Gordo Passive In Fish-Killing Politics? Think Again

The Klamath water controversy that flared in 2001 and 2002 and goes on to this day has become something of a national story, most vividly wrapped inside a devastatingly precise indictment of Dick Cheney's term as Vice President. Jason Leopold's story that we looked over on Monday reminded everyone of Karl Rove's intervention and subsequent airy clearing of wrongdoing by the Interior IG (fedora doff to Bill at P3, noble work). Now Darlene Hooley has asked for an investigation into Cheney's role--it has truly been a shitty week for that guy, and I hope it continues and also he suddenly can't shake the hiccups. Hah.

What did both evildoers have in common as their motivation in the Klamath case? If you said the reelection of Gordon Smith in 2002, score one on your personal chalkboard. Where, in each of these storylines of politics over science and the electoral jimmying of a Senate office, does Gordon Smith appear? If you said "only in the context of being the guy people seemed to be doing awfully nice things for, convoluted and difficult things to try to keep him in office and hold power in the about-to-be-Democratic Senate," hack into this account and start writing my columns for me.

I hope he takes it as a compliment if he finds out I'm calling him a smooth, dirty bastard, although it's more in awe than any respect. Because of course that's exactly what everybody wanted for Gordon, and it's certainly what Gordon wanted for himself--personal distance from the dirty work that is sometimes necessary to make things go, when following the law as written becomes unfruitful. It certainly is important to see if Dick and/or Rove can be busted for jiggering the evidence, but aren't we forgetting somebody? Why is there no examination of Gordon Smith's role in the greatest fish kill in recorded Western history, on his own electoral behalf?

The pieces have come out in dribs. They haven't been connected, but the evidence has been there all along of Smith's very active efforts to do whatever he could to prioritize the farmers of the lower Klamath . You have to pay for the archives of the Klamath Herald and News, but the since-departed John Bragg followed Smith's involvement from the very beginning in early 2001, as the Bush administration sauntered in after Inauguration Day and the water level crisis began. If you want to see any of the articles in their entirety I will email them to you for educational use.

On March 30 in 2001, here's how passive Gordo wasn't being about the looming situation:

Sen. Gordon Smith has asked President Bush to step into the debate over what should be done with Klamath Basin water. In a letter to Bush Thursday, Smith outlined the situation which pits the needs of irrigators against the needs of endangered species.

"I have been working for several months to try to head off the crisis that the farmers I represent are currently facing," Smith wrote. He requested Bush to make emergency funds available for farmers this summer.

"I respectfully request that your domestic policy team become involved in this issue today," he wrote.

Smith, R-Ore., told Bush that while the Klamath Basin farmers "no doubt" are suffering the effects of a severe drought, they were suffering more from the effects of the previous administration.

"Added to the natural drought is a regulatory drought that could leave them with no water for their crops. This should not happen on your watch," Smith wrote.

Note that Smith didn't actually ask Bush; he asked the "domestic policy team." Karl Rove is the head of domestic policy in the White House.

If you take nothing else from this particular piece, and all the shitty little ways Gordon Smith interjected his personal and political gain into the supposedly scientific decision about who gets the water, continue to ask Smith this question until you get an answer:

Why is a US Senator asking the head of executive domestic policy to intervene in a matter handled normally by science agencies and in dispute by the courts? In other words, what business was it of Rove's, and for that matter what about Smith? Was that a proper thing to do?

That was just the beginning of Smith's attempts to reverse the conclusion that water levels had to be raised, costing farmers water. Just 10 days later, Smith stood in a banquet room of the Klamath Shilo Inn after the decision to protect the fish came down, and said "I am here to be your whipping post"--and whipped he was, by about 700 angry farmers telling him they wanted the law changed.

Smith was sympathetic, but "wasted no time in telling the small group he was seeking ideas to take back to Washington, D.C." (700 is small??) And he tried to spin the crowd. According the Herald, despite the angry mood of the crowd at Dick Cheney's decision to follow the law (at first), Smith was clearly in the loop on exactly the same thing a Cheney aide heard the VP say (as we learned today from WaPo:

Another person told Smith he was upset to hear that the decision had received the approval of Vice President Dick Cheney. "I thought Cheney was on our side," the man said.

