Bush’s sudden February visit to Chattanooga — UPDATED
Posted by Thomas Nephew on April 3rd, 2007
UPDATE, 4/4: The photo referred to below (”photo at link”) may be a hoax… confirmed. The Coptix company itself doctored the photo and disseminated it, according to an article by the Chattanooga Times Free Press’s Michael Davis (”Morphing a conspiracy?“):
In the altered Rove photo, the president’s chief political adviser is seen in Chattanooga’s Porker’s Bar-B-Que restaurant carrying the folder. A Chattanooga resident, David Gidcumb, said he took the photo of Mr. Rove at the restaurant on Feb. 21 and put the doctored image on his blog. Mr. Rove was accompanying President Bush during his visit to the Scenic City.
After the photo was altered, Mr. Roe said, Coptix employees spread the photo on local blogs and social networking sites. He said they also placed comments by the picture to stir up more dialogue and “see how big we could get it.”
Shades of Rathergate? Bush’s National Guard years remain something of a mystery, but after a document about that turned out to be fake, the story died. Similarly, Rove apparently really was in Chattanooga on February 21, but after a photo supposedly documenting that turns out to be (partly) fake, that story may not be pursued much further either. But there also may not be a story to pursue. (emph. added, 4/6.)
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It’s been widely known since a March 13 Washington Post article (Dan Eggen, Paul Kane: “Gonzales: Mistakes Were Made“) that White House staff have been using outside e-mail services, paid for by the Republican Party, for a good deal of their correspondence — including some that might have a bearing on “AttorneyGate,” the scandal involving the firings of federal prosecutors in retribution for insufficient partisanship in their official business. As Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote to Congressman Henry Waxman, this was potentially a violation of the Presidential Records Act, which mandates that all White House records be be available to help account for presidential actions.
It has turned out that one of the domains involved, “gwb43.com” — i.e., George W. Bush, 43d president — is hosted by two Chattanooga, Tennessee IT companies. One, called Smartech Corp., is a small company — albeit one that hosted the 2004 Republican National Convention web site. The other is “Coptix,” according to an earlier “CorrenteWire” post by xan.
When Henry Waxman demanded on March 26 that the White House take steps to preserve all e-mail traffic out of the White House, he may have been more than a month too late — Air Force One had already landed in Chattanooga on February 21. The stated goal of the presidential visit was to tout Bush’s health voucher plan at one of the White House’s typical “meet some regular folks I’m pretending to help” events, and observe some gee-whiz machinery at a local hospital.
But as lambert (”CorrenteWire”) has discovered, Karl Rove was along for the ride, too — with a Coptix brochure tucked under his arm when he was spotted and photographed at a local restaurant (photo at link).
And far from being an event that was painstakingly planned well in advance, the president’s Chattanooga visit was fairly rapidly conceived and executed. The plans were only made known to local law enforcement “more than two weeks” earlier according to a February 23 Chattanooga Times Free Press article. A somewhat breathless video postcard of Bush’s historic 3 hour 45 minute visit* records Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen roughly confirming that on the 21st: “…when the Secretary called me a couple of weeks ago and said they’d like to come down here…” The visit was on such short notice that neither Congressman Zach Wamp nor Senator (and former Chattanooga mayor) Bob Corker seem to have publicized it on their web sites.
Other explanations for all of this come to mind, of course. Bush visits may not have the same glow for local GOP politicos they once had. And for all I know two week notice is S.O.P. for White House trips like this one. But referring to the “Talking Points Memo” AttorneyGate timeline, one also sees that the story was really starting to blow up by early February. Perhaps most importantly, deputy attorney general Paul McNulty claimed the firings were based on “performance-related issues” on February 6 — an easily refutable claim that predictably infuriated the prosecutors involved, but one McNulty doubtless felt was better than alternative explanations.
If Rove was starting to get worried about his e-mail traffic, he would have needed to communicate with the management of at least one of the two companies (I’m guessing they somehow share server equipment). He would not have wanted to do that by e-mail, but rather in person — especially if he wanted to see the setup with his own eyes (or with the eyes of some trusted expert he brought along). And Rove showing up on his own in Chattanooga would arouse interest that showing up as part of Bush’s entourage would not.
Hence my interest in when Bush’s visit to Chattanooga was planned. It’s possible that Rove was panicking, and that that Coptix brochure under his arm was connected to the real point of the trip when Air Force One touched down in Chattanooga five weeks ago.
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* Air Force One touched down in Chattanooga at 11:00 AM on February 21, and took off again at 2:45PM, reported the Chattanooga Times Free Press’ Emily Berry.
NOTES: CorrenteWire items via Avedon Carol (”The Sideshow”). Washington Post and CREW links via Steve Benen (”The Carpetbagger Report”); reverse DNS lookup revealing SmarTech and Chattanooga address via commenter BlueSkize about that Benen posting. Waxman demand also via Steve Benen. Chattanooga Times Free Press story reported by Emily Berry and Lauren Gregory.
