Self-Interest
Exciting things are happening in Washington, where the game of “legal immunity musical chairs” is in full swing. That’s the process by which it’s decided who takes the fall for those sins of the presidency which can’t be hidden. And since this presidency has so many visible sins to account for, this term’s game promises to be particularly lively.
The most recent chair to be tugged from the dwindling ring is a free pass on abuses in the OSC. The Office of Special Counsel is charged with protecting federal whistle-blowers from government retaliation for their whistle-blowing, and especially from getting fired for exposing abuses. I dimly remember the scandal when Scott Bloch took over the office in 2004 and immediately began dismissing out of hand complaints against Republican-appointed officials, and, when his own department began blowing whistles on such behavior, creating a new field office in Detroit where complainers could be assigned to undesirable posts. Or fired, if they preferred.
The FBI just raided Bloch’s office and home, seizing computer and paper records. No official statement of the charges the warrants pursue is yet available, but the smart money is on violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from using their offices for partisan political goals, because two of Bloch’s deputies, also under investigation for Hatch Act violations, were subjected to warranted search and seizure at the same time. Perhaps the move was motivated by Bloch’s decision to have a “virus” purged from his computer, which, by a startling coincidence, had apparently infected his two deputies’ computers as well, without touching the rest of the department—the FBI calculated it had more to lose than to gain by waiting for evidence to mount.
I await further developments with delight, especially since the OSC itself is investigating the White House, and especially Karl Rove, for improper firing of federal prosecutors and the use of federal offices in Republican political events. I hope that unleashing the FBI on the OSC is not simply a convenient way for the White House to stop investigation into its own misdeeds.