It looks like the Bushies are going all in to limit the damage from those torture memos.

The Washington Post reports that former Bush administration officials have launched a "behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign," designed to pressure DOJ to soften its forthcoming ethics report into the lawyers who approved torture.

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Buried in the news about charges against Ted Stevens being dropped, there's an additional serious indictment (as if more were needed) of the Bush Justice Department -- and specifically, of Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

Reporting from yesterday's hearing, at which Judge Emmet Sullivan formally announced that the charges would be dropped, the Washington Post notes:

When the judge heard that Stevens's attorneys sent three letters about prosecutorial misconduct to former Attorney General Michael Mukasey but received no response, he called it "shocking -- but not surprising."

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Those Bush lawyers who approved torture may not be in the clear just yet.

Newsweek reveals that a report into the integrity of opinions given by Bush DOJ attorneys, approving water-boarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, is sharply critical of several top officials, including John Yoo, the author of the infamous "torture memo".

A draft of the report -- which was authored Marshall Jarrett, the head of the department's Office of Professional Responsbility -- was submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration. But it looks like Bush's DOJ brass pushed back.

According to Newsweek's sources, former Attorney General Michel Mukasey, and his deputy Mark Filip, "strongly objected to the draft." Apparently, Filip wanted the report to include responses from the three DOJers most heavily criticized -- in addition to Yoo, that was Jay Bybee, another top department lawyer who wrote opinions authorizing harsh tactics, and Steven Bradbury, who ran the department's Office of Legal Counsel.

A spokesman for the Obama DOJ told Newsweek it's reviewing the matter.

It sounds like the report could contain be pretty hard-hitting. Newsweek says it's focusing on "whether the memo's authors deliberately slanted their legal advice to provide the White House with the conclusions it wanted." According to one source, the investigators have obtained, in the magazine's words, "internal e-mails and multiple drafts that allowed OPR to reconstruct how the memos were crafted."

But Yoo et al. may not be in much legal jeopardy. Newsweek adds that, at worst, the report "could be forwarded to state bar associations for possible disciplinary action".

It's also not clear we'll ever get to see the report. Jarrett told the Senate Judiciary committee last year that he'd inform them of his findings, but only that he's "consider" releasing a public version.

If this isn't an issue that deserves a full public airing, it's hard to know what would be.

A federal grand jury probe of the firings of nine U.S. attorneys during the Bush administration is focusing on the role played by recently retired Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and former senior Bush White House aides in the 2006 dismissal of David Iglesias as U.S. attorney for New Mexico, according to legal sources familiar with the inquiry.

The federal grand jury is investigating whether Domenici and other political figures attempted to improperly press Iglesias to bring a criminal prosecution against New Mexico Democrats just prior to the 2006 congressional midterm elections, according to legal sources close to the investigation and private attorneys representing officials who prosecutors want to question.  Investigators appear to be scrutinizing Iglesias' firing in the context of whether he was fired in retaliation because Domenici and others believed that he would not manipulate the timing of prosecutions to help Republicans.

Previously, Domenici was severely criticized by two internal Justice Department watchdog offices, the Department's Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), for refusing to cooperate with their earlier probe of the firings of the U.S. attorneys. In part because of their frustration that Domenici and his chief of staff, Steve Bell, as well as several senior White House officials, would not cooperate with them, the Inspector General and OPR sought that a criminal prosecutor take over their probe. It is unclear whether Domenici will now cooperate with the criminal probe. Domenici's attorney, Lee Blalack, in an interview, declined to say what Domenici will do when he is contacted by investigators.

The focus of the grand jury probe was described by a federal law enforcement official, two witnesses who have been recently been asked to answer questions from investigators, and an attorney representing a former Justice Department official who has been told that investigators want to question his client.  People who had been contacted by investigators spoke on the condition that they not be named because they did not want to upset federal law enforcement officials who would question and investigate them and also because they believe that simply being questioned might unfairly tarnish their reputations.

The grand jury investigation is currently being led by Nora Dannehy, the acting U.S. attorney in Connecticut.  Then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey named Dannehy to "determine whether any prosecutable offense was committed" in the course of the firings following September's report by the Inspector General and OPR on the firings.