UPDATE, EDIT, 4/3: Welcome, CorrenteWire readers! TPM timeline link added.
UPDATE, 4/6: Welcome, Sideshow readers! For a grin, see also “http://coptix2.iago/rove, meet 18 U.S.C. 912” above (4/5/07). For less of a grin, see “The Supreme connection?” below (3/30/07), on something I think is still being overlooked: former Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers’ role in the AttorneyGate story.
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April 6th, 2007 at 3:34 am
I don’t think this was a crime (of course, I’m a criminal defense lawyer, I don’t think anything is a crime!).
Here’s the language of the statute:
“Whoever falsely assumes or pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States or any department, agency or officer thereof, and acts as such, or in such pretended character demands or obtains any money, paper, document, or thing of value, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”
Did anyone “falsely assume or pretend to be” Karl Rove? No — what they did was falsely portray the actual Karl Rove as doing something he didn’t actually do — namely, carrying a Coptix file folder. If they had dressed someone up to look like Rove and done everything else that they did, that might be a crime, but this almost assuredly was not within the bounds of the statute.
April 6th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
I think you’re right about the photo. I wasn’t referring to that, though, but to the visits from the “coptix2.iago/rove” web site in furtherance of the hoax.
April 6th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
I’m missing something here: coptix2.iago isn’t even a proper domain (unless someone has gone and made a bunch of top-level domains named after Shakespeare characters). Where the hell is that coming from?
) on my server. Has nothing to do with the flesh-and-blood Turd Blossom. Just a place to put a Rove hoax. All in all, a pretty good one, unless you were the one punk’d!
Okay, then there’s coptix.com/rove. The “rove” part is just a directory (or “folder” in the newfangled [i.e., post-1990] Windows lingo) on the web server. I could put a directory called “rove” (or “nephew”
My guess is that the Coptix goofballs had a web page that linked to the punk’d blogs. I think what you’re seeing is a hit on your blog coming from a page on the Coptix server (probably meant for internal consumption and amusement).
Anyway, let us all renew our resolve to be skeptical of any photo we didn’t take ourselves, especially if it looks too good to be true!
[I didn't read the Wonkette entry you linked to. But here's the word from the horse's mouth.]
April 6th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
I don’t know about how domains can be made to work or disguised; all I know that I got the visits I documented. Take a look at the image: “coptix2.iago/rove,” plain as day. When I tried to visit that site, I got the “can’t find the server” message I also mentioned.
You’re quite right — as I have already acknowledged in the post — that the public coptix.com/rove site is what you say, and (at least on its face) has nothing to do with Karl Rove per se.
But my point is not about that, but about the visits from the “dark” coptix2.iago/rove site — and at a time when most were still under the impression the “Coptix folder photo” was real. At that point it was plausible that this was a Rove homepage or directory of some kind. I even asked around about it — always suggesting that there was clearly nothing definitive about it, but wondering if there was some way to learn more about the site and/or visit.
April 6th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Have you seen any other “referring URLs” in your Site Meter reports that aren’t valid URLs? I don’t know much about spoofing referring URLs–never had the urge (or the need) to do it. Maybe these guys did it to keep the page private (or maybe this is what happens automatically [i.e., "innocently," by the server autonomically] when the referring page is in a protected intra- or extranet).
April 6th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Anyway, we don’t need a photo of Rove with a Coptix brochure to know that White House staff used nongovernmental e-mail servers (probably illegally) to do their dirty work, do we?
April 6th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
…we don’t need a photo of Rove with a Coptix brochure…
No, we don’t. But in the court of public opinion, this story may help discredit that one; Britt Hume at FOX has mentioned it, as has Michelle Malkin. It looks very much like a Rovian dirty trick.
Maybe these guys did it to keep the page private (or maybe this is what happens automatically [i.e., “innocently,”
Maybe. Or maybe that was as convenient as the alleged (but arguable) “April Fools” timing. For my part, I’d say that in the case of an ongoing hoax, the default assumption is not “innocence”, but “more hoax.”
April 8th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
OT-
I hope you don’t mind an off-topic comment, but I think this is important: There is a great post on The Carpetbagger Report from a few days ago about the mainstream media’s (specifically Time magazine’s) ignoring the prosecutor purge scandal.
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/10367.html
What explains the failure of the mainstream media to cover the purge scandal for so long, and so many other scandals? Do you think somebody just set up newspaper editors to cheat on their wives, and threatened to tell if the editors wouldnÂ?t play ball when they come back some day and ask for something?
It wouldnÂ?t be that hard to do, when you think about it. People wouldnÂ?t talk about it.
April 8th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
Things like “failure to cover” are hard to quantify. But I think you’re right there was a failure, and that’s really more important than this side story about the little hoax in Chattanooga.