Justice Dept official resigns over investigation connected with Abramoff
by Marisa Taylor and David Whitney
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - A senior Justice Department official has resigned after coming under scrutiny in the Department’s expanding investigation of convicted super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to a Justice Department official with knowledge of the case.
Making the situation more awkward for the embattled Department, the official, Robert E. Coughlin II, was deputy chief of staff for the criminal division, which is overseeing the Department’s probe of Abramoff.
He stepped down effective April 6 as investigators in Coughlin’s own division ratcheted up their investigation of lobbyist Kevin Ring, Coughlin’s long-time friend and a key associate of Abramoff.
When contacted at his home in Washington, Coughlin said he resigned voluntarily because he was relocating to Texas. “I was not asked to resign,” he said in an interview with McClatchy Newspapers. “It’s important to me that it's made clear that I left voluntarily.”
He said he couldn’t comment on the Abramoff investigation, nor on whether he has a job lined up in Texas. He referred all other questions to friend Michael Horowitz.
Horowitz, a criminal defense attorney and former Justice Department official and public corruption prosecutor, did not respond to questions, including about whether he is representing Coughlin. Coughlin also would not say whether he had hired a lawyer.
McClatchy’s source at the Justice Department asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the case.
Coughlin appears to be the first Justice Department official to come under scrutiny in the wide-ranging probe that has implicated a veteran congressman, a deputy Cabinet secretary, a White House aide and eight others. Abramoff has pleaded guilty to three counts in the corruption probe and could face up to 11 years in prison.
It was unclear whether Coughlin is a target in the investigation, which would mean he is under intense scrutiny, or whether he is a subject in the investigation, which would mean investigators have not yet determined whether he committed any wrongdoing.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to respond to any questions about the Abramoff investigation because it is still ongoing. Spokesman Bryan Sierra, however, confirmed Coughlin had resigned. He also said Coughlin had recused himself from the Abramoff investigation.
The disclosure, nevertheless, was another blow to a Justice Department already struggling to recover from the controversy over the firing of 8 U.S. Attorneys. Democrats and a number of Republicans have criticized Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for his handling of the ousters, which critics charge were politically motivated.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Showing posts with label Justice Department. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Justice Department. Show all posts
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Monday, April 23, 2007
It Has To Be Bush and Rove
U.S. ATTORNEYS
Questions remain about who engineered the firings of U.S. attorneys
By Margaret Talev and Ron HutchesonMcClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The Senate Judiciary Committee's grilling Thursday of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was rich in human drama but failed to resolve Congress' central questions.
After thousands of pages of documents and hours of testimony from Justice Department officials, it remains unknown who in the Bush administration conceived the plan to fire eight U.S. attorneys and why.
Gonzales' testimony Thursday left senators convinced he wasn't behind the plan or its execution and in fact knew far less than a department head should have about the details. Former and current members of Gonzales' staff who've been interviewed by congressional investigators also have said their roles were limited or nonexistent.
Absent another explanation, the signs point to the White House and, at least in some degree, to the president's political adviser, Karl Rove.
David Iglesias, the former New Mexico U.S. attorney and one of the eight fired last year, said investigating the White House's role is the logical next step - one that would follow existing clues about Rove's involvement.
"If I were Congress, I would say, `If the attorney general doesn't have answers, then who would?' There's enough evidence to indicate that Karl Rove was involved up to his eyeballs."
Iglesias said another clue that the White House may have been the driving force is the relative lack of Justice Department documentation for the firings in the 6,000 pages of documents turned over to Congress.
"If you want to justify getting rid of someone, you should have at least some paper trail," Iglesias said. "There's been a remarkable absence of that. I'm wondering if the paper trail is at the White House."
Even if Gonzales decides to step down - he says he won't despite widespread Republican disappointment with his performance - Democrats say they'll continue their probe into whether politics inappropriately influenced the firings.
"The arrow points more and more to the White House," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. "The one thing I can assure you of: This is not over, far from it."
That's why some Republicans think Gonzales should stay on the job.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told Gonzales in a telephone call Friday that the worst was probably over for him and that stepping down wouldn't necessarily help the president.
In a statement he released later in the day, Cornyn said, "Democrats see an opportunity to score a lot of political points, so I don't necessarily believe that the attorney general's resignation would quell the Democrats' desire to continue with a partisan fishing expedition."
Charlie Black, a Republican consultant with ties to the White House, said of Democrats: "What they're after in this so-called U.S. attorneys investigation is a fishing expedition to try to see if Karl, or somebody else, fired people for political purposes. It would not slow them down if the attorney general left."
Black added: "They might decide, `This worked great. Let's go after some other Cabinet official.'"
Some Republicans, however, want to know more about Rove's role.
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., immediate past chairman of the judiciary panel, said after Gonzales' testimony, "Those questions are going to be outstanding to the White House people.
"I believe we will have an opportunity to question them," Specter predicted, but he added,
"What the quality of the answers will be remains to be seen."
