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"Myth" of Voter Fraud Focus of Senate Hearing; Iglesias Set to Testify
By Jason Leopold (about the author) Page 2 of 3 page(s)
An email, http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072607A.shtml dated September 30, 2004, and sent to a dozen or so staffers on the Bush-Cheney campaign and the RNC, under the subject line "voter reg fraud strategy conference call," describes how campaign staffers planned to challenge the veracity of votes in a handful of battleground states, such as Ohio, in the event of a Democratic victory.
Emails among Ohio Republican Party official Michael Magan, Coddy Johnson, then national field director of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, and Timothy Griffin, reveal the men were given documents that could be used as evidence to justify widespread voter challenges if the Bush campaign needed to contest the election results. Johnson referred to the documents as a "goldmine". In mid-2006 Griffin, a former RNC operative and close friend of Karl Rove, expressed an interest in becoming the US attorney in Arkansas. The DOJ fired Bud Cummins, the state’s US attorney at the time, to make room for Griffin who resigned in disgrace last year when his role in “vote caging” surfaced.
The documents Hearne and his counterparts obtained were lists of registered voters who did not return address confirmation forms to the Ohio Board of Elections. The Republican operatives compared this list with lists of voters who requested absentee ballots. In the opinion of one of the strategists, the fact that many names appeared on both lists was evidence of voter fraud. "A bad registration card can be an accident or fraud. A bad card AND an Absentee Ballot request is a clear case of fraud," former Bush-Cheney campaign staffer Robert Paduchik wrote in a 2004 email.
But Christopher McInerney, a RNC researcher, warned his colleagues at the time that if "other states...don't have flagged voter rolls, we run the risk of having GOP fingerprints."
In New Mexico, Iglesias said in an interview that Pat Rogers, a Republican attorney in Albuquerque, and Mickey Barnett, a Republican lobbyist, pressured him to bring charges of voter fraud.
Rogers worked for Hearne's ACVR group. Rogers is also the former chief counsel to the New Mexico Republican Party and had lost in litigation over a proposed voter ID law. He was tapped by Domenici to replace Iglesias as US Attorney for New Mexico when Iglesias was fired.
Rogers has not responded to emails seeking comment. But in prior email correspondence he has insisted that he did not play a role in Iglesias's firing and categorically denied that he pressured Iglesias to bring charges of voter fraud against Democrats.
Recently, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, which is investigating the US attorney firings with particular attention being paid to Iglesias's dismissal, interviewed Rumaldo Armijo, Iglesias's former executive assistant, to find out whether he was pressured by Rogers and Barnett to file criminal charges of voter fraud in the state in 2004. During his tenure in the US attorney's office, Armijo was in charge of voter issues and worked with Iglesias’s task force to probe the matter, Iglesias confirmed.
Armijo spoke to the Senate Ethics Committee last year about numerous telephone calls and emails dating back to 2005 he received from Rogers related to voter fraud, and Iglesias's alleged failure to investigate the matter while Iglesias was US attorney, Iglesias confirmed.
Last May, House Democrats released a transcript of an interview congressional investigators had with one of Gonzales's senior Justice Department staffers, Matthew Friedrich, in which Friedrich recounted that over breakfast in November 2006, Rogers and Barnett told him they were frustrated about Iglesias's refusal to pursue cases of voter fraud and that they had spoken to Karl Rove and Domenici about having Iglesias fired.
"I remember them repeating basically what they had said before in terms of unhappiness with Dave Iglesias and the fact that this case hadn't gone anyplace," Friedrich said, according to a copy of the interview transcript. "It was clear to me that they did not want him to be the US attorney. And they mentioned that they had essentially . . . they were sort of working towards that."
According to media reports, Rogers said he does not recall speaking to Rove about Iglesias.
Additionally, Barnett and Rogers met with Monica Goodling, the Justice Department's White House liaison, in June 2006 to complain that Iglesias was ignoring voter fraud. Goodling's meeting with Rogers and Barnett took place at the urging of a colleague. Rogers also drafted a lengthy letter that he sent to Domenici detailing what he claimed were Iglesias's prosecutorial failures, Iglesias said he had been told.
Allen Weh, the New Mexico Republican Party chairman, told McClatchy Newspapers in March that he urged Rove to use his influence to have Iglesias fired because Weh was unhappy with Iglesias's alleged refusal to bring criminal charges against Democrats in a voter fraud investigation.
Weh told McClatchy Newspapers that he followed up with Rove personally in late 2006 during a visit to the White House.
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