1 Boring Old Man

Report Implicates White House
E-Mails Hint at Involvement in Prosecutor Firings, Officials Say

In 18 months of searching, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine and Office of Professional Responsibility chief H. Marshall Jarrett have uncovered new e-mail messages hinting at heightened involvement of White House lawyers and political aides in the firings of nine federal prosecutors two years ago. But they could not probe much deeper because key officials declined to be interviewed and a critical timeline drafted by the White House was so heavily redacted that it was "virtually worthless as an investigative tool," the authorities said. "We were unable to fully develop the facts regarding the removal of David Iglesias and several other U.S. Attorneys because of the refusal by certain key witnesses to be interviewed by us, as well as the White House’s decision not to provide internal documents to us," the investigators concluded in their report. The standoff is a central reason that Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey on Monday named a veteran public-corruption prosecutor, Nora R. Dannehy, to continue the investigation, directing her to give him a preliminary report on the status of the case in 60 days…

Investigators urged Dannehy to focus on the dismissal of Iglesias in New Mexico. He was the subject of repeated complaints by Republican lawmakers to White House and Justice Department officials in 2005 and 2006 over not bringing voter-fraud and corruption charges against Democrats. Their report said the internal probe at Justice could not reach Miers and Rove, "both of whom appear to have significant first-hand knowledge regarding Iglesias’s dismissal"…

The report depicts a steady drumbeat of pressure leading up to the 2006 elections. Republican former state senator Mickey D. Barnett e-mailed Rove in October to complain about the pace of a federal bribery probe that Iglesias’s office was conducting against a Democratic rival. Barnett wrote that he had already complained to Justice Department White House liaison Monica M. Goodling and Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.). That same month, President Bush and Rove both spoke to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about rampant voter fraud in three cities, one in New Mexico, Gonzales told investigators.

In November, Domenici’s chief of staff, Steven Bell, e-mailed Rove seething about voting issues in New Mexico and expressing "worry" about Iglesias. Rove advised Bell to have Domenici reach out to the attorney general. Around the same time, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty received a phone call from Miers, who passed along complaints about Iglesias that she had heard from Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.) At a White House breakfast in mid-November, Wilson approached Rove to tell him that the U.S. attorney was a "waste of breath," according to her interview with investigators. She said Rove told her: "That decision has already been made. He’s gone." Less than three hours later, a Justice Department official forwarded a firing list to the White House Counsel’s Office on which Iglesias’s name appeared, giving rise to questions about how Rove learned about its contents in advance, and whether the department ultimately fired Iglesias for improper political reasons…

It was in the U.S. Attorney firings where the infiltration of the DoJ by the Administration took yet another turn – appearing to be a political arm for the Republican Party. One of the apparent motives for these firings was that the lawyers had not pursued the Administration’s voter fraud agenda. The Administration claimed that there was rampant voter fraud by the Democratic Party, registering unqualified [minority] voters. The Republican Party had a not so savory campaign going to push this agenda [see Thor Hearne], and part of the plan was to prosecute voter fraud cases widely – presumably to intimidate minority voters. David Iglesias had resisted participating, along with others.

The ensuing scandal essentially emptied the DoJ by resignations while under investigation, but there has never been full disclosure or prosecution. The central question centers on whether the White House was directly involved, and, in fact, directed these firings. As has usually been the case with this Administration, the presumptive evidence is there, but the key players have been kept off the stand by the secretive Bush Administration, evoking their mythical powers of Executive Privilege.

Before 2006, Karl Rove had been able to control what happened in the national elections using dirty tricks, political wrangling involving the religious right, and some voter intimidation techniques. As 2006 approached, it became apparent that the Republicans were going to lose both the House and Senate mid-term elections. The mass firing of U.S. Attorneys in the month following the mid-terms seems to have been a desparate attempt to regain control over the elections.