A Vindication for Iglesias?

The former federal prosecutor at the center of the controversy over the 2006 U.S. attorney firings said today that he feels fully vindicated by newly disclosed e-mails from the Bush White House showing that Karl Rove and his deputies were actively involved in arranging his dismissal from the Justice Department. "This confirms my worst nightmares," David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney in New Mexico, said in an interview with NEWSWEEK. "There were improper and potentially illegal—as in criminally illegal—reasons for my removal."

His comments came shortly after the House Judiciary Committee released hundreds of pages of interview transcripts of Bush White House officials and internal e-mails that were obtained by the panel earlier this year and kept confidential until today. The material suggests, at a minimum, an often aggressive effort by Rove's office for more than a year and a half to have Iglesias removed as the chief federal prosecutor in New Mexico following a barrage of complaints from Republican Party officials and members of Congress that he was not doing enough to prosecute voter-fraud cases and bring indictments that would hurt Democrats and boost the GOP's prospects in the key swing state.

Iglesias said today that he was "surprised" last month when Rove insisted in a rare joint interview to reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post that he was merely a "conduit" of complaints about Iglesias, rather than a driving force behind the decision to fire the prosecutor. "This doesn't sound like he was merely a conduit," Iglesias said about the newly released e-mails and testimony. "This sounds like he had a very active role."

Rove, in a statement emailed to reporters Tuesday night, said the newly released documents "show politics played no role in the Bush Administration's removal of U.S. Attorneys, that I never sought to influence the conduct of any prosecution, and that I played no role in deciding which U.S. attorneys were retained and which replaced." Rep. Lamar Smith, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, also dismissed the significance of the new material. "Despite all evidence to the contrary, House Democrats continue to falsely accuse former Bush administration official Karl Rove of wrongdoing in the dismissal of several U.S. Attorneys," said Smith in a statement. "But the interviews reveal no evidence of wrongdoing in the firings."

Whether the new material is enough to help a special Justice Department prosecutor bring any criminal cases is far from clear. For the past year the prosecutor, Nora Dannehy, has been investigating whether any Bush administration officials engaged in obstruction of justice in the decision to fire Iglesias and other U.S. attorneys. But there are some passages that raise fresh questions about the involvement of Rove's office. "I would really like to move forward with getting rid of NM USATTY," Rove's deputy, Scott Jennings, wrote in an e-mail on June 28, 2005, to one of his colleagues, Tim Griffin, complaining about Iglesias's refusal to bring vote-fraud cases that had been pushed by New Mexico Republicans.

In perhaps the most significant passage in the new material, former White House counsel Harriet Miers—questioned by the judiciary committee for the first time in June—described getting a phone call from a "very upset" Rove telling her that Iglesias was "a serious problem and he wanted something done about it."