Others, however, suggest that they'd prefer that Gonzales resign so that the president and his inner circle would be spared from more investigation.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., told Gonzales he should resign, but added, "I disavow aggressively any implication that there was a political nature in this. I know that's the politics of the blood sport that we're playing. I don't think it had anything to do with it."
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., told Gonzales "you should have said no" to whoever wanted to fire the attorneys. He said Friday that Gonzales should "take the weekend" to re-evaluate. "If he and the president decide that he cannot be an effective leader moving forward, then he should resign," Sessions said. But on neither occasion did Sessions go after the White House's role.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., all but told Gonzales he should go during the hearing, but he seemed to dismiss any idea of a cover-up.
"I do believe that your associates have prosecuted both Democrats and Republicans," Graham told him. "I don't believe that you're involved in a conspiracy to fire somebody because they wouldn't prosecute a particular enemy of a politician or a friend of a politician."
Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., chairman of the House Republican Conference, said Gonzales' tenure is hurting the president's policy agenda, and he's worried that the Democrats are just looking for any reason to get Rove under oath.
The investigation shows that complaints about the fired U.S. attorneys came over a two-year period from grassroots Republicans who were upset with them for various reasons. Most of the complaints were rooted in partisan politics.
Some concerns were ideological, such as whether a prosecutor was doing enough in going after illegal immigration or pornography. Others reacted to some U.S. attorneys' decisions not to charge Democrats with corruption prior to elections or not to prosecute Democrats for voter fraud when prosecutors said the evidence simply wasn't sufficient.
Rove has acknowledged passing along complaints to the Justice Department, and a former Rove aide was chosen to replace one of the fired U.S. attorneys. E-mail traffic between Gonzales' chief of staff, who's since resigned, and a Rove deputy, reveals another connection.
Another e-mail released as part of the investigation shows a Rove deputy kept Rove abreast of turns in the controversy via Rove's Republican Party e-mail account rather than Rove's White House e-mail address.
The White House isn't authorizing Rove to testify publicly or to testify privately but with a transcript.
And when Congress told the Republican National Committee to turn over all pertinent e-mails, the administration instructed the RNC to give the e-mails to the White House, not to Congress.
That standoff appears headed to court.
McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Marisa Taylor contributed to this report.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Questions remain about who engineered the firings of U.S. attorneys
By Margaret Talev and Ron HutchesonMcClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The Senate Judiciary Committee's grilling Thursday of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was rich in human drama but failed to resolve Congress' central questions.
After thousands of pages of documents and hours of testimony from Justice Department officials, it remains unknown who in the Bush administration conceived the plan to fire eight U.S. attorneys and why.
Gonzales' testimony Thursday left senators convinced he wasn't behind the plan or its execution and in fact knew far less than a department head should have about the details. Former and current members of Gonzales' staff who've been interviewed by congressional investigators also have said their roles were limited or nonexistent.
Absent another explanation, the signs point to the White House and, at least in some degree, to the president's political adviser, Karl Rove.
David Iglesias, the former New Mexico U.S. attorney and one of the eight fired last year, said investigating the White House's role is the logical next step - one that would follow existing clues about Rove's involvement.
"If I were Congress, I would say, `If the attorney general doesn't have answers, then who would?' There's enough evidence to indicate that Karl Rove was involved up to his eyeballs."
Iglesias said another clue that the White House may have been the driving force is the relative lack of Justice Department documentation for the firings in the 6,000 pages of documents turned over to Congress.
"If you want to justify getting rid of someone, you should have at least some paper trail," Iglesias said. "There's been a remarkable absence of that. I'm wondering if the paper trail is at the White House."
Even if Gonzales decides to step down - he says he won't despite widespread Republican disappointment with his performance - Democrats say they'll continue their probe into whether politics inappropriately influenced the firings.
"The arrow points more and more to the White House," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. "The one thing I can assure you of: This is not over, far from it."
That's why some Republicans think Gonzales should stay on the job.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told Gonzales in a telephone call Friday that the worst was probably over for him and that stepping down wouldn't necessarily help the president.
In a statement he released later in the day, Cornyn said, "Democrats see an opportunity to score a lot of political points, so I don't necessarily believe that the attorney general's resignation would quell the Democrats' desire to continue with a partisan fishing expedition."
Charlie Black, a Republican consultant with ties to the White House, said of Democrats: "What they're after in this so-called U.S. attorneys investigation is a fishing expedition to try to see if Karl, or somebody else, fired people for political purposes. It would not slow them down if the attorney general left."
Black added: "They might decide, `This worked great. Let's go after some other Cabinet official.'"
Some Republicans, however, want to know more about Rove's role.
Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., immediate past chairman of the judiciary panel, said after Gonzales' testimony, "Those questions are going to be outstanding to the White House people.
"I believe we will have an opportunity to question them," Specter predicted, but he added,
"What the quality of the answers will be remains to be seen."
Others, however, suggest that they'd prefer that Gonzales resign so that the president and his inner circle would be spared from more investigation.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., told Gonzales he should resign, but added, "I disavow aggressively any implication that there was a political nature in this. I know that's the politics of the blood sport that we're playing. I don't think it had anything to do with it."
