October 11, 2005

What Rove Said To Dobson

The secret stuff (which is bolded in the full entry) is that Rove first spoke to Dobson on Saturday and told him that Miers was high on the short list. And second, that several prominent prospects had taken themsevles out of contention.

This clearly will raise other questions -- clearly, if what Rove told Dobson is true (and we're reading the implication correctly), the president was not choosing from his ideal field of candidates -- and it dovetails with scuttlebutt that other potential nominees asked not to be considered.

According to Dobson: "Karl Rove has now given me permission to go public with our conversation."

Here's the full transcript. Highlights below.

Dobson: "Let me go back through the sequence of events and...and explain what happened. The President announced his decision on Monday morning, October 3rd, that Harriet Miers was his selection and the debate was on. And a few hours after that, many conservative Christian leaders were involved in a conference call, wherein some of those men and women were expressing great disillusionment with President Bush's decision and there was a lot of anger over his failure to select someone with a proven track record in the courts. And I came in a little bit late and I caught just a bit of that angst and then I shared my opinion, that Harriet Miers might well be more in keeping with our views than they might think and that I did believe that she was a far better choice than many of my colleagues were saying and that they obviously believed."

" . . . Karl Rove had shared with me her judicial philosophy which was consistent with the promises that President Bush had made when he was campaigning. Now he told the voters last year that he would select people to be on the Court who would interpret the law rather than create it and judges who would not make social policy from the bench. Most of all, the President promised to appoint people who would uphold the Constitution and not use their powers to advance their own political agenda. Now, Mr. Rove assured me in that telephone conversation that Harriet Miers fit that description and that the President knew her well enough to say so with complete confidence."

"Then he suggested that I might want to validate that opinion by talking to people in Texas who knew Miers personally and he gave me the names of some individuals that I could call. And I quickly followed up on that conversation and got glowing reports from a federal judge in Texas, Ed Kinkeade and a Texas Supreme Court justice, Nathan Hecht, who is highly respected and has known Harriet Miers for more than 25 years. And so, we talked to him and we talked to some others who are acquainted with Ms. Miers."

"So, I shared my findings with my colleagues, not only what I just mentioned, but other calls I made. I talked to Chuck Colson, my great friend, who is a constitutional attorney --

-- and talked to him four times. He helped me kind of assimilate the information that we had garnered, but I would not say much about the phone call from Karl Rove, even though I'm very close to many of the people who are on the telephone. Why would I not do that? Because it was a confidential conversation and I've had a long-standing policy of not going out and revealing things that are said to me in confidence. That may come from my training as a psychologist, where you hear all sorts of things that you can't go out and talk about."

"So, I wouldn't reveal any of the details about the call, although I did say to these pro-family leaders, which has been widely quoted, that Karl had told me something that I probably shouldn't know. And you know, it really wasn't all that tantalizing, but I still couldn't talk about it. And what I was referring to is the fact that on Saturday, the day before the President made his decision, I knew that Harrier Miers was at the top of the short list of names under consideration. And as you know, that information hadn't been released yet, and everyone in Washington and many people around the country wanted to know about it and the fact that he had shared with me is not something I wanted to reveal."

"But we also talked about something else, and I think this is the first time this has been disclosed. Some of the other candidates who had been on that short list, and that many conservatives are now upset about were highly qualified individuals that had been passed over. Well, what Karl told me is that some of those individuals took themselves off that list and they would not allow their names to be considered, because the process has become so vicious and so vitriolic and so bitter, that they didn't want to subject themselves or the members of their families to it.

So, even today, many conservatives and many of friends of mine, are being interviewed on talk shows and national television programs. And they're saying, "Why didn't the President appoint so-and-so? He or she would have been great. They had a wonderful judicial record. They would have been the kind of person we've been hoping and working and praying for to be on the Court. Well, it very well may be that those individuals didn’t want to be appointed."

Posted at 07:36 PM

Comments

Sniff, Sniff? Yep, You're right. Simply won't pass, will it?

Janeal Jordan | 10.12.05 06:16 PM

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