The report found that Iglesias was fired largely as a result of complaints made to the White House by Domenici and Bell. But the report also concluded that the probe was severely "hindered" by the refusal by Domenici, Bell, and several senior Bush administration officials to cooperate with the investigation. 

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The Bush DOJ may not usually be inclined to hold its own members accountable for criminal wrongdoing. But when the alleged wrong-doing consists of embarrassing the administration by revealing the existence of a program that was illegally spying on the American people, the wheels of justice seem to start turning.

Last month, as we noted at the time, Newsweek unmasked the man, Thomas Tamm, who leaked to the New York Times the news that the NSA had been conducting a secret wiretapping program that was being concealed from the FISA court.

And as the magazine reported, Tamm, who spoke on the record to Newsweek for its story, has been in federal law enforcement's sights thanks to his fateful decision.

Now, DOJ has written a letter to his lawyer -- obtained by Salon's Glenn Greenwald -- asking whether, in light of his decision to speak to Newsweek, Tamm "is willing to reconsider his prior refusal to speak with agents of the FBI and/or to testify before the Grand Jury regarding his knowledge of and/or participation in the disclosure of TSP-related information to [James] Risen, Mr. Lichtblau and others."

(Risen and Lichtblau, of course, are the New York Times reporters who first reported on the program, based on Tamm's leak.)

The letter, signed by Steven Tyrrell, the chief of DOJ's fraud section, continues with what appears to be a veiled threat to subpoeana Tamm:

if I do not hear from you by [January 7], I will assume that Mr. Tamm is not interested in submitting to a voluntary interview or testifying before the Grand Jury.

In its report last month, Newsweek wrote that federal agents have "pursued [Tamm] relentlessly for the past two and a half years ... raided his house, hauled away personal possessions and grilled his wife, a teenage daughter and a grown son. More recently, they've been questioning Tamm's friends and associates about nearly every aspect of his life."

That pursuit appears to be continuing -- even as the department declines to bring charges against anyone in connection with the illegal program itself that Tamm revealed.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey gave his sendoff speech yesterday, and, after the usual boilerplate -- "pleasure to work alongside a group of the most talented legal professionals anyone could ever hope to work with..." -- he made reference to the department's politicization under the Bush administration.

From Mukasey's prepared remarks:

As I suggested a few moments ago, not all of the news over the last 14 months was good news. We heard allegations, and saw revelations, of politically influenced functioning within the Department, principally in hiring, and of other deviations from established procedures and acceptable professional standards. Thankfully, we can draw a measure of satisfaction even from these painful episodes. After all, many of the revelations and solutions came from within the Department itself. And, in those cases where investigations have been warranted, the Department has shown that it is capable of conducting the necessary review of the conduct and practices of its own people and of others.

We have also responded to these troubling allegations by changing policies and procedures. We instituted rules that limit contact between the Department and the White House on ongoing cases; we restored the role of career lawyers in making hiring decisions in the Honors and Summer Law Intern Programs; and we took steps to ensure that hiring and recruitment decisions throughout the Department take place on the merits, and without regard for any improper consideration, be it politics, age, race or sexual orientation.

It's true that Mukasey's tenure hasn't seen the kind of blatant politicization in hiring that we saw under Alberto Gonzales -- and Mukasey's decision to appoint a special prosecutor to determine whether criminal wrongdoing occurred in regard to the US Attorneys firings may help us finally get to the bottom of that issue. But on crucial issues of the day like torture and warrantless wiretapping, he's been far from the model of independence that the Attorney General is supposed to represent.

One sidenote: The press release containing Mukasey's comments was dated: "TUESDAY, JANUARY 8, 2008" Two mistakes by DOJ in one attempt to render today's date! Really gives you confidence in our federal law enforcement system.

It looks like Republicans on the Senate Judiciary committee have won at least a partial victory in that battle with Judiciary chair Pat Leahy over the timing of confirmation hearings for Eric Holder, Barack Obama's nominee for Attorney General.

