Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Karl Rove and Karen Johnson: The Political Marriage That Ali Akbar Built?

Karl Rove and Karen Johnson

Karl Rove and Karen Johnson don't seem like the kind of couple that would have a quickie wedding. Published reports indicate they have known each other for roughly 15 years. A source tells Legal Schnauzer that they were carrying on an affair while Rove's second wife, the former Darby Hickson of Alabama, was battling cancer.

So why did they reportedly get married in a rush, under circumstances that remain hush hush? Well, leave it to Karl Rove to turn the "sanctity of marriage" into a political calculation. And that's exactly what the Rove-Johnson marriage appears to be.

Why did Rove need political cover at the moment? Well, for one, it's a presidential election year, and Rove is courting casino moguls Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson in an effort to buy the White House for Mitt Romney. But the No. 1 reason might have originated here at Legal Schnauzer.

We reported on June 27 that Rove had been conducting a gay affair with Ali A. Akbar, the president of the right-wing National Bloggers Club. Our information came from a letter that Alabama attorney and former GOP operative Jill Simpson wrote to Bob Bauer, counsel for the Obama re-election campaign.

Rove had appeared on Greta Van Susteren's Fox News program to level a series of bizarre charges at Simpson, Bauer, and others. Simpson responded with a letter to Bauer, informing him that she thought Rove's rant was driven by fears that he was about to be outed for his affair with Ali Akbar.

What's a political guru to do when pesky reports about his gay affair with a party operative won't go away--especially when the guru has built his career to a certain extent on anti-gay rhetoric? Well, he gets married for the third time--and he does it in a big hurry.

Rove and Johnson got married in such a hurry that we've seen no hard proof a wedding even took place. What date was the wedding? Where was it held? Who officiated? We've seen no answers to any of those questions. We've scoured the Austin American-Statesman Web site--that could be considered the happy couple's hometown newspaper--and found no mention of a Rove-Johnson wedding. Wouldn't that be big news in Austin?

Rove and Johnson clearly have quite a history, dating to George W. Bush's term as governor of Texas. The New York Daily News reported on Johnson's apparent affair with the married Rove in 2005:

Karl Rove has earned himself some gossip payback. President Bush's deputy chief of staff and foremost fishwife is fending off whispers about his friendship with lobbyist Karen Johnson. Rove, who stands accused of using leaks and slurs against Sen. John McCain, terrorism adviser Richard Clarke and CIA agent Valerie Plame, was mum yesterday when we called about Johnson, a never-married, fortysomething GOP loyalist from Austin, Tex. The two are said to have gotten acquainted when Johnson sat on the board of then-Gov. George W. Bush's Business Council. "Their friendship reportedly deepened after Bush appointed Johnson--a little-known spokesperson for the Texas Good Roads Association-- to a seat on his Transportation Department transition team in 2000," Radaronline.com reports. "The plum appointment enabled Johnson's lobbying firm, Infrastructure Solutions, to snare such high-paying clients as Aetna and the City of Laredo.

Notice that Johnson apparently received major financial benefits from her, ahem, relationship with Rove. If a quid pro quo agreement was present--and we all have learned that term from the Don Siegelman prosecution, which Rove reportedly helped orchestrate--both Johnson and Rove could have violated federal bribery statutes. For that matter, Dubya's appointment of Johnson to a state board sounds an awful lot like the appointment that the Bush Justice Department determined was criminal in the Siegelman case.

Ali A. Akbar
Was there a quid pro quo in Bush's appointment of the "little known" Johnson to a state board--and was Karl Rove involved in the equation? If so, why aren't all three of them facing federal prison terms?

The Radar Online piece--titled "A Fork in the Rove?"--referenced Rove's tendency to out certain folks for their sexual leanings:

Last Sunday, in a blistering column in the New York Times, Frank Rich charged that around the time the White House was leaking Plame's undercover CIA status to friendly reporters, Rove’s office was publicly “outing” Jeffrey Kofman after the gay ABC correspondent reported on the flagging morale of American troops in Iraq. Rich angrily charged the Republican rumor-monger with fostering a “pervasive culture of revenge” in Washington. Now, in the same spirit, Rove’s critics are forcing the married pol to fend off a politically motivated campaign that focuses on his own personal life.

Radar proceeded to break the story about the apparent Rove-Johnson affair. In a followup piece, titled "Rove and a Hard Place," Radar reported that Johnson had grown tired of her dalliance with Rove. In fact, she wound up falling for a guy named Rhett Hard--that name is for real, folks; we aren't making it up--who served as a foreman on her Texas ranch. We can only guess that all the goodies she received via Rove--in the form of government contracts and such--helped pay for the ranch.

