*** Special to The BRAD BLOG by Greg Palast
“The wheels have come off, the engine is on fire and no one is driving,” Captain David Iglesias told me yesterday. I’d asked the Naval Reserve officer, heading off to duty in Norfolk, why he didn’t want his old job back, United States Attorney for New Mexico.
The busted, burning, ghost-mobile he described is the Department of Justice, driven by Alberto Gonzales. Or is Karl Rove at the wheel? Or no one? Whomever, he didn’t want to jump back into Bush’s Justice Jalopy.
Today, Iglesias is in Washington to pull the junker off the road, meeting with the Office of Special Counsel where Obstruction of Justice may be swirling around in the old oil pan laying on the garage floor.
The ex-prosecutor and I, long, long ago, had both worked for the Attorney General of New Mexico, a state where the snakes have less venom than the politicians.
First, there’s Senator Pete Domenici, whose hiss is as smooth as his bite is deadly.
Domenici, softball interviewer Chris Matthews notes, is a nice guy. On TV. However, the Republican Senator’s call to Iglesias at his home, just before the 2006 midterm election, asking the prosecutor about filing charges against Democrats in the week before the vote, was downright rude. When the prosecutor replied in the negative, the Senator hung up.
And apparently, the Senator contacted one Monica Goodling who, scribbled on a notepad: “Iglesias – Domenici says he doesn’t move cases.” Oops. Goodling, a political stooge working for Gonzales, was listing the reasons for firing US attorneys. Now, rudeness was no longer the issue. Firing a prosecutor for failing to “move cases” — handcuff citizens at the request of a Senator — is Obstruction of Justice.
No wonder Monica took The Fifth.
Of course, the Rove dogsbodies at Justice couldn’t tell Congress they fired Iglesias because he wouldn’t jump at the Senator’s rattle. They reached for another complaint on Monica’s list: “absentee landlord.” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Paul McNulty used absenteeism as the official reason for dismissal. McNulty’s resigned.
He should have taken The Fifth….
The problem is that the US Attorney from New Mexico was missing for 40 days because he was on active duty. I guess the White House gang doesn’t go to the movies. Iglesias is a celebrity Navy lawyer, the role model for Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men.
“Our Mission Accomplished President attacked you for spending time in the US Naval Reserve?” I asked Iglesias…
“Appalling,” he said. And illegal. Firing a reserve officer for missing work for active duty violates the Uniform Services Employment Rights and Reemployment Act (USERRA).
Pressuring a prosecutor to bust Democrats and punishing a soldier for deploying are the little felonies, the warm-up crimes, in this caper.
The real crime is the one they are about to commit: The Theft of 2008.
Iglesias told me he was continually being pushed to bring “voter fraud” cases beginning in 2004. Unfortunately, Iglesias went along with the game, at least at the opening kick-off, holding a press conference just weeks before the Bush-Kerry race, announcing he was setting up a task force with the FBI to hunt down evil voters.
But there were none. “It was the old throwing pasta at the wall trick. Something’s got to stick. And it didn’t,” he said.
So Iglesias got the axe. “I didn’t help them out on their bogus voter fraud prosecutions.”
Notably, Iglesias has been signaling these cases were phony-baloney for two years. I got that word from his office in 2005 while reporting for BBC Television on what passes for elections in the USA. But the New Mexico and US press continued to hawk the Republican line of masses of illegal voters, especially illegal immigrants jamming the polling stations.
One thing the American media still has failed to do is to explain why the GOP wanted to bring these cases. In New Mexico, in Arizona, in Georgia and a dozen other states, Republicans were pushing laws requiring voters to have special ID. In 2004, at least a quarter million citizens lost their vote because they didn’t bring in the right ID. And which quarter million? Overwhelming, it was Black, Brown and “Blue” Americans.
Yet, despite this tidal wave of a quarter million “fraudulent” voters, not one was charged with a crime. Hmmm. Maybe they were innocent. If there’s no crime, there’s no need for a law to stop the crime. But Republicans don’t want to stop voter fraud — they want to stop voters. The US press won’t tell you that.