In a press release sent moments ago, Leahy wrote the he was delaying the hearings, and made clear he wasn't happy about it:

The Committee has not yet received the names of other designees for high-ranking Department of Justice officials that we had anticipated and more time is now available to the Judiciary Committee. Therefore, to accommodate the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, at their request we are delaying the hearing, again, until January 15.
...

It is disappointing to me that they are insisting that we delay at a time when the nation needs its top law enforcement officer and national security team in place and working.

The delay is only a week, since Leahy had been planning to begin the hearings on January 8. He had argued that, after the politicization of the Bush years, it's particularly important for fresh leadership to be installed quickly.

The committee's GOP minority, led by Arlen Specter, has been arguing that Leahy's schedule doesn't allow enough time to review documents pertaining to Holder's role in the controversial pardon of Marc Rich in the waning days of the Clinton administration.

The dispute had gotten unusually pointed for an intra-committee disagreement. Leahy, in a letter to Specter, implied that the Republican's trip to Europe and the middle east this month was a congressionally sponsored junket. Leahy also dredged up a year-old quote from Republican Jon Kyl, arguing for a speedy confirmation of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General, which appears to contrast with today's GOP position on Holder. In announcing the delay today, Leahy again brought up Kyl's quote on Mukasey.

The full release follows after the jump...

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Is the Department of Justice going back on its word about a report on its investigation into whether crimes were committed in the U.S. Attorney firings scandal?

When prosecutor Nora Dannehy was appointed to run the probe, in the wake of another investigation by the department's Inspector General, it was reported that Dannehy was expected to provide Attorney General Michael Mukasey with a status report on her findings within around 60 days.

That timeline was confirmed by DOJ Inspector General Glenn Fine in testimony before Congress at the time:

REP. NADLER: Mr. Fine, it's been reported that Ms. Dannehy was appointed to special counsel, will make a preliminary report to the attorney general within the next two months. Do you know when this report will be made public?

MR. FINE: I think what it is is the status of the investigation at that point to the deputy attorney general or the attorney general to see where she is in the process.

...

I don't think it's sort of a formal report; I think it's more of a status report.

And it was reiterated a few weeks later in a letter from Mukasey to House Judiciary Chair John Conyers. Mukasey wrote:

As the Inspector General testified, Ms. Dannehy is expected to report on the status of the investigation to the Attorney General approximately 60 days after her appointment.

Now that 60-day deadline has come and gone. And DOJ won't confirm that any such report has been provided, instead referring us to a spokesman for Dannehy who wouldn't comment on the issue.

In other words, at first DOJ had been clear that it wanted a report submitted within 60 days. But now it won't even confirm that such a report has been submitted, or give any further information.

So is the department now going back on its requirement that Dannehy submit a report within 60 days? Is it exerting pressure to reduce the likelihood that details about Dannehy's progress -- like the fact that she's contacted Gonzales -- will slip out? What's going on?

A staffer for the House judiciary committee told TPMmuckraker that they haven't been able to get anythign out of DOJ either on whether Dannehy has submitted a report. A call to the Senate judiciary committee was not immediately returned.

We'll keep you posted as we learn more...

A report in the Washington Post suggests that Nora Dannehy, the prosecutor assigned by Attorney General Michael Mukasey to look into the U.S. attorney firings, is taking an aggressive approach to the job.

The Post says Dannehy "has been meeting with defense lawyers, dispatching subpoenas and seeking information about the events, according to legal sources familiar with the case."

It adds: "A grand jury in the District has issued subpoenas, the sources said."

And there's another interesting nugget:

D. Kyle Sampson, who served as the chief of staff to Gonzales until his March 2007 resignation, recently took a leave from his job as a partner at the law firm Hunton & Williams while the investigation proceeds. A spokeswoman for the law firm said he is on leave "pending admission to the D.C. bar."

DOJ's Inspector General report, released in late September, found that Sampson's testimony was "not credible" and "unpersuasive."

Dannehy was appointed September 29 to determine whether crimes had been committed in the affair. She was given 60 days to submit a preliminary report on her findings. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TPMmuckraker about the report's status.

More on this soon...

