Greg Palast: The Goods on Goodling

BBC Television’s Newsnight has 500 “missing” Rove office emails including a series of self-incriminating notes which provide “the keys to the kingdom” behind the prosecutor firings. [1]

In the opening to today’s testimony before Congress, Monica Goodling, former Department of Justice White House Liaison, testified that Deputy Attorney General Kyle Sampson lied. At issue was, says Goodling, Sampson’s denial “that he had some knowledge of allegations that Tim Griffin had been involved in vote ‘caging’ during the work on the President’s 2004 campaign.”

What is ‘caging’? Why is it so important that it lead Goodling’s testimony? Why is Tim Griffin’s involvement kept secret? And what are ‘the allegations’?

Goodling, in her testimony (and in several subpoenaed emails) identifies the source of the allegation as BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast - who, in October 2004, first broke open the ‘caging’ story on BBC’s Television’s premier current affairs show, Newsnight. ( Watch it here [2])

The BBC reporter explained that ‘vote caging’ is a crime; Tim Griffin directed it; Karl Rove, Goodling and Sampson knew it, yet Rove demanded the appointment of Griffin as the US Attorney for Arkansas.

‘Caging’ was a 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign scheme to challenge, on false evidence, the right to vote of tens of thousand of Black voters.

Was Tim Griffin involved? Palast showed, on camera, the email he intercepted from the Bush campaign, “Subject: caging,” written by Griffin himself, making clear that Griffin was not just involved, the but the director of this vote fixing scheme.

The allegation is based on an email, re-produced on page 207 of Palast’s book, “Armed Madhouse,” currently a New York Times bestseller (published by Penguin).

In several emails obtained by subpoena by Congressional investigators, Goodling and Griffin complain about ‘that British reporter Palast’ (an American working with BBC London). In a February 5, 2006 email, Griffin gloats to Goodling that “no [US] national media” has picked up Palast’s discovery of the ‘caging’ operation. [3]

Here’s how caging works: letters were sent “Do Not Forward” to voters at home addresses. When the letters were returned to sender (”caged”), the voter’s right to vote was challenged. The letters, however, were targeted at African-American homeless men, students — and soldiers send overseas — all legal voters who, because they were shipped to Iraq or for other reasons, were not at their home address. BBC obtained 50 ‘caging’ lists with 70,000 voters including large groups of servicemen.

Palast, currently in New York, is available for a limited number of media interviews. Contact interviews (at) gregpalast.com immediately.

Palast is the award-winning reporter who, for BBC TV, exposed the Florida 2000 ‘purge’ of Black voters wrongly accused of being ‘felons.’

Article from Greg Palast: http://www.gregpalast.com

URL to article: http://www.gregpalast.com/journalist-with-bbc-has-rove-office-emails/

URLs in this post:
[1] Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregpalast/413062748/
[2] Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkvWkwv7UVo
[3] Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregpalast/485331744/

ENDS

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