Is MZM Karl Rove's "Rosebud"?

Is MZM the key to all of the Karl Rove scandals - the mysterious "Rosebud" in Citizen Kane?

Karl Rove is implicated in two of the hottest White House scandals - the outing of Valerie Plame and the firing of eight Attorneys General. And these two scandals may be intimately linked by a corrupt defense contractor named MZM.

At the moment, Rove's role appears secondary in both scandals. It was Scooter Libby, not Rove, who took the fall for the outing of Valerie Plame. But Dick Cheney (and Libby's lawyer) believe Rove was the prime culprit.

Likewise for the US Attorney scandal. Most fingers are pointing at Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers, but savvy Bushwatchers know both dimwits are mere tools of "The Architect." Digby is right on the money as always:

The minute I read that the Arkansas replacement was one of Rove's little minions and that Iglesias had been pressured before the election to indict a Democrat, it was clear that this was Rove deal all around.  

And now we know the New Mexico Republican Chairman spoke with Rove twice about firing Iglesias, and that Senator Pete Domenici spoke to Bush, who would have told... Rove. 

The rapidly-growing body of evidence points to Rove as "The Architect" of the firing of all eight U.S. Attorneys. Why? Because they were all fired to punish honest prosecutors for political reasons - either to protect Republicans under investigation or to launch bogus investigations of Democrats for "voter fraud."

If charges of "voter fraud" are swirling around Bush's White House, they could have but one source: Karl Rove. Karl Rove's entire career has been devoted to voter fraud - of course Rove commits the fraud by disenfranchising Democratic voters and rigging electronic voting machines, but then he loudly and without a shred of evidence accuses Democrats of committing fraud, and that's the only version the Corporate Media reports (see Florida, 2000). As Josh Marshall has documented, Democratic voter fraud is a myth.

And one key fact is forgotten about Rove: on April 19, 2006, Rove was demoted. Amidst rumors he lost his security clearance - and faced indictment in Plamegate - Rove was forced to give up his job as the head of all White House policy and assigned exclusively to politics. The 2006 campaign was well underway, and GOP prospects were looking grim as the public turned against the war and GOP scandals multiplied. Rove desperately needed to bury those scandals, or create bigger Democratic scandals to eclipse them.

Of course, little is known about the investigations that were (or were not) underway by these honest prosecutors. But obviously they were important if Karl Rove had eight good prosecutors fired.

The prosecutor we know the most about is Carol Lam of San Diego, who put Rep. Duke Cunningham behind bars for the worst case of bribery in Congressional history - $2.3 million. But was she fired for that? Josh Marshall doesn't think so:

I'm not sure Lam would have been canned simply for prosecuting Cunningham. His corruption was so wild and cartoonish that even a crew with as little respect for the rule of law would have realized the impossibility of not prosecuting him. But she didn't stop there. She took her investigation deep into congressional appropriations process -- kicking off a continuing probe into the dealings of former Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis. She also followed the trail into the heart of the Bush CIA. Those two stories are like mats of loose threads. That's where the story lies.

So what is that story? I think emptywheel figured it out last July. She put the question simply:

Was Mitchell Wade's company, MZM, the contractor that had the final say that declared the aluminum tubes to be only suitable for building a nuclear centrifuge?

In 2006, MZM's Mitchell Wade pleaded guilty to paying Cunningham over $1 million in bribes in exchange for millions more in government contracts.

MZM, which Wade started in 1993, did not report any revenue from prime contract awards until 2003." [6], but starting in May 2002 they were awarded contracts in the tens of millions of dollars which then grew to well over $150 million.[7]

Laura Rozen discovered MZM's first government contract was with

The Army National Ground Intelligence Center (the NGIC), where Mitchell Wade's MZM got its start, by, as Walter Pincus has reported, hiring relatives of top NGIC officials, and then the NGIC officials themselves.

When intelligence agencies discovered Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes, they disagreed whether those tubes were for conventional battlefield rockets like those on the left (which is what the purchase contract said) or parts of a centrifuge for enriching uranium and making a nuclear bomb.