Why is it taking so long for the Justice Department to answer written questions from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee?

That's the question Judiciary Chair Pat Leahy posed to Attorney General Mukasey in a letter sent today demanding answers to hundreds of written queries from 11 Judiciary hearings going back over a year. Over one hundred of the unanswered questions were directed to then-AG Alberto Gonzales in July 2007.

Leahy writes:

It is my hope that the Department will answer all outstanding questions before the adjournment of the 110th Congress. You can set an example by promptly returning responsive answers to the questions posed to you in connection with the July 9 oversight hearing, which was more than four months ago.

The questions are typically submitted in writing to the DOJ in the days after committee hearings, and witnesses have two weeks to respond, Leahy says in the letter. Attached to the letter is a chart with the list of unanswered questions -- there are over 300 -- date of submission, and the submitters. The questions, on issues like department oversight and voter protection, were submitted by senators of both parties to officials including FBI Director Robert Mueller and Mukasey himself.

A staggering 104 of the unanswered questions were submitted for Gonzales following this storied July 2007 hearing, at which the AG was grilled on his visit to John Ashcroft's hospital room. The Gonzales item indicates that "partial answers" have been received.

So what exactly are the unanswered questions about? The letter doesn't specify, but we'll look into it and let you know what we find.

Five ex-DOJ officials have written to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, urging him to keep investigating whether ACORN committed voter fraud in its registration efforts, Roll Call reports.

The group, led by leading voting-rights foe Hans Von Spakovsky, wrote:

"We hope that you will assure the American people that your Department intends to investigate and prosecute any and all instances of voter registration and other fraud occurring in the days leading up to the election, and that you will enforce all of the federal voting rights laws that are important to preserving the fairness and security of the election process..."

The other members of the group, according to Roll Call, are Former Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds and former Deputy Assistant Attorneys General Roger Clegg, Michael Carvin and Robert Driscoll.

Earlier this month, sources leaked to the Associated Press that the FBI had launched a naitonwide investigation into ACORN. Since then, few details about the probe have emerged. DOJ has declined to confirm its existence on the record, and ACORN recently said it had not been contacted in connection to the investigation.

Von Spakovsky was nominated for a seat on the Federal Elections Commission last year, but the Democratic Senate refused to confirm him. TPMmuckraker reported in August that he had been given a temporary appointment at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

House Judiciary Chair John Conyers has released a statement in response to Republican leader John Boehner's various recent efforts to get the Justice Department to pay more attention to voter fraud, despite scant evidence of such fraud.

Writes Conyers:

This endless campaign to press the Department into pursuing phantom claims of 'voter fraud' must end. So-called "voter fraud" is vanishingly rare and every time this subject is given a careful look it is found to have essentially no concrete impact in our elections. Indeed, according to Justice Department data, out of almost 200 million votes cast in federal elections since October 2002, only 102 individuals have been convicted of federal voter fraud offenses. Thus, Republican agitation on this issue is both unnecessary and costly, as Department resources are needed to combat serious matters of voter suppression. Fliers distributed in Virginia this week using state letterhead to mislead Democrats and Independents about the date of the election and recent reports of violence and intimidation against citizens working to register and turnout voters are real-world problems that directly impact citizens' right to vote. It is also disconcerting to see Members of Congress criticizing career personnel of the Department for their private political activity, which intrudes deeply upon their privacy and appears to have no bearing on their job performance.

As we noted earlier, the Department of Justice yesterday released a list of counties across the country to which it will send teams of federal observers to monitor polling places, as it does every election year.

Given DOJ's mixed record in recent years in protecting voting rights, and its efforts to push voter fraud cases despite a lack of evidence, we asked some experts whether the list of sites selected seemed appropriate.

Both Gerry Hebert, a former acting head of DOJ's voting-rights section, and Rick Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a leading authority on voting law, said that it did.

Hebert, however, questioned the decision to send monitors to Noxubee and Wilkinson counties in Mississippi.

Hebert noted in an email to TPMmuckraker that in Noxubee, DOJ brought a controversial, though ultimately successful, suit on behalf of white voters in 2006, representing the first time that the Voting Rights Act had been used on behalf of whites.

