After more than two years of banging the drum here at The BRAD BLOG, it looks as if the national MSM have finally picked up on the fraud perpetrated by Missouri’s White House operative Mark F. “Thor” Hearne and his high-level, democracy-hating GOP scammer pals in Missouri, at the Department of Justice, and in the White House.
In a McClatchy article just out today, reporter Greg Gordon correctly identifies Missouri as “Ground Zero” in the Republican attempt to establish phony claims of Democratic “voter fraud” in order to institute new restrictions at the polls as part of an insidious ploy to Democratic-leaning voters from being able to cast their vote.
Gordon reports on a number of issues out of Missouri that we’ve covered here over the years, including; the unsubstantiated claims of “voter registration fraud” against ACORN filed just prior to the ’06 election in the Show-Me state; the unsuccessful lawsuit brought by the DoJ against MO SoS Robyn Carnahan alleging more voters on the rolls than actual eligible voters; and the unconstitutional Voter ID law as pushed through the MO legislature as drafted by the slime-ball Hearne.
As well, McClatchy finally outs the supposedly “non-partisan” American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), as created by Hearne and RNC Communications director, Jim Dyke. We began reporting on ACVR just three days after they went public on March 22, 2005 to testify before then-Rep. Bob Ney’s (R-OH) House Administration Committee on Democratic attempts at “vote supression” during Ohio’s 2004 Presidential Election.
Gordon finally exposes the ACVR in the mainstream media for what it actually was: Little more than a well-coordinated, (and still-mysteriously-funded) scam to produce public propaganda to support the GOP’s insider push in swing states for voter suppression legislation and tactics by Republican officials.
Though the ACVR claimed tax-exempt 501(c)3 status from the beginning (despite their inability to show evidence of same), their “non-partisan” status was neatly embellished several months after they formed when they added “Democrat” Brian Lunde as their Executive Director. As Gordon writes…
…
[I]n February 2005, Hearne helped establish the non-profit Center for American Voting Rights, which issued lengthy reports alleging voter fraud in states across the country, including Missouri. One director for the supposedly non-partisan group was Brian Lunde, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee, who switched parties in 2000 and headed Democrats for Bush in 2004.
We covered the Lunde element of the scam back in August of ’05 as the bulk of the MSM were still quoting reports from the phony group, and using their spokesmen as sources identified as “non-partisan,” “grass roots,” and “voting rights advocates.”
Our article earlier today (and several prior to it, most recently here and here) reveals still more of Hearne’s Missouri machinations and how his direct connections to the White House and DoJ led to the firing of the U.S. Attorney in Arkansas, Bud Cummins. The Republican attorney had been investigating both Gov. Matt Blunt and Hearne’s lawfirm, Lathrop & Gage — who have long served as Blunt’s legal reps — at the time of Cummins’s unwarranted removal and subsequent replacement by a Rove protégé.
Gordon’s complete article is a must-read. But allow us to highlight a few key passages concerning Hearne specifically, as well as Rove, Blunt, Sen. Kit Bond, DoJ “voter fraud” zealot/operative Bradley Schlozman (who would be installed, despite a lack of any previous prosecutorial experience, as interim U.S. Attorney in MO’s Western District, just in time to bring several inappropriate, unsupported, and unprecedented “voter fraud” cases in the days prior to the ’06 election), and the rest of the corrupt Missouri politicians/gangsters willing to use their offices in order to undermine democracy for their own personal, political gain.
“Few have endorsed the strategy with more enthusiasm than White House political guru Karl Rove,” writes Gordon, “and nowhere has the plan been more apparent than in Missouri.”
He reports that for all the sturm and drang in Missouri concerning allegations of “voter fraud,” little, if any, was actually ever proven to be true. While in the meantime, the entire scheme has now been revealed as “part of a wider effort to protect the GOP majority in Congress with a series of measures to dampen Democratic turnout.”…
In fact, no significant voter fraud was ever proven.
Instead, the Republican preoccupation with voter fraud was part of a wider effort to protect the GOP majority in Congress with a series of measures to dampen Democratic turnout. They included stiffer voter ID requirements, wholesale purges of names from lists of registered voters and tight policing of liberal get-out-the-vote drives.
Few have endorsed the strategy with more enthusiasm than White House political guru Karl Rove, and nowhere has the plan been more apparent than in Missouri.
Gordon unearths this nugget about a visit by Rove to Missouri just prior to the 2006 Election and his meeting with “Republican strategists” and “a large number of lawyers that are standing by” to take on the “threat of voter fraud.”
One can safely assume that Rove met with “Republican strategist” and “lawyer” Hearne, as the St. Louis attorney was the point man, in Missouri and elsewhere, for the entire national scam. Earlier in the year, Rove thanked Hearne, by name, for his “work on clean elections” in 2000 and 2004, during an April 2006 speech at a Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA) conference.
Gordon traces the early moments of Hearne’s emergence on the scene back to an incident during the 2000 Election in St. Louis which would eventually feed the entire national GOP-backed voter suppression effort…
Responding to the bedlam, Democrats won an emergency court order keeping some polls open beyond their scheduled 7 p.m. closing. That outraged Republicans and Hearne, the Bush campaign lawyer, won an emergency appeals court ruling that shut the polls within an hour.
In the ensuing days, Sen. Bond blamed Ashcroft’s defeat on “a criminal enterprise.”
The following summer, then Secretary of State Blunt alleged in a 47-page investigative report that the use of affidavits to allow more than 1,000 “improper ballots “¦ compels the conclusion that there was in St. Louis an organized and successful effort to generate improper votes in large numbers.”
But an investigation by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, launched before Ashcroft settled in as U.S. attorney general in 2001, found the reverse.
As we’ve charged many times, in scores of The BRAD BLOG articles, Hearne then plied his trade as both an oft-quoted mouth piece in the media, and more insidiously, as a back room man, helping to create staged events like; the James Baker/Jimmy Carter chaired “Blue Ribbon National Election Reform Commission” (which, surprise surprise, ended up advocating for Photo ID measures at the polls); a recent study by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) which was first buried and then altered when it failed to show the evidence of “voter fraud” that Hearne and the EAC’s then-chair, Paul DeGregorio, a St. Louis colleague of Hearne’s, had hoped for; and most destructively, legislation in a number of states attempting to force Voter ID restrictions at the polls despite millions of citizens who would have no ID to meet the narrow provisions which have been ruled unconstitutional already in several states.
As Gordon writes:
Hearne did not respond to several requests for comment. His organization closed down its Internet site in March and has since disappeared from view.
Again, we encourage you to read Gordon’s entire piece (and hope that he, and others who chance upon our coverage here, will peruse our detailed reports and documents on Hearne and the ACVR scam via our Special Coverage Page devoted to the matter). But before we leave you for now, a quote from Missouri’s Democratic Rep. William Lacy Clay Jr. in the article sums the entire issue up perfectly.
“The real problem has never been vote fraud,” Clay said in a recent interview. “It’s access to the polls. In the last 50 years, no one in Missouri has been prosecuted for impersonating someone else at the polls. But thousands of eligible voters have been denied their constitutional rights “¦ It’s sickening.”
Sickening, indeed. Glad the mainstream media are finally beginning to catch on.
For more information on the “non-partisan” tax-exempt ACVR “Voter Fraud” scam and the snakeoil salesmen who invented it, Bush/Cheney ’04 National General Counsel Mark F. “Thor” Hearne and RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, please see BRAD BLOG’s full Special Coverage of the “American Center for Voting Rights” at https://BradBlog.com/ACVR.
your article is great,but this guy has nothing on the gov. of ms. haley barbour,i have stacks of illegal activities that date back 10 years,from katrinia to phone scamming in n.h. to raising taxes on food and lowering taxes on tobacco.
So, the Rethuglicans lie, steal elections, destroy the impartiality of the Justice System and take us into a bloody and expensive war.
Why would anybody admit to being a Republican when their party has THAT kind of record?
I guess the Rethuglicans in this country just hate America so much.
Brad, I’m glad you’re finally getting a little assistance from the lackies in MSM. You certainly have proved your merit over the years. You’re countless times more reputable than most MSM journalist (teleprompt readers).
Regarding “corrupt Missouri politicians/gangsters”: Brad, I really think it’s “GOPsters.”
Go ahead and try the catchphrase, “RICO the GOPsters.” After all, it is increasingly clear that the Republican Party has morphed under Bush into something that bears all the hallmarks of the kind of criminal conspiracy that gets prosecuted under the RICO Act.
My goodness, how silly. GOP voter fraud allegations are nothing more than accusing their opponents of what they , the GOP, are up too. Come on now..how did they pull off Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004?
What is the point of arguing the legitimacy of GOP voter fraud allegations? You give them credibility in doing so. Rove has a long history of using the tired, trite and hackneyed trick: accuse those you oppose of being guilty of your dirty tricks. Knock it off for Christ’s sake! What do you expect from a group of draft dodging war mongers that blame everything on Clinton?