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., told Gonzales "you should have said no" to whoever wanted to fire the attorneys. He said Friday that Gonzales should "take the weekend" to re-evaluate. "If he and the president decide that he cannot be an effective leader moving forward, then he should resign," Sessions said. But on neither occasion did Sessions go after the White House's role.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., all but told Gonzales he should go during the hearing, but he seemed to dismiss any idea of a cover-up.
"I do believe that your associates have prosecuted both Democrats and Republicans," Graham told him. "I don't believe that you're involved in a conspiracy to fire somebody because they wouldn't prosecute a particular enemy of a politician or a friend of a politician."
Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., chairman of the House Republican Conference, said Gonzales' tenure is hurting the president's policy agenda, and he's worried that the Democrats are just looking for any reason to get Rove under oath.
The investigation shows that complaints about the fired U.S. attorneys came over a two-year period from grassroots Republicans who were upset with them for various reasons. Most of the complaints were rooted in partisan politics.
Some concerns were ideological, such as whether a prosecutor was doing enough in going after illegal immigration or pornography. Others reacted to some U.S. attorneys' decisions not to charge Democrats with corruption prior to elections or not to prosecute Democrats for voter fraud when prosecutors said the evidence simply wasn't sufficient.
Rove has acknowledged passing along complaints to the Justice Department, and a former Rove aide was chosen to replace one of the fired U.S. attorneys. E-mail traffic between Gonzales' chief of staff, who's since resigned, and a Rove deputy, reveals another connection.
Another e-mail released as part of the investigation shows a Rove deputy kept Rove abreast of turns in the controversy via Rove's Republican Party e-mail account rather than Rove's White House e-mail address.
The White House isn't authorizing Rove to testify publicly or to testify privately but with a transcript.
And when Congress told the Republican National Committee to turn over all pertinent e-mails, the administration instructed the RNC to give the e-mails to the White House, not to Congress.
That standoff appears headed to court.
McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Marisa Taylor contributed to this report.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Justice Dept. Lawyers Write Letter to Leahy
US Attorneys Not Alone…
By: Nicole Belle on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 10:07 AM - PDT
…of feeling intense (and inappropriate) politicization of their Department of Justice jobs.
The Gavel:
Today the House and Senate Judiciary Committees received a letter from anonymous Justice Department employees concerning widespread politicization at the Justice Department. Read the full letter here (pdf). [..]
The letter then goes on to describe confusion and consternation within the divisions, and ultimately a meeting that was demanded by staff, in which Michael Ellston, Chief of Staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, "was offensive to the point of insulting" in addressing the concerns. (Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty has also testified regarding the firings of the US Attorneys.) Ellston attributed the removals from the interviewee lists to "spelling errors" and other such technical problems.
The letter continues from there:
When division personnel staff later compared the remaining interviewees with the candidates struck form the list, one common denominator appeared repeatedly: most of those struck form the list had interned for a Hill Democrat, clerked for a Democratic judge, worked for a "liberal" cause, or otherwise appeared to have "liberal" leanings. Summa cum laude graduates of both Yale and Harvard were rejected for interviews.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
By: Nicole Belle on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 10:07 AM - PDT
…of feeling intense (and inappropriate) politicization of their Department of Justice jobs.
The Gavel:
Today the House and Senate Judiciary Committees received a letter from anonymous Justice Department employees concerning widespread politicization at the Justice Department. Read the full letter here (pdf). [..]
The letter then goes on to describe confusion and consternation within the divisions, and ultimately a meeting that was demanded by staff, in which Michael Ellston, Chief of Staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, "was offensive to the point of insulting" in addressing the concerns. (Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty has also testified regarding the firings of the US Attorneys.) Ellston attributed the removals from the interviewee lists to "spelling errors" and other such technical problems.
The letter continues from there:
When division personnel staff later compared the remaining interviewees with the candidates struck form the list, one common denominator appeared repeatedly: most of those struck form the list had interned for a Hill Democrat, clerked for a Democratic judge, worked for a "liberal" cause, or otherwise appeared to have "liberal" leanings. Summa cum laude graduates of both Yale and Harvard were rejected for interviews.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Sunday, April 22, 2007
More on GOP Electioneering
While political junkies and media everywhere have been fixated on "I don't Recall" Gonzales and his testimony last week, a late Friday (4-20-07) A.P. story, Court Rejects Blocking Ariz. Voter Law, reports interesting developments in fired U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton's Arizona District...and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Friday's ruling adds to ePluribus Media's earlier rumblings about the Politicization of the Civil Rights Division and the two engines of subverting its original agenda and mandate.
The ruling is one more in a growing body of circumstantial evidence that supports what 35-year veteran and once head of the Voting Rights Section Joe Rich alleges is a well-orchestrated partisan program to disenfranchise minority voters, who, as a general rule, tend to vote Democratic.
