A major voting-rights group has sent a letter to New Mexico U.S. Attorney Gregory Fouratt, calling on him to investigate claims of voter intimidation and suppression.

The letter, from the group Project Vote, comes in the wake of reporting by TPMmuckraker and others about a private investigator -- who said he was working for Pat Rogers, a lawyer connected to the state GOP -- appearing at the homes of Hispanic voters in Albuquerque, and questioning them about their right to vote. In a press release announcing the letter, Project Vote refers directly to these reports.

In its letter, Project Vote -- a non-profit voting-rights group that works to increase voting in low-income and minority communities -- writes:

This form of intimidation and suppression is in direct violation of Section 12 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as Section 2. We feel that the right of all Americans to vote is of the utmost importance, and if there is credible evidence of voter intimidation and suppression of a particular class of voters it should be addressed and promptly persecuted.

Fouratt was appointed U.S. Attorney for the district after the 2006 firing of David Iglesias. According to a recent DOJ report, Iglesias was removed for his failure to prosecute voter fraud cases he believed to be bogus.

Minority voters in New Mexico report to TPMmuckraker that a private investigator working with Republican party lawyer Pat Rogers has appeared in person at the homes of their family members, intimidating and confusing them about their right to vote in the general election.

Earlier this week, we reported that Rogers -- a lawyer and state committeeman for the GOP, who in previous elections worked closely with the party in pressuring New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to pursue bogus voter fraud cases -- is involved with a new effort to gin up concerns about the issue. Last week the state party falsely claimed that 28 people had voted fraudulently in a local Democratic primary race in June. Rogers, described in an Associated Press report on the allegations as "an attorney who advises the state GOP," told the news wire that the party planned to turn the suspect forms over to law enforcement authorities.

The visits to minority voters by the P.I. appear to be connected to last week's effort.

The story starts last week, when several representatives of the New Mexico Republican party, including Rogers, held a press conference to announce that 28 people had voted fraudulently in a Democratic primary in June in Bernalillo county, which contains Albuquerque. The party released the names of ten of these people -- almost all of whom are Hispanic.

The allegations quickly fell apart. ACORN announced that it had contacted the county clerk's office, who had verified that all of the voters were in fact legitimate. The group now says it has independently contacted 8 of these 10 voters to separately verify their validity.

At that point, the national GOP, which had at first jumped on the story as rare evidence of genuine voter fraud, seemed to quietly back off.

But that wasn't the end of the story.

Guadalupe Bojorquez, who works in law enforcement in Albuquerque, told TPMmuckraker today that her mother, Dora Escobedo, was one of the ten voters whose names were released by the GOP. After this happened, said Bojorquez, her mother had been contacted by the voter registration group ACORN. Bojorquez, with ACORN's help, confirmed with the county clerk that her mother, who does not speak English, is indeed eligible to vote, and had been when she voted in June.

Nonetheless, Bojorquez said that her mother yesterday received a visit from a man who asked for her personal information, including an ID, in reference to her eligibility to vote. Bojorquez told TPMmuckraker that according to her mother, at one point the man asked what she would do if immigration authorities contacted her.

After Bojorquez's mother, frightened, refused to let him in the door, the man waited outside her house. Eventually, Bojorquez's brother arrived at the house, emboldening Bojorquez's mother to go outside, call Bojorquez, and put her on the phone with the man.

Bojorquez said the man told her he wanted to make sure her mother knew that she shouldn't be voting, and continued to ask for her mother's personal information. When Bojorquez said that no information would be handed over unless the man revealed who he was employed by, he said he was a private investigator hired by Pat Rogers. He told Bojorquez his name was Al Romero, and left a number at which Bojorquez could contact him.

Bojorquez added that in fact, her mother has already voted in the general election, by absentee ballot -- which she is eligible for because she has trouble walking -- so Romero's efforts on that front were in vain.

Another Albuquerque woman had a similar experience.

Jenais Griego told TPMmuckraker that yesterday, as she arrived home with her kids, a man in a beige Chevy Silverado pulled up, removed a notebook from his pocket, and said he was looking for Emily Garcia. Garcia is Griego's grandmother -- Griego said Garcia, who works as a home care-giver, lists Griego's address for her mail -- and, like Escobedo, was one of the voters named by the GOP last week as having voted fraudulently in June.

Griego said she allowed the man in, and when she asked him for identification, he pulled out a card that gave his name as Al Romero. She said the man had a redacted copy of Garcia's voter registration form, and asked whether Garcia intended to vote. He said if she intended to do so, she needed to make sure she was properly registered.

