State GOP official pushed vote fraud issue; Fingerprints on Rove.

The mystery is solved.

For weeks, it was unclear who whined to the White House last year that not enough voter fraud cases were being prosecuted in Milwaukee.
Now we know.

The state Republican Party went straight to the top in its efforts to make voter fraud an issue in Wisconsin.

Sources tell No Quarter that Rick Wiley, then the executive director of the state GOP, directed a staffer in 2005 to prepare a 30-page report on election abuses in Wisconsin so Wiley could pass it along to a top White House official.

That document, entitled "Fraud in Wisconsin 2004: A Timeline/Summary," turned up last week in the horde of White House and U.S. Justice Department records released by the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

"The report was prepared for Karl Rove," said a source with knowledge of the situation. "Rick wanted it so he could give it to Karl Rove."

Yeah, that Karl Rove, President Bush's political mastermind and his deputy chief of staff.

The same guy who was knee-deep in helping decide which U.S. attorneys to keep or to boot.

So the head of the state party went to the political arm of the White House with a report supposedly documenting widespread abuse of election laws in Milwaukee, violations that the party clearly believed weren't getting the attention they deserved. In late 2005, U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic, a Bush appointee, announced that his probe found no evidence of a conspiracy to steal the 2004 election here.

Was Wiley - or his boss at the time, then-Chairman Rick Graber - hoping the Bush team would ax Biskupic, as it did the other top federal prosecutors last year?

"I'm not sure it was that nefarious," said the knowledgeable source. "I think the idea was to make Rove aware of the situation in Wisconsin."

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