And indeed, A.P. reporter Paul Davenport tells us that, with the recent ruling, Arizona can now proceed with refusing voting rights to anyone who doesn't produce government-issued picture ID or two pieces of other non-photo identification as specified by the new law -- the very legislation recently struck down in Georgia.
According to Davenport:
Critics said that the law would disenfranchise voters, particularly minorities and the elderly, and that requiring voters to acquire and produce identification would be burdensome in time, money and effort.
A three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based appeals court said the law doesn't appear at first blush to severely burden the right to vote, violate a federal law on voter registration, place a disproportionate burden on naturalized citizens or require what would be an unconstitutional poll tax.
But how do those voter ID laws actually play out in reality?
Here's what happened to Roxy's elderly mother in the 2004 presidential election:
My mother ... bless her heart ... turns 98 years young today. To the best of my knowledge she has never missed voting in an election. I grew up with the mantra -- "if you don't vote, don't bitch." She has lived in the same district for the last 82 years, and in the 2004 election she ran afoul of the Montana's new voter ID law.
Mom has never had a driver's license -- or any state issued photo ID -- and when she got to the polls they asked her for ID. She didn't have ID, but determined to vote, she made the person that drove her to the polls take her home to get a piece of mail. (The elections folks would accept her social security card, but would not accept her medical insurance ID or her baptismal
certificate).
There are only 753 (maybe less now) people in the little town where she lives. The poll workers all knew her, her name was on the voting register ... yet, the "two men in suits" insisted she provide ID to vote.
Additionally, in Rich's Los Angeles Times opinion editorial, Bush's long history of tilting Justice, he writes that the Bush Administration's Department of Justice:
has notably shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights. From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities.
It has been strongly suggested that two of the U.S. Attorneys who were fired (Mckay and Inglesias), were so in part because they refused to use their office to further the Bush/Rove/Gonzales policy of using the faux issue of voter fraud to politicize Justice investigations prior to national elections -- and we are not talking about the long lines, the too few machines, the lock down on voter recounts because of terrorist threats in Ohio. Instead,
we are talking about a systematic, planned process of shutting out the poor and middleclass.
One place to start looking seems to be who in the Civil Rights Division are pushing for the Voter ID Laws...in Georgia, Alabama, Indiana, Missouri.
We should become familar with names such as Robert Popper, the new Special Counsel in the Voting Section, acting/interim U.S. Attorney Brad Schlozman, and Hans von Spakovsky, of whom Digby says:
Wanderindiana provided a link to Real Nightmare.org for a map of the states where these Voter ID laws are in effect or winding their way through the courts.
Many in the blogs saw a pattern of the fired U.S. Attorneys being predominantly in the western border states. This pattern led many to speculate that enforcement of immigration or perhaps control of the 8th and 9th Circuit of Appeals might be contributing reasons for the firings.
Perhaps the refusal to participate in faux Voter Fraud litigation should be added to the list.
....and the truth shall set us free.
Friday's ruling adds to ePluribus Media's earlier rumblings about the Politicization of the Civil Rights Division and the two engines of subverting its original agenda and mandate.
The ruling is one more in a growing body of circumstantial evidence that supports what 35-year veteran and once head of the Voting Rights Section Joe Rich alleges is a well-orchestrated partisan program to disenfranchise minority voters, who, as a general rule, tend to vote Democratic.
And indeed, A.P. reporter Paul Davenport tells us that, with the recent ruling, Arizona can now proceed with refusing voting rights to anyone who doesn't produce government-issued picture ID or two pieces of other non-photo identification as specified by the new law -- the very legislation recently struck down in Georgia.
According to Davenport:
Critics said that the law would disenfranchise voters, particularly minorities and the elderly, and that requiring voters to acquire and produce identification would be burdensome in time, money and effort.
A three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based appeals court said the law doesn't appear at first blush to severely burden the right to vote, violate a federal law on voter registration, place a disproportionate burden on naturalized citizens or require what would be an unconstitutional poll tax.
But how do those voter ID laws actually play out in reality?
Here's what happened to Roxy's elderly mother in the 2004 presidential election:
My mother ... bless her heart ... turns 98 years young today. To the best of my knowledge she has never missed voting in an election. I grew up with the mantra -- "if you don't vote, don't bitch." She has lived in the same district for the last 82 years, and in the 2004 election she ran afoul of the Montana's new voter ID law.
Mom has never had a driver's license -- or any state issued photo ID -- and when she got to the polls they asked her for ID. She didn't have ID, but determined to vote, she made the person that drove her to the polls take her home to get a piece of mail. (The elections folks would accept her social security card, but would not accept her medical insurance ID or her baptismal
certificate).
There are only 753 (maybe less now) people in the little town where she lives. The poll workers all knew her, her name was on the voting register ... yet, the "two men in suits" insisted she provide ID to vote.
Additionally, in Rich's Los Angeles Times opinion editorial, Bush's long history of tilting Justice, he writes that the Bush Administration's Department of Justice:
has notably shirked its legal responsibility to protect voting rights. From 2001 to 2006, no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African American or Native American voters. U.S. attorneys were told instead to give priority to voter fraud cases, which, when coupled with the strong support for voter ID laws, indicated an intent to depress voter turnout in minority and poor communities.
