McRove's political theater expands into foreign policies.

From TPMmuckraker:

Why should it just have been U.S. Attorneys? Or the General Services Administration?

Yes, Karl Rove -- who, the White House has insisted for years, isn't involved in foreign policy -- instructed his White House deputies to repeatedly brief State Department officials and U.S. ambassadors in key foreign missions about GOP electoral priorities. The push to enlist U.S. embassies into the service of Rove's dream of a permanent Republican majority, according to today's Washington Post, has been a feature of the last six years. They involved the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Peace Corps. Needless to say, all are expected to be non-political agencies.


Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is going to explore the depths of the White House's political outreach to foreign-policy officials during today's confirmation hearing for Henrietta Holsman Fore, nominated to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID employees apparently received two briefings for the White House in the last ten months.

Sure enough, this one is another Rove-Sara Taylor special:

In one instance, State Department aides attended a White House meeting at which political officials examined the 55 most critical House races for 2002 and the media markets most critical to battleground states for President Bush's reelection fight in 2004, according to documents the department provided to the Senate committee.

On Jan. 4, just after the 2006 elections tossed the Republicans out of congressional power, Rove met at the White House with six U.S. ambassadors to key European missions and the consul general to Bermuda while the diplomats were in Washington for a State Department conference.

According to a department letter to the Senate panel, Rove explained the White House views on the electoral disaster while Sara M. Taylor, then the director of White House political affairs, showed a PowerPoint presentation that pinned most of the electoral blame on "corrupt" GOP lawmakers and "complacent incumbents." One chart in Taylor's presentation highlighted the GOP's top 36 targets among House Democrats for the 2008 election.

It looks as if the White House's political clash with the Democrats focused heavily on the European theater:

The ambassadors included in the Rove briefing were Eduardo Aguirre Jr. of Spain, James P. Cain of Denmark, Alfred Hoffman Jr. of Portugal, Ronald Spogli of Italy, Craig Stapleton of France and Robert Tuttle of Britain. Gregory Slayton, the consul general to Bermuda, also attended.

In total, the seven diplomats donated more than $1.6 million to Republican causes from 2000 through 2006, according to a Center for Responsive Politics report on large Bush donors who were named ambassadors. The State Department, in a letter to Biden, said that Cain -- one of Bush's top fundraisers in North Carolina -- requested the meeting with Rove and did not notify department officials in advance.