Not Ranked
Complaints Begin in 2005
Steve Bell, Domenici’s chief of staff, "began complaining about Iglesias to the White House sometime in 2005."
Bell lodged his complaints with Scott Jennings, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Political Affairs. Jennings told the IG and OPR investigators that "that shortly after joining the White House in early 2005, he received criticism of Iglesias’s erformance as U.S. Attorney from Bell."
"Jennings said Bell told him on a periodic basis that he was unhappy with Iglesias’s response to complaints about voter fraud, among other issues, and that the White House should replace him. Jennings said he passed that information along to his immediate superiors at the time, [White House Director of Political Affairs Sara] Taylor and [Tim] Griffin."
Taylor reported directly to Rove. Griffin was a former Republican National Committee opposition researcher and close friend of Karl Rove.
Bud Cummins, the former U.S. Attorney for Little Rock, Arkansas, was fired and Griffin was given his job. Griffin resigned from his post as interim U.S. Attorney last year when details of his role in vote suppression during the 2004 election was reported.
Monday’s report by the Justice Department’s IG and OPR said, “After Cummins was instructed to resign and Griffin was announced as his replacement, senior Department leaders made a series of conflicting and misleading statements about Cummins’s removal.”
Jennings told IG and OPR investigators that "sometime in 2006 Bell told him that Senator Domenici was going to call the White House Chief of Staff, Josh Bolten, about Iglesias.
"Jennings notified Taylor and Rove so that Bolten could be given a heads-up. We do not know whether this call was made, and if so what was discussed," the report says.
The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten last year to testify about the role the White House played in the decision to fire nine U.S. attorneys in late 2006. Additionally, the committee sought documents from Bolten and Miers related to the attorney purge.
Bolten and Miers were instructed by President George W. Bush to ignore the subpoenas and advised not to appear before the committee. Bush claimed Bolten and Miers were immune to congressional subpoenas and any information they may have related to the firings was protected by executive privilege. The House voted to hold Bolten and Miers in contempt of Congress. It was the first time in 25 years a full chamber of Congress voted on contempt of Congress citation.
Additionally, New Mexico Republican party chairman Allen Weh also complained to Jennings about Iglesias's refusal to pursue voter fraud cases.
"Weh said he complained about Iglesias to Scott Jennings in the White House sometime in 2005, and told Jennings that Iglesias should be replaced," the report says. "E-mail records we obtained from the White House confirm that Weh wrote to Jennings about Iglesias on August 9, 2005. His message to Jennings, which was copied to Karl Rove, Sara Taylor, Tim Griffin, and Steve Bell, stated:
We discussed the need to replace the US Atty in NM several months ago. The brief on Voter Fraud at the RNC meeting last week reminded me of how important this post is to this issue, and prompted this follow up. As you are aware the incumbent, David Iglesias, has failed miserably in his duty to prosecute voter fraud. To be perfectly candid, he was ‘missing in action’ during the last election, just as he was in the 2002 election cycle. I am advised his term expires, or is renewed, in October. It is respectfully requested that strong consideration be given to replacing him at this point . . . . If we can get a new US Atty that takes voter fraud seriously, combined with these other initiatives we’ll make some real progress in cleaning up a state notorious for crooked elections.
Just a few months earlier, Iglesias had reached out to Weh after hearing from a friend that the New Mexico Republican Party was unhappy with his handling of voter fraud cases.
"Iglesias said he wanted to get the message out to his fellow Republicans that he would prosecute “provable” voter fraud cases but would not bring a case unless it could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt," according to the report. "In a further attempt to defuse the situation, Iglesias called state Republican Party Chairman Weh, and the two met briefly for coffee near Weh’s home on May 6, 2005. Iglesias said he tried to explain to Weh that he wanted to prosecute provable voter fraud cases but could not go forward without sufficient evidence."
Weh told IG/OPR investigators that "Iglesias began the meeting by asking if he was “in trouble” with the Republican Party, and that he tried to blame the lack of prosecutions on the FBI’s failure to commit resources. Weh also said he told Iglesias that Iglesias needed to do something about voter fraud and that he should have already done something about it."