It has been strongly suggested that two of the U.S. Attorneys who were fired (Mckay and Inglesias), were so in part because they refused to use their office to further the Bush/Rove/Gonzales policy of using the faux issue of voter fraud to politicize Justice investigations prior to national elections -- and we are not talking about the long lines, the too few machines, the lock down on voter recounts because of terrorist threats in Ohio. Instead,
we are talking about a systematic, planned process of shutting out the poor and middleclass.
One place to start looking seems to be who in the Civil Rights Division are pushing for the Voter ID Laws...in Georgia, Alabama, Indiana, Missouri.
We should become familar with names such as Robert Popper, the new Special Counsel in the Voting Section, acting/interim U.S. Attorney Brad Schlozman, and Hans von Spakovsky, of whom Digby says:
He was hired by the Bush Justice Department's civil right's division shortly after his stint down in Florida during the recount. Anyway, Von Spakovsky is not just another Atlanta lawyer. He had for years been involved with a GOP front group called the "Voter Integrity Project" (VIP) which was run by none other than Helen Blackwell, wife of notorious conservative operative Morton Blackwell.
(Many of you will remember him as the guy who handed out the "purple heart" bandages at the 2004 GOP convention but he's actually much better known for years of running the dirty tricks school "The Leadership Institute" and is even credited with coining the name "Moral Majority."
Let's just say he's been a playah in GOP circles for a long time --- and the VIP is one of his projects.)Wanderindiana provided a link to Real Nightmare.org for a map of the states where these Voter ID laws are in effect or winding their way through the courts.
Many in the blogs saw a pattern of the fired U.S. Attorneys being predominantly in the western border states. This pattern led many to speculate that enforcement of immigration or perhaps control of the 8th and 9th Circuit of Appeals might be contributing reasons for the firings.
Perhaps the refusal to participate in faux Voter Fraud litigation should be added to the list.
....and the truth shall set us free.
A 6 Year Project of Election Theft
This kind of voter suppression nd intimidation should be crime, if it isn't already.
We have to wonder how many Democrats lost because of these practices, even in 2006, where they seem not to have worked, with Democratic majorities being in the House and Senate.
Every election from 2000 on needs to be investigated for voter suppression and mainipulation by e-voting machines!
The legal penalty for such actions should be no lese than 20 years
WASHINGTON - For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.
The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.
Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.
Questions about the administration's campaign against alleged voter fraud have helped fuel the political tempest over the firings last year of eight U.S. attorneys, several of whom were ousted in part because they failed to bring voter fraud cases important to Republican politicians. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales could shed more light on the reasons for those firings when he appears Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Civil rights advocates charge that the administration's policies were intended to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority voters who tend to support Democrats, and by filing state and federal lawsuits, civil rights groups have won court rulings blocking some of its actions.
Justice Department spokesperson Cynthia Magnuson called any allegation that the department has rolled back minority voting rights "fundamentally flawed."
She said the department has "a completely robust record when it comes to enforcing federal voting rights laws," citing its support last year for reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the filing of at least 20 suits to ensure that language services are available to non-English speaking voters.
The administration, however, has repeatedly invoked allegations of widespread voter fraud to justify tougher voter ID measures and other steps to restrict access to the ballot, even though research suggests that voter fraud is rare.
Since President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, a former Republican senator from Missouri, launched a "Ballot Access and Voter Integrity Initiative" in 2001, Justice Department political appointees have exhorted U.S. attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases, and the department's Civil Rights Division has sought to roll back policies to protect minority voting rights.
On virtually every significant decision affecting election balloting since 2001, the division's Voting Rights Section has come down on the side of Republicans, notably in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Washington and other states where recent elections have been decided by narrow margins.
Joseph Rich, who left his job as chief of the section in 2005, said these events formed an unmistakable pattern.
"As more information becomes available about the administration's priority on combating alleged, but not well substantiated, voter fraud, the more apparent it is that its actions concerning voter ID laws are part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens," he said.
Former department lawyers, public records and other documents show that since Bush took office, political appointees in the Civil Rights Division have:
-Approved Georgia and Arizona laws that tightened voter ID requirements. A federal judge tossed out the Georgia law as an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of poor voters, and a federal appeals court signaled its objections to the Arizona law on similar grounds last fall, but that litigation was delayed by the U.S. Supreme Court until after the election.
-Issued advisory opinions that overstated a 2002 federal election law by asserting that it required states to disqualify new voting registrants if their identification didn't match that in computer databases, prompting at least three states to reject tens of thousands of applicants mistakenly.
-Done little to enforce a provision of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act that requires state public assistance agencies to register voters. The inaction has contributed to a 50 percent decline in annual registrations at those agencies, to 1 million from 2 million.
-Sued at least six states on grounds that they had too many people on their voter rolls. Some eligible voters were removed in the resulting purges.
