Partisanship at DOJ Raises Legitimate Question about Sincerity of Investigation into Campaign Skimming by Top Ohio Republican Official, Operatives

OhioNewsBureau – Opinion Editorial

COLUMBUS, OHIO: With the release this week of an internal investigation at the US Department of Justice (DOJ) that found the department’s top staff routinely took politics and ideology into account in filling nonpolitical positions – then lied about it – it's not hard to imagine that the decision to not pursue the investigation into abuses of campaign finance laws committed by top Ohio Republicans, including the former Ohio House Speaker and two GOP operatives, was dropped for purely partisan political reasons and not because not enough evidence was available to base a case on.

Investigation Shows Politicized DOJ Under Alberto Gonzales

The New York Times editorial said that while the report offered no real surprises, it augured for a fuller, deeper investigation to sound the depths of the degree to which the Bush DOJ, under the direction of then-AG Alberto Gonzales, politicized the country’s top law enforcement agency as it perverted laws and rules to further the purely partisan political interests of the GOP at the expense of citizens who expect and deserve an agency, above all others, that must adhere to neutrality and professionalism in every way, especially when enforcing the nation’s laws.

The blistering attack on the Gonzales-led DOJ that led to Gonzales himself resigning and his successor, Michael B. Mukasey, promising to right the ship that had gone so wrong under the Bush Administration, includes charges that Gonzales, with advice and consent from White House political operatives  Karl Rove, Bush senior political adviser, and Harriet Miers, a Dallas attorney who was nominated for a seat on the US Supreme Court but was forced to withdraw from consideration when senators recoiled at the move, made hiring and firing decisions based in large part on what this duo advised.

Did Ohio Political Leader Benefit from Partisan DOJ?

With the story of the firing of 95 state district attorneys by Gonzales, based on performance decisions shown by this internal investigation to be factually false and through victims of the firings like New Mexico district attorney David Iglesias who has attained a level of celebrity among the media and who has written a book detailing what happened to him, it is not foolish speculation that former House Speaker Larry Householder, who at one time was under a grand jury investigation for skimming campaign funds, and GOP operatives, Brett Buerck and Kyle Sisk, who schemed to overpay some vendors, then having those vendors make secret payments to Householder and his top advisers, were not pursued with any force because they were Republicans. Many of the 95 fired district attorneys were dismissed, in Mr. Iglesias’ case on December 7th, for not faithfully following directions to file false charges of election fraud against Democrats as Rove and Gonzales are alleged to have ordered, in their malicious scheme to win elections by causing a debris field of negative media coverage that would benefit Republicans by blowing trouble toward Democrats.

The Toledo Blade reported in July 2005 that a “select group of key players in state government have used the same network of connections they established in their official positions to make money for themselves and raise loads of cash for their party and President Bush.” The print paper that broke the scandal of the Ohio Department of Workers’ Compensation investing $50 million with Republican campaign contributor and rare-coin dealer Tom Noe, described the dealings between state officials and special interests as a web of campaign contributions-for-state contracts that became known as “pay to play” government.

“The payoffs come in the form of lucrative state and federal lobbying deals, political consulting pacts, and having the pull to convince campaign contributors to support their candidates.” [Toledo Blade]

In its detailed chronicle of how politically motivated operatives built a house of cards that eventually tumbled down on them in scandals, the Blade reported that an Ohio political strategy session held in 2003 with Mr. Mehlman, Mr. Johnson, and possibly Karl Rove, the architect of Mr. Bush's campaigns, was on the agenda for Ohio campaign contributors like Tom Noe after the White House's celebration of Ohio State University's national championship football team.

Thomas Whatman, who left after nine years as executive director of the Ohio GOP to open his lobbying and consulting firms in 2002 - Strategic Public Partners and Whatman & Associates – is reported to have collected about $500,000 as lobbyists in Washington and worked on a number of issue advocacy campaigns, according to Blade reporters Jim Drew and Steve Eder. Whatman was reported to have teamed up with aides to former House Speaker Larry Householder (R., Glenford), then-Perry County auditor, to create an advocacy group called YourOhio.org that was designed to play a big role in the 2006 statewide election.

Mr. Whatman was subsequently subpoenaed for information about Informed Citizens of Ohio, a campaign fund formed by Mr. Householder that raised and spent money to elect Republican candidates for the state Supreme Court in 2002. Federal authorities began an investigation, in part based on an anonymous nine-page memo authored by a Householder loyalist that was leaked to investigators. The memo accused the House Republican campaign fund of overcharging vendors, with the money being skimmed to Mr. Householder and top campaign aides. The memo made no reference to Mr. Whatman and Mr. Householder and his aides denied any wrongdoing, Drew and Eder said. Ohio’s lobbying registration center currently lists Whatman as one of four lobbyists representing Beech Brook and one of three lobbyists representing Fleishman Hilliard in Ohio.

DOJ Closes Case on Householder After Two Years of Work

As for Mr. Householder, charges filed against him went fallow after two years, dozens of subpoenas and countless interviews when the DOJ declined to prosecute, according to then-investigative reporter Sandy Theis of the Cleveland Plain Dealer who closely followed the investigation. In her June 2006 report, the text of which was supplied to OhioNewsBureau by Avahome at ePLuribus Media, which collects, categorizes and maintains a large database of articles on election and political issues, Theis quoted FBI legal counsel Mike Brooks saying the decision to close the investigation of Householder and top political allies, including Buerck, Sisk and Sam Van Voorhis, a political consultant whose company did political mailings for House Republicans, was made by the department’s Public Integrity Section.

Theis reports that while “much of the investigation appeared to be handled by the IRS,” the DOJ controlled whether it went forward or not. Now that we know more about the extent to which Gonzales and others, maybe including Karl Rove, politicized the operations of the nation’s justice department, it hardly seems a stretch to speculate that Householder and his confederates were allowed to slip away into the mists of the past because pursuing them would have been contrary to the partisan ideology that Democrats, not Republicans, were the political prey.

John Michael Spinelli is a former Ohio Statehouse government and political reporter and business columnist. He now serves as the OhioNews Bureau Chief for ePluribus Media Journal. Find ONB archives here.
Photo credits: (c) 2008 AnHarris, istockphoto

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