How did our gal Karen come to fall into the ready arms of Rhett Hard? Here is how Radar reported it:

In July we reported on the very close relationship Johnson, a single, Austin-based lobbyist, has enjoyed with Rove since they met over a decade ago in Texas. But now that Rove's White House tenure is looking increasingly shaky, friends are whispering that the forty-something lobbyist--who pulls in well over $1 million a year thanks to her administration connections--may be cooling toward the married presidential advisor.
"Everyone knows how close Karen is to Karl, but she's sick of it," says a person familiar with the situation. Johnson's disapproving family has long urged her to settle down with the improbably named Rhett Hard, a handsome ranch foreman whom Johnson has dated sporadically over the last few years. "Karen's dream has always been to own a cattle ranch, and two years ago she bought Cinco de Mayo [the name of her Austin property] and hired Rhett to manage the place. They even joined the Cattleman's Texas Longhorn Registry together."
But while the movie-star handsome Hard shares Johnson's affection for the president (he contributed $2,000 to Bush's reelection campaign in 2004), one Austin social observer doubts that their relationship is going anywhere. "If Rhett hasn't married her by now, he never will," says the source. "Karen has never been married. She's what I call a serial dater."
Hard could not be reached for comment and Johnson did not return repeated calls.

Johnson and Hard wound up getting married in May 2006, but alas, the marriage did not last. That's how Johnson came to be available when King Karl needed someone to fill a breach that his relationship with Ali Akbar helped create.

Will a quickie marriage prove to be the solution to the Ali Akbar problem that threatens the reign of "Bush's brain"? How will the "pro family," "pro American," and "pro white" GOP factions react when they learn about Rove's extracurricular activities with a young black man who has a Muslim-sounding name?

We will have to wait for the answers to those questions. But our guess is that the Ali Akbar story will not go away so easily. The source of the story has a history of being right on target about ugliness connected to the postmodern Republican Party. The source is right on target again--and Karl Rove clearly knows it. That's why he turned, in a desperate moment, to Karen Johnson.

8 comments:

  1. You are being censored Legal Schnauzers.

    ". . . The spectacle of this shattered destiny is suggestive of ancient tragedy. The Roman saying: "Arx tarpeia Capitoli proxima" comes to mind: the Tarpeian Rock from which a convicted person was hurled to his death was close to the Capitol, the symbol of power and greatness . . . .

    . . . Leaving aside any considerations of his innocence or guilt, the steamrolling of such a high-profile personality can only provoke anguish in the ordinary citizen. If someone like him is unable to defend himself, then how can we hope to succeed if we were to be accused like him? . . . .

    . . . The rise and the fall

    http://www.voltairenet.org/Obama-financial-war-and-the

    ". . . In this regard, the French are trying to find excuses for the nature of the Anglo-Saxon judicial system to which they are just beginning to awaken. They had already seen such a parody of justice in their favorite television series, but they never imagined it could actually exist in reality. As for the extra-judicial system, Guantánamo and the secret prisons, they have always preferred not to know. Some commentators have speculated that the harsh treatment at the hands of the police and the first judge denotes a will to treat the powerful and the weak on an equal footing. Yet, surely, they must all be familiar with the works of illustrious sociologists explaining that in this unjust system money is king and that justice may be blindfolded, but is not class blind . . . .

    Too bad the JUSTICE in the U.S. is blind to KARL ROVE, ET AL?

    OR do we HOPE for real that our system of blue vs. red changes into NOT a purple hostile takeover again by the same usual criminally insane - trouble is, there are few that have not joined the ZIONIST routine of global full spectrum dominance!?

    Getting onto your site was very, very difficult and posting was even more difficult. THUS, hope this gets out to the people in the U.S. who need to see how our system of "JUSTICE" is viewed by older "cultures of corruption," than We here in the U.S. are also discovering from real news, LS, how the system can be healed?

    Transparency is not exactly the Bush's Brain Boy Genius' script.

    BUT, not to worry about any competition, there are few brains in Washington DC with synapses firing, so we are definitely in the double digit handicap zone whether blue, red, purple.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ". . . “We have met the enemy, and he is US,” summed up Harvey . .

    . . . The expression is a pun on the earlier phrase “We have met the enemy, and he is us” adopted by environmentalists from a 1970 cartoon . .

    . . . But few were in the mood for wordplay . .

    . . . Auckland University law professor Bill Hodge described the phrase as “an extra-judicial comment that isn't helpful”, and some local media said the judge’s position in a case where the US is one of the sides had become untenable . .

    . . . Kim Dotcom (real name Kim Schmitz) was the founder of file hosting site Megaupload, and was arrested in New Zealand in January at the request of the United States. He was accused of copyright infringements, racketeering and money laundering . .