The administration's presence was felt last year in at least one state legislative battle over voter identification.
In Missouri, where Republican Sen. Jim Talent was fighting to hang onto his seat and hold the U.S. Senate for the GOP, a Republican-backed photo ID requirement cleared the state House of Representatives by one vote in May 2006 after an intense lobbying effort in which backers alleged voter fraud in heavily Democratic St. Louis and Kansas City.
"The White House was heavily involved" in the effort to win passage, state Rep. Bryan Stevenson, the Republican floor leader, said in a telephone interview. Stevenson said he wasn't privy to the details of the White House efforts.
In late 2001, Ashcroft also hired three Republican political operatives to work in a secretive new unit in the division's Voting Rights Section. Rich said the unit, headed by unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate Mark Metcalf of Kentucky, bird-dogged the progress of the administration's Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and reviewed voting legislation in the states.
One member of the three-person political unit, former Georgia elections official and Republican activist Hans von Spakovsky, eventually took de facto control of the Voting Rights Section and used his position to advocate tougher voter ID laws, said former department lawyers who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals.
Those former employees said that Spakovsky helped state officials interpret the Help America Vote Act's confusing new minimum voter identification requirements. He also weighed in when the Voting Rights Act required department approval for any new ID law in 13 states with histories of racial discrimination.
In November 2004, Arizona residents passed Proposition 200, the toughest state voter ID law to date, which requires applicants to provide proof of citizenship and voters to produce a photo ID on Election Day. The Voting Rights Act state requires states to show that such laws wouldn't impede minorities from voting and gives the Justice Department 60 days to approve or oppose them.
Career voting rights specialists in the Justice Department soon discovered that more than 2,000 elderly Indians in Arizona lacked birth certificates, and they sought their superiors' approval to request more information from the state about other potential impacts on voters' rights. Spakovsky and Sheldon Bradshaw, the division's top deputy and a close friend of top Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson, a former Bush White House lawyer, denied the request, said one of the former department attorneys.
Later in 2005, career lawyers wrote a memo recommending that the department oppose a new Georgia law requiring voters to present a $20 photo ID. They argued that the requirement would discriminate against poor blacks, but that was quickly rejected.
Toby Moore, a political geographer who was one of five career civil rights specialists who reviewed the law, said the only dissenter to the recommendation was a newly hired lawyer, Joshua Rogers, a member of the National Republican Lawyers Association, a partisan organization interested in election issues.
Moore said that John Tanner, who'd just been appointed the new section chief, "doctored the memo ... reversing many of our findings," and used the occasion to change procedures so that he alone could make future recommendations.
A Georgia state judge, acting on a suit by civil rights groups, struck down the law as unconstitutional.
Moore, now the project manager for American University's Commission on Election Reform, said he believes that administration officials felt the Voting Rights Section was populated by "recalcitrant, embedded, liberal Democrats ... and they were determined to plant their DNA, change the institution and bring it to bear on behalf of Republican interests."
Spakovsky, who declined to be interviewed, also played a role in an expansive interpretation of the new federal election law.
The Help America Vote Act directed states to create central, computerized voter registration lists, to make a "reasonable effort" to remove ineligible names and to match new applicants' driver's licenses and Social Security numbers to those in state databases.
A failure to match wasn't grounds for rejection: Tiny variations such as the inclusion of a middle name or misplaced figure could prevent a match. But when confused state officials asked the Justice Department about the requirement, Spakovsky offered a harsh reading of the law.
In a letter on Sept. 8, 2003, he advised Judith Arnold, Maryland's counsel for election laws, that the application "must be denied" if an applicant's data failed to match that in driver's license and Social Security databases. He wrote that "the prudent course" would be to let those voters cast provisional ballots that would count only if their registration information were verified later.
His guidance was posted on the Voting Rights Section's Web site.
Some states, including California, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington, began to reject applicants whose credentials didn't match.
The rejections prompted a lawsuit and protests by civil rights groups, which halted the practice.
The practice was "a barrier to voting," said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, whose suit in Washington state led to a court injunction.
Catherine Blinn, Washington state's assistant elections director, said in a sworn statement last year that her state was merely following guidance from the Justice Department and cited Spakovsky's letter to Maryland.
Just before the 2006 election, the California Secretary of State's Office rejected more than 20,000 registration applications, including 43 percent of Los Angeles County's new applicants. Those rejections were reversed before Election Day amid a public clamor.
Former Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, a moderate Republican, said in a phone interview that Justice Department officials reviewed his office's regulations and okayed the rejections, but gave no hint that they exceeded federal law.
The Bush administration also has shifted enforcement priorities under the National Voter Registration Act, known as the "Motor Voter" law because it provides for registration at state vehicle licensing and public assistance agencies.
In the last six years, the number of voters registered at state government agencies that provide services to the poor and disabled has been cut in half, to 1 million.
Instead of forcing lax agencies to increase registrations, the Justice Department sued at least six states and sent threatening enforcement letters to others requiring them to scour their election rolls for potentially ineligible voters.