As with Bojorquez and Escobedo, Griego said that Garcia had already confirmed after the GOP press conference that she was indeed a valid voter. An ACORN worker had come to her house to explain that the GOP had questioned her registration, and, along with Griego, they had contacted the county clerk to ensure that she could legitimately vote, and had done so in June.

So when Romero asked Griego whether Garcia intended to vote, Griego replied that she did. At that point, said Griego, Romero became "angry" and "upset," and left abruptly.

Rogers did not return several calls from TPMmuckraker seeking comment. But last week he said that the state party had hired a private investigator in connection with vote fraud.

Reached by TPMmuckraker at the phone number he provided to Bojorquez, Romero said he didn't have time to talk about the matter. He did not respond to repeated follow-up calls.

We've got a bit more information on the FBI's investigation into voter fraud that's taking place in New Mexico.

Last Friday, the Associated Press reported that FBI agents had met with Bernalillo County clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver, "after she notified authorities about an estimated 1,500 possibly fraudulent voter registration cards."

And speaking today to TPMmuckraker, Toulouse Oliver added a bit of detail to that picture. She said she had passed on redacted copies of the suspicious forms (many of which had badly mismatched information, or listed addresses that did not exist) to the offices of the District Attorney and the US Attorney in the area. When the FBI contacted her, it said it had been asked to follow up by the US Attorney' office. And the meeting between Toulouse Oliver and an FBI agent was also attended by an Assistant US Attorney.

The US Attorney's office didn't return a call seeking comment. But it appears that the office is taking a lead role in the investigation.

It's worth noting that David Iglesias was fired from that very US Attorney's office largely for his reluctance to pursue bogus voter fraud claims.

What's still unclear is how closely the probe is tied to the nationwide investigation into ACORN's voter registration activities that we learned about last week. ACORN is active in Bernalillo County.

Yesterday we told you about Pat Rogers, the New Mexico Republican lawyer who, according to reports, is deeply involved in the state party's effort to make an issue out of voter fraud -- despite essentially no evidence that such fraud is occurring. As we noted, Rogers also played a central role a few years ago in pressuring former U.S. attorney David Iglesias to bring politically motivated voter-fraud cases. Iglesias' reluctance to bring such cases led to his firing in 2006.

But it's worth paying a bit more attention to Rogers, to see how the Justice Department's new nationwide investigation into ACORN, in which New Mexico seems to be a crucial focus -- appears to represent the very same politicization of DOJ that was exposed in the scandal over the US attorney firings.

As we noted yesterday, Rogers' role in pressing Iglesias to pursue voter fraud prosecutions was extensive. According to the OIG report on the firings, Rogers set up a lunch meeting with Iglesias, and met with an FBI agent -- among many other activities -- to push the issue.

Perhaps most damagingly, the report contains a September 2004 email sent to Iglesias and several staffers for New Mexico's GOP congressional delegation, in which Rogers admitted that he was interested in the issue in large part for its potential to help the GOP:

I believe the [voter] ID issue should be used (now) at all levels - federal, state legislative races and Heather [Wilson]'s race ... You are not going to find a better wedge issue ... I've got to believe the [voter] ID issue would do Heather more good than another ad talking about how much federal taxpayer money she has put into the (state) education system and social security ... This is the single best wedge issue, ever in NM. We will not have this opportunity again ... Today, we expect to file a new Public Records lawsuit, by 3 Republican legislators, demanding the Bernalillo county clerk locate and produce (before Oct 15) ALL of the registrations signed by the ACORN employee.

But Rogers is no mere local player on the Republican voter fraud team. He was on the board of the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR), a fake think-tank which was little more than an effort by GOP operatives to offer an intellectual gloss to politically motivated claims of voter fraud -- and which abruptly closed down operations in 2007.

ACVR was run by Mark "Thor" Hearne, who served as national election counsel to President Bush's 2004 reelection campaign. Jim Dyke -- who was the communications director of the Republican National Committee during the 2004 election, and went on to work for both the White House and for Vice President Cheney -- was also involved.

Writing in Slate last year, election-law expert Rick Hasen described ACVR's modus operandi:

Consisting of little more than a post-office box and some staffers who wrote reports and gave helpful quotes about the pervasive problems of voter fraud to the press, the group identified Democratic cities as hot spots for voter fraud, then pushed the line that "election integrity" required making it harder for people to vote. The group issued reports (PDF) on areas in the country of special concern, areas that coincidentally tended to be presidential battleground states. In many of these places, it now appears the White House was pressuring U.S. attorneys to bring more voter-fraud prosecutions.

