by Deb Cupples | Yesterday, Barack Obama called for a special prosecutor to take over the Justice Department's widely publicized attacks on the voting-rights group ACORN. (CNN) Obama has cause to doubt the Justice Department's objectivity, because this is not the first time that Republican operatives have gone after ACORN during the weeks before a major election.
In 2006, for example, then-U.S. Attorney in Missouri Bradley Schlozman vigorously pursued a case against ACORN under highly questionable circumstances -- and he apparently violated the Justice Department's own policies when doing so.
Basically, here's what happened, according to the Boston Globe:
"That summer, the liberal activist group ACORN paid workers $8 an hour to sign up new voters in poor neighborhoods around the country. Later, ACORN's Kansas City [Missouri] chapter discovered that several workers filled out registration forms fraudulently instead of finding real people to sign up. ACORN fired the workers and alerted law enforcement.
"Schlozman moved fast, so fast that his office got one of the names on the indictments wrong. He announced the indictments of four former ACORN workers on Nov. 1, 2006, warning that 'this national investigation is very much ongoing.' Missouri Republicans seized on the indictments to blast Democrats in the campaign endgame.
"Critics later accused Schlozman of violating the Justice Department's own rules. A 1995 Justice election crime manual says 'federal prosecutors . . . should be extremely careful not to conduct overt investigations during the preelection period' to avoid 'chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities' and causing "the investigation itself to become a campaign issue.'"
Incidentally, Missouri was a battle-ground state during the November 2006 congressional elections.
I remember this information coming out while watching a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing back in June 2007.
The Justice Department manual that called for delay regarding minor voter-fraud cases until after an election was informally called the "Red Book."
As noted in red text above, the reason the Red Book called for caution and delay is that anyone could taint an election's outcome simply 1) by making accusations, even false ones, about voter fraud; and 2) by making sure those accusations got plenty of press attention.
What happened back in 2006? After ACORN voluntarily alerted law enforcement that the four fired workers had erroneously registered voters, U.S. Attorney Bradley Schlozman started getting indictments against those few fired workers -- and ACORN's name became directly connected in the media to criminal activity.
What did Missouri Republican party officials do?
According to a 2007 Washington Post article, they "used the voter-registration indictments last fall in campaign literature attacking Democrat Claire McCaskill in her Senate election bid."
In other words, GOP officials tried to use the Justice Department's questionably timed indictments to defeat a Democrat in a senate race.
That's precisely the type of behavior that the Red Book's authors had sought to prevent.
At the June 2007 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Mr. Schlozman actually admitted that waiting a few weeks to launch the case against ACORN's fired workers likely would not have affected the case.
Incidentally, Mr. Schlozman originally blamed fellow Justice Department attorneys for pushing him to launch the case before the election. Apparently, those attorneys didn't like that.
One result: Mr. Schlozman altered his prior testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a letter to Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, Mr. Schlozman retracted the blame that he'd laid at other lawyers' feet, stating "I take full responsibility for the decision to move forward with the prosecutions" (Legal Times has a pdf the letter).
It doesn't end with Mr. Schlozman. In 2006, ex-U.S. Attorney from New Mexico David Iglesias was fired, in part, he suspects, because he refused to prosecute ACORN after investigating the group. TruthDig reports:
"Professor Peter Dreier, director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Program at Occidental College in Los Angeles, told me that 'of all the organizations in the country that represent the poor, except for the labor unions, ACORN is the most effective.' With a good political research operation and a grasp of local, state and national politics, ACORN targets its work in swing districts, 'registering voters who are likely to be Democrats,' Dreier said.
"ACORN’s success woke up New Mexico State Republican Chairman Allen Weh and other state party officials. They accused ACORN of fraud in the 2004 drive that registered 35,000 potential voters, according to The Albuquerque Tribune.
"U.S. Attorney Iglesias investigated the complaints. He formed a task force that took a close look at more than 300 of them. In fact, some ACORN workers, who were paid for each person they registered, weren’t too fussy about whom they signed up. ACORN fired a worker for registering a 13-year-old boy.
"But in January 2005, The Albuquerque Tribune reported that the U.S. attorney’s office had said most of the complaints were 'not criminally prosecutable.'”
"Unhappy about this, Weh met with Iglesias over coffee. 'I told him there were well-known instances of voter fraud and people expect them to be prosecuted,' Weh told the Tribune. Weh said he then took his complaint to an aide to Karl Rove, President Bush’s political brain. 'The next time I saw that [Rove] staffer, I said, ‘Man, you guys need to get