"What interest would they have in sending federal observers now,?" Hebert asked.

As for Wilkinson county, Hebert wrote: "It's hard to see why DOJ would send poll watchers to a county where the issues seem to be among two factions of black voters and not alleged discrimination by whites."

Still, these concerns aside, it sounds like there's little reason to believe that DOJ's list skews inappropriately toward making hay out of swing-state voter-fraud claims at the expense of a focus on voter intimidation.

The complete list follows after the jump...

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At last, a high-ranking Republican has admitted what many Democrats and independent observers have maintained since the scandal over the US Attorney firings -- that, under President Bush, the Department of Justice has been inappropriately politicized.

But according to John Boehner, the House GOP leader, that politicization was actually carried out ... by Democrats.

Boehner today released a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in which he complained about the department's decision no longer to include federal prosecutors in its teams of election observers, as it has done in previous years.

He also cited recent reports that some top officials in the department's voting-rights section had contributed to Barack Obama's campaign.

Writes Boehner:

Frankly, the real motive behind the Department's decision is undeniably suspect given that Obama partisans in key positions at the Department of Justice may well have played a pivotal role in making it.

Earlier this week, DOJ announced that it would decline a request by Boehner -- forwarded by the White House -- to intervene in a voting dispute in Ohio, on behalf of state Republicans.

Yesterday, the department released a list of the polling places to which it will send its team of observers. We'll have more on that shortly.

Boehner's full letter follows after the jump...

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The phony flier that surfaced recently in Virginia, instructing Democrats to vote on Wednesday November 5th, has drawn the attention of House Judiciary Chair John Conyers.

As we wrote Monday, the flier, which surfaced in largely African-American areas of the Hampton Roads region, is designed to look like an official communication from the state board of elections, even reproducing the board's logo. It informs readers that becasue of expected high turnout on election day, November 4th, Democrats have been asked to vote November 5th.

Election day, of course, is November 4th for everyone.

Conyers wrote to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking him to take action. Conyer's letter points out that, because there are legitimate concerns in Virginia about over-crowded polling places, and because the flier is designed to look like it comes from the state election board, it "has enough of a ring of truth to confuse voters and suppress turnout."

The letter goes on to call the effort "an echo of the darkest days of our struggle for civil rights."

Virginia election officials have said that state police are already looking into the flier's provenance.

Yesterday we posted a quick round-up of the various voter-suppression schemes being pushed by Republicans in swing states around the country. And after looking at the list, one thing quickly becomes clear: most of the efforts have failed.

There's no one grand unifying theory for why that's true.

In some cases, the courts have rejected GOP efforts to make voting harder:

• In Indiana, for instance, a Superior Court judge declined to support a GOP bid to shut down early voting centers in Democratic-leaning cities in Lake County, and the state Supreme Court chose not to immediately intervene.

• In Wisconsin, a suit brought by Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen -- which he later admitted had been requested by the Republican Party -- seeking to force the state election board to re-confirm all newly registered voters was thrown out by a county court.

• In Michigan, a federal appeals court today blocked the Republican secretary of state, Terri Lynn Land, from throwing 5,500 newly registered voters off the rolls because their registration cards were returned as undeliverable, after voting-rights groups sued.

In other states, Democratic state officials or voting-rights advocates have held the line:

• In Nevada, Secretary of State Ross Miller denied a request from the state GOP to require voters to cast provisional ballots if they fixed mistakes in their voting information at the polls.

• In Colorado, a bid by Republican Secretary of State Mike Coffman -- who himself is running for a seat in the U.S. House -- to purge 14,000 voters from the rolls was only partially successful. After voting-rights groups sued, a settlement was reached yesterday allowing the voters to cast provisional ballots. According to the Rocky Mountain News, those ballots would "be presumed to be valid unless state and county officials prove otherwise." A lawyer for the voting-rights groups called the deal "a win-win."

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Looks like the most high-profile of the various Republican voter-suppression schemes is faring no better than many of the others.

The New York Times reports that the Department of Justice will not require Ohio's Democratic secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner, to provide local election officials with lists of new voters who have mismatches in their registration information.

