Former Bush Adviser and GOP top strategy man Karl Rove’s book tour is coming to Littleton and Colorado Springs this weekend. Will he be citizen-arrested by members of Code Pink? Rove ditched a signing event in Beverly Hills last month where anti-war protesters were heckling him and when activist group Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans approached him with handcuffs to make a citizen’s arrest. “Look what you did. You outed a CIA officer and you lied to take us to war,” said Evans. She tried to arrest Rove again at a book signing in Las Vegas Friday.
Evans said she startled Rove in Vegas, that he jumped back against the book cases there when he recognized her and stayed there as security escorted her out of the store. Evans brought with her the Nevada arrest complaint, statute 171, that lists Rove’s alleged felony acts and that says citizens have the right to arrest felony suspects and hold them until police arrive to take them into custody. Evans hid handcuffs in her sleeve and the arrest complaint in the copy of Rove’s book, “Courage and Consequences,” she brought for him to sign.
Later, Evans appeared on L.A. radio’s Mike Malloy Show with guest host Brad Friedman, who wrote on the interview and on Evans’s citizen-arrest campaign at the Brad Blog:
Evans writes to say that she and several others from CODE PINK, including an army vet who is a member of Military Families Speak Out (MFSO), attempted to hand-cuff Rove at the table where he was signing copies of his new book, while unfurling a “Rove is a War Criminal” banner.
“We get to the table, he looks up to take my book and jumps back against the book shelves,” Evans says. He then points to three security guards and says “it’s her,” before the guards “pile in,” according to her account.
One member of the team then takes out the banner — which had been hidden in her skirt, since purses were confiscated before citizens were allowed in line — “while I pull out the handcuffs and try to reach for him and then pull the arrest complaint out of the book, trying to argue that he needs to be arrested and I have a right to be there. They argue private property and lead us out.”
She went to add that he was “standing freaked against the books” before he was then handed the next book to sign “as we are ushered out. We were physically pushed out the door with our unsigned book.
Here are Rove and Evans clashing in Beverly Hills:
In a reveiw of Rove’s book published at the Colorado independent in March, Dave Weigel wrote that the book seemed petty even by the standard set by most politics memoirs. He wrote that it was a book designed to settle scores by looking for lawyerly loopholes in arguments and that skimmed the surface of the grave policy issues behind the political back and forths.
Washington memoirs are all about settling scores. Karl Rove’s “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight” takes that tradition to new and self-parodying heights. To read Rove’s recollections of George W. Bush’s White House is to believe that, for eight years, men of “courage and moral clarity” governed the United States and were beset by critics who refused to give them any credit.
Rove will appear at a Barnes and Noble signing in Littleton Saturday April 17 and at a Borders signing in Colorado Springs Sunday April 18.
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