Guess Who’s Investigating Karl Rove
The Los Angeles Times reports today that the Office of Special Counsel will investigate Karl Rove’s various and sundry shenanigans in Washington, including the U.S. Attorney firings:
“We will take the evidence where it leads us,” Scott J. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview Monday. “We will not leave any stone unturned.”
Isn’t that sweet. And who is Mr. Bloch? Well, according to his official government bio, until 2003 he:
served as Associate Director and then Deputy Director and Counsel to the Task Force for Faith-based and Community Initiatives at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on First Amendment cases, regulations, intergovernmental outreach, and programmatic initiatives.
Isn’t that special! A former DoJ employee investigating a DoJ scandal! I’m sure that will go swimmingly. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.
In fact, it seems Scott Bloch raised some alarm bells with the GLBT community when President Bush first appointed him to head the OSC. From the memory hole:
Bloch hadn’t received much in the way of media scrutiny when he first took over the Office of Special Counsel in January of this year and, he recently admitted during a speech at his alma mater, the University of Kansas, he really didn’t know much about the job when he was nominated. That didn’t stop Bloch from getting embroiled in an on-the-job controversy immediately after he took charge of the Office, when he announced that he would review a 1978 law protecting employees and job applicants from being terminated for issues unrelated to their job.
If Bloch’s efforts were to prevail, federal employees would no longer have “recourse… if they are fired or demoted simply for being gay,” the Federal Times reported. According to the Chicago Tribune’s T. Shawn Taylor, “While there is no overarching federal law that protects private-sector employees from sexual-orientation discrimination, it has been understood since the Reagan era that federal employees are protected.”
Bloch also ordered the agency — which investigates and prosecutes federal employees’ and job applicants’ claims of discrimination, sexual harassment and retaliation against whistleblowers — to remove from its complaint forms and scrub from its Web site references to sexual orientation.
In March 2004, several Democrats in Congress asked President Bush renounce Bloch and by early April he was forced to issue a statement assuring GLBT employees they would be covered by the 1978 law. But in October 2004 Congressional Democrats had to send Bush yet another letter demanding action because Bloch still hadn’t restored the sexual orientation language to the OSC website and materials.
So, this is the man who is going to investigate Karl Rove’s possible role in the Valerie Plame case, U.S. Attorney firings, etc. A former DoJ employee with a history of trying to change longstanding policy for ideological reasons, who has an ax to grind against Democrats in Congress, and who frankly doesn’t seem to like gays and lesbians very much.
Good to know.
Update [2007-4-24 13:38:57 by Southern Beale]:
Welcome, Tennessee Guerilla Women!