Top AP editor to Rove: 'Keep up the fight.'

And we knew that the Administration had pulls with certain media outlets and reporters.


In its investigation of the misleading accounts that initially surrounded Pat Tillman's death and Jessica Lynch's rescue the House Oversight Committee on Monday shed some light on the White House's press-management apparatus and the chummy relationship between Karl Rove and AP scribe Ron Fournier.

The report details the Bush administration's exploitation of Tillman's death and suppression of evidence that the former football pro who joined the Army Rangers after 9/11 was killed by friendly fire. In the day's after Tillman's death, on April 22, 2004, the committee examined e-mails from the White House's communications team, including some exchanges with reporters.

Commentators and reporters contacted the White House to offer advice. For example, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan e-mailed the White House’s Director of Strategic Initiatives, Peter Wehner, recommending that he “find out what faith Tillman practiced and have the president go by that church and light a candle or say a prayer.” Karl Rove exchanged e-mails about Pat Tillman with Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier, under the subject line “H-E-R-O.”

In response to Mr. Fournier’s e-mail, Mr. Rove asked, “How does our country continue to produce men and women like this,” to which Mr. Fournier replied, “The Lord creates men and women like this all over the world. But only the great and free countries allow them to flourish. Keep up the fight.”


White House staff exchanged more than 200 e-mails concerning Tillman's death, according to the Oversight Committee report (.pdf).

Fournier appears not to have written anything about Tillman in the months after his death, according to a database search.

The committee's draft report does not indicate who initiated the e-mail exchange between Rove and Fournier, and hence who would have written the "H-E-R-O" subject line. A committee spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for more information.

More on the story.

On a side note: LaVena Johnson is mentioned in Waxman's report:

Page 50:

The Committee’s majority staff was also contacted by the family and friends of Private First Class LaVena Johnson, a weapons supply manager from Florissant, Missouri, who died, family members say, in a suspicious non-combat incident near Balad, Iraq, on July 19, 2005.

According to news reports, the Army ruled the death a suicide, and a medical examiner concurred with this finding.265 But Private Johnson’s family believes Army investigators ignored physical evidence inconsistent with a finding of suicide. They also believe that the Army has additional information about the circumstances of Private Johnson’s death that it has not shared with the family.