Late last week, in an unusual intervention, the White House had passed on a request by Republican House leader John Boehner that DOJ take action on the issue -- triggering outrage from voting-rights groups. But according to the Times:

The Justice Department has been in contact with Ohio election officials since early October and this week its lawyers determined they would not pursue litigation before the election, according to the sources familiar with the discussions.

The state Republican party had sued to force Brunner to hand over the information. Voting-rights advocates feared that it could allow the Republicans to launch a slew of voter challenges at the polls, and the Supreme Court rejected the GOP bid earlier this month.

Still, the Ohio Republicans are trying to make maximum political hay out of the dispute. They released a radio ad earlier this week accusing Brunner of "concealing evidence."

The Department of Justice announced yesterday that, at an annual awards ceremony, it had given an award for "Outstanding Professionalism and Exemplary Integrity" to David Margolis.

Why is that noteworthy?

Margolis, who has been at DOJ since 1965 and now serves as Associate Deputy Attorney General, makes frequent appearances in the report on the US Attorney firings released earlier this month by DOJ's Office of the Inspector General.

By and large, the report depicts Margolis as a respected career DOJ-er, who was largely out of the loop on many of the details of the scheme to fire US Attorneys for political reasons.

But it also shows that right before the firings, Kyle Sampson, the point man on the plan, showed Margolis -- whose informal biography, says the report, listed one of his duties as being a liaison between main DOJ and the US Attorneys -- a list of six of the US Attorneys to be fired. Margolis had earlier recommended to Sampson that two US Attorneys -- Kevin Ryan and Dunn Lampton -- be fired for legitimate performance-based reasons, but neither one appeared on Sampson's list. And yet, says the report, Margolis neither raised any objections, nor asked Sampson about how the list was drawn up.

From the report's conclusion:

In November 2006, when Sampson advised Margolis about the impending removals, he either showed Margolis a list or read from a list of six U.S. Attorneys that Sampson indicated were to be removed. Margolis told us that he was struck more by the names Sampson did not mention than the ones he did. Margolis asked Sampson why Ryan and Lampton were not on the removal list, and Sampson responded that he would look into it. Based on Margolis's and McNulty's suggestion, Ryan was subsequently added to the list.

However, Margolis told us that he did not think to question Sampson about the six U.S. Attorneys who were on Sampson's list. Margolis said he was more focused on the names that were omitted and assumed Sampson had valid reasons for the six slated for removal.

Margolis is the senior career attorney in the Department and someone who had significant knowledge about U.S. Attorneys and their performance. He was involved in panel interviews for the selection of most U.S. Attorneys, and as part of his duties handles misconduct allegations involving U.S. Attorneys. He is highly respected within the Department, and his opinion was valued because of his experience and stature.

Yet, prior to the removals, he never questioned Sampson concerning why the specific U.S. Attorneys slated for removal were chosen or what process was used to select them. We believe that under these circumstances - an unprecedented dismissal of a group of U.S. Attorneys at one time allegedly for performance reasons - Margolis should have raised questions about the list and the process used to identify the names to ensure there were no improper reasons and that the Department was following a defensible process for the removals. But Margolis never raised those issues, and instead focused solely on seeking to ensure that Ryan was added to the removal list.

...

We recognize that the decision to remove the U.S. Attorneys was not Margolis's to make. But given his position, we believe he should have asked Sampson, McNulty, or other senior Department leaders about the removal process. This is particularly true given that this removal of U.S. Attorneys was unprecedented, and it did not appear from the names on Sampson's list that the U.S. Attorneys Margolis thought were weak had been included.

The report also quotes from Margolis' subsequent testimony to Congress, in which he acknowledged he should have done more:

I should say that I am a bit exasperated by my role here because I'm the only one of all the people involved who knows how to fire a United States Attorney or a Marshal based on experience. And I was not aggressive enough or vigilant enough, and I should have done a number of things, I should have inserted myself. I was too passive, and I'd like to, I think--and I hold myself accountable for this--that if I had stepped in and said something, that maybe this would have been - we would have handled this better...

