Now with the release of congressional investigative documents, it is evident that the Rove Republican Racket intentionally fired then U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton in 2006 to protect the disgraced Renzi from being probed.
And marching with Karl Rove was the Arizona Republic newspaper.
How did the Arizona Republic manage to screw up its initial coverage so badly? The answer, as it turns out, is Karl Rove. Last week, as part of a probe into the Bush Administration's dismissal of seven U.S. Attorneys, a Senate committee released thousands of pages of new documents. Some of them involved Paul Charlton. Charlton, the then-U.S. Attorney in Phoenix, was one casualty of the administration's forced resignations in December 2006. At the time of Charlton's "resignation," he was
in the midst of investigating a fellow Republican, Congressman Renzi. And though the documents still don't make 100 percent clear what led to Charlton's dismissal, they show for the first time the Bushies' attempt to spin the media in Renzi's defense. Let me explain. More than a month before the 2006 election, New Times broke the story at the center of the charges against Renzi — that Renzi pushed investors to buy land owned by his business partner in exchange for sponsorship of a land swap in Congress. Our report was no bit of conjecture. We nailed down the complete paper trail. Yet the Republic endorsed the guy, with nary a mention of our findings. I never expect other media outlets to credit our work — but I don't expect them to ignore such serious allegations, either. It seemed just plain lazy to not follow up. But within the coming weeks, the paper's passivity turned to outright misinformation. That's where Rove comes in. Go figure. Two weeks before the election, news outlets from the Washington Post to Roll Call relayed our findings along with news that Renzi was under federal investigation. But instead of looking into the facts, the Republic's Dennis Wagner followed with a bizarre story suggesting the whole "investigation" was a Democratic dirty trick.
