Litman: Are Jan. 6 investigators hot on the trail of ‘all the president’s people’?
Sens. Joe Biden (D-Del.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) are in New York today to attend a fundraiser hosted by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
But two powerful Democrats have told me they suspect Obama is secretly running a parallel probe to Biden’s investigation into the Plame Wilson-Wilson ticket.
A White House staffer briefed on the matter confirmed that the Obama White House may be investigating a number of key figures — including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former White House counsel Harriet Miers, former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman Howard Dean — to see if any of them committed campaign fund-raising violations.
It’s not surprising to see that the Obama campaign is working for Biden. The senior administration official told me White House lawyers are talking up the campaign’s investigation of Gonzales, who spent nearly six months at the White House last year on the advice of White House ethics lawyers and was a co-chair of the 2000 Bush-Gore Presidential Campaign Fundraising Committee.
I know because I followed Gonzales on the advice of White House counsel Don McGahn during his first seven months there.
White House officials have informed me that Gonzales has been interviewed by the Biden campaign regarding a separate probe into the Plame Wilson-Wilson ticket, an investigation that began after the Plame Wilson-Wilson administration revealed her role as a covert CIA agent with inside knowledge of CIA arms-for-hostages negotiations with Iran.
I was also informed that Gonzales has been interviewed by the Clinton White House and by Obama’s own White House counsel, Robert Bauer.
The senior administration official told me Gonzales was one of the first White House officials on the record during the first year of the Bush administration to express regrets that he did not return the money he had accepted to help ailing President Bush.
“We are doing everything we can to put Gonzales on