Deputy Director Michael Slater of Project Vote, a national voter registration group, called this "selective enforcement. ... They've focused on purging of voters from registration rolls at the expense of enforcing provisions that encourage registration."
He said that Kentucky eliminated 4,000 people from its list of voters, but "did it poorly, and took off people who lived there and tried to vote."
One of the Justice Department suits was filed against Missouri's Democratic Secretary of State Robin Carnahan. Last week, U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey in Jefferson City, the capital, threw out the suit, noting that the motor voter law was intended to increase voter participation and eliminate fraud.
The judge wrote that the Justice Department had offered no evidence that anyone had been denied his right to vote as a result of deficiencies in voter rolls, and "nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred."
For more information on the Georgia litigation, as well as other major election law litigation: http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/common-cause.php
....and the truth shall set us free.
We have to wonder how many Democrats lost because of these practices, even in 2006, where they seem not to have worked, with Democratic majorities being in the House and Senate.
Every election from 2000 on needs to be investigated for voter suppression and mainipulation by e-voting machines!
The legal penalty for such actions should be no lese than 20 years
WASHINGTON - For six years, the Bush administration, aided by Justice Department political appointees, has pursued an aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates.
The administration intensified its efforts last year as President Bush's popularity and Republican support eroded heading into a midterm battle for control of Congress, which the Democrats won.
Facing nationwide voter registration drives by Democratic-leaning groups, the administration alleged widespread election fraud and endorsed proposals for tougher state and federal voter identification laws. Presidential political adviser Karl Rove alluded to the strategy in April 2006 when he railed about voter fraud in a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association.
Questions about the administration's campaign against alleged voter fraud have helped fuel the political tempest over the firings last year of eight U.S. attorneys, several of whom were ousted in part because they failed to bring voter fraud cases important to Republican politicians. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales could shed more light on the reasons for those firings when he appears Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Civil rights advocates charge that the administration's policies were intended to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority voters who tend to support Democrats, and by filing state and federal lawsuits, civil rights groups have won court rulings blocking some of its actions.
Justice Department spokesperson Cynthia Magnuson called any allegation that the department has rolled back minority voting rights "fundamentally flawed."
She said the department has "a completely robust record when it comes to enforcing federal voting rights laws," citing its support last year for reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the filing of at least 20 suits to ensure that language services are available to non-English speaking voters.
The administration, however, has repeatedly invoked allegations of widespread voter fraud to justify tougher voter ID measures and other steps to restrict access to the ballot, even though research suggests that voter fraud is rare.
Since President Bush's first attorney general, John Ashcroft, a former Republican senator from Missouri, launched a "Ballot Access and Voter Integrity Initiative" in 2001, Justice Department political appointees have exhorted U.S. attorneys to prosecute voter fraud cases, and the department's Civil Rights Division has sought to roll back policies to protect minority voting rights.
On virtually every significant decision affecting election balloting since 2001, the division's Voting Rights Section has come down on the side of Republicans, notably in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Washington and other states where recent elections have been decided by narrow margins.
Joseph Rich, who left his job as chief of the section in 2005, said these events formed an unmistakable pattern.
"As more information becomes available about the administration's priority on combating alleged, but not well substantiated, voter fraud, the more apparent it is that its actions concerning voter ID laws are part of a partisan strategy to suppress the votes of poor and minority citizens," he said.
Former department lawyers, public records and other documents show that since Bush took office, political appointees in the Civil Rights Division have:
-Approved Georgia and Arizona laws that tightened voter ID requirements. A federal judge tossed out the Georgia law as an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of poor voters, and a federal appeals court signaled its objections to the Arizona law on similar grounds last fall, but that litigation was delayed by the U.S. Supreme Court until after the election.
-Issued advisory opinions that overstated a 2002 federal election law by asserting that it required states to disqualify new voting registrants if their identification didn't match that in computer databases, prompting at least three states to reject tens of thousands of applicants mistakenly.
-Done little to enforce a provision of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act that requires state public assistance agencies to register voters. The inaction has contributed to a 50 percent decline in annual registrations at those agencies, to 1 million from 2 million.
-Sued at least six states on grounds that they had too many people on their voter rolls. Some eligible voters were removed in the resulting purges.
The administration's presence was felt last year in at least one state legislative battle over voter identification.
In Missouri, where Republican Sen. Jim Talent was fighting to hang onto his seat and hold the U.S. Senate for the GOP, a Republican-backed photo ID requirement cleared the state House of Representatives by one vote in May 2006 after an intense lobbying effort in which backers alleged voter fraud in heavily Democratic St. Louis and Kansas City.
"The White House was heavily involved" in the effort to win passage, state Rep. Bryan Stevenson, the Republican floor leader, said in a telephone interview. Stevenson said he wasn't privy to the details of the White House efforts.
In late 2001, Ashcroft also hired three Republican political operatives to work in a secretive new unit in the division's Voting Rights Section. Rich said the unit, headed by unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate Mark Metcalf of Kentucky, bird-dogged the progress of the administration's Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and reviewed voting legislation in the states.
