The Rove Subpoena

I guess it’s my day to be underwhelmed.

I find it really hard to get excited over SJC issuing Rove a subpoena today. That’s partly for tactical reasons. Until we get the Sergeant at Arms to arrest Harriet and hold her in contempt, after all, it doesn’t make sense to subpoena Rove because we don’t have the tactically proven tools to enforce such a subpoena.

But it’s also a question of focus. We’ve got a well-supported claim against Alberto Gonzales moving foward right now. And we should have the same on Cheney–there is the same richness of evidence to go after Cheney. Whereas with Rove (with the exception of Presidential Records violations on the RNC emails and, eventually, Abramoff) we don’t have that evidence. And without tactical tools to force him to turn over the evidence …never mind, I’m going in circles.

So without that evidence, we’re forced to make claims that, I suspect, aren’t entirely well-founded. For example, Leahy states the following in his statement on the subpoenas.

What the White House stonewalling is preventing is conclusive evidence of who made the decisions to fire these federal prosecutors.  We know from the testimony that it was not the President.  Everyone who has testified said has said that he was not involved.  None of the senior officials at the Department of Justice could testify how people were added to the list or the real reasons that people were included among the federal prosecutors to be replaced.  Indeed, the evidence we have been able to collect points to Karl Rove and the political operatives at the White House.