But Smith said the decision, bitter as it was, constituted a victory of sorts.

At the end of March the outlook was no water for anyone in the Basin, he explained.

"Dick Cheney stopped that order from coming down," Smith said. "He ordered the biologists back to Washington" to see if there were some way to get around the conclusion that all available water must go to protect endangered suckers in Upper Klamath Lake and threatened coho salmon in the lower Klamath River.

Sources told the Herald and News that more than 80 biologists from federal agencies and tribes attended a whirlwind of meetings last week in Washington to review the science behind the biological opinions.

"There wasn't a single scientist who would back the administration in court," Smith said. [you bet those are my emphs!]

I'm sure Smith intended to mean that no scientist concluded the initial findings were defensible. But of course the reality is that he was being literal--none would back the administration in court because they were there NOT to back the administration, in order to justify the administration's reversal. That they could make Gordon Smith look like the hero of the farmers, getting Dick Cheney to force those damn Washington scientists to redo their math and put irrigation first, was likely just a sweet bonus to Cheney, but it surely mattered all the world to electoral nerd Karl Rove.

How else did Gordon Smith work his own magic? How about telling an outright fib to distort the debate and color public opinion? From the May 8th, 2001 Herald:

When U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith came to Klamath Falls to offer his support to farmers April 7, he expressed puzzlement about the suckers that dwell in Upper Klamath Lake.

He didn't know, Smith told a crowd of 600 or more gathered to hear him at the Shilo Inn, how government could consider endangered a fish it had once tried to extinguish by means of poison.

Smith misspoke, and another Klamath Basin "rural myth'' was perpetuated.

There is no evidence that anyone ever tried to eliminate Lost River or shortnose suckers from Upper Klamath Lake, said Roger Smith, Klamath district biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Chris Matthews, a spokesman for Sen. Smith, said he did not know what was the basis for the senator's comment.

Notice this is the same gathering at the Shilo as in the previous story a month earlier, and the 30 days caused 100 attendees to vanish from the event! I love our media.

What else did Smith do? How about introducing a law for which he was the sole sponsor, making it easier to delist species from the endangered and threatened lists, giving more powers to states, and removing the requirement of the Secretary to evaluate regulations which would adversely affect habitat? And here's yet another sentinel from Smith that suggests he knew exactly where Cheney and Rove were headed:

(1) BEST SCIENTIFIC AND COMMERCIAL DATA AVAILABLE- Where this Act requires the Secretary to use the best scientific and commercial data available, the Secretary, when evaluating comparable data, shall give greater weight to scientific or commercial data that is empirical or has been field-tested or peer-reviewed.'.

In the NAS decision that reversed the initial finding and literally opened the floodgates, the central contention was that the so called "Hardy Phase II" reports that informed much of the scientific reccomendation was only a draft and had not been fully reviewed. How amazing is that kind of foresight, to put such a clause right at the top of your bill? Fascinating.

The initial thoughts of calling in the "God Squad," as laid out in the WaPo series and an idea that was later rejected, is noted at the time by the Herald on May 18 featuring that OTHER Republican:

The God Squad, formally known as the Endangered Species Committee, could be convened under a provision of the 1973 Endangered Species Act. The law contains a provision allowing a special panel to declare an exemption to the law's requirement that threatened or endangered species be protected before all other considerations.

"We have been contacted by several of our constituents who have posed legitimate questions about this statutory exemption under the ESA," Walden, R-Ore., and Herger, R-Calif., wrote in a joint letter sent to Norton Thursday.

Convening the God Squad might allow the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation an exemption to its operations plan that requires all available water stored in Upper Klamath Lake to be held to protect habitat for endangered suckers or sent downstream to protect habitat for coho salmon, Walden and Herger said.

