So hard to tell in the Bush administration who the good guys are. Take U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch. Didn’t start out looking very much like a good guy. As Matt pointed out, when he started to get good press:
He’s actually a particularly odious Bush appointee and partisan Republican who was part of the “faith-based” nonsense and loves him some good, old-fashioned gay-bashing.
But the fact remains that in April 2007, he took on Karl Rove:
Most of the time, an obscure federal investigative unit known as the Office of Special Counsel confines itself to monitoring the activities of relatively low-level government employees, stepping in with reprimands and other routine administrative actions for such offenses as discriminating against military personnel or engaging in prohibited political activities.
But the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.
The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.
[…]
“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.”
Bloch declined to comment on who his investigators would interview, but he said the probe would be independent and uncoordinated with any other agency or government entity.
And then in June, he came down hard on GSA chief Lurita Doan:
The Office of Special Counsel, in a letter to President Bush released late Monday, said General Services Administrator Lurita Doan engaged in “the most pernicious of political activity” banned by the 1939 Hatch Act when she asked, at a meeting of General Services Administration political appointees, how they could help Republican candidates.
“I recommend that Administrator Doan be disciplined to the fullest extent for her serious violation of the Hatch Act and insensitivity to cooperating fully and honestly in the course of our investigation,” wrote Scott Bloch, special counsel for the independent investigative and prosecutorial agency.recommending that should be “punished to the fullest extent” for engaging in “the most pernicious of political activity” banned by the 1939 Hatch Act when she asked, at a meeting of GSA political appointees, how they could help Republican candidates.
So for a while, he made himself look pretty good, grabbed himself a lot of positive headlines. But what the press wasn’t talking about a whole lot was the unsavory side of Scott Bloch.
He has been on the hot seat since he took office in 2004, in part for closing hundreds of whistle-blower cases allegedly without investigating them.
“It’s like finding out that your town fire chief is an arsonist,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Protection, a whistle-blower group.
“It’s just sort of jaw-dropping how bizarre this entire episode has been.”
A group of current and former Office of Special Counsel workers filed a complaint against Bloch in 2005, accusing him of retaliating against those who opposed with his policies through intimidation and involuntary transfers. The employees also accused Bloch of refusing to protect federal workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Those charges are being investigated by the inspector general at the Office of Personnel Management.
In November 2007, Bloch seems to have decided to engage in some old-fashioned destruction of evidence in the middle of this investigation:
… Mr. Bloch has himself been under investigation since 2005. At the direction of the White House, the federal Office of Personnel Management’s inspector general is looking into claims that Mr. Bloch improperly retaliated against employees and dismissed whistleblower cases without adequate examination.
Recently, investigators learned that Mr. Bloch erased all the files on his office personal computer late last year. They are now trying to determine whether the deletions were improper or part of a cover-up, lawyers close to the case said.
Bypassing his agency’s computer technicians, Mr. Bloch phoned 1-800-905-GEEKS for Geeks on Call, the mobile PC-help service. It dispatched a technician in one of its signature PT Cruiser wagons. In an interview, the 49-year-old former labor-law litigator from Lawrence, Kan., confirmed that he contacted Geeks on Call but said he was trying to eradicate a virus that had seized control of his computer.
Except that the virus story doesn’t exactly seem to hold water:
Mr. Bloch had his computer’s hard disk completely cleansed using a “seven-level” wipe: a thorough scrubbing that conforms to Defense Department data-security standards. The process makes it nearly impossible for forensics experts to restore the data later. He also directed Geeks on Call to erase laptop computers that had been used by his two top political deputies, who had recently left the agency.
[…]
Jeff Phelps, who runs Washington’s Geeks on Call franchise, declined to talk about specific clients, but said calls placed directly by government officials are unusual. He also said erasing a drive is an unusual virus treatment. “We don’t do a seven-level wipe for a virus,” he said.
And now this whole untidy mess has boiled over very nicely:
Federal agents raided the office and home of U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch on Tuesday while investigating whether the nation’s top protector of whistle-blowers destroyed evidence potentially showing he retaliated against his own staff.
Computers and documents were seized during the raid on the special counsel’s downtown office, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing inquiry. At least 20 agents were still on the scene as of mid-afternoon Tuesday.
Bloch’s home, in a Virginia suburb of Washington, also was raided, the officials said.
This is, of course, a soap opera of unbelievably comic proportions:
Only with the Bush gang is this set of circumstances even possible — Bloch is ostensibly investigating the Justice Department for its political activities, and simultaneously the Justice Department sends the FBI to raid Bloch’s office and home. What’s more, everybody is probably guilty.
And so, for the second day in a row, I am forced to end a post by exclaiming: Only in George Bush’s administration!
*** Update, 5:50 pm ***
Anyone who has followed Bloch’s story has probably wondered whether Bloch — who was very much considered “one of us” by the Bush administration when they appointed him as Special Counsel — cooked up his wide-ranging investigation of Karl Rove’s misdeeds just to create conflict of interest issues if the administration attempted to take action against him on the various charges that had already been leveled against him.
The Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a government watchdog, is charging that that was exactly Bloch’s motivation. What they’re calling evidence is not all that clear-cut, but TPMMuckraker is pushing their claim:
Now government watchdog POGO says they’ve discovered evidence that Bloch’s apparent motivation for launching a very well publicized probe was to make himself invulnerable:
An extraordinary document obtained by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) from inside the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) reveals that Special Counsel Scott Bloch created a special task force to investigate sensitive and high-profile matters and then ignored virtually every recommendation made by it. The document lends support to POGO’s theory that Bloch used the task force to launch an investigation of the White House, issuing demands for documents termed by his own task force as “overly broad,” to create the appearance of a conflict of interest with an ongoing investigation into allegations that Bloch himself had engaged in misconduct.
“Created a special task force and then ignored virtually every recommendation made by it” doesn’t necessarily sound all that convincing. That, of course, doesn’t mean Bloch’s motivation wasn’t exactly what BOGO says it is.