Susan Ralston quit Rove's office, went to Commerce >>>

(December 07, 2005 -- 01:14 PM EST // link)

Was that a shoe falling? Susan Ralston is the woman who has managed to be at the center of both the Abramoff and the CIA leak investigations. She was Abramoff's executive assistant back in the day; then she took the same job with Karl Rove.

But maybe no more.

The Philippine News (Ralston is of Filipino descent) reports (link courtesy of The Plank) that she's moved on to the Commerce Department because she's been under "too much pressure" at the White House.
-- Josh Marshall

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/007190.php

(December 06, 2005 -- 03:45 PM EST // link)

Eh, small world, small conspiracy.

This news has been out for a few weeks and I just hadn't noticed. But the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Fund is being headed up by none other than Mel Sembler, the Cheney-fan and the big-ticket GOP fundraiser from Florida who was the US Ambassador to Italy when all the secret meetings took place and when the forged uranium papers showed up at the US Embassy in October 2002.

Since I've reported on this story for almost two years and am still writing a series on it, I need to say explicitly that I've never seen any evidence tying Sembler to any bad acts related to the forgeries. So the 'conspiracy' crack is mainly a jest. But there's a lot that's still really murky about what was happening at the US Embassy in Rome after 9/11 with the forgeries and other matters. That was on Sembler's watch. And Libby's bad acts stem from the whole forgeries bamboozlement. (Whacking Wilson was part of the larger White House effort to keep the forgeries scam covered up -- a cover up that's still underway.)

So Sembler just seems like a pretty big part of this story to be collecting money for the one person under indictment for their role in it.
-- Josh Marshall

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/007185.php