This Sacramento Bee oped by Marie Cocco, “The real U.S. attorneys scandal,” begins: “It is time to stop referring to the ‘fired U.S attorneys scandal’ by that misnomer, and call it what it is: a White House-coordinated effort to use the vast powers of the Justice Department to swing elections to Republicans.” The column echoes Marty Lederman’s recent post on Balkinization, “The U.S. Attorney Scandal, in a Nutshell (Upshot — It’s Actually A ‘Voter Fraud’ Scandal).”
Meanwhile, this McClatchy story claims even more U.S. attorneys were involved in the “voter fraud” issue. Some snippets: “The disclosure of the extensive firing list brings to nine the number of battleground election states where the Bush administration set out to replace some of the nation’s top prosecutors. In at least seven states, it now appears, U.S. attorneys were fired or considered for firing as Republicans in those states urged investigations or prosecutions of alleged Democratic voter fraud. Maxwell Wood, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia, and John L. Brownlee, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, remain in office. But their brief, last-minute appearances on a Nov. 1, 2006, target list have caught the interest of congressional investigators looking into whether politics improperly prompted the firings of the U.S. attorneys.” And ” One of the targeted prosecutors, Tallahassee’s U.S. attorney, Greg Miller, said he didn’t know why he would have appeared on the list in February 2005, and then be off it by November 2006. Miller said he was never pressured by Washington to prosecute voter fraud cases. Ion Sancho, the Leon County, Fla., election supervisor, said in an interview Thursday that Miller’s staff called his office soon after the November 2006 elections requesting a database of voter rolls. ‘They told us, ‘We want to look for voter fraud,’ he said. ‘They didn’t give me any specific reason.'”
Meanwhile, a former registration gatherer for ACORN in Missouri has pleaded guilty to voter registration fraud.
Former U.S. attorney in Seattle John McKay spoke at Loyola yesterday as part of the very impressive inaugural program for the Fidler Institute on Criminal Justice (LA Times story on the program here. ) During the question-and-answer period after McKay’s speech, I asked whether he thought many of the U.S. Attorneys were indeed fired because of failure to aggressively pursue voter fraud allegations. Some of McKay’s comments were picked up in this LA Times story (“He said he suspected that U.S. Atty. David C. Iglesias was removed from his post, in New Mexico, because Iglesias wouldn’t go along with voter fraud prosecutions to help the GOP in 2006 elections in that state.”) In a part of his answer not quoted in the paper, McKay said (and I’m paraphrasing here because I don’t have a transcript) that he could not go into details, but he exhaustively investigated allegations of criminal activities in connection with the extremely close 2004 Washington state gubernatorial election and found no criminal conduct. He said he had thought of people advancing the idea of massive voter fraud in the election as “crackpots.”
In a few minutes I hope to post a link to my new Slate piece on the topic. UPDATE: My Slate piece is now up: The Fraudulent Fraud Squad: The Incredible, Disappearing American Center for Voting Rights.