Almost four months before Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in a sex scandal, a lawyer for Republican political operative Roger Stone sent a letter to the FBI alleging that Spitzer ”used the services of high-priced call girls” while in Florida.

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Stone, known for shutting down the 2000 presidential election recount effort in Miami-Dade County, is a longtime Spitzer nemesis whose political experience ranges from the Nixon White House to Al Sharpton’s presidential campaign. His lawyer wrote the letter containing the call-girl allegations after FBI agents had asked to speak to Stone, though he says the FBI did not specify why he was contacted.

This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort to collect tips from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in the Department, and with the danger of retaliation very real, the committee had set up a form on the committee’s website for people to blow the whistle privately about abuses there. Although the panel said it would not accept anonymous tips, it assured those who came forward that their identity would be held in the “strictest confidence.”

But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the “to:” field — instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or “bcc:”.

"New emails show conclusively that Karl Rove was in the middle of this mess from the beginning. It is now imperative that he testify before Congress and give all the details of his involvement both in the proposal to fire the 93 U.S. Attorneys in the beginning of George Bush’s second term, and his involvement in the firing of the individual eight U.S. Attorneys who were fired throughout 2006.  If the White House prevents Karl Rove from testifying, it will be thumbing its nose at the American people and at the rule of law. The reason it’s so imperative that people testify under oath is that every time new information comes out, it proves that the White House was not telling the truth in their previous statements. Statements from those involved have proved to be false, false, false, time after time after time."

-U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer