by Charley James

John McCain lost the presidential election only because the Obama landslide was greater than Republican operatives anticipated and local GOP apparatchiks weren’t vigilant enough in preventing legitimate voters from casting ballots. And when informed by field offices of a potential voting rights problem, Attorney General Michael Mukasey reportedly chose not to do anything.

As reported here on Oct. 22, 2008, well before election day the Republican Party developed a carefully planned and coordinated effort to suppress, steal or “disappear” votes cast for Barack Obama. The fraud is likely to have cost the President-elect up to seven million votes, enough to put a few more states in his column and, possibly, kept down ballot Democrats from winning Senate, House and state elections.

Three independent sources inside the Justice Dept., all career lawyers who would not speak for attribution for fear of reprisals in the waning days of the Bush Administration, state that countless reports of voter suppression flowed into Justice Dept. regional offices and Washington on Election Day. Mostly rejected were minorities and most disputes arose in rural or exurban areas – away from where a snoopy reporter might pop up unexpectedly.

“The political people here (at Justice) kept saying they were taking it under advisement,” one of the sources said in a phone interview on Sunday. “Everyone knew what that meant: Nothing was gonna get done.”

Said another source, “It’s a good thing Obama had so many people voting for him so he won by a large margin anyway. The bad thing is this would have been the third election in a row that the Republican Party grabbed illegally.”

In other words, when we reported in October that a McCain insider was worried about voting problems – and got vile spit at us by right wing bloggers and radio hosts for writing the article – the source for the original story was correct.

Extensive GOP Manipulation
In the original article, a long-time source inside McCain headquarters told me, “… they (the McCain campaign and GOP) know the election is lost in a fair fight …” 

Yesterday, Mark Crispin Miller, an authority on election fraud, confirmed to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! that the GOP was working hard nationally to keep the fight from being fair, a la 2000 in Florida and 2004 in Ohio. (AUDIT AZ have also done extensive research to come after the first of the year on this story - Ed.)

Miller notes that in just two precincts in Illinois’ DuPage County, 350 people who voted in the state’s primary only a few months earlier were told in November they weren’t registered and turned away. 

“The Illinois Ballot Integrity Project was monitoring the vote in DuPage County, right next door to Obama’s, you know, backyard, Cook County,” Miller states. “And two of them, in only two precincts on Election Day, saw … 350 voters show up only to be turned away, told, ‘You’re not registered.’” 

Miller is a professor of media culture and communication at New York University and the author Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 as well as Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too. He notes that in the DuPage County incident, all but one of the thwarted voters was black. But the problem isn’t limited to Illinois. 

“People at the Election Defense Alliance discovered from sifting through the numbers, an 11-point red shift in New Hampshire,” Miller reveals. “That means that there’s a discrepancy in Obama’s disfavor, primarily through use of the optical scan machines, an eleven-point discrepancy in the Republicans’ favor.”

Perverting Justice
That John and Cindy aren’t getting ready to move into the White House is only because Obama’s local ground organization produced a massive voter turnout, more than enough to overwhelm Republican vote stealing and coordinated efforts to keep likely Obama supporters from voting..

Yet, despite the fact that Michael “I Don’t Know If Waterboarding Is Torture” Mukasey replaced Alberto Gonzales as attorney general because of Fredo’s involvement in the political firings of US Attorneys who refused to investigate phony GOP allegations of vote fraud, he has been remarkably unwilling to look into instances where the Republican Party is alleged to have actually suppressed or didn’t count Obama votes.

Put bluntly, it seems as if Mukasey is as much a Bush and Cheney flunky as Gonzales.

“There was absolutely no indication from the AG or any of his people that we were to take these allegations seriously,” says a third career lawyer at Justice who is in a position to know. “When somebody pressured Mukasey about it, someone at the meeting – I don’t know for sure it was the AG – said, ‘Hell, if we win the new AG will bury it. If Obama wins, nobody will care.’”

But whether Mukasey uttered the statement is irrelevant. If he was at the meeting, he and everyone else in the room could be charged with a raft of federal crimes ranging from conspiracy and election fraud to perverting the course of justice, violating the Voting Rights Act and even racketeering, according to a criminal lawyer in private practice in Illinois.

So, along with keep the nation from total economic collapse, the incoming Obama administration has another thorny legal issue involving the Bush administration. Not only does the he have to decide about prosecuting Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Yoo and others for war crimes, he also must look at possible charges against Mukasey and other top political appointees at Justice.