NGIC advised the CIA that the tubes were for enriching uranium, while the nuclear weapons experts at the Department of Energy (which makes U.S. nuclear weapons), along with those at the State Department, said they were the wrong specs for a centrifuge but were perfect for rockets.

This technical disagreement should have been referred to the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, but instead was given to a mysterious contractor. This contractor's role was described in the Senate Intelligence Committee report on pre-war intelligence (Part A) dated 7/4/04. Emptywheel quotes a part of the report where the contractor's identity was DELETED:

Contributing to the CIA's analysis for the extensive September intelligence assessment was an analysis performed by an individual from DELETED who were working under contract with the CIA at the time to provide broad-based technical advice DELETED. The CIA WINPAC analyst, DELETED, requested in September 2002 that they perform an analysis of the tubes.                      SENTENCE DELETED                    

eRiposte writes:

So, there was a contractor (a "red team" as the Robb-Silberman report called them), whose name the SSCI Report thought important to block out, who produced in exactly 1 day a detailed report that magically agreed with the CIA WINPAC analyst's (Joe's) fabrications conclusions on the aluminum tubes. This incident is one of the most interesting in the context of the tubes and the identity of the contractor is certainly of great interest to me.

emptywheel continues:

You see, rather than going to the nonpartisan experts they would normally use, they went to this contracting firm associated with the NGIC. And that firm gave the warmongers precisely the report they wanted.

Was MZM the Contractor?

See, we know MZM had a contract with NGIC at the time (among others). We know that it was an NGIC contractor who gave this assessment. And we know that two MZM consultants worked for the Robb-Silberman commission that didn't name MZM directly. And we know, from BusinessWeek, that MZM was definitely involved in assessing Saddam's nuclear program...

Finally, we know that the then-CEO of MZM is a corrupt Republican partisan deeply involved in a system of bribery. 

We don't know for sure whether MZM was the contractor in question. But do you see how it'd be easier to get the assessment you want from a contractor like MZM, who is dependent on a synergistic system of bribery for its work?

I noted in bold the remarkable fact that MZM consultants worked on the Robb-Silberman commission - which would certainly explain why the contractor's name was deleted IF that contractor was MZM. 

So what does this all mean in relation to Karl Rove and the firing of Carol Lam?

Lam's investigation of Duke Cunningham's bribes led her to MZM. Naturally, Lam would want to know which contracts MZM got for its bribes. If MZM got the contract from the CIA to lie about the aluminum tubes, Lam would have discovered that - or gotten dangerously close to discovering it.

And the aluminum tube contract was no ordinary contract - it was one of the two most important "facts" supporting the crucial Bush-Cheney-Rice-Tenet-Powell claim that Iraq was building nuclear weapons and therefore had to be invaded. Here is the quote from Bush's infamous 2003 State of the Union, which point the aluminum tube lie front and center:

Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

What was the other crucial "fact"? Here is the sentence that immediately preceeded this in Bush's speech:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Those, of course, were the infamous "16 words" that led Joe Wilson to challenge Bush's claim in the New York Times and the Washington Post, which immediately became the obsession of Dick Cheney and led to the outing of Valerie Plame. Ultimately Wilson's claim proved correct and the White House admitted the African uranium story was bogus - although our government has never identified the person who created the crude (and easily debunked) forgery that created the bogus story. (Many arrows point to associates of prominent neocon Michael Ledeen.)

If MZM was the contractor that corruptly "proved" the aluminum tube lie, Carol Lam would have stumbled onto it sooner or later - and the whole corrupt lie would have been exposed, just like the Niger uranium lie.

And that would have led to the obvious question: were both uranium lies an accident, or were both uranium lies manufactured by the same people?

There was a very powerful group of people whose job was to sell the Iraq War to the American people - the White House Iraq Group (WHIG).

The members were Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, Andrew Card, James R. Wilkinson, Nicholas E. Calio, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Michael Gerson.

