It took two years, but it finally happened - thanks to an agreement with the White House that deposing Rove would not infringe on executive privilege. Now everyone wants to know: What did Karl say? And don't you wish you were the fly on the wall?

Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove was deposed Tuesday by attorneys for the House Judiciary Committee, according to Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the panel’s chairman.

Rove’s deposition began at 10 a.m. and ended around 6:30 p.m, with several breaks, Conyers said.

Conyers would not comment on what Rove told congressional investigators, what the next step in the long-running Judiciary Committee investigation would be or whether Rove would face additional questioning.

“He was deposed today,” Conyers said in an interview. “That’s all I can tell you.”

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, declined to confirm or deny that his client had appeared before the committee. Luskin said there was an agreement that the depositions would remain confidential until they were completed. However, in a court filing Monday, the Justice Department indicated that the deposition set for this week would be the committee's last.

Conyers’ panel had first subpoenaed Rove in 2007 as part of its probe into the firing of nine U.S. attorneys. But the Bush White House, citing executive privilege, refused to make Rove or White House Counsel Harriet Miers available for any deposition.

David Sirota on yesterday's hearing about Bernie Madoff:

At a contentious Financial Services Committee hearing today about the failure of the Securities and Exchange Commission to prevent the Bernie Madoff scandal, the SEC's General Counsel cited executive privilege as reason that he and the SEC's enforcement branch were refusing to answer congressional inquiries. You can watch the video here - the executive privilege issue comes at about 5 minutes and 15 seconds into the clip.

As you'll see, SEC officials refuse to answer the committee's basic questions about the Madoff scandal, and the agency's acting general counsel, Andy Vollmer (a Bush holdover and maxed-out donor to John McCain's presidential campaign) explicitly cites executive privilege as his legal rationale for refusing to provide basic information to federal lawmakers.

Congress has a constitutional obligation to engage in basic fact finding, both in order to legislate reforms at the SEC and to publicly expose how our economy was destroyed by sharks like Madoff. Now, Bush holdovers at the SEC are using executive powers - powers that are now President Obama's - to prevent Democratic lawmakers from doing their job.

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Keith talks to Rep. Jerrold Nadler about Rove's claims of executive privilege and what the process will be if he again refuses to appear before Congress, this time with a new Attorney General's office to enforce contempt charges.

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Keith talks to John Dean about Karl Rove's recent subpeona to appear before the House Judiciary Committee. Dean feels that it's likely Rove will get little help from the Obama administration in supporting his claims of executive privilege. He also cites the ongoing court cases involving Harriet Miers and Josh Bolton and notes that in the past the courts have only protected ex-Presidents and not their advisors when claims of executive privilege have been made. He feels it's likely all of them will eventually end up being forced to testify before Congress and hopes that under the Obama administration we will return to following the rule of law.

I just want a non-Photoshopped version of this if he refuses to show up this time.

American presidents and their staff work for the American people, they are not monarchs with an inner court of priviliged nobles. President Obama has reminded all his predecessors of that simple fact, living up to a campaign promise to "nullify attempts to make the timely release of presidential records more difficult."

President Barack Obama, in his first full day in office, revoked a controversial executive order signed by President Bush in 2001 that limited release of former presidents’ records.

The new order could expand public access to records of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in the years to come as well as other past leaders, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. …

Under Bush’s order, former presidents had broad ability to claim executive privilege and could designate others including family members who survive them to exercise executive privilege on their behalf.

Obama’s new order gives ex-presidents less leeway to withhold records, Aftergood said, and takes away the ability of presidents’ survivors to designate that privilege.

Separately, an Obama memorandum issued Wednesday also appears to effectively rescind a 2001 memo by President Bush’s then-Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft giving agencies broad legal cover to reject public disclosure requests.

Over at MoJo blog, they quote CREW chief counsel Anne Weismann as explaining:

"[Obama]'s putting former presidents on notice that if you want to continue a claim of executive privilege that [Obama] doesn't think is well-placed, you're going to have to go to court."

Even Ed Morrissey at Hot Air is impressed, writing "On Inauguration Day, I promised to offer praise for Barack Obama when he pursued good policy, and it didn’t take long." At least one other conservative thinks this executive order is "nothing more than him throwing a meaty bone to his constituency who hopes to be able to find out “The Truth” about the Bush administration’s alleged plans to turn this nation into a dictatorial theocracy." That's simply mean-spirited hyperbole, hiding an implied argument. Who would really want to argue, out there in plain words, that stopping Bush's bosses (the American people) from finding out what's in millions of his administration's emails is a good thing?

Crossposted from Newshoggers

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You knew it was going to happen. For all his big talk about being happy to talk to the House Judiciary Committee looking into the conviction and incarceration of Don Siegelman, when push came to shove, you had to know that Karl Rove would never, ever freely respond to the HJC subpoena. CQPolitics:

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, cited executive privilege as the reason that the former White House adviser would not appear before the Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee on July 10.[..]

"Mr. Rove will respectfully decline to appear before the Subcommittee on July 10 on the grounds that Executive Privilege confers upon him immunity from process to respond to a subpoena directed to this subject," Luskin wrote.

Luskin renewed an offer that would have Rove submit to an off-the-record, untranscribed interview or answer written questions about the Siegelman case, but not the broader issue of the politicization of the Justice Department.

Not even man enough to stand up for his actions. Hear that, Karl? Not even man enough. Dan Abrams brings NYU Law School Professor Michael Waldman and former HJC counsel Julian Epstein to discuss the latest in Bush League (In)Justice:

Abrams: Okay, Michael, let me start with you: it is clear, Karl Rove is not coming. I mean, the House Judiciary Committee can say as much as they want, we're still hoping, we're still encouraging him to come, we're still insisting that he come, he's not coming. So what do they do now?

Waldman: Well, it's really quite remarkable, as you say, you can just say no to a lawful subpoena from Congress. Congress has a bunch of tools they can use. They can, of course, throw him in jail. There's a jail in the basement of the Capitol. That's probably the extreme remedy. There's all kinds of other things. They can cut off funding, they can hold up nominations, they can bring a lawsuit as has been the case in the Miers...the Harriet Miers contempt case. But what Congress has to have when it looks in its toolbox is not any of these tools but some backbone. Congress is a co-equal branch of government and it needs to stand up for its rights in this.

Backbone in Congress? What's that? I'll believe it when I see the perp walk.