I hate Karl Rove and ACVR and Rove’s election assholes that took the right to vote away from me, but don’t you dare take “Ground Zero for election fraud” away from the state of Georgia.
Georgia in the year of 2002 installed 100% electronic voting machines. Georgia went from 132 years of democratic governor, democratic house, democratic senate and democratic presidential candidates to fully 100% republican rule overnight.
Georgia has been in history and will always be ground zero for election fraud.
the voterga.com lawsuit is the only thread of accountability holding history at bay to return the voting rights of the people back to the citizens.
Missouri and Thor are just poor players that strut and fret their time upon a stage but the citizens of Georgia have suffered far longer and in far greater proportion to any other state in the area of stolen elections.
let’s not let these phrases stop us from framing our own. Electronic voting, first instituted at 100% was in Georgie by diebold in 2002. everything else in the election fraud world was downhill from there.
Re: Georgia. SO TRUE. Read the history of Fulton County vote suppression in the New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin, published in 2004. Titled “Poll Position”, this article details the history of the Federalist Society’s involvement in voter suppression and their takeover of the DOJ’s “voting section” of the Civil Rights division beginning under Ashcroft and initiated by the Voting Rights Act and HAVA–a section now headed by none other than head Federalist Society honcho Hans Von Spakovsky who was the “main justice department interpreter for HAVA”.
http://www.newyorker.com/archiv.../040920fa_fact
Here is just a sample of this 5-page treatise:
The Georgia controversy also raised a question that once seemed unthinkable: Is the Voting Rights Act obsolete? The question has special salience because key provisions of the law expire in 2007, and it’s not clear how, or whether, Congress will reauthorize them. “The Voting Rights Act was a transformative statute,” Samuel Issacharoff, a professor at Columbia Law School, says. “It’s hard to think of any civil-rights law in any walk of life that has been as dramatically effective.” In more recent years, the law has gone far beyond such basic issues as eliminating the poll tax; it has, for instance, stopped cities from annexing suburbs to dilute the importance of the minority vote, and the law has made sure that city councils are elected by neighborhood, rather than in at-large citywide races, which had been another way to limit the number of minority candidates who would win seats. As a result of all its changes, according to Issacharoff, “the act created a black political class that is now deeply embedded and politically savvy.” The civil-rights establishment””which includes interlocking networks of public-interest organizations, legal academics, and social scientists””is now conducting a sober and uncertain appraisal of the law, but doing so with little momentum and unclear goals.
It is a vacuum that the Justice Department, under John Ashcroft, has moved quickly to fill. As 2007 approaches and liberal activists cautiously explore their options, conservatives””including those in the Justice Department””are using the traditional language of voting rights to recast the issues, invariably in ways that help Republican candidates. The results of this quiet rightward revolution within the Justice Department may be apparent as soon as the November election.
(snip)
The idea of placing prosecutors on call on Election Day created misgivings both inside and outside the Voting Section. “A lot of assistant U.S. attorneys are going to be more interested in voting integrity than in voter protection,” Jon Greenbaum, a lawyer who recently left the Voting Section, after nearly seven years, to join the progressive Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told me. “How many people are scared off from voting because you ask them a question at a polling place? There is no way to know.” As another civil-rights lawyer puts it, “Voting is kind of an irrational act anyway. It’s easy to discourage people from doing it.” Justice officials insist that they don’t want to keep anyone from legitimately voting. “I understand that, historically, intimidation is something that could be used as a method to get people not to vote,” Luis Reyes, who is counsellor to Acosta, says. “But intimidation is antithetical to our mission with this initiative.”
By most accounts, Ashcroft’s Access and Integrity Initiative came too late to make much difference in the 2002 elections, which followed his announcement by about a month. Civil-rights advocates note, however, that the only major fraud investigation that came out of that election concerned Native Americans in South Dakota, who generally vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.