The report further concludes:

We believe that given Margolis's experience, position, and stature he was too deferential to others on this important and unprecedented removal of U.S. Attorneys. Had he raised questions, as he acknowledged he should have, the damage to the Department by the fundamentally flawed removal process might have been mitigated.

Margolis was clearly a long way from being the main villain in the US Attorneys saga. But he didn't exactly cover himself with glory in the affair.

And he certainly didn't demonstrate "Outstanding Professionalism and Exemplary Integrity" -- the qualities for which he's just been honored.

Last week, the White House asked the Department of Justice to take action on an effort that could force tens of thousands of new Ohio voters to cast provisional ballots.

Soon afterwards, a group of Ohio Democrats, led by Sen. Sherrod Brown, announced in a press release that they had written to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, urging him not to intervene in the issue.

Wrote the Democrats: "The eyes of the nation are once again on Ohio in this critical election, and there is no room for partisan politics that seek to erode voter confidence in Ohio's election system."

The U.S. Supreme Court had earlier rejected an effort by the GOP to require the Democratic Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, to provide local election officials with information on newly registered voters whose registration information does not match other government records. Democrats fear that giving that information to local officials could allow Republicans to mount challenges to eligible voters, with the result that many could be forced to cast provisional ballots.

In addition to Brown, the other Democrats signing the letter were Reps. Marcy Kaptur, Tim Ryan, Zack Space, Betty Sutton, and Charles Wilson.

Looks like the White House is having trouble getting out of the habit of using the Department of Justice for political purposes.

The Washington Post reports that President Bush has asked DOJ to look into a request by House Republican leader John Boehner that would force Ohio's Secretary of State to provide local election officials with information on 200,000 newly registered voters who have mismatched registration data. That could make it possible for Republicans to issue challenges to many of these voters, perhaps forcing them to cast provisional ballots.

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Ohio Republicans, who were seeking to force the Secretary of State, Democrat Jennifer Brunner, to provide the information on mismatches to local officials, did not have standing to bring the case.

Boehner announced yesterday in a press release that he had sent a letter earlier this week to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking him to take action, but received no response. He then turned to the White House for help -- warning in a letter to President Bush that if no action were taken, "there is a significant risk if not a certainty, that unlawful votes will be cast and counted."

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino characterized the move as "a routine step that would be taken for any such request from a congressional leader," according to the Post.

But it's worth remembering that much of the politicization of the Department of Justice that was exposed in the U.S. Attorneys scandal centered on voting issues, and specifically on an effort by the White House and DOJ to prioritize voter fraud prosecutions despite scant evidence that such fraud was occurring.

As voting rights groups point out, the mismatches at issue in this case are often nothing more than that the name on a voter's drivers license includes a middle initial, while that on his voter registration form does not.

Jon Greenbaum of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told the Post: "This is taking the politicization of this to a new level."

We'll be watching this closely.

After the Washington Post beat the Senate Judiciary Committee to memos from the White House to the CIA endorsing interrogation practices, Chairman Patrick Leahy hasn't been pulling punches.

Today, Leahy issued a subpoena to Attorney Gen. Michael Mukasey demanding that he provide testimony and related documents to the committee about "legal analysis and advice from the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) related to the Bush administration's terrorism policies, including detention and interrogation policies and practices." The deadline for the testimony and documents is November 18. The committee voted on issuing the subpoena in a September 25 business meeting.

"This administration's stonewalling leaves this Committee without basic facts that are essential to carrying out its oversight responsibilities," Leahy said in his letter to Mukasey.

"There is no legitimate argument for withholding the requested materials from this Committee. The Executive Branch should not obstruct Congress from conducting its constitutional oversight and lawmaking duties by making sweeping assertions of secrecy and privilege."

Leahy and the Bush administration have been embroiled in an ongoing tussle over access to administration documents. As Leahy explains in today's letter, in August he wrote to White House counsel Fred Fielding requesting the documents, and was rebuffed. Fielding referred Leahy to DOJ, which continued to stonewall. As a result, the committee voted to authorize the subpoena, which was issued to Mukasey today.

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.

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.