Here's Rogers, on behalf of ACVR, telling CNN back in 2004 about the need for "safeguards to make sure that citizens only are voting."

And now this is the guy who's involved in pushing voter fraud claims in connection with an investigation in which the FBI is already involved.

Rogers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It's also worth keeping in mind that New Mexico -- which went for Al Gore in 2000 by just 365 votes, and President Bush in 2004 by around 6000 -- is crucial for John McCain's chances. Today, MSNBC.com quotes an RNC official saying: "[T]he numbers -- public and private -- in the [south west] have swung wildly. We believe the possibility of NV or NM breaking at the last minute is likely and we have our dominos lined up to knock down the win at the last minute."

It looks like one of those dominoes is Rogers' effort to use bogus claims of voter fraud as "the single best wedge issue ever."

The evidence is growing that the FBI's investigation into ACORN is just the latest iteration of the unprecedented politicization of the Department of Justice that was exposed in the US attorney firings scandal.

Rep. John Conyers, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, today released a second letter about the FBI probe to Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Conyers
noted that the New Mexico GOP last week held a press conference where it publicly named people it said had voted fraudulently in a Democratic primary in June, as part of an ongoing FBI investigation into voter fraud. (ACORN appears to have subsequently shown that those voters were in fact valid.)

And Conyers goes on to make a great catch. He notes that "New Mexico lawyer Pat Rogers -- described in the local press as 'an attorney who advises the state GOP' -- is apparently playing a key role in pressing these current claims." (Conyers is referring to this Associated Press report.)

Conyers continues:

Mr. Rogers, however, appears repeatedly in the report on the U.S. Attorney firings, prepared by the Department's Office of the Inspector General and Professional Responsibility, which documented his actions making flawed claims of voter fraud and bringing unwarranted pressure to bear on law enforcement officials, including Mr. Iglesias, in 2006.

In other words, one of the very same New Mexico GOP activists who was found in the OIG report to have tried to pressure David Iglesias to bring bogus voter-fraud prosecutions is still on the case, and has now helped to get a new federal investigation launched just weeks before the election.

And remember: the OIG report definitively concluded that Iglesias was fired as New Mexico's US attorney for his reluctance to follow up on politically motivated voter-fraud claims, made by local Republicans including Rogers.

There's a broader point worth making too: It's looking more and more like New Mexico is ground zero for the FBI's new investigation. (Remember that the Wall Streeet Journal had reported back on October 9 -- a good week before the news of a nationwide FBI probe broke -- that the bureau was looking into voter fraud in New Mexico.) And given what we saw happen to Iglesias, the FBI's focus on the state, apparently in response to GOP complaints, is further evidence that what's happening in 2008 has as a lot in common with what happened in 2006.

Since the news was reported last week that the FBI, less than three weeks before the election, is launching a voter-registration-fraud investigation into ACORN, we've seen a number of former top DOJ voting-rights officials --as well as former US attorney David Iglesias -- denounce the probe as an inappropriate politicization of the department.

Add Joe Rich to the list. Rich, who from 1999 until 2005 ran the voting section in the department's civil rights division, and is now at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told TPMmuckraker this morning that the ACORN investigation is "much worse than what happened in 2006."

Rich was referring to an indictment for voter fraud against four ACORN voter-registration workers, filed by Bradley Schlozman, an interim US attorney in Kansas City, just five days before a close Missouri Senate election. Schlozman later was investigated for possible perjury after testifying to Congress that he was "directed" by main DOJ to pursue the indictment, then filing a "clarification" in which he took "full responsibility" for the prosecution.

Noting that the Bush administration appears to be using the Department of Justice to pursue politically motivated voter-fraud investigations, even after getting caught red-handed doing so in the scandal over the US attorney firings, Rich added: "There is no shame."

A former top Department of Justice voting rights official -- who once worked with John McCain in defense of the senator's campaign-finance reform bill -- has added his name to the growing chorus that is denouncing the department's investigation of ACORN as a shameful and inappropriate politicization of Justice along the lines of the US attorney firings.

Speaking to TPMmuckraker, Gerry Hebert described the investigation, word of which was leaked off the record to the Associated Press less than three weeks before the election, as "a continuation of injecting DOJ into what has clearly become a political issue."