And the last two paragraphs of Toobin’s article are particularly relevant to “attorney-gate”:
Under Ashcroft, the Justice Department has also changed its method of hiring lawyers, who are supposed to be apolitical, and often go on to spend their careers working for the government. The department, which employs close to four thousand attorneys, hires junior-level lawyers through a program known as the Attorney General’s Honors Program, which brings in about a hundred and fifty new lawyers each year. In the past, the program was run by mid-level career officials, who were known for their political independence. Since 2002, the Honors Program has been run by political appointees. “It’s called the Attorney General’s Honors Program, and when Attorney General Ashcroft signed the first batch of appointments he said, ‘I’m the Attorney General. How come I don’t know anything about this?’ “ Mark Corallo, Ashcroft’s spokesman, says. “He said he wanted the top people in the department getting involved. He said he wanted greater outreach, different law schools approached, reaching out not just for racial minorities but for economic minorities as well.” Corallo dismisses complaints about the changes as coming from malcontents. “A bunch of mid-level people here had their boondoggle taken away from them, going on these recruiting trips for weeks at a time, wining and dining at great hotels on the government’s dime,” he said.
Lawyers inside and outside the department say that the change in the Honors Program has already had an effect, especially in politically sensitive places like the Voting Section. “The front office disbanded the hiring committee and took over all hiring,” one lawyer who recently left the Voting Section told me. “That was a huge deal. Under previous Republican Administrations, that hadn’t happened. They even took it over for summer volunteer clerks.” Thanks to these changes, some in the department believe, it’s only a matter of time before tensions in the Voting Section disappear. As a current employee puts it, “Soon, there won’t be any difference between the career people and the political people. The front office is replicating itself. Everyone here will be on the same page.” ♦
ok, that’s it – MO loses their statehood…
This is part of the wide spread plan to destroy election democracy in this nation.
The neoCons can’t even say “democratic party” in the debates I have been watching lately.
They have to say “democrat party” because even the republicans themselves sense how guilty the republican party has become. The latest trick is to put “D” beside the republican’s name, because “R” is a dirty word in the eyes of the people these days.
But, sadly, the republicans have no character left with which to free themselves. They are now slaves to corruption and the failed policies of the bushies:
(AP Story, emphasis added). So much for the false republican talking point about the job being “political”.
They just can’t see past their crooked noses anymore.
They are beginning to say, again, that it is ok to spy on Americans without a search warrant:
(Raw Story). They probably need to force another US Attorney to resign, so they need some private information with which to put a little pressure here and there.
St Louis – the Most Dangerous City in America and now 1 of the Most Polluted as Well
As a St Louis area resident I can definately say that Missourian’s are always the first to drink the kool-aid and have few if any regard for thinking for themselves. Pulling off voter fraud is as easy as doing it and blaming it on Al-Qaida because Missourian’s don’t even know Al-Qaida isn’t even real.
I agree; this looks like a job for the RICO act.
You can bet your bottom dollar that “clean elections” was an inside joke of Rove’s … meaning ‘scrubbed of all black and brown voters!’
Thank you Brad.
Impeach and jail the greedy lying murderous bushit administration and their anti-environmental agenda of DESTRUCTION. Oh yeh OIL BARONS, YOUR GAS PROFITS ARE UP!
SCUM OF THE EARTH.
Was Tenet Source For Downing Street Memo?
“You don’t get much more momentous than the head of the CIA and MI6 discussing how the “intelligence” used to justify a war is being falsified.”
And you’ll never guess what the conservatives really want to see as their preferred Electoral Roll: None other than The Social Register, come to think of it.
Rove was on the Hannity show on election day saying he was going to bring out an army of lawyers.
Guess you didn’t scare enough people, Turd.
Hi Brad
STRANGE my first try in telling you my story-just as I clicked submit my ips shut me down.
WE do have voter fraud here in Missouri, Republican. In 2000 I voted in the primary only to find my name removed from the voter books in November. I was given a provisional type ballot which I’m sure was never counted. Our then SoS was Govenor Matt Blunt who I believe had removed millions of Democrats from the rolls, I am 100% positive Al Gorewon Missouri. In 2004 a Joplin Globe reporter Eric found here in Jasper County dead people were voting. One man was surpized to find out his father, dead 10 years had been voting since his death. Eric found all fraudulent votes were made by republicans. PLEASE send the law down here to Jasper County Election board which by the way is run by Republicans. Nufsaid!
Larry #18
The private testimony of the deputies in the DOJ are saying that Rove personally counselled them about how to talk to congress:
(Newsweek, emphasis added). The radically conflicting testimony could be the basis of obstruction of justice or a conspiracy to obstruct justice.
P.S. I forgot to mention but Jasper County is District 7 home of Roy Blunt House Whip in D.C. and Govenor Blunts daddy!!!! When working for Clair McCaskill last summer I found nearly all people I talked to did not vote republican or vote for Bush in 2004.
Phylis Huster (#6) –
Look under the Voter ID legislation rock in Georgia. You will find Thor and friends. That’s the point.