But Iglesias wouldn’t help. He did the PR stunt — but he wouldn’t handcuff the innocent. Was he fired for that? His termination was ordered by Tim Griffin, Karl Rove’s right-hand hitman.
Were Griffin and Rove punishing Iglesias for not bringing the fake cases? Iglesias said, “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.”
Figuring out Rove’s intent requires crawling inside his head. That’s scary and difficult — unless you have his office’s “missing” emails. I have 500 of them. How I got them is another story. The key thing is, as I was discussing with my fellow alum of the AG’s office, is to explain to a jury the perp’s mindset. And these emails show the mad fixation of Griffin and the Rove crew with eliminating voters of the wrong hue.
Most notable were the “caging” lists naming thousands of voters who lost their vote to GOP challenges, a large proportion of them soldiers sent overseas. Voting rights attorney, law professor Robert F., Kennedy Jr., reviewed the evidence we obtained and concluded, “They ought to be in jail for doing this” — Griffin and his boss Rove both — for violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But who would bust them, Bobby? Albert Gonzales?
Is Captain Iglesias just another serviceman “caged”?
And where is Griffin today? After Rove had the US Attorney for Arkansas fired, he replaced him with Griffin. The perpetrator became the prosecutor.
And that’s the real crime: removing those who won’t conspire with the GOP bigs to push the voter ID con — and planting their Griffins, expert in election manipulation — in place for the 2008 race.
This week, I contacted the office of Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy about the Griffin appointment to which they seemed oddly indifferent. His aide said, “Well, Griffin’s just an interim appointee.”
True, Griffin has promised to leave — right after the 2008 election.
Prosecutor-gate is not about Gonzales’ incompetence. It’s not about appointing “loyal Bushies.” It’s not even about firing A Few Good Men.
It’s about the 2008 election and changing the Department of Justice — the agency charged with protecting voters — into an army of Rove-bots…programmed to attack them.
===
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, ARMED MADHOUSE: From Baghdad to New Orleans — Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild, just out in a new edition. For more information, go to www.GregPalast.com
UPDATE FROM BRAD, 5/17/07 8:46pm PT: More evidence tonight that it’s all about the ’08 Elections, stupid…
“Rove-bots” … well said.
One of the Rove-bots is Wolfowitz. He said:
(Guardian, emphasis added). I have been saying for years, here on this blog, that they use the NSA material just like J. Edgar Hoover used to use it. For blackmail and that sort of “diplomacy”.
I am sure it helped in the US Attorney matters, and I am sure they are planning many political prosecutions and other uses of the NSA material in order to steal the ’08 election thru intimidation of various sorts.
They simply cannot win fair and square, so that leaves it up to Rovian tactics … which means prime time crime.
The funniest part in ALL of this, to me at least, is how Palast wound up with the emails.
These Regent gradutates just aren’t the brightest bulbs in the string, are they?
Biggest story going right now, with lots of facts and evidence.
And thats just one element of the whole election fraud scheme, this part has been done over and again thru the years, like the Republican KKK in Indiana and thruout the South in the ’20s was almost identical to this thing their doing now without the hoods (watch the “Hitler [History] Channel” this week, “History of the KKK”).
They have to make the elections appear close enough to run the (coincidental) electronic machine flip… so caging is one of the ways, so is poll flipping.
It seems they have more tricks up their sleeves than Houdini, doesn’t it ?
The testimony, under oath, by Department of
JusticeJust Us high ups is in accord with Bradblog posts:(AP Story, emphasis added). What did Gonzales, who worked with Rove at the
WhiteWhat House at that time, want with warrantless wiretap information?Some of it was financial. They were making a big deal out of it being necessary “to fight the enemy”.
Wolfowitz indicated that he “had enough on” the world bank people to do damage to them. In saying that, he has outed the whole corrupt spy program. Corrupt spying on political “enemies” for political purposes to make it available to all the Rove-bots.