    . . . Since then, Dotcom has fought his extradition to the US . . . . . continue reading at the website "Russia Today."

    Kim Dotcom judge quits after calling US 'the enemy'

    Published: 18 July, 2012, 18:38

    AN UNDERSTANDING is the U.S. is owned and operated by the Federal Reserve Syndicate [Fed] which has used the U.S. as its warrior nation to have the one world government.

    ALL nation states have aspired and continue to aspire for this insatiable power lust, a single currency and head of that control, globally.

    The Chinese and Russians of course were PARTNERS with the U.S. U.S. did the first double-cross and that was the French IMF, claimed to be one of the oldest traps set to get rid of a political elite, "Honey Pot" take down in NY, NY.

    We The People in the US are definitely in a big time world whirlwind of T-R-O-U-B-L-E.

    People better prepare for a not very civilized happening.

    Think 9-1-1. Think before that, the Oklahoma bombing, and of course we were also being "readied" via the New York bombing earlier than 9-1-1, et al, et Cetera.

    Water, electricity, food? How prepared are we for a disaster?

    How many more days before the Diebold next president?

    ReplyDelete
  3. LS, FYI. look at the acronyms!

    Here is how our "money" appears to be in the process of finding "transparency"

    ALSO, check out livinglieswordblog [Neil Garfield] for the best cover on the LIE MORE [LIBOR] that also hit the municipals in the good ole south.

    http://www.sec.gov/spotlight/globalaccountingstandards/ifrs-work-plan-final-report-exhibit-e.pdf

    IASB deadlines,
    19
    and raised more overarching concerns regarding the quality of IFRS compared
    to U.S. GAAP,
    20
    especially when scrutinized by the SEC and PCAOB.
    21
    One commenter felt
    that FASB must continue as a “strong, vibrant, and effective standard setter” and that any
    endorsement approach would “significantly weaken the standard-setting ability of the FASB and
    the ability for the FASB to influence standards set by the IASB.”
    22
    However, other commenters criticized the continued convergence approach, noting that it
    would be impracticable: the U.S. cannot expect forever to have a special role in developing
    IFRS jointly with the IASB, and the MOU process is already starting to unravel with the Boards
    reaching seemingly intractable differences.
    23

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  4. Their friendship reportedly deepened after Bush appointed Johnson--a little-known spokesperson for the Texas Good Roads Association-- to a seat on his Transportation Department transition team in 2000

    ***

    Sounds as if the dubya regime believed in PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION & definitely quid pro quo!!

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  5. Bravo, Bravo Legal Schnauzer for calling out yet another Barclay's/Rollins corpoRAT scam which the taxpayers will be backing. I recently saw Vivek Seth, Raymond James IPO guy extraordinaire on TV-he was asked how he so successfully pulled of the Campus Crest IPO in the present financial atmosphere...of course he gave a random answer which was aimed at making the potential investor salivate...but he didn't mention his ties to HSBC Bank in India where he used to work nor his and Rollins' ties to Goldman Sachs, Barclays and some other Wall Street thugs.

    It might also interest LS that I recently read where Mr. Rollins aka Corp Rat has managed to get the government to pay off his debt on two apartment communities. Freddie Mac invested $40 million which helped his company pay off the construction loans on his Austin Peay property in Tennessee and his property in Columbia Missouri. Business wire July 2012.

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  6. What are the possibilities that Breitbart and Akbar were an item, and Rove moved in a Breitbart threatened Rove and ended up dead?

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  7. Wow, CommonSense, that is a possibility that had never occurred to me. Some might consider it wild, but I wouldn't rule anything out with the postmodern conservative crowd.

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  8. I don't know why I bother posting here since no one is reading this apparently. It appears the only link to anything "legal" is your dancing ("prancing"?) awfully close to a lawsuit. But then again, no one reads this ... Thing, so why bother? If a tree falls in the forest...? You're too chicken to let this comment through, as so many gays are, yes? Conservatives are either stupid or hypocrites in your eyes, so we are all closet gays? Not. Time has blown away your Rove-Plame theory, as we know for certain it was Dep Secy of State Richard Armitage who "outed" Valerie Plame who had already outed herself and besides that, her mini job at the Agency was WAY overblown. But one thing we know for certain after 8 years of Bill Clinton and 6 1/2 of Obama, there is nothing Liberals embrace more than crazy, Elvis-is-alive theories to commit character assassination to a degree that Richard Nixon could only drem about. And now your standard bearer, Hillary-in-hiding who not surprisingly was fired for lying by the lead Democratic counsel of the Watergate Committee, is about to see how many more ethical violations the American public can accept. You should be .so proud.

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