New Mexico GOP Attorney's 'Voter Fraud' Claims Unravels

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White was upset with Iglesias’s inaction against Democratic-back voter registration drives and other criminal issues. He took his complaints about Iglesias’s lack of aggressiveness to Washington.

In a little-noticed article in the Albuquerque Journal at the height of the U.S. Attorney scandal, White, who was New Mexico chairman of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, confirmed that in spring 2006, he took his “complaints directly to the Department of Justice where he met with Attorney General [Alberto] Gonzales' chief of staff, Kyle Sampson and others," the Albuquerque Journal reported on April 15, 2007.

White is now campaigning for the congressional seat being vacated by Rogers' former client, Rep. Heather Wilson.

Rogers and White, the Bernalillo County Sheriff, are longtime friends. Rogers worked closely with White in 2004 to challenge the veracity of voter registrations in the county.

They also have something else in common: They were both implicated in Iglesias’s firing. New Mexico’s Republican Senator, Pete Domenici, had recommended Rogers to replace Iglesias as U.S. Attorney when Iglesias was fired. The DOJ report said Domenici played a major role in Iglesias’s ouster.

According to a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, "Patrick Rogers, the former general counsel to the New Mexico state Republican Party and a party activist, continued [before the 2006 election] to complain about voter fraud issues in New Mexico.

"In a March 2006 e-mail forwarded to [Craig] Donsanto in the [Justice Department's] Public Integrity Section, Rogers complained about voter fraud in New Mexico and added, ‘I have calls in, to the USA [U.S. Attorney] and his main assistant, but they were not much help during the ACORN fraudulent registration debacle last election.”

Donsanto was the author of the updated May 2007 Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses manual that softened the warnings about investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases before an election.

In June 2006, Rogers sent Iglesias's Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Rumaldo Armijo an e-mail:

“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!”

John Wertheim was then chairman of the New Mexico Democratic Party.

Iglesias said he now believes GOP claims of voter fraud have been “unique to the Bush administration.”

“If voter fraud is such a problem nationally, why have there only been a handful of prosecutions in the past few years?” he said.

Rogers told The Public Record the Justice Department report on the U.S. Attorney firings “is erroneous is so many ways it is not possible to address them all."

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http://www.pubrecord.org

Jason Leopold is editor of the online investigative news magazine The Public Record, http://www.pubrecord.org, and the author of the National Bestseller, "News Junkie," a memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com for a preview. He is also a two-time (more...)

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