He continued: "That's really not the proper role for the DOJ, and why their policies counsel otherwise."

To demonstrate that point, Hebert provided TPMmuckraker with a copy of the department's Manual on Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses.

Under a section headlined "Investigative Considerations in Election Fraud Cases", the manual reads:

When investigating election fraud, three considerations that are absent from most criminal investigations must be kept in mind: (1) respect for the primary role of the states in administering the voting process, (2) an awareness of the role of the election in the governmental process, and (3) sensitivity to the exercise of First Amendment rights in the election context. As a result there are limitations on various investigative steps in an election fraud case.

In most cases, election-related documents should not be taken from the custody of local election administrators until the election to which they pertain has been certified, and the time for contesting the election results has expired. This avoids interfering with the governmental processes affected by the election

Another limitation affects voter interviews. Election fraud cases often depend on the testimony of individual voters whose votes were co-opted in one way or another. But in most cases voters should not be interviewed, or other voter-related investigation done, until after the election is over. Such overt investigative steps may chill legitimate voting activities. They are also likely to be perceived by voters and candidates as an intrusion into the election. Indeed, the fact of a federal criminal investigation may itself become an issue in the election.

Although it is unclear whether the FBI has taken information or interviewed voters, Hebert argued that the new ACORN investigation clearly violates the manual's guidelines, both in terms of its timing -- initiated so close to election day -- and in terms of the off-the-record leak by which it was publicized.

Hebert served 21 years at DOJ's civil-rights division, including a stint as acting head of the voting rights section.* He left in 1994 and now heads a public interest legal non-profit. In 2003, he represented McCain and Sen. Russ Feingold, when the campaign-finance reform legislation authored by the two senators was challenged by conservative activist groups.

Hebert, noting that he had been at DOJ during the administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, added: "During the twenty-one years I was there, even though there were political appointees who I worked with, never did we inject partisan considerations into our law-enforcement responsibilities. That has clearly not been the case in recent years under this administration. And it's going to take a long time to cleanse the Department of Justice."

The Obama campaign, House Judiciary chair John Conyers, and, in an interview with TPMmuckraker, former US attorney David Iglesias, have all also connected the FBI's ACORN investigation to the kind of politicization exposed in the firings saga.

* This sentence has been corrected from an earlier version.

Add the Obama campaign to the growing list of players who think that DOJ's election-eve investigation into ACORN is a repeat of the politicization of the department that we saw in the US attorney firings scandal.

"With this voter fraud [investigation], we're seeing an unholy alliance of law enforcement and the ugliest form of partisan politics," Bob Bauer, an elections lawyer with the Obama camp, said on a conference call with reporters just now. Bauer compared the decision to launch the investigation with the US attorneys scandal, in which several US attorneys were fired for their unwillingess to pursue politically charged cases, including voter fraud, with sufficient aggression to satisfy the Bush administration.

Bauer released a letter sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey calling on him to have the issue taken on by Nora Dannehy, the prosecutor he appointed to investigate the US attorney firings.

Bauer went on to accuse John McCain of "trying to create a much greater doubt about the electoral process altogether," by alleging that ACORN voter fraud could threaten the fabric of our democracy, as McCain claimed in the debate Wednesday night.

House Judiciary chair John Conyers, as well as David Iglesias -- whose firing as US attorney was a direct result of his reluctance to pursue GOP-pushed claims of voter fraud, according to the recent OIG report -- have also connected the FBI's ACORN investigation to the kind of politicization exposed in the firings saga.

It's not just David Iglesias who thinks the Bush administration has inappropriately politicized the Department of Justice.

Paul Hancock, a former top official with the DOJ's civil-rights division, told TPMmuckraker that during his tenure, the department responded in an independent and non-partisan manner to outside pressure to bring politically sensitive cases. But "I think we might have gotten away from that in this administration," he said.

Hancock, who left the department in 1997, stressed that, in his view, it's too soon to know whether the FBI's investigation into ACORN is politically driven, and said that such investigations are not unusual. But they usually would not be aggressively carried out so close to an election, for fear of their existence being made public, and thereby affecting the election.

It remains unclear how far along the ACORN investigation is.

This morning, we noticed an RNC press release in our inbox, breathlessly touting an Associated Press story that reports:

"The New Mexico Republican Party say they believe 28 people voted fraudulently in an Albuquerque state House district in the June Democratic primary."

