YouTube channel.


Copyright © 2007 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved.

Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.

This story was published on March 8, 2007.
 

Public Service Ads:
Verifiable Voting in Maryland