Failure To Cooperate

"I've always believed that Rove was front and center in this mess," Iglesias told Newsweek in a telephone interview today. But he said he was not surprised that the former White House chief political aide (along with Miers and two other former White House officials) rebuffed the attempts by Justice inspector general investigators to question them about their actions in the U.S. attorney firings. "They have the right against self-incrimination like anybody else," said Iglesias.

Rove and his attorney, Robert Luskin, did not respond to repeated request for comment. Rove and Miers had previously refused to answer questions from Congress about the firings, citing White House claims of executive privilege. But as inspector general Glenn Fine noted in the report, the claim of executive privilege did not apply in this instance, since the Justice Department is part of the executive branch itself-one key reason, the report says, that the White House counsel's office "encouraged" current and former employees to cooperate with the probe. (The White House refused, however, to turn over its own internal emails about the U.S. attorney firings as well as a full copy of a special internal memo, prepared for White House counsel Fred Fielding last year about the firings, citing what it called "confidentiality interests of a very high order.")

Iglesias, a Bush appointee who served as the model for the Tom Cruise character in the movie "A Few Good Men," said Monday that the new evidence in the report shows how New Mexico Republican officials and White House aides like Rove fundamentally misunderstood his duties as U.S. attorney. The report documents how the state GOP chairman wrote one email to Iglesias proposing that he become part of "the [Republican] party's voter fraud working group." (The email was copied to other state GOP officials as well as the chiefs of staff of GOP Rep. Heather Wilson and Sen. Domenici in Washington.) But Iglesias ignored the request. "I was a law enforcement official," he said. "It wasn't appropriate for me to join any partisan team."

The report does criticize Iglesias, saying he engaged in "misconduct" by failing to report his election-eve phone call from Domenici to senior Justice officials in Washington as he was required to do under Justice guidelines. And it dismisses some of the charges of congressional Democrats about the U.S. attorney firings last year-concluding, for example, that the dismissal of Carol Lamm, the U.S. attorney in San Diego, had nothing to do with her aggressive corruption prosecution of a GOP congressman. Instead, it was related to her failure to more vigorously bring immigration and gun cases, as department officials wanted.

The report did find there may have been political factors in some of the other U.S. attorney firings in Missouri, Washington, and Arkansas. But the investigators could not get to the bottom of the matter-and in particular determine the role White House officials played-without the cooperation of key witnesses like Rove, the report found. The newly appointed special prosecutor, a career official named Nora Dannehy, who is now serving as acting U.S. attorney in Connecticut, will have more leverage. Unlike the inspector general, she will be empowered to subpoena the reluctant witnesses-and have a federal judge hold them in contempt if they fail to comply. But Iglesias, for one, isn't holding his breath. "I don't think we're going to get the answers while this administration is in office," he said.

© 2008