Thomas Heffelfinger, the former U.S. Attorney for Minneapolis, isn’t generally included in the list of nine purged prosecutors, but we’ve known for over a month that his departure was, shall we say, odd.
What we didn’t know was what might have spurred the Bush gang to push Heffelfinger from his post. Today, the LAT fills in the gaps.
For more than 15 years, clean-cut, square-jawed Tom Heffelfinger was the embodiment of a tough Republican prosecutor. Named U.S. attorney for Minnesota in 1991, he won a series of high-profile white-collar crime and gun and explosives cases. By the time Heffelfinger resigned last year, his office had collected a string of awards and commendations from the Justice Department.
So it came as a surprise — and something of a mystery — when he turned up on a list of U.S. attorneys who had been targeted for firing.
Part of the reason, government documents and other evidence suggest, is that he tried to protect voting rights for Native Americans.
At a time when GOP activists wanted U.S. attorneys to concentrate on pursuing voter fraud cases, Heffelfinger’s office was expressing deep concern about the effect of a state directive that could have the effect of discouraging Indians in Minnesota from casting ballots.
This story is a real gem. Apparently, Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer, a Republican, directed that tribal ID cards could not be used for voter identification by Native Americans living off reservations. In other words, if Native Americans wanted to participate in an election, a routine form of identification on reservations would be rejected by election officials.
Heffelfinger knew that many low-income families who live on reservations don’t have driver’s licences, so he resisted Kiffmeyer’s push. This, naturally, didn’t go over well with Republican officials, and wouldn’t you know it, all of a sudden Heffelfinger’s name showed up on a list of U.S. Attorneys to be fired.
The issue was politically sensitive because the Indian vote can be pivotal in close elections in Minnesota. The Minneapolis-St. Paul area has one of the largest urban Native American populations in the United States. Its members turn out in relatively large numbers and are predominantly Democratic.
Heffelfinger resigned last year for personal reasons and says he had no idea he was being targeted for possible firing. But his stance fits a pattern that has emerged in the cases of several U.S. attorneys fired last year in states where Republicans wanted more vigorous efforts to legally challenge questionable voters. […]
Goodling said she had heard Heffelfinger criticized for “spending an excessive amount of time” on Native American issues.
Her comment caused bewilderment and anger among the former U.S. attorney’s supporters in Minnesota. And Heffelfinger said it was “shameful” if the time he spent on the problems of Native Americans had landed him in trouble with his superiors in Washington.
This may be “shameful,” but it’s not a mystery. Indeed, one of the common threads of the U.S. Attorney scandal is a GOP drive to disenfranchise those Republicans consider to be likely Democratic voters. We’ve already seen plenty of examples regarding African-American voters; in Minnesota, we’re dealing with Native-American voters.
What’s more, as Josh Marshall noted, it doesn’t get as much attention as it should, but targeting reservations is an important page in the Rove playbook.
One of my first introductions to how aggressively the post-2000 Rove GOP was going to use bogus ‘vote fraud’ stories to stop minorities from being able to vote came in the extremely close South Dakota senate race back in 2002. That was when Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD) barely squeaked out a victory over Jon Thune (R). Thune, of course, came back two years later and defeated South Dakota’s senior senator and then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D). If you go back and look through the TPM Search for ‘South Dakota Fraud’ you’ll find a decent cross section of the reporting and writing I did on the subject in the spring and summer of 2002.
It was a riveting and also profoundly disgusting story. The whole rightwing noise machine from Sioux Falls to the Journal OpEd page spreading tales about the rampant vote fraud on the state’s Indian reservations. For folks more familiar with how this stuff works in the South it was reminiscent of something from early in 20th century or late in the 19th. And the aftermath was a lot like the cases we’ve learned about in the aftermath of the Attorney Purge. Lots of lurid stories and in the end usually it’s left to some reasonably honest Republican officeholder to scrutinize the whole thing and have to announce that all the stories were bogus.
In the Minnesota case, the reasonably honest Republican officeholder was Heffelfinger — who was quickly targeted for dismissal. Typical.