emptywheel has become obsessed with Ed Gillespie, which is a very good thing.

I'm increasingly fascinated with the prominent role of Lobbyist-in-Chief, Ed Gillespie. We now know he was included in discussions, in spring of 2006 (at precisely the time Andy Card and Scottie McClellan were ousted), about whether or not to fire Rummy. He picked up the portfolios of both Dan Bartlett and Karl Rove, two of the last hold-outs from the Texas Mafia. And now here he is, promising to do what Karl Rove couldn't do--excommunicate the corruption from the Corruption Party.

The Lobbyist-in-Chief is accruing an awful lot of power in fairly short order. Is Gillespie the guy corporate America imposed on BushCo to ensure the Republicans not lose power for all eternity? And is Gillespie the guy who told Rove and Gonzales to leave?

Gillespie doesn't make a lot of headlines so I checked my archives and was surprised to find Gillespie on a conference call at the height of the Rathergate scandal, courtesy of NewsMax:

Many questions still remain. Was a crime committed? I believe so. Obviously, forgery is involved. But the Texas Legal Code also says it is a third-degree felony if one "makes, presents, or uses any record, document, or thing with knowledge of its falsity and with intent that it be taken as a genuine governmental record" or "makes, presents, or uses a governmental record with knowledge of its falsity."

Did the Kerry campaign know about the existence of the documents in question in advance of the CBS report? A chronology of events indicates they did.

At the time, I loved the rightwing argument that the forgeries were a crime that absolutely positively had to be prosecuted - because I knew the forger wasn't Bill Burkett (who freaked out when he received the forgeries) but most likely GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone, whose Cuban wife most likely played the role of "Lucy Ramirez," the woman who arranged the delivery of the forgeries to Burkett.

But was Stone working alone, or was he working with the Busheviks who scrubbed all records of Bush's National Guard desertion from 1998 to the present - people like Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Dan Bartlett - and Ed Gillespie?

It's hard to imagine Stone worked alone. And it's Standard Operating Procedure for the Busheviks to use a string of intermediaries to create "plausible deniability" for the insider operatives who are actually pulling the strings. (Think how Cheney used Libby to quietly spread Plame's identity through a series of White House officials and reporters.)

And it's also SOP for Busheviks to aggressively blame Democrats for the crimes they commit. So the fact that Ed Gillespie led the charge to blame the Kerry campaign for the forgeries is powerful circumstantial evidence that Gillespie himself helped create the forgeries - and is therefore guilty of the very crimes he cites.

At the time, DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe asked exactly the right question:

Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic national chairman, attempted to turn the matter against Republicans. McAuliffe cited a New York Post story that said Roger Stone, a Republican consultant based in Miami Beach, had declined to comment on whether he was the source of the documents. "Will Ed Gillespie or the White House admit today what they know about Mr. Stone's relationship with these forged documents?" McAuliffe said.

"I have nothing whatsoever to do with this," Stone told USA TODAY. "I'm a firm believer in political hardball, but I draw the line at forged documents."

So c'mon bloggers, let's find the connections between Gillespie and Roger Stone!

p.s. since emptywheel is also obsessed with Plamegate, she will also find this interesting from 9/30/03, when the Plamegate scandal was breaking:

RNC CHAIRMAN ED GILLESPIE: I think if the allegation is true, to reveal the identity of an undercover CIA operative -- it's abhorrent, and it should be a crime, and it is a crime.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: It'd be worse than Watergate, wouldn't it?

GILLESPIE: It's -- Yeah, I suppose in terms of the real world implications of it. It's not just politics.

Now that Gillespie has access to all the secret White House files about Plamegate, isn't it his duty as a lawyer to help solve the crime by turning those documents over to Patrick Fitzgerald and Henry Waxman?