Rove now under investigation for election fraud by Italian and Mexican officials...by Wayne Madsen

March 19, 2007

-- Democratic Party sources have reported to WMR that Karl Rove and a team of Republican Party election manipulators he has used in the past for tampering with U.S. elections, particularly in Florida, Ohio, and New Mexico, are under investigation by the Italian government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi and the opposition Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) of Mexico.

The sources report that investigators are looking at alleged technical and strategic advice given by Rove and GOP election tampering consultants to Silvio Berlusconi's government, particularly the arch-neo-cons in the Berlusconi Cabinet -- then Interior Minister Beppe Pisanu and Foreign Minister Ginafranco Fini. Although polls before the April 2006 election indicated that Prodi's Center-Left coalition was far ahead of Berlusconi's right-wing/neo-fascist alliance and exit polls also indicated a large Center-Left win, Prodi squeaked by with a mere 0.1 percent of the vote. Our sources claim that Rove and his Italian counterparts severely miscalculated in their planning for tampering with the Italian election returns. Rove and his advisers forgot to include the expatriate Italian vote in their calculations. The 2006 national elections were the first in which Italians abroad were allowed to vote and by failing to calculate those votes, Berlusconi lost by a hair, despite the vote counting fraud that reportedly also included siphoning blank protest votes to the Berlusconi column.

Similarly, PRD officials are also looking at Rove and his team's involvement in providing election tampering assistance to conservative National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderon in last July's Mexico presidential election. Calderon beat PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador by a razor-thin 0.6 percent. However, as with Italy, pre-election polls and exit polls showed the PRD candidate with a commanding lead. Ballot boxes were found in garbage dumps in pro-PRD precincts. In addition, votes for the PRD were either shaved from the total count and some precincts were not even counted.

Some of the financial support for Republican interference in the Italian and Mexican elections may have been laundered through the U.S. taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which, in turn, funds the International Republican Institute (IRI), an arm of the Republican Party. The IRI has been involved in funding election campaigns in Venezuela against Hugo Chavez and in Haiti against Jean-Bertrand Aristide.



Rove now under investigation for election fraud by Italian and Mexican officials. Is an INTERPOL Red Notice for Rove in the offing?

Italian government and PRD officials have been in direct contact with Democratic Party election experts concerning the suspected international vote fraud committed by the GOP and Rove. If Rove is asked to testify in Italy about his contacts with Berlusconi government officials and refuses, he will have more than U.S. congressional subpoenas to worry about -- he could be faced with an INTERPOL Red Notice, a international arrest warrant recognized by INTERPOL member states.



[link to www.waynemadsenreport.com]