Accomplished liar Mark. F. “Thor” Hearne told Jo Mannies at the Post-Dispatch (the only reporter he’ll speak to of late) that there is absolutely nothing nefarious behind the continuing attempts by “someone” at his Missouri law firm, Lathrop & Gage, to scrub references to his discredited GOP “voter fraud” group, American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), from his page at Wikipedia, as we discussed Tuesday, and again Wednesday, as the Wiki War continued, and as it became apparent that the ACVR had lied about their involvement in political activities on their federal 990 tax forms.
Mannies asked Thor about the ACVR references, now several times expunged from the page, and about what happened to the amazing, disappearing “voter fraud” hucksters. Incredibly, this is what she reports old Thor as having to say about it…
As for the center itself, Hearne said he couldn’t speak to the disappearance of its website or its own Wikipedia entry. But he did deny the critics’ assertions, once featured on Wikipedia, that the center had ties to the White House.
Hasen added, in a short blog item about the Post article, that he finds Thor’s excuse laughable.
“Couldn’t speak to the disappearance of the website?” Hasen asked rhetorically. “That strains all credulity for the person who was the public face of the organization and the brains behind the operation.”
“A law firm partner who doesn’t know who at his law firm is editing the Wikipedia entry about him?” he noted skeptically.
Mannies adds another point or two of note, reporting that “Efforts to track down the center’s former executives were unsuccessful,” and that “Some political sources privately blamed possible financial problems for the center’s surprisingly swift demise.”
Speaking of straining credulity, “possible financial problems”? Give us a break. The ACVR received nearly $1 million from still unknown sources to ply their vote-suppression trade via bullshit reports of “Democratic voter fraud.” As those political, and unsupported, charges revealed themselves to be at the center of the US Attorney Purge scandal, Thor and ACVR went slithering back under their rock for cover.
Thor is the only one who will speak on the record at this time, and only to Mannies. He’s refused to call back Murray Waas from National Journal and Peter Overby at NPR, among others. Even though, as Mannies notes, “For the past two years, the American Center for Voting Rights — and its studies citing the potential for voter fraud — seemed to be everywhere….Any story about alleged voter misdeeds, or the battle over stiffer voter identification requirements, featured a quote from the center or its chief counsel, St. Louis-based lawyer Thor Hearne.”
Mannies, however, reports that Thor is still willing to lie to any media interested in speaking about non-ACVR issues…
Which means that news outlets seeking a conservative viewpoint regarding voter or election issues are still free to give Hearne a call.
In another related-ish item following the Hearne story, Mannies also reports that Todd Graves, then-US Attorney for the Western District in Missouri, was not under investigation at the time that now-fired US Attorney for Arkansas Bud Cummins was said to be looking into a state fee office scandal said to involve the Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt and Hearne’s lawfirm of Lathrop & Gage.
Various members of Graves’s family owned pieces of the state-run fee offices and initial reports on the matter had said that Graves — who was later purged as well and replaced by interim GOP/DoJ “voter fraud” zealot Bradley Schlozman — had recused himself from the investigation due to his conflicts of interest.
Cummins has told The BRAD BLOG via email that he was asked to take the case after the US Attorney in MO’s Eastern District (St. Louis, where Thor is based) recused herself, and that Graves, to his knowledge, was never asked to take over the investigation.
“The scope of our investigation was limited to the fee offices in the Eastern District,” Cummins told Mannies. “It could have spread, but it didn’t.”
While Cummins, appropriately, would not tell us the scope of the actual investigation, we’ll be sending him this recently posted item, just for kicks, since — who knows? — he might want to pass it on to Jane Duke, who ran the original investigation and is now serving as the US Attorney for Arkansas. Duke stepped in after the Rove-bot vote cager Tim Griffin, whom Cummins was moved out to make room for, recently stepped down amongst the glaring light of AttorneyGate.
