A month ago today, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Tony Snow if the president might have been directly involved in suggesting the purge of U.S. Attorneys. Snow said, “Anything’s possible … but I don’t think so.”
Keep that background in mind when you consider a very interesting item from The Albuquerque Journal that ran over the weekend.
Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was fired after Sen. Pete Domenici, who had been unhappy with Iglesias for some time, made a personal appeal to the White House, the Journal has learned.
Domenici had complained about Iglesias before, at one point going to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales before taking his request to the president as a last resort.
As the Journal explained it, Domenici wanted Iglesias to pursue some alleged corruption controversies involving Democrats in New Mexico. Iglesias resisted the pressure. By the spring of 2006, Domenici was fed up and told AG Gonzales he wanted Iglesias out. Gonzales refused and said he’d only take orders from the president.
So, Domenici went over the Attorney General’s head and called Karl Rove, asking him to take his concerns about Iglesias directly to the president. The New Mexico senator and the president reportedly discussed the U.S. Attorney on the phone at some point after the midterm elections but before the Dec. 7 purge. (Iglesias’ name first showed up on a Nov. 15 list of federal prosecutors who would be asked to resign. It was not on a similar list prepared in October.)
You’ll also recall, of course, that Domenici called Iglesias shortly before the election, asking the U.S. Attorney if he would indict New Mexico Democrat Manny Aragon. When Iglesias declined, Domenici replied, “I’m very sorry to hear that,” and then hung up on him.
So, what exactly was the president’s role in directing this firing?
For weeks now, there have been several questions about who was “in the loop” when it came to firing these prosecutors. Gonzales said he wasn’t, Sampson said he was, Goodling clearly was, Miers and Rove were, etc. But The Albuquerque Journal article brings the president himself into the loop, possibly even ordering the firing directly.
Josh Marshall, who was all over the Domenici story over the weekend, said Bush’s role in “the key point.”
Out of all the issues raised in today’s Albuquerque Journal story on the Iglesias firing and any potential sourcing questions, the central fact asserted is that after Sen. Domenici’s pressure call to Iglesias and before Iglesias’s name appeared on the firing list, Sen. Domenici had a conversation about firing Iglesias with President Bush himself.
That places the president at the center of the story and marks him as the likely ‘decider’, shall we say, in Iglesias’s ouster…. This may also help explain why Karl Rove’s deputy Scott Jennings assumed his White House colleagues knew so much about the Iglesias backstory when he sent them this panicked email as the news of Domenici’s call was breaking.
Last night, the White House denied the report in a rather ambiguous way, claiming that the president never brought up a “specific case” with Gonzales and never “gave him specific instructions.” There was no “directive” that Gonzales should “fire anybody or anything like that.”
As a TPM reader noted, however, Bush could have called Gonzales and said, “‘Pete Domenici called me this morning, says we gotta do something about that U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, Iglesias. Not doing his jobs, not bringing cases fast enough – can you look into that, see what needs to be done?’ That would fit within the White House denial.”
Stay tuned.