Then in August Smith helped shepherd through a bill providing $20 million in direct relief to any farmer who suffered a decline in irrigation supply. As WaPo detailed, even more was coming, and Smith pushed for those as well (although it should be said that much of the Oregon delegation at the time was in favor of subsidies to the farmers).

That's just the stuff that happened in public. How did Smith become so canny at knowing what the next steps in the Cheney strategy were, before they were even implemented? He sure seems like an active listener, y'know?

More to come.

Rove, Smith and the Salmon--the Deeper Story

[Warning: wonky detail threat is orange for this post...]

Astute readers, or those who read most threads at Blue Oregon (and they are most often the same people) recall the new outbreak of stories about Karl Rove's potentially criminal--certainly greasy--influence on Gordon Smith's 2002 reelection. BlueO tips to the Truthout.org piece by Jason Leopold (a source I am not fully comfortable with) which uses the recently released deposition by Rove aide Susan Ralston {pdf} before Waxman's House Oversight Committee, to paint a larger picture of Rove repeatedly holding meetings in "target states" at federal agency offices to talk about how the political scene needed to be managed to support the President.

That's some crazy shit in it's own right; the White House is trying to weasel out by claiming no directives were given, but they were riding a razor's edge on the Hatch Act by holding partisan political policy meetings on federal property. So it's no wonder Leopold doesn't get sidetracked by the Klamath mention in Ralston's deposition. However for us there are key moments in her testimony that have direct impact on why Smith is running for reelection next fall, rather than sitting at home freezing peas. So the entire deposition is worth reading, and since we trudged over to Waxman's virtual office and rummaged through their files until we found it, you can read it too by following the link above.

It has been known for a fairly long time that Rove held a Powerpoint presentation in Klamath before the 2002 elections, and discussed the fact that Gordon Smith was running in Oregon and the farmers had always been staunch Smith voters (wink, wink). The scene as Rove set it:

On Jan. 5, Mr. Rove accompanied the president to an appearance in Portland with Mr. Smith. The president signaled his desire to accommodate agricultural interests, saying "We'll do everything we can to make sure water is available for those who farm."

The next day, Mr. Rove made sure that commitment didn't fall through the cracks. He visited the 50 Interior managers attending a department retreat at a Fish and Wildlife Service conference center in Shepherdstown, W.Va. In a PowerPoint presentation Mr. Rove also uses when soliciting Republican donors, he brought up the Klamath and made clear that the administration was siding with agricultural interests.

His remarks weren't entirely welcome -- especially by officials grappling with the competing arguments made by environmentalists, who wanted river levels high to protect endangered salmon, and Indian tribes, who depend on the salmon for their livelihoods. Neil McCaleb, then an assistant Interior secretary, recalls the "chilling effect" of Mr. Rove's remarks. Wayne Smith, then with the department's Bureau of Indian Affairs, says Mr. Rove reminded the managers of the need to "support our base." Both men since have left the department.

Senator Kerry got so far as to ask the Inspector General to investigate, and as perhaps you might expect he found no undue influence by Rove--and validated the science used to make the decision to divert water to irrigation. That kind of killed the story, obviously. But how well did the IG's office do their job? Under questioning by Waxman's committee, even with her bureaucratically convenient hazy memory she recalled that Klamath and Smith were a popular topic of conversation:

In 2002, were you familiar with a dispute in Oregon over whether or not to divert water from the Klamath Rìver Basin to nearby farms?
A: I recall that.
What was Mr. Rove's involvement in that dìspute?
A: You know, I do not remember the exact details, but there were djscussions with Barry Jackson, and I guess it would have been Ken Plehlman at the time for the 0ffice of Politìcal Affairs, but as a policy matter, they did discuss it.
Barry Jackson, Ken Mehlman and Mr. Rove discussed this issue?
A: Correct.
Was anyone else involved?
A: Well, as I recall, this subject did come up frequently in our directors meetings. We had a directors' meeting every day, pretty much every day.
What is a "directors' meeting" ?
A: It would be, the participants would have been Karl, myself , Israet Hernandez, each of the directors of the four offices that he managed, and sometimes those directors would bring a deputy, and thjs meetìng was held in his office.
In Karl Rove's office?
A: Correct. And we met almost every day.
For how long was the subject of the "Klamath River Basin water diversion" issue a topìc of these directors' meetings?
A: Oh, I can't say specifically, but it was definìtely mentioned on multiple occasions.