Scooter Libby, Stephen Hadley, and Mary Matalin were intimately involved with Plamegate. Condi Rice famously warned of the "smoking gun" that could be a "mushroom cloud." Michael Gerson was Bush's top speechwriter and the person who put both uranium lies into the State of the Union.

And who was the chair of this powerful group?

Karl Rove - the man who fired Carol Lam.

Reps. Henry Waxman and John Conyers, along with Senators Pat Leahy and Jay Rockefeller, are all investigating different aspects of this story.

It's entirely possible that it's all one story, and the "Rosebud" of the story is MZM.

If so, you read it here first.

Update 1: Conyers wants Rove to testify, but it's unclear whether he will.

The House Judiciary Committee will call senior White House adviser Karl Rove to testify about his role in the firing of several U.S. attorneys, Chairman John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., said [Monday]. “On Friday, the Judiciary Committee issued a letter expanding the investigation into the firing of U.S. attorneys to include the White House. We had previously learned of Karl Rove’s involvement in the firings, and recent stories implicating him in the firing of [former U.S. attorney in New Mexico David C. Iglesias] raise even more alarm bells for us,” Conyers said. “As a result, we would want to ensure that Karl Rove was one of the White House staff that we interview in connection with our investigation.” Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., called on the Senate Judiciary Committee to do the same. “The more we learn, the more it seems that people at high levels in the White House have been involved in the U.S. attorney purge,” Schumer said. The Justice Department made the unusual move of ousting seven U.S. attorneys in December. An eighth, H.E. “Bud” Cummins III of Arkansas, was dismissed in June to make way for a Rove protege.

Rep. Conyers, make Rove show all his fingers and toes when he swears to tell the truth!

Update 2: Sen. Pat Leahy told NPR he will subpoena anyone he needs to get to the bottom of the US Attorney firings - including Karl Rove if his testimony is relevant. Poor Michelle Norris nearly had a heart attack over Leahy's audacity.

Update 3: When Republicans claim Bush's advisors should not have to testify to Congress, they are (as always) completely full of shit.

Waxman says on his Web site that he sees “ample precedent for White House testimony.” Hinting at the aggressive role he intends to play, the congressman wrote a report when he was in the minority that documents all the material the Clinton White House provided Congress, including internal e-mails, FBI interview notes, confidential communications from the White House Counsel’s Office and information about White House contacts with private individuals.

The committee’s Web site includes a 2004 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress that documents many such appearances by presidential advisers.

The report notes that Congress “may encounter legal and political problems in attempting to enforce a subpoena to a presidential adviser.” And it lists more than 70 instances dating back to 1944 when a presidential adviser testified before a committee or subcommittee.

More than 45 of the instances occurred during the Clinton administration, including appearances by National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, senior adviser George Stephanopoulos and counsels Charles F.C. Ruff and Beth Nolan.

Update 4: Kagro X reports on a shocking study

by communications professors Donald C. Shields and John F. Cragan (available at ePluribus Media), nearly 80% of all federal investigations undertaken by the Bush DoJ and targeting elected officials or candidates were aimed at Democrats, with under 18% targeting Republicans.

Update 5: Josh Marshall is moving in my direction:

Lam's firing has always been at the heart of this...

Lam's investigation (and allied ones her probe spawned) were uncovering a) serious criminal wrongdoing by major Republican power players on Capitol Hill, b) corruption at the CIA -- which reached back to the Hill, c) and as yet still largely hidden corrupt dealings at the heart of the intelligence operations in the Rumsfeld Pentagon.

Nothing matters unless the investigation gets to the heart of what happened there.

That will require much deeper digging by Senator Jay Rockefeller and the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who will have to get past the lies and coverups by the Robb-Silberman Commission (which included MZM staff!) and Senator Pat Roberts' "Phase 1" report. The silence from Rockefeller's "Phase 2" investigation is deafening - is the truth about pre-war intelligence manipulation by the White House so corrupt that Rockefeller is afraid to tell the truth?