Bobby Kennedy may think that Griffin’s scheme to remove legal voters from the rolls was illegal, but Bush’s Justice Department was not likely to bust one of their own.
Nevertheless, Griffin wasn’t taking any chances. Neither was his boss, deputy chief of staff to the president and consigliere to the Bush reelection campaign, Karl Rove.
They feared there might be honest federal prosecutors. They could cause problems with The Plan to cage and challenge voters in 2004, in 2008, and beyond.
So, a directive came down from Main Justice in Washington to federal prosecutors nationwide: hunt for fraudulent voters. However, the lawmen were not told about an unwritten footnote to the directives: unsuccessful hunters would soon find themselves hunted.
I too was hunting for fraudulent voters—a good journalist should give evil the benefit of the doubt. So I went to New Mexico to bag myself a killer-rapist-illegal-alien-ID-thief voter.
But I was having a helluva time finding even one, despite three million having lost their vote to prevent this terrible crime.
But then, in October 2008, a state legislator in New Mexico, Justine Fox-Young, held up two pieces of paper in the capitol building showing, she said, twenty-eight cases of someone voting with someone else’s name. It wasn’t a crime wave, but a kind of gentle ripple. So I called her and told to her to fax me the evidence. She didn’t. I called again and asked the crime-buster politician, “Justine, you’ve uncovered felony criminals.”
“Oh, yes!”
Cool. So did she turn over these villains to the federal prosecutors?
Uh-huh.
So, did the prosecutor arrest them? Lock’m up?
“Not exactly.”
The answer was, not even remotely. I called the federal prosecutor, a rising star in the Republican Party, US Attorney David Iglesias. He found Ms. Fox-Young’s evidence just a load of bollocks, though he didn’t use those words, I’ll admit.
Iglesias hadn’t arrested one single person in the entire state for voter fraud, despite the fact that the GOP campaign to prevent “fraud” in the state had resulted in the rejection of twenty-eight thousand voters and ballots, almost all Democrats.
In other words, the guy in charge of enforcing the law had not and would not bust a single person for the crime that justified his party’s pogrom against Hispanic voters all across the Southwest.
I wasn’t the only one to note that Captain Iglesias (he had remained in the Naval Reserve as one of the Navy’s top adjutant generals) was not busting Bad Voters.
Around the same time, I discovered that Allen Weh, chairman of the state Republican Party, and Pat Rogers, the party’s lawyer, complained to the White House about Iglesias failing to cuff these Hispanic voters after sending him fifty names, likely from the caging lists.
In 2008, Iglesias was able to tell me he “ran all over the plateaus of New Mexico with FBI agents” tracking down these fraudulent voters and found nothing but good citizens.
That wouldn’t do for the party apparatchiks.
The Republican Chairman Weh, and his counsel, Pat Rogers, brought in an enforcer from the White House: Karl Rove.
In my line of business I hear a lot that could make you shiver, but what Captain Iglesias told me that day in 2008 was one of the most chilling things I’d ever heard from a US official.
The GOP honchos, state and federal, he said, wanted him to lock up voters no matter the evidence. They wanted him to indict innocent people to justify their vote-blocking laws.
Iglesias told me, “I didn’t help them with their bogus fraud prosecutions.”
Rove’s buddies leaned on Iglesias, but they picked the wrong guy. Captain Iglesias was one of the models for the Tom Cruise character, the crusading military defense lawyer, in the film A Few Good Men. Here’s a photo of the pretend Iglesias, though more than a few women believe the real one is handsomer.
The real Iglesias told the Rove-bots to stick their phony prosecution demands where the votes don’t shine.
So, President Bush fired Iglesias. And he wasn’t the only one. Seven other US attorneys, good Republicans but ethical ones, were removed by the White House and replaced by pliant Rove-bots.
At first, the US press didn’t notice. Iglesias was officially fired for “absenteeism”—because he was placed by the president on active duty and sent to Bosnia to address war crimes.
The press asked no questions, but one of my fans did when he watched my London broadcast on caging for BBC. Congressman John Conyers has always kept abreast of our investigations for BBC television. Conyers called me, then called hearings. He had plenty of evidence that the firings were illegal.
But the problem, Conyers told me, was that his fellow congressmen wouldn’t go after the real issue, the motive for the firings: suppressing the vote of minority citizens. Conyers, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, had the problem that while he was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, the majority of them were Republicans or other members of the Congressional “White” Caucus.
The committee would concentrate only on the firings as “political,” and a repeat-a-press-release US media covered it that way, never getting to the real motive. And most important, the Bush White House stonewalled Conyers’ subpoena for cage-meister Griffin’s boss, Karl Rove.