Were you aware that the Interior Department's inspector general investigated the White House's involvement in the Interìor Department's decision about Klamath River water levels?
A: I do not remember that.

It kept coming up at Karl Rove's daily meetings of all the office heads and their deputies. Somehow, this did not raise the suspicion of the Inspector General--why it kept coming up in a political policy office what civil service agencies were doing in the Klamath Basin--for as Ralston notes, she can't even recall the investigation in the first place. How would the top aide to Karl Rove not remember whether there was an investigation? Come on, now--unless it was so feeble it could legitimately be forgotten.

Maybe it was--it's unclear whether White House emails were examined by the IG, but according to Ralston they certainly never asked to see any of the emails Rove sent via RNC servers, which now appear to be where all the skeletons were buried. Again, from the deposition:

Beyond Mr. Fitzgerald's requests, were there other requests from other investigators for Mr. Rove's e-mails?
A: There may have been, but the only other major investigation that I recall specifically was related to Enron.
Do you know when that would have been?
A: I believe that was in 2001 sometime.
And you think in 2001- that Mr. Rove searched his e-mails to respond to a request from investigators relating to Enron?
A: He or I searched.
And that search included a search of political e-mails sent over the political account?
A: Correct.
Were other White House officials aware that Mr. Rove in 2001- was providing e-mails from his political accounts to investigators who were looking at Enron?
A: I believe so, because all of the documents that we collected were then turned over to the White House Counsel's Office.

No wonder the IG didn't find anything to nail Rove with on the river diversion; either their office was ignorant of the fact that he was conducting most of his White House business over RNC email systems--or they knew and opted not to pry. And beyond the unexamined emails, there doesn't appear to have been much of any serious investigating going on, given that Ralston can't even remember there being one.

So let's be clear on what we have:

• Karl Rove taking great interest in water policy in Oregon, coincidentally at the same time Gordon Smith was running for reelection
  
• Karl Rove meeting on federal property to make clear that the administration sided with the farmers.
  
• Karl Rove meeting with the farmers to make clear the administration sided with them.
  
• Two federal agencies which cited their best available evidence (the appropriate standard for decisionmaking in this case) had their findings overruled on the basis of inconclusivity (which is NOT the appropriate standard), with the excuse that an important report used in the original findings was only a draft report and could not be considered definitive--even though the overruling report was itself an interim set of conclusions.
  
• A federal judge rejecting the Bush administration's plan for allocating water in the basin, which favored farmers. One of the principal biologists working on the plan claims his drafted opinions were twice rejected by the Bureau of Reclamation, which created the plan, in favor of those which afforded farmers more water.
  
• When Rep. Greg Walden discovered water might be restricted to farmers, his first call went to Karl Rove. The plan was dropped.
• An investigation was done into the possible influence of the White House--but the prime target's top aide can't even remember that there was one, and no pertinent emails outside of White House channels were ever reviewed.
  

Something stinks, and it isn't old salmon.

[postscript--for further reading on this highly complex subject, you might try some of these sources...]

For info on the Endangered Species Act and how it applies to salmon in the Klamath Basin, this online book is rich with detailed information.

For the House Democrats' perspective on how dirty this all is, this is a good source.

For California state officials' endorsement and opinion on the "Hardy Phase II" report, which was the primary document suggested the need for higher water flows protecting the salmon, read this pdf. To see opposing views on it from the farmers, this doc is appropriate.

More documentation on the efficacy of reducing water flows is here; this report attempts to show that revenue from recreation well exceeds the potential for revenue from farming if water is diverted. Neither this report nor the Hardy study were ever allowed to go past draft form, House Democrats allege.

And for a rich trove of timelined links on both sides of the issue, here's a resource page from a UO professor on watershed science and policy.