Rove connection to Wisconsin U.S.A. on Purge List?

<--though the letters are cut off, you can see "ROVE_K" among the file information at the bottom Rove was clearly interested, circling words (like Milwaukee) in the piece and scribbling in the margin "Discuss w/ Harriet." Harriet presumably referring to White House counsel Harriet Miers.

Here's what the evidence shows. Karl Rove wanted evidence that there had been a Democratic criminal conspiracy to stuff the ballot box in Milwaukee and New Mexico in 2004. But the U.S. attorneys there didn't deliver. In the case of New Mexico's David Iglesias, that likely cost him his job. Wisconsin's Steve Biskupic only avoided being fired by the skin of his teeth.
Iglesias and Biskupic were the only U.S. attorneys in the country to have launched task forces to investigate voter fraud in the 2004 elections. There's arguably not another U.S. attorney in the country to have so thoroughly investigated such allegations. A review of Biskupic's manifold efforts demonstrates that without a doubt.
Despite that fact, Karl Rove and President Bush himself passed along complaints to Alberto Gonzales in October 2006 about Biskupic's and Iglesias' performance on voter fraud. Iglesias was fired. Biskupic, for some reason, wasn't. But it looks like it was a very close call.

Even as Biskupic was investigating, Republicans kept the pressure on. In August of 2005, the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Republicans Rick Wiley sent a letter to Biskupic outlining nine voter fraud cases that demanded prosecution. Biskupic replied with a letter (pdf) knocking down all nine of Wiley's pet cases.
At about the same time, in the middle of 2005, Wiley had one of his staff members prepare a lengthy memo (see page 10) called "Fraud in Wisconsin 2004: A Timeline/Summary." According to Daniel Bice of The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the report was prepared for Karl Rove.
But Rove was already interested. We know this because one of the documents released by the Justice Department last month appears to be a printout from his computer of a February 2, 2005 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article about the city's voter records. A study by the paper had found sizeable discrepancies between the number of votes and voters in the records for more than a dozen wards.

More on the story.

Also, here is some information about U.S. Attorney Biskupic. From Buzzflash.com:

Bush Milwaukee U.S. Attorney Disgraced by Appeals Court for Politicial Prosecution of Innocent Woman


After all the talk about the fired U.S. attorneys, we reported recently on one prosecutor allowed to stay who botched the biggest tax fraud case in American history. Last week, a federal appeals court handed down a "total, humiliating embarrassment" to another prosecutor by vacating a case evidently brought purely for political reasons (but without any evidence).


Steve Biskupic, the U.S. attorney for Milwaukee, indicted and convicted a Wisconsin state purchasing supervisor named Georgia Thompson for improperly awarding a contract to a firm linked to Democratic Governor Jim Doyle's 2006 reelection campaign.

So just why did Steve Biskupic ruin the life of an innocent woman and loyal civil servant? Wisconsin blogger Mike Plaisted has some pretty good insight:

According to some of the e-mails in the fired U.S. attorney scandal currently boiling in Washington, Biskupic was on the hot seat last year for not being "tough" enough on the GOP’s bogus "voter fraud" agenda. No doubt he saved his job by going after this lowly state employee, giving valuable ammunition to the GOP and its wing-nut surrogates to paint Doyle as somehow ethically challenged in an election year. At this point, he and his handlers probably don’t even care that the conviction was tossed – the case had already served its intended purpose.