Where did Wolfowits get the information “on them” if it wasn’t from spying before he came on over to the bank?
He was at the Pentagon, where the NSA gets its marching orders, and he had CIA access thru Rove.
They have been doing massive spying on domestic targets so they can use it politically. It is a desperate move to hang on to power or to ill fated war ideology.
The Valerie Plame Wilson matter made that utterly clear.
All that is missing now is 5 million Rovian emails. And those are missing due to a massive cover up, scrub down, and cleaning frenzy.
It really boils down to obstruction of justice.
“Wolfowitz indicated that he “had enough on” the world bank people to do damage to them. In saying that, he has outed the whole corrupt spy program. Corrupt spying on political “enemies” for political purposes to make it available to all the Rove-bots.”
Great, insightful comment, Dredd! Always “read between the lines” of what they’re actually on record as saying…
Where is this eventually going to go? Palast has “the emails”…the “hard” evidence, of “caging”. RFK is aware of it, it’s been all over non-ANBCBSNNX (has the Palast/emails been on ANBCBSNNX???). This should solidify blacks never voting Republican again, and not falling for any GOP “tricks” like, “We changed…we’re welcoming blacks”…
I read somewhere, there’s not ONE black congressman, is this true?
I sure wish Wolfie would start spewing all his secrets, then we could ask him how he had gotten his information.
Dan, did you mean “one Black Republican Congressman” ? there was JC Watts (Uncle Tom or Al Jolson)
He might be retired…isn’t he? I don’t feel like looking it up, I just read a comment somewhere, that there’s presently no black GOP congressmen. Google “Republican black congressmen”??? Probably get back from Google: “No Hits On That One, Bub!”
When Bill Kristol was so excited by the AG scandal I knew the Israeli lobby was after Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. I predicted (sorry to be correct) over a month ago that Paul McNulty would be one of the AG’s fall guys and that his resignation would “cast clouds” over the upcoming(very little news of this in the MSM) AIPAC/ROSEN/WEISSMAN ESPIONAGE TRIAL)
For the lawyers out there. How will McNulty’s resignation effect the upcoming AIPAC espionage trial?
The way I look at this is, that we got half a broken chance to do something about these fuckers. The CMSM ain’t going to help, the SENATE is non existant. The house can pass a resolving “CLEAN IT UP AND LEAD THE COUNTRY” but it will be nullified.
“at the Pentagon, where the NSA gets its marching orders, and he had CIA access thru Rove ”
This is the CRUST of the Biscuit. Internal destruction and broken oaths of office. To “quote” Michael Savage (sic) “The Enemy Within.” (I might have been brainwashed by him early on, but it don’t hurt to “steal back.”
Time to turn OFF the fucking spying powers, until it has public oversight, if can’t trust your citizens, then this whole discussion is over.
Yank the fucking SECURITY of these key people and CONFISCATE THIER SHIT!
It’s probably too late.
I am again thinking maybe it’s just time to get the fuck out of this country, which is being controlled by the most evil fuckers that ever sucked air.
I guarantee when the shit starts coming down, I will walk thousands of miles to escape this shit.
And the obligatory big FUCK YOU to the CMSM!
You fucking Bush FCC owned pieces of shit!
That Alberto Gonzolez needs to GO! Yet another ENEMY WITHIN!!!
He ain’t protecting the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, he’s a corrupt player. I don’t give a shit what anyone says. You’ll never get justice with that piece of DUNG in control.
And if you look around on the web you can already see the CYBER-DIS-INFORMATION-WAR.
Phil~! I’m thinking of tattooing your previous post on my forehead. Amen.
The best investigative reporter in the country gives an exclusive to the best blog. Can’t top that!
Finally, I would add this.
Big Dan #7 (RE my post #2)
The word is out that he is geting a “performance bonus” of $400,000 on June 1, and will resign June 30.
He was not bluffing when he said he had “enough on them” it would seem.