REPORT DETAILS BUSH OFFICIALS' PARTISAN TRIPS

House Panel Finds Federal Appointees Attended Many Events on Taxpayers' Dime

When Karl Rove's office requested special help for beleaguered
Republican congressional candidates in the months before the 2006
elections, the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy
jumped to the task. Director John Walters was called a "superstar" by
a Rove aide after carrying half-million-dollar grants to news
conferences with two congressmen and a senator.

Walters's visits to Utah, Missouri and Nevada were among at least 303
out-of-town trips by senior Bush appointees meant to lend prestige or
bring federal grants to 99 politically endangered Republicans that
year, in a White House campaign that House Democratic investigators
yesterday called unprecedented in scope and scale.

Federal law prohibits the use of public funds or resources for
partisan activities -- and specifically barred Walters's office from
any involvement in a federal election campaign -- but the agencies
involved said most of the trips were paid for by taxpayer funds,
according to the draft report released by the Democratic majority of
the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The report said that since the Rove aide and many others involved in
organizing the trips are no longer in office, "there is no effective
remedy" for any related violations of the 1939 Hatch Act, which
restricts the use of public funds for partisan gain.

The report said the trips were freely described as political in
subpoenaed e-mails and interviews. A list prepared at the White House
two weeks before the election gave the names and dates of appearances
by Cabinet secretaries in 73 key congressional districts, all under
the heading "Final Push Surrogate Matrix."

"This is," the report said, "a gross abuse of the public trust."

The existence of the White House effort to turn federal officials
into instruments of the 2006 Republican campaign effort is already
well known. But the House report, based on a review of more than
63,000 pages of internal documents, includes fresh details about
which Cabinet members participated and who benefited.

The committee, chaired by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), makes
clear in the report that Bush is hardly the first president to
squeeze reelection support from the federal bureaucracy. It notes
that one of President Bill Clinton's White House aides met with
Cabinet secretaries and other senior appointees to brief them on
tough races before the 1994 election.

The House committee probed the Clinton effort in the 1990s at the
behest of its then-Republican chairman, but it "received no evidence
of practices . . . resembling the coordinated and comprehensive
strategy the Bush White House employed to use taxpayer resources to
support Republican candidates for office," the report states.

The committee's senior Republican, Rep. Tom Davis (Va.), disputed
this statement, however. "The same kind of things [were] done by
every administration since Eisenhower," he said, and he compared the
Democrats' "angry swooning" to the scene in "Casablanca" when the
police captain feigns shock at finding gambling in Humphrey Bogart's
nightclub. Not since then, he said, has "righteous indignation seemed
quite so contrived."

In a separate report four times longer than the Democrats', Davis and
his Republican colleagues said that in a few cases, Democratic
politicians appeared at events tallied by Waxman's staff as partisan.
They also said some trips occurred at lawmakers' request, not merely
at White House insistence.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said in a statement that the
Democratic report was merely "an attempt to score political points."

The report details the activities of Sara Taylor, a Rove aide who ran
the White House political office until last year and coordinated the
effort. During the first 10 months of 2006, she sent periodic updates
to the White House scheduling director, as well as White House
liaisons at each agency, about which candidates deserved federal
agency support.

White House e-mails to agencies urged officials to pay attention to
"our top priorities going into November" in order to achieve "a good
result on 11/7." Trips by Cabinet officials became so routine that
Taylor's office developed a standard form to send around, titled
"Secretary _____ Suggested Event Participation."

A July 2006 White House e-mail said that as the elections got closer,
officials would have to participate in at least five "recommended
events" per month. The message went to the appointed liaisons at 18
departments and agencies, who sometimes functioned like political
commissars, enforcing discipline and rallying top appointees to the cause.

Taylor's office also ensured that orders were carried out, and
e-mailed the liaisons when agency or department heads shirked their
responsibilities or went to events with lawmakers who were not on the
office's priority list of beleaguered Republicans.

In all, senior administration officials participated in 425 suggested
events, according to the committee's tally, including 92 Republican
Party events and 326 appearances with Republican candidates.
Secretary of Commerce Carlos M. Gutierrez was the most enthusiastic
recruit, showing up at 59 events. Four other Cabinet secretaries --
of agriculture, housing and urban development, labor, and veterans
affairs -- attended more than 20 apiece.

Walters made it to 19 events in 2006, while then-Attorney General
Alberto R. Gonzales went to two. Walters's office did not reply to a
request for comment, but his aides have previously said the trips had
legitimate, official purposes.

Agencies and departments questioned by investigators said that 185 of
the 303 out-of-town trips urged by the political office were
justifiably to attend what were considered official events, and were
paid by tax dollars. The agencies could not determine whether another
59 trips were paid by tax dollars and did not say whether the events
were "official."

Despite all the energy poured into the effort, it was hardly a
sterling success. The report lists Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.) as the
target of 20 visits by Bush officials, and he was overwhelmingly
defeated. Rep. Heather A. Wilson (N.M.) got 12 visits, and she held
onto her seat by only 875 votes. Rep. Steve Chabot (Ohio), who got 10
visits, won a healthy 53 percent of the vote in his district, but
Rep. Nancy L. Johnson (Conn.) collected just 44 percent after getting
10 visits herself.

In a contentious deposition, Taylor characterized all the out-of-town
trips as efforts to "be helpful" to members of Congress who requested
assistance, but she said she could not recall more precisely why some
members were aided and others were not.

The committee judged her remarks during the deposition "evasive" and
misleading, a conclusion that her lawyer W. Neil Eggleston said was
an unwarranted "partisan slap." He said Taylor's testimony was
"honest and forthright."

The committee report urged that the Hatch Act be amended to eliminate
the political affairs office at the White House or to force it to
serve "the interests of the taxpayer rather than the political party
of the President."

The Republicans' report was less sanguine. No statute, it said, "can
repeal the laws of political gravity."