Of course, as faithful TPMmuckraker readers know, David Iglesias -- who yesterday told us he was "astounded" by the FBI's new investigation of ACORN in connection with nationwide voter fraud -- was fired as U.S. attorney for the district of New Mexico in large part for failing to follow up on voter fraud complaints with sufficient aggressiveness to please the Bush administration. And many of those complaints came also from the New Mexico Republican Party.

According to the recently released report on the firings by the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General, Allen Weh, the state party chair, continually pressed Iglesias to make voter fraud a priority, and in 2005 sent an email to Karl Rove and others in the White House office in which he asked for Iglesias to be removed, and a replacement appointed "that takes voter fraud seriously."

The report concluded:

complaints from New Mexico Republican politicians and party activists about Iglesias's handling of voter fraud and corruption cases were the reasons for his
removal as U.S. Attorney.

And it left no doubt that the Bush administration's decision to act on these complaints represented inappropriate politicization of the Department of Justice.

Still, it looks like the party is still out there pushing the issue.

It's not that we were expecting the GOP to act chastened after getting caught pressuring non-partisan law enforcement officials to pursue bogus and politically motivated cases of voter fraud.

But sometimes the cognitive dissonance is too much to let pass.

David Iglesias says he's shocked by the news, leaked today to the Associated Press, that the FBI is pursuing a voter-fraud investigation into ACORN just weeks before the election.

"I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again," Iglesias told TPMmuckraker. "Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic." In 2006, Iglesias was fired as U.S. attorney thanks partly to his reluctance to pursue voter-fraud cases as aggressively as DOJ wanted -- one of several U.S. attorneys fired for inappropriate political reasons, according to a recently released report by DOJ's Office of the Inspector General.

Iglesias, who has been the most outspoken of the fired U.S. attorneys, went on to say that the FBI's investigation seemed designed to inappropriately create a "boogeyman" out of voter fraud.

And he added that it "stands to reason" that the investigation was launched in response to GOP complaints. In recent weeks, national Republican figures -- including John McCain at last night's debate -- have sought to make an issue out of ACORN's voter-registration activities.

As we noted earlier, last year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein publicly highlighted changes made to DOJ's election crimes manual, which lowered the bar for voter-fraud prosecutions, and made it easier to bring vote-fraud cases close to the election.

Speaking today to TPMmuckraker, Iglesias called such changes "extremely problematic."

The way in which the news was revealed today -- Associated Press sourced its report to two "senior law enforcement officials" who "spoke on condition of anonymity because Justice Department regulations forbid discussing ongoing investigations particularly so close to an election" -- is also raising eyebrows.

Both Iglesias and Bud Cummins -- another of the U.S. attorneys who, according to the IG report, was also fired for political reasons -- told TPMmuckraker that DOJ guidelines do allow US attorneys to speak publicly about an investigation, even before bringing an indictment, if it's to allay public concern over an issue.

But that certainly wouldn't cover anonymous leaks. "If you can't say it with your name on it, it's fair to say you should not be saying it," Cummins told TPMmuckraker.

Earlier this afternoon, House Judiciary Chair John Conyers (D-MI) released a letter he sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey and FBI director Robert Mueller, which connected today's news to the U.S. attorney firings, and to recent GOP efforts to stoke fears over voter fraud.

Now that the dust has settled on the U.S. attorney firings report, released Monday morning by the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General, we thought it was worth taking some time to lay out what it tells us.

Almost since the scandal broke early last year, there have been clear signs that the plan to fire U.S. attorneys as a means of advancing the Bush administration's political goals was being driven by the White House. That impression has been strengthened as top current and former White House officials, including Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, have consistently stonewalled efforts to look into the matter.

The OIG investigation was no exception. As the report notes, Miers, Rove and several other Whte House officials refused to talk to investigators, and the White House wouldn't provide internal emails or documents relating to the firings. Perhaps the most crucial of the documents denied to OIG was a memo, written in March 2007, which contained the results of an internal White House investigation into the firings, conducted by associate White House counsel Michael Scudder. Scudder had interviewed top DOJ and White House officials, including Rove, and had compiled a timeline that "appeared to contain information we had not obtained elsewhere in our investigation," according to the OIG report.

Still, a close examination of the report makes clear that, although on a day-to-day basis the plan was put into effect by mid-level DOJ political appointees -- enabled by a shocking lack of oversight from top department officials, principally former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales -- the impetus for the move came straight from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Many of the individual pieces of information have been previously reported, as DOJ provided emails and internal documents to Congress for its 2007 investigation. But the OIG report provides a far clearer sense of the longer-term trajectory of the plan, and the consistent interest in it from Miers and Rove, than we've yet been offered.