For more information on the “non-partisan” tax-exempt ACVR “Voter Fraud” scam and the snakeoil salesmen who invented it, Bush/Cheney ’04 National General Counsel Mark F. “Thor” Hearne and RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, please see BRAD BLOG’s full Special Coverage of the “American Center for Voting Rights” at https://BradBlog.com/ACVR.
This is why these snakes and vipers must be convicted criminally for their illegal conduct. They are fully content to commit their crimes against the American political system – and then quietly slither off hopefully unnoticed, unapprehended, and unconvicted for their crimes. Then popping back up sometime in the future to pull the very same crap/crime again.
Remember the Neo-Con Fascist who pop back up when least expected and everyone’s attentions have been diverted else where.
RICHARD CHENEY
DONALD RUMSFELD
JOHN NEGROPONTE
ELLIOT ABRAMS
PAUL WYRICK
RICHARD PEARLE
DOUGLAS FEITH
BILLY KRISTOL
MICHAEL LEDEEN
If you don’t stop them. If you don’t hold public hearings to reveal each and every gritty detail of their crimes and bring embarrassment upon them and their cohorts – these criminals and their foot soldiers and their minions will be back to perpetrate the same crimes again and again sometime in the future. If they are allowed to escape justice – then our society suffers dire consequences of their fascist minds and actions.
Why do these Fascist Americans hate America so ?
BradBlog Thank-You for keeping the spotlight on this issue of Mark F. “THOR” Hearne this anti-American, anti-Democracy piece of dirt should not be allowed to operate in the darkness without full public view. With full scrutiny these people – like cockroaches – they scamper for a dark place to hide were they can continue the practice of their criminality that will ultimately bring the end of DEMOCRACY. One hundred year Republican Majority Party Rule – welcome the Neo-Con, Neo-Fascist, Quasi-Christian Theocratic State.
Be patient, or at least don’t give up, sometimes it takes a long time to convict.
oldturk said
Yes, the emergence of Pro Neo-Con Man. An evolutionary question for anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and zoologists to ponder.
The first of the species has been isolated, with the out of the closet statement:
(One Party Country, p. 102, quoting RNC’s Ken Mehlman, emphasis added).
Thor, give up the coy bu$hit dude, millions of people are on to you big time. You are see thru thor.
And going back into the bushie tree of devolution and perversion of every american government agency, which preznit blush calls “my government”, we see what has been predicted by bloggers here for years:
(T. Insider, emphasis added).
They say widespread and we have said all along “tip of the iceberg”. The law has been disregarded wholesale:
(Think Progress, emphasis added).
Even Gonzales himself a loyal bushie, does no understand all this, and things he is innocent because all he wanted to do was make the Department of
JusticeJust Us the protector of the empire.He wonders “Why is everyone so uptight about what he can’t recall remembering” for heavens
sakegate?It’s important when you work in a Government Agency to remember who you work for.
Not your boss.
Not your boss’s political party.
Not the President of the United States.
You work for the PEOPLE of the United States of America.
Anything less, and you are enabling the creation of a Fascist, non-American state.
If Civil Service workers EVER want to have the respect of the American People and not be despised as hacks, partisans, and criminals, then they must turn State’s Evidence NOW and begin to cooperate with all investigations of this most corrupt and criminal Rethuglican Administration in EVERY SINGLE case where politics has trumped public service at the instruction of the Rethuglican power-hungry and dynasty-seeking monsters.
Congrats to Thor for attempting to scrub history. Hearne managed to get Wikipedia to delete and re-direct the article about him to the American Center for Voting Rights page. When you think about it, deleting the article about Mark F. “Thor” Hearne, II and redirecting it to ACVR causes ACVR to be the only thing notable in his life so far to be ACVR, the very thing he has suppressed from his resume (which is posted on the Internet). I’m really surprised that Wikipedia caves into political pressure, especially to someone that is as important to changing the methods by which we cast our votes in the US such as voter ID laws and other things that must have been on his Wikipedia page.