"Weh said that although his meeting with Iglesias was cordial, he remained unconvinced by Iglesias’s explanation," the report says. "Weh told us that he also thought Iglesias was unqualified for his position as U.S. Attorney, and Weh said he had concluded by then that Iglesias had failed to adequately investigate and prosecute voter fraud crimes. Weh added that his opinion of Iglesias was widely shared by New Mexico Republicans, and that he made his views known to many people."
As the 2006 elections approached, "Patrick Rogers, the former general counsel to the New Mexico state Republican Party and a party activist, continued to complain about voter fraud issues in New Mexico," according to the report. "In a March 2006 e-mail forwarded to Donsanto in the [DOJ's] Public Integrity Section, Rogers complained about voter fraud in New Mexico and added, “I have calls in, to the
USA and his main assistant, but they were not much help during the ACORN fraudulent registration debacle last election.”
In June 2006, Rogers sent Iglesias's Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Rumaldo Armijo an email:
The voter fraud wars continue. Any indictment of the Acorn woman would be appreciated. . . . The ACLU/Wortheim [sic] democrats will turn to the camera and suggest fraud is not an issue, because the USA would have done something by now. Carpe Diem!
"Carpe Diem" was a reference to the Chairman of the New Mexico Democratic Party at the time, John Wertheim.
"In June 2006, [GOP activist] Mickey Barnett said he asked...Jennings to set up a meeting for Barnett and Rogers at the Department of Justice to discuss Iglesias’s performance," the report says. "According to Barnett, he had complained to Jennings about Iglesias approximately 5 to 10 times by that point."
In more than a dozen email exchanges with me last year, Rogers denied playing a role in Iglesias's ouster.
On Oct. 2, 2006, Rove received an email from Mickey Barnett, an attorney who worked on Bush-Cheney’s reelection campaign. Barnett complained about the slow pace of the results of a task force Iglesias set up to investigate allegations of voter fraud. The email to Rove had not been disclosed prior to the publication of the DOJ’s report.
“We still await the results of the task force Iglesias convened about this time two years ago on the clear Acorn fraudulent voter registrations,” Barnett wrote Rove. “We were told it would look to [sic] "political" to indict anyone that close to the election. Then we never heard anything else.”
On Nov. 7, 2006, the day of the midterm elections, Bell emailed Rove about problems with ballots at a precinct in New Mexico and said “we worry about the [U.S. Attorney] here.”
Rove responded to Bell's Nov. 7, 2006 email by saying that Domenici should “call the Attorney General about this.”
According to the report, Iglesias's name was placed on a termination list around this time.
“It appears that Sampson put Iglesias on the remova list sometime after October 17 [2006] based largely on complaints about Iglesias’s handling of certain voter fraud and public corruption investigations in New Mexico,” according to the report. “Sampson said he knew that New Mexico Republican Senator Pete Domenici had called Attorney General Gonzales on three separate occasions in 2005 and 2006 to register complaints about Iglesias’s performance.”
"The White House would not provide us any internal documents and e-mails relating to the removals of Iglesias or the other U.S. Attorneys,” according to the report. “Our investigation was also hindered by the refusal of Senator Domenici and his Chief of Staff to agree to an interview by us. In addition, we were not able to interview [former DOJ White House liaison] Monica Goodling, who also declined to cooperate with our investigation. "As a result, important gaps remain in the facts regarding Iglesias’s removal as U.S. Attorney."
Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed Nora Dannehy, a federal prosecutor from Connecticut, to continue the investigation. DOJ IG Glen Fine and OPR's H. Marshall Jarrett, the principal authors of the report, said they were unable to fully investigate the firings of the nine U.S. attorneys "because of the refusal by several former key White House officials, including Harriet Miers and Karl Rove, to cooperate with our investigation.”
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Jason Leopold launched a new online investigative news magazine, The Public Record.
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