Conyers forced Griffin’s cronies at the Justice Department to cough up their files on Iglesias’s firing which included this smoking pistol:
Iglesias–Underachiever in very important district. That’s the failure to bust innocent voters.
Absentee landlord. That’s his forty-day assignment for the Navy. Firing reserve officers on active duty is a crime, but hell, that’s nothing compared to the next felony on the list.
Domenici says he doesn’t move cases. This is Republican Senator Pete Domenici who, said Iglesias, woke him up at home to tell Iglesias to speed up the indictment of a Democrat prior to the election.
Oops. He’s telling a United States attorney to indict citizens, and attacking his failure to “move” when the Senator tells him too.
I asked the prosecutor if Rove had him removed as punishment for not bringing the fake cases. “If his intent was, ‘look what happened with Iglesias,’ if that was his intent, he’s in big trouble. That is obstruction of justice, one classic example.”
Iglesias was screwing them bad. The captain and eight other prosecutors were getting all precious about bringing bogus cases. That was undermining the GOP’s attempt to obtain new voter ID laws. The failure to find illegal voters put the lie to their campaign to prove the nation’s top voter registration organization, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), had registered fraudulent voters. Getting ACORN was Republican operative Pat Rogers’s obsession, which he made into a national cause of the GOP and other politicians in the White Caucus as lawyer for the “nonpartisan” American Center for Voting Rights. It should have been called, American Center Against Voting. Everything the group proposed would cut the number of citizens voting by millions.
I wanted to ask Rogers why he brought in Rove and why he had Captain Iglesias gunned down. But Rogers didn’t want to answer my formal request for BBC TV. But I figured he couldn’t pass up the free champagne they would pour at a GOP victory party. At the soiree to which I obtained press credentials under another name, I caught Rogers in half-sip with an unseen microphone that captured his personal reviews of my reporting skills. “He’s an asshole,” he told a crony before greeting me warmly as the cameras rolled.
“Iglesias was not capable in his job.” Which was, apparently, hunting ACORN.
“ACORN hired a collection of people who fraudulently registered persons who are not eligible to vote. ACORN is working for the Democratic Party,” said Rogers. (He wore a flag lapel pin the party handed to all the champagne sippers. They gave me one of the Republican freebie flags. I still have it in the wrapper. Take a look: Made in China.)
Had Rogers unmasked a conspiracy between ACORN and the Democratic Party—covered up from them by US Attorney Iglesias, a Republican? Wow!
“Conspiracy,” said Rogers mysteriously, “is a loose word.” Rogers is fond of loose words. He’d recently held a press conference waving a list of a half-dozen fraudulent voters registered by ACORN. With his full house of illegal voters, Rogers made a huge splash in the papers. Then Iglesias made a total ass out of Rogers, by not busting even one.
What the hell, even a jerk reporter like me will give Rogers a chance. I checked out all six of these ne’er-do-wells, these fugitives from justice. I began at a diner in Cerritos where I tracked Melissa Tais, notorious for allowing another voter with another signature to use her name so she and her confederate could vote twice.
Actually, what she’d done was fill out one registration form at an ACORN table, but never received the receipt. So, following the law’s requirements, she reregistered, this time signing while holding the form in her hand so the signature was a little shaky—resulting in two admittedly different-looking signatures.
So, did she vote twice? No. County officials hauled her into a hearing and it shook her up so much she wouldn’t vote at all. And that’s what they wanted.
But Iglesias wouldn’t play and ACORN continued to register Hispanic and low-income voters until 2009, when Andrew Breitbart (who has since returned to the bosom of Satan) blew up some cockamamie sting which had nothing to do with voting—and put ACORN out of the registration business. (ACORN’s one-time lawyer, Barack Obama, averted his gaze as the media jackals savaged the poor folks’ group, then paid for his pusillanimity in 2010 when Congress flipped color from Blue to Red.)
The US attorney firings occurred just in time for the 2008 election. Iglesias wasn’t alone, of course. Tom Heffelfinger, Republican US attorney for Minnesota, was on the hit list for defending Native American voters from an attack by the GOP’s Minnesota secretary of state. Iglesias called his buddy in Arkansas who was taken down for similar pangs of conscience, but agreed to step aside without a fight so his friend, President Bush, could make his own choice.
And Bush’s choice was . . . Tim Griffin.
Now, instead of being prosecuted for crimes, Tim became the prosecutor. At Karl Rove’s behest, Tim Griffin was appointed US attorney for Arkansas.