Failure To Cooperate

Karl Rove shows up most nights these days as a commentator on Fox News and offers up political insights in columns for the Wall Street Journal and NEWSWEEK. But when Justice Department investigators tried to ask him about his role in the mass firings of U.S. attorneys, the former White House political chief would say nothing, refusing to be questioned at all.

According to a blistering new report by the Justice Department inspector general released Monday, Rove was one of a number of former White House officials (including ex-White House counsel and Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers) who declined to cooperate with its investigation into the U.S. attorney firings-even though the current White House counsel's office encouraged them to do so.

The result of that stance led Attorney General Michael Mukasey today to take the extraordinary step of appointing a new special prosecutor (with full grand jury subpoena power) to investigate the U.S. attorney firings. He did so, he said in a statement, because "important questions" about the mass purge of prosecutors remain "unanswered" and "further investigation" is needed to determine whether federal crimes were committed in the decision to fire some of the U.S. attorneys or in providing false testimony to Congress about why the dismissals had taken place.

The massive (and long-awaited) 392-page report excoriates former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other onetime senior Justice Department officials for presiding over a "fundamentally flawed" and "unprecedented" process to summarily remove nine U.S. attorneys-and then mislead the Congress about why they had done so. And it lays the basis for Mukasey's action by concluding there was "significant evidence that political partisan considerations" played a major role in some of the firings-most notably in the dismissal of David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney in New Mexico.

The inspector general uncovered new evidence showing how New Mexico Republican Party officials repeatedly tried to pressure Iglesias to launch vote fraud investigations that could boost the party's prospects in federal and state elections. "This is the single best wedge issue ever in NM," one state GOP lawyer wrote in an email to Iglesias that was copied to the New Mexico GOP chairman and a host of party officials in the state.

But when Iglesias concluded there was not enough evidence to bring such cases, the state GOP chairman and others were infuriated and brought their complaints to Washington-including to Rove and his political deputies in the White House. The state GOP's complaints prompted Rove (and President Bush himself) to raise the issue with then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Those complaints-coupled with the annoyance of GOP Sen. Pete Domenici about Iglesias' failure to bring an election eve indictment against a leading state Democrat in Oct. 2006-prompted Gonzales' chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, to suddenly put Iglesias on the list of prosecutors to be fired in November, 2006, the report concludes.

"Because of complaints by political officials who had a political interest in the outcome of these voter fraud and public corruption cases, the Department removed Iglesias, an individual who had previously been viewed as a strong U.S. attorney," the report states. (The report concludes that if Iglesias was fired as part of an attempt to influence the decisions on particular cases, it could constitute "obstruction of justice" or a conspiracy to defraud the public of his "honest services.")

The report dismisses later testimony to Congress by Gonzales and other top Justice Department officials that Iglesias was fired because he was an "under-performer" and an "absentee landlord" as "disingenuous after-the-fact rationalizations that had nothing to do with the real reason for Iglesias' removal."