Pilot Mike Connell, Karl Rove’s computer guru and a key witness in a potential criminal case against the long time Bush political operative, died instantly when his Piper Supercub crashed and exploded in a neighborhood near Akron, Ohio one week before Christmas.

Mike Connell had been caught up in at least two major legal probes, one involving the disappearance of Rove’s potentially incriminating emails and one pertaining to computerized election fraud allegations in Ohio during the 2004 election. All indications were that Connell was guilty of both crimes, as well as perjury when he denied them in a sworn deposition. But he was finally ready to come clean, perhaps because of the frighteningly complex matrix of circumstances he was caught in. So he had notified his attorneys and an investigative news editor, Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story, that he was ready to talk.

During the interview with Alexandrovna, Connell was “frightened,” according to the reporter. He was being called upon by Ohio election attorney Cliff Arnebeck to testify against Rove. But Connell claimed that he was being threatened by Karl Rove  if he did so. Rove, he said, was telling him to “take the fall.” If he did not, Rove was going to unleash the Bush Justice Department on Connell’s wife, Heather, to investigate her lobbying activities.

The Ohio attorney Cliff Arnebeck knew from his own numerous inside sources that these threats were credible. He also had been tipped off that Connell’s life was at risk. Following the alleged threats by Rove, Connell had cancelled two flights after noticing suspicious problems with his airplane. Arnebeck took all this information so seriously that he communicated his concerns to several government officials, including U.S. Attorney General Mukasey, stating that Connell was an important witness, his life was in danger, and that he should be under protective custody. Mukasey did nothing.

Arnebeck also informed  several prominent media sources: “60 Minutes,” The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and C-Span. There was plenty of coverage about the threats and the airplane malfunctions–before the crash. But after the plane actually went down, the mainstream media showed scant interest in the story. As of December 25, on the first seven index pages of the Google search engine, the only prime media sources listed were CBS, AP, and U.K.’s Guardian. 

Connell was a skillful pilot with no history of flight incidents. The explanations that were circulated in the immediate aftermath of the crash cited “weather conditions,” although personnel at the airport information desk in Akron indicated the bad weather had passed two hours before the disaster. (The backup story was that Connell’s plane had run out of gas, one of those tricky little details that experienced, savvy pilots often fail to notice on their flight checklists.) If you look at footage of the post-crash inferno, you don’t need to be a fire marshall to know there was plenty of gasoline in that plane.

The most concise and clear treatment of the political, business, and legal issues preceding the tragedy can be seen on a YouTube video by Mark Crispin Miller. Miller, a professor of media culture and communication at New York University, is the author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 and Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too. Professor Miller maintains he has viewed Connell’s own contemporary notes pertaining to the case.

According to Miller and other sources, Connell’s downfall began when he approached Stephen Spoonamore, a highly skilled and very prominent computer and internet technician, for information about making emails disappear. Spoonamore, a conservative Republican, whose expertise was in detecting and reporting computer fraud, stopped the conversation cold. Despite their shared political and religious beliefs, he realized such a conversation would be illegal. Further, he did not believe in making end-runs around the Constitution for partisan purposes.

So Spoonamore was the whistleblower who first revealed Connell’s involvement in the voter fraud and email disposal activities of the Bush White House. He was also personally acquainted with many of the people involved in the White House cyber-security operations. He became the star witness in the Ohio computer fraud investigation.

Here is the nitty-gritty of the alleged voter fraud scheme. The only purpose of the computer architecture set up by Connell, according to Spoonamore, was to steal votes. This was done through a system of routing the immediate election returns from Ohio to a highly partisan Republican operating a basement computer facility in Tennessee. This scheme was known as “Man in the Middle,” and there was no reason for its existence except “to commit crime”–namely to analyze voting patterns as they were emerging in Ohio on election night, send them to the Chattanooga basement to shave off votes from the Democratic candidates, add the shaved votes to the Republican tallies, and then re-route the altered voting data back to the Secretary of State’s website in Ohio.

This same group of election returns sculptors were also the ones who reportedly helped Karl Rove with his potentially damning emails.

Professor Miller added this cautionary disclaimer to his findings: “I cannot assert with perfect confidence that this [crash] was no accident, but I will say that the circumstances are so suspicious and so convenient for Rove and the White House that I think we’re obliged to investigate this thing very, very thoroughly.”

This is not just some kook conspiracy story. Numerous respected news outlets, not just a gaggle of overly excited googlers, reported on the threats to Mike Connell and the puzzling mechanical problems that led him to cancel a couple of air trips. The email to Mukasey is available for viewing on the internet. The interview account by Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story is written cautiously, factually, responsibly, with no hyperbole or signs of sensationalism. Most of the relevant interviews on YouTube are devoid of the dramatic gloom music and scary deep voiced narrations you’ll find in so many goober videos and on websites that try to spook you into believing things “the GOVERNMENT doesn’t want YOU to KNOW!!!!!”

It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that the crash disaster was a plot initiated by Karl Rove, and that could be true. For decades he’s been up to his beefy neck in all varieties of political hijinks and dirty tricks, and he has been able to grease his way out of them. The threat to Mike Connell’s wife has distinct Rovian echoes of Valerie Plame’s CIA cover being blown to retaliate against her husband for burning the yellowcake, though that hasn’t been proven either. But previous accusations against Rove have always been about ruthless political tricks and character assassination, not homicide. That is a level of villainy even his detractors have not raised, because he has never seemed to stoop quite that low. But to save himself from a long prison term, who knows what depths he might probe?

There are other possibilities. Bush? Probably not. The Bushes have always appeared to let other people do their dirty work for them. It’s doubtful they’d want to know or participate in the specifics. And many of us doubt he has ever really been in the loop in decisions about sensitive matters. Cheney? Perhaps more likely, but it could be hard to prove, even if true. Certainly he would understand the principles of plausible deniability.

Yet the seriousness of this fatal incident and the allegations about Rove demand a serious, thorough, honest investigation. And not by some arm of the government controlled directly or indirectly by Bush-Cheney. If everyone is innocent here of anything but pilot error, then this episode needs to be put away so that no one but the ever-present crazies will give it another thought. If there actually was major foul play, it needs to be documented with the impartial thoroughness demanded by courts of law and used to fully prosecute any guilty parties.

But there remains this infuriating possibility. Even if Cheney or Rove or Bush or anyone in the White House ordered or allowed this to happen, what could ultimately be done about it? The FAA is under Bush’s Executive Branch control. And we could endure the scenario of an Inauguration eve pardon “for any and all acts that may have occurred….”