Read more »

In the almost two years that TPMmuckraker has been covering the scandal over the removal of the U.S. attorneys, there have been many questions raised over the reasons behind the firings. On Monday, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General's report answered some of those, but raised others. While it concluded that only three of the firings were carried out for political reasons or to interfere with active prosecutions, it could not gather sufficient evidence to conclude the rest of the firings were politically based. Regardless, the report strongly condemned the DOJs overall mishandling of the firings, calling the process "fundamentally flawed . . unsystematic and arbitrary."

As we wrote earlier this week, the report reveals that Todd Graves, David Iglesias and Bud Cummins were fired for reasons of politics, not performance.

The report lays out the investigations into each of the remaining U.S. attorney firings, but repeatedly states that its analysis and investigation were "hindered" due to many witnesses' "lack of recall"; the refusal of many witnesses to cooperate with the investigation or give testimony; and the administration's stonewalling in disclosing documents. Citing these obstacles, the report hedges its findings, requesting a prosecutor to continue the investigation with the power to compel testimony.

In the case of Margaret Chiara, the former Western Michigan U.S. attorney, the report could find no evidence that the rumors that Chiara was in a lesbian relationship with one of her subordinates were behind her removal.

Chiara has stated publicly that she believes the rumors -- which she called "false and malicious" in a statement yesterday from her attorney -- were the reason for the loss of her position.

Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of California, was believed to have been asked to resign over her prosecution of former Executive Director of the CIA, Dusty Foggo and Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor who bribed former Republican Rep. Duke Cunningham and Foggo. But the report "found no evidence" to support those claims, stating that "the investigation and prosecution of Cunningham and Foggo were aggressively pursued by career prosecutors in Lam's office, both during and after her tenure."

Instead, the report supports the Department's previous claims that Lam was removed because of her poor statistics on gun and immigration prosecution statistics -- but blames the DOJ for poor handling of her removal.

In the case of Daniel Bogden of Nevada, little was known about his removal, except that he had not been diligent in prosecution of obscenity cases. The report found the claim to be behind Bogden's removal, but added some color to the removal. Interestingly, the report found that the complaints of Bodgen's dalliance in obscenity prosecutions were made by Brent Ward, the head of the DOJ Obscenity Prosecution Task Force -- who was friends with Attorney General Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson's brother and had direct conversations with Sampson regularly.

When questioned by the DOJ, Sampson stated he "did not recall whether those complaints played a role in the decision to remove Bogden," a response the report found "particularly suspect, given his role in the removal process."

In Arizona, Paul Charlton's termination was believed to be connected to his investigation of Republican Rep. Rick Renzi, but the report states that it could find no evidence to support that claim. Charlton had previously clashed with Main Justice on a decision he made to not seek the death penalty on a case involving a murder that transpired during a drug deal. Charlton believed it was this death penalty case as well as his policy of tape recording interrogations that led to his removal -- theories the IG report confirmed as the primary reasons for his dismissal.

Lastly, there is Seattle's John McKay who was believed to have been fired over his failure to prosecute voter fraud related to the 2004 Washington governor's election.

McKay famously received a call from Ed Cassidy, chief of staff to Washington Rep. Richard Hastings (R) asking about his prosecution, to which McKay responded, "Ed, I'm sure you're not about to start talking to me about the future direction of this case," after which Cassidy quickly ended the call.

Hastings claimed ignorance and told investigators that "he could not remember telling Cassidy to call McKay. . . or whether Cassidy had told him he had done so."

The report also mentions a meeting in Washington between McKay and White House Counsel Harriet Miers in which Miers reportedly asked McKay "why Republicans in the state of Washington were angry with him."

The report concludes that the "evidence suggests" that the primary reason for McKay's removal was an argument with Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty over an information sharing program -- not because of failure to prosecute voter fraud as McKay conjectured.

The OIG report, though nearly 400 pages long, is far from comprehensive. The investigation lacked the power to compel testimony or documents outside of the Justice Department and were consequently limited in their investigation. As a result, the report is forced to reserve judgment on whether many of the firings were inappropriately political, though it recommends that a prosecutor be appointed to look into whether crimes were committed.

Nora Dannehy, appointed on Monday by Attorney General Michael Mukasey will take up that mantle. It remains to be seen if that will be enough to ferret the truth out of unwilling witnesses and departments.