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Rove's Office Urged Spending to Help GOP Incumbents in Tight Races

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 15, 2008; 2:27 PM

When Karl Rove's office requested special help for beleaguered Republican congressional candidates in the months before the 2006 elections, the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy jumped to the task. Director John Walters carried half-million-dollar grants to news conferences with two congressmen and a senator, earning a top Rove aide's accolade of "superstar" after the election.

Walters's visits to Utah, Missouri and Nevada were among at least 303 out-of-town trips by senior Bush appointees meant to lend prestige or bring federal grants to 99 politically endangered Republicans that year, in an orchestrated White House campaign that House Democratic investigators yesterday called unprecedented in scope and scale.

Although federal law prohibits the use of public funds or resources for partisan political activities -- and specifically barred Walters from any involvement in a federal election campaign -- the agencies involved said most of these trips were paid for by taxpayer funds, according to the draft report released by the Democratic majority of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The report said the trips were freely described as political in subpoenaed e-mails and interviews. A master list prepared at the White House two weeks before the election listed the names and dates of appearances by Cabinet secretaries in 73 key congressional districts, all under the heading "Final Push Surrogate Matrix."

"This is," the report said, "a gross abuse of the public trust."

The existence of the White House effort to turn federal officials into instruments of the 2006 Republican campaign effort is already well known, as well as the existence of a so-called "asset deployment" strategy involving senior appointees in every federal agency. But the House report, based on a review of more than 63,000 pages of internal documents, includes fresh details about which Cabinet members participated and who benefited.

Chaired by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), the committee makes clear in the report that Bush is hardly the first president to try to squeeze reelection support from the federal bureaucracy. It notes that one of President Bill Clinton's White House aides met with Cabinet secretaries and other senior appointees to brief them on tough races before the 1994 election, a precursor to at least 22 similar briefings that Bush aides conducted for top political appointees at 20 agencies between 2005 and 2007.

The House committee probed the Clinton effort in the 1990s, at the behest of its then-Republican chairman, but "received no evidence of practices . . . resembling the coordinated and comprehensive strategy the Bush White House employed to use taxpayer resources to support Republican candidates for office," the report states.

The committee's senior Republican, Rep. Tom Davis (Va.), disputed this statement, however. "The same kind of things [were] done by every administration since Eisenhower," he said, and compared the Democrats' "angry swooning" to the police captain's shock in the final scene of Casablanca. Not since then, he said, has "righteous indignation seemed so contrived."

In a separate report four times longer than the Democrats', Davis and his Republican colleagues said that in a few cases, Democratic politicians appeared at events tallied by Waxman's staff as partisan. They also said that some trips occurred at lawmakers' request, not merely at White House insistence.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said in a statement that the report was merely "an attempt to score political points" and asked whether the media had a "Dog Bites Man" headline ready. Asserting that Waxman's probes "tend to be a colossal waste of time and taxpayer money," he declined more detailed comment.

The Democratic report attributes the overall strategy of harnessing public officials to support the election of Republicans to Sara Taylor, a Rove aide who ran the White House political office until last year. Throughout the first 10 months of 2006, she sent periodic updates to the White House scheduling director, as well as White House liaisons at each agency, about which candidates deserved federal agency support.

White House e-mails to various agencies urged officials to pay attention to "our top priorities going into November" in order to achieve "a good result on 11/7." Each week, a new batch of suggestions went out, and trips by Cabinet officials actually became so routine that Taylor's office developed a standard form to send around, under the heading, "Secretary _____ Suggested Event Participation."

A July 2006 White House e-mail said that as the election got closer, officials would have to participate in at least five "recommended events" per month. The message went to the appointed liaisons at 18 departments and agencies, who sometimes functioned like political commissars, enforcing discipline and rallying top appointees to the cause.

Taylor's office also ensured that orders were carried out, and e-mailed the liaisons when agency or department heads shirked their responsibilities or went to events with lawmakers who were merely on their appropriating committees and not on the office's priority list of beleaguered Republicans.

In all, senior administration officials participated in 425 suggested events, according to the committee's tally, including 92 Republican Party events and 326 appearances with Republican candidates. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez was the most enthusiastic recruit, showing up at 59 recommended events. Four other Cabinet secretaries -- from the departments of Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, and Veterans Affairs -- showed up at more than 20 apiece.

Walters made it to 19 in 2006, while Attorney General Alberto Gonzales went to two. Walters's office did not immediately reply to a request for comment, but his aides have previously said the trips had legitimate, official purposes.

In total, agencies and department questioned by investigators claimed that 185 of the 303 trips urged by the political office were justifiably considered "official" events, and paid by tax dollars. The agencies could not determine whether another 59 events were paid by tax dollars, and did not say whether they were "official."

Despite all the energy poured into the effort, it was hardly a sterling success. The report lists Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) as the target of 20 visits by Bush officials, and he was overwhelmingly defeated. Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) got 12 visits and she held onto her seat by only 875 votes. Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), who got 10 visits, won a healthy 53 percent of the vote in his district, but Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-Conn.) collected just 44 percent after getting 10 visits herself.

In a contentious deposition by investigators, Taylor characterized all the out-of-town trips as efforts to "be helpful" to members of Congress who requested assistance but said she could not recall more precisely why some members were aided and others were not. She even speculated that some Cabinet-level visits might have harmed the Republican candidates on the White House's targeted list.

The committee judged her remarks during the deposition as "evasive" and misleading, a conclusion that her attorney W. Neil Eggleston said was an unwarranted "partisan slap." He said Taylor's testimony was "honest and forthright."

The report said that because Taylor and many other officials involved in organizing the trips are no longer in office, "there is no effective remedy" for any related violations of the 1939 Hatch Act restricting the use of public funds for partisan gain. The law spells out administrative sanctions for violations or, at worst, removal from office.

"For this reason, the Committee is making no referral to the Department of Justice . . . for further investigation," the report states. It urged instead that the Hatch Act be amended to eliminate the political affairs office at the White House or force it to serve "the interests of the taxpayer, not the political party of the President."

The Republican minority report was less sanguine about this goal. No statute, it said, "can repeal the laws of political gravity. There is a necessary, even inevitable, political element in White House efforts to build national consensus behind a president's policy initiatives."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/15/AR2008101501791.html?nav=hcmodule