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White House that explains what's going on in these disparate investigations."
The 106-person Office of Special Counsel has never conducted such a broad and high-profile inquiry in its history. One of its primary missions has been to enforce the Hatch Act, a law enacted in 1939 to preserve the integrity of the civil service.
Bloch said the new investigation grew from two narrower inquiries his staff had begun in recent weeks.
One involved the fired U.S. attorney from New Mexico, David C. Iglesias.
The other centered on a PowerPoint presentation that a Rove aide, J. Scott Jennings, made at the General Services Administration this year.
That presentation listed recent polls and the outlook for battleground House and Senate races in 2008. After the presentation, GSA Administrator Lorita Doan encouraged agency managers to "support our candidates," according to half a dozen witnesses. Doan said she could not recall making such comments.
The Los Angeles Times has learned that similar presentations were made by other White House staff members, including Rove, to other Cabinet agencies. During such presentations, employees said they got a not-so-subtle message about helping endangered Republicans.
White House spokesman Scott M. Stanzel said the Hatch Act did not prohibit providing informational briefings to government employees.
Responding to a letter of complaint to the White House from 25 Democratic senators, Stanzel said: "It is entirely appropriate for the president's staff to provide informational briefings to appointees throughout the federal government about the political landscape in which they implement the president's policies and priorities."
However, questions have emerged about the PowerPoint presentations, including whether Doan's comments crossed the line and whether the presentations violated rules limiting political activity on federal property.
Whether legal or not, the multiple presentations revealed how widely and systematically the White House sought to deliver its list of electoral priorities.
In the course of investigating the U.S. attorney matter and the PowerPoint presentations, Democratic congressional investigators discovered e-mails written by White House personnel using accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee.
For example, they discovered that Jennings, a special assistant to the president and deputy director of political affairs in the White House, was using an e-mail with the domain name of "gwb43.com" that the RNC maintained.
That domain name showed up in e-mail communications from Jennings about how to replace U.S. Atty. H.E. "Bud" Cummins III of Arkansas to make room for Timothy Griffin, a Rove protege, in such a way as to "alleviate pressure/implication that Tim forced Bud out."
Another Jennings e-mail using the RNC account requested that department officials meet with a former New Mexico campaign advisor who wanted to "discuss the U.S. Atty situation there."
The growing controversy inspired him to act, Bloch said.
"We are acting with dispatch and trying to deal with this because people are concerned about it … and it is not a subject that should be left to endless speculation," he said.
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