Jim Crow: Rove's bro

The big news continues to be the link between USAgate and voter suppression.

Tanner: EPluribus Media has a great new piece called "Resurrecting Jim Crow," which focuses on John Tanner, section chief of the DOJ's Voting Rights Department.

A third troubling precedent occurred in the aftermath of the 2004 election and accusations of widespread voter suppression in Ohio. Again, Tanner seemed willing to serve the political agenda of his bosses. A source who left the Voting Section in 2004 notes that Tanner's June 29th 2005 letter closing the investigation into the distribution of voting machines in Franklin Country, Ohio reads instead like a legal brief supporting the use of disparate numbers of machines in predominantly white and predominantly black precincts, arguing that such disparity did not violate the Voting Rights Act.

Described by sources as repugnant, Tanner's 4-page letter doesn't merely note that the investigation is closed, but also develops convoluted excuses for why black voters didn't have enough machines and white voters did.

In a sense, bloggers covering the 2004 vote controversies failed. We should have made the mental connection: Those hellishly long lines in Ohio could not have occurred unless the DOJ had been forced to look the other way.

Thor's hammer. As you probably know, McClatchy news wrote an excellent story on the Rovian "voter fraud" gambit in Missouri. Oddly, when the KC Star (owned by McClatchy) ran this piece, they heavily re-wrote it to water down accusations against the Republican machine. (We've been seeing a lot of stories called into Bush-friendly rewrite lately.) Brad Friedman has been doing his usual excellent job of covering these events.

He directs our attention to the Fired Up Missouri Blog, which we've cited before, and which today makes a fascinating find:

Until now we've failed to examine one potential factor in the Star's inexorable reliance on GOP talking points and tainted sources in its coverage of the Justice and Voter Fraud scandals: that the Kansas City Star's corporate legal representation is provided by none other than the firm of Lathrop & Gage -- itself a key player in much of the GOP's campaign to strengthen Republican political power.­

Lathrop & Gage is the law firm owned by Rove's buddy Thor Hearne, the guy who started the American Center for Voting Rights, a fake grassroots organization devoted to suppressing the minority and poor vote (under the disguise of battling voter registration fraud). Brad has covered their shennanigans in exquisite detail.

Hearne helped to draft a photo ID Bill that would have made it tougher for poor and minority voters in MO to get into the voting booths. That bill was struck down.

But ACVR is just the beginning. Hearnes' legal eagles also

-- Created the elaborate and byzantine system of management companies and shell corporations into which the Blunt Administration's fee office system was organized. The fee office scheme was the focus of a DOJ investigation during which U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins was told that he'd be fired;
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-- ­­Hired former DOJ Attorney and criminal defense attorney William Mateja to intervene in the Bud Cummins fee office invetigation on Matt Blunt's personal behalf;
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-- Allowed its ­prominent attorneys to serve as media spokespeople for former U.S. Attorney Todd Graves, who is brother to GOP United States Rep. Sam Graves and husband of the holder of one of Matt Blunt's most lucrative fee offices.

If these names befuddle you, check out my previous pieces here and here.

Todd Graves. With a name like that, he must have his pick of goth chicks. He was one of the prosecutors "axed" to leave the DOJ. And his current 'tude toward his old gig is -- well, interesting.

He had, as noted, followed the Rove playbook in trying to suppress the minority vote in MO. Yet more recently he has said that the Bush DOJ has become "toxic," and that he wants nothing further to do with it.

Corrente takes the story further:

Todd Graves was the US Attorney in Kansas City who suspiciously resigned in March 2006 and was replaced by the now infamous Bradley Schlozman. Graves’s cover story has always been that he was fired, er, forced out because he wouldn’t sign a lawsuit against the Missouri Secretary of State to force voting roll purges. He was replaced by Schlozman who immediately pushed the lawsuit forward. But the kicker is that, despite what he has said, Graves’s name was actually on the lawsuit.

Near as I can tell, Graves has two options: He can reveal that his name was forged on that lawsuit (which was eventually tossed out), or he can come up with another story.

It may be that Todd wants to rewrite the tale of his severance from DOJ in order to make himself seem more noble than he actually was.

Schlozman, by the way, will soon be doing "a whole lotta splainin'" to the Senate Judiciary Committee. If you have not seen it yet, check out Josh Marshall's TPMtv presentation here.