About a month ago, former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and answered questions about the events that led to his unjustified dismissal. As Slate’s Emily Bazelon noted, “Perhaps the most astonishing moment of the hearings was when it came out that the Department of Justice was dumb enough to accuse Iglesias of ‘absentee landlordism’ because he had to take 40 days of annual duty in the naval reserve.”
“It was ironic,” Iglesias said of that misstep, since it’s the Department of Justice that enforces the law that forbids job-based discrimination for activities related to military service.
As it turns out, Iglesias wasn’t the only one to find the “absentee landlordism” excuse problematic.
When he wasn’t doing his day job as U.S. attorney in New Mexico, David Iglesias was a captain in the Navy Reserve, teaching foreign military officers about international terrorism.
But Iglesias’s military service in support of what the Pentagon likes to call the Global War on Terror (GWOT) apparently didn’t go down well with his superiors at the Justice Department. Recently released documents show that one reason aides to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales cited in justifying the decision to fire Iglesias as U.S attorney late last year was that he was an “absentee landlord” who was spending too much time away from the office.
That explanation may create new legal problems for Gonzales and Justice. Iglesias confirmed to NEWSWEEK that he was recently questioned by lawyers for the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal watchdog agency, to determine if his dismissal was a violation of the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA), a federal law that prohibits job discrimination against members of the U.S. military.
It may be one of the more unintentionally hilarious angles to the purge scandal so far. Administration officials couldn’t admit the real reason to fire Iglesias — he refused to politicize his office and cave to pressure about prosecuting New Mexico Dems without cause — so they came up with an after-the-fact rationalization: his 40 days a year in the Navy Reserve was too much time away from the job.
In other words, the cover story to avoid getting in trouble has led DoJ officials to get into trouble.
At the encouragement of Office of Special Counsel director Scott Bloch and his deputies, Iglesias said he is this week filing a formal legal complaint with OSC against the Justice Department over his dismissal on this and other grounds. (While the Justice Department normally prosecutes USERRA violations, the OSC, an independent federal agency that protects the rights of whistle-blowers, takes the case when the potential violator is the federal government itself.) “I want to make sure they didn’t fire me because of my military duty,” Iglesias said. “When I was away from the office, it wasn’t like I was going on vacation in Europe.” (A Justice Department spokesman did not respond for a request for comment on whether Iglesias’s firing might have been a violation of the law.)
The OSC’s inquiry into the Iglesias case — first reported this week in NEWSWEEK — injects yet another irony to the controversy over the U.S. attorney firings.
The Bush administration has vigorously promoted enforcement of USERRA — in large part because of the dramatic increase in National Guard and military reserve members who have been called into active duty due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The law’s purpose — highlighted by Gonzales himself in a Justice Department press release last summer — is to make sure reservists and National Guard members don’t suffer in the workplace when they are called to serve their country.
Gonzales announced last August the creation of a special Web site to inform reservists and National Guard members of their rights under the law. At the time, he also touted the first-ever class-action lawsuit under USERRA that had been brought by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The suit against American Airlines alleged the company had reduced employment benefits for two pilots — one of them, like Iglesias, a captain in the Navy Reserve – because the pilots had taken too much leave to perform their military service. “This nation depends on our reservists to faithfully carry out their duty,” said Wan J. Kim, assistant attorney general in the charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, when the lawsuit suit was filed. “No reservists — indeed, no members of our armed forces — should ever be punished or discriminated against for answering the call of duty.”
Oops. Too bad this never occurred to Justice Department officials when they were scrambling to come up with a rationalization for firing Iglesias and all they could come up with was the “absentee landlordism” excuse.
As Paul Kiel explained, “[A]s Kyle Sampson admitted last week, there was no real performance reason to fire Iglesias. And in fact, it’s indisputable at this point that Iglesias was actually fired because he didn’t indict enough Democrats.” And now their cover story has come back to bite them.
What a tangled web the Bush gang weaves….