One member of the three-person political unit, former Georgia elections official and Republican activist Hans von Spakovsky, eventually took de facto control of the Voting Rights Section and used his position to advocate tougher voter ID laws, said former department lawyers who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals.
Those former employees said that Spakovsky helped state officials interpret the Help America Vote Act's confusing new minimum voter identification requirements. He also weighed in when the Voting Rights Act required department approval for any new ID law in 13 states with histories of racial discrimination.
In November 2004, Arizona residents passed Proposition 200, the toughest state voter ID law to date, which requires applicants to provide proof of citizenship and voters to produce a photo ID on Election Day. The Voting Rights Act state requires states to show that such laws wouldn't impede minorities from voting and gives the Justice Department 60 days to approve or oppose them.
Career voting rights specialists in the Justice Department soon discovered that more than 2,000 elderly Indians in Arizona lacked birth certificates, and they sought their superiors' approval to request more information from the state about other potential impacts on voters' rights. Spakovsky and Sheldon Bradshaw, the division's top deputy and a close friend of top Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson, a former Bush White House lawyer, denied the request, said one of the former department attorneys.
Later in 2005, career lawyers wrote a memo recommending that the department oppose a new Georgia law requiring voters to present a $20 photo ID. They argued that the requirement would discriminate against poor blacks, but that was quickly rejected.
Toby Moore, a political geographer who was one of five career civil rights specialists who reviewed the law, said the only dissenter to the recommendation was a newly hired lawyer, Joshua Rogers, a member of the National Republican Lawyers Association, a partisan organization interested in election issues.
Moore said that John Tanner, who'd just been appointed the new section chief, "doctored the memo ... reversing many of our findings," and used the occasion to change procedures so that he alone could make future recommendations.
A Georgia state judge, acting on a suit by civil rights groups, struck down the law as unconstitutional.
Moore, now the project manager for American University's Commission on Election Reform, said he believes that administration officials felt the Voting Rights Section was populated by "recalcitrant, embedded, liberal Democrats ... and they were determined to plant their DNA, change the institution and bring it to bear on behalf of Republican interests."
Spakovsky, who declined to be interviewed, also played a role in an expansive interpretation of the new federal election law.
The Help America Vote Act directed states to create central, computerized voter registration lists, to make a "reasonable effort" to remove ineligible names and to match new applicants' driver's licenses and Social Security numbers to those in state databases.
A failure to match wasn't grounds for rejection: Tiny variations such as the inclusion of a middle name or misplaced figure could prevent a match. But when confused state officials asked the Justice Department about the requirement, Spakovsky offered a harsh reading of the law.
In a letter on Sept. 8, 2003, he advised Judith Arnold, Maryland's counsel for election laws, that the application "must be denied" if an applicant's data failed to match that in driver's license and Social Security databases. He wrote that "the prudent course" would be to let those voters cast provisional ballots that would count only if their registration information were verified later.
His guidance was posted on the Voting Rights Section's Web site.
Some states, including California, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington, began to reject applicants whose credentials didn't match.
The rejections prompted a lawsuit and protests by civil rights groups, which halted the practice.
The practice was "a barrier to voting," said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, whose suit in Washington state led to a court injunction.
Catherine Blinn, Washington state's assistant elections director, said in a sworn statement last year that her state was merely following guidance from the Justice Department and cited Spakovsky's letter to Maryland.
Just before the 2006 election, the California Secretary of State's Office rejected more than 20,000 registration applications, including 43 percent of Los Angeles County's new applicants. Those rejections were reversed before Election Day amid a public clamor.
Former Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, a moderate Republican, said in a phone interview that Justice Department officials reviewed his office's regulations and okayed the rejections, but gave no hint that they exceeded federal law.
The Bush administration also has shifted enforcement priorities under the National Voter Registration Act, known as the "Motor Voter" law because it provides for registration at state vehicle licensing and public assistance agencies.
In the last six years, the number of voters registered at state government agencies that provide services to the poor and disabled has been cut in half, to 1 million.
Instead of forcing lax agencies to increase registrations, the Justice Department sued at least six states and sent threatening enforcement letters to others requiring them to scour their election rolls for potentially ineligible voters.
Deputy Director Michael Slater of Project Vote, a national voter registration group, called this "selective enforcement. ... They've focused on purging of voters from registration rolls at the expense of enforcing provisions that encourage registration."
He said that Kentucky eliminated 4,000 people from its list of voters, but "did it poorly, and took off people who lived there and tried to vote."
One of the Justice Department suits was filed against Missouri's Democratic Secretary of State Robin Carnahan. Last week, U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey in Jefferson City, the capital, threw out the suit, noting that the motor voter law was intended to increase voter participation and eliminate fraud.
The judge wrote that the Justice Department had offered no evidence that anyone had been denied his right to vote as a result of deficiencies in voter rolls, and "nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred."
For more information on the Georgia litigation, as well as other major election law litigation: http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/common-cause.php
....and the truth shall set us free.
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