by Scott Darnell
Daily Lobo columnist
David Iglesias says his firing as U.S. attorney was politically motivated, and he was threatened and intimidated by phone calls he received from Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson. The Department of Justice is now under fire for not properly outlining the reasons behind the firings of Iglesias and seven other U.S. attorneys, leading to top White House aides being called to testify in front of the Democrat-controlled Senate on the issue. Democrat organizations are already running radio ads against Wilson, and the media continues to churn the story, relishing the opportunity to grill top Republicans and put Iglesias on a pedestal as a victim of the political system.
In the Albuquerque Tribune on March 21, a headline read, "Iglesias: Fill post without the politics." It's humorous to hear Iglesias plea for his former position to be filled in a nonpolitical manner and to hear him bemoan that his firing was tied to politics. What does he think motivated his hiring back in 2001? Politics, of course. Does Iglesias think he was actually the most qualified attorney in New Mexico when he was originally tapped for the job? Of course he wasn't. He had just finished an attorney general's campaign against Patricia Madrid, and his party, Domenici and the White House figured he would have a chance to perform well as U.S. attorney. It was a political appointment, much like the hirings and firings of U.S. attorneys under President Clinton or any other president.
Obviously, political appointees serve at the will of the president; Iglesias knew his job could be there one day and gone the next.
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In this case, it was easy to fire Iglesias, because he didn't perform well on the job. Iglesias was handed thousands of fraudulent voter registration forms in 2004, and he did nothing to investigate. He was informed of numerous other instances of blatant voter fraud, and in response, he formed a task force that issued no report on its findings - what a political solution to a very serious problem. I was at the U.S. attorney's office in September of 2004 when he announced he was going to tackle voter fraud with a task force - I didn't feel confident then, and certainly not now, that his office did everything it could to find the perpetrators, despite evidence being provided to him by the Republican Party and then-Democrat County Clerk Mary Herrera.
Iglesias could have been heralded as a tremendous prosecutor if he had pinned more than one criminal count against our corrupt former State Treasurer Robert Vigil. Instead, he didn't close what the public and the media saw to be a compelling, open-and-shut corruption case.
Also, pending corruption charges against high-profile Democrats - and possibly some Republicans - were known to exist well before the elections of 2006, but he never brought those indictments. Maybe he was gun-shy, incompetent or lacked the guts to take on New Mexico's corrupt power structure. Whatever the reason, his inaction was unacceptable.
It is for all of these reasons that Domenici and Wilson likely called him last year. I have no doubt they were receiving serious questions from constituents about Iglesias' competency and about the pending indictments that were supposed to have been brought forward months before. By all accounts, even Iglesias' account, the phone calls from Wilson and Domenici were brief, and neither official prodded him about the progress of the investigations. Yet, Iglesias claimed in front of Congress that he was threatened, sickened and saddened by the calls. Hollywood would have been proud.
It's no wonder Iglesias didn't prosecute corruption or voter fraud effectively - his weakness is evident in his decision not to report the phone calls from Domenici or Wilson when they happened. If they were so threatening and inappropriate, he should have cried in public the next day, rather than 4 months later. But he only came forward about the calls after he was fired by the Department of Justice. He only came forward after he realized that everyone thought he was a poor prosecutor and his future political career could be in jeopardy. He only came forward after he decided that to protect his own image he could placate the Democratic Party by trying to take down Domenici and Wilson with him.
Now, Democrats are honoring campaign promises to render our government inoperable while they investigate anything and everything about the Republicans in Congress and the executive branch. Work with the president on immigration reform? No way. Health care reform? It can wait. Instead, they've chosen to exert what they've called a "slow-bleed" strategy on our troops in Iraq and to conduct show trials against Republicans for the next year and a half. If anyone bumps into Iglesias, thank him for that. Thank him for his service, tell him he did a good job and pat him on the back - maybe then he'll stop "fragging" honorable public servants on his way out the door to save his name and salvage his reputation.
Scott Darnell is a senior political science major and ran political field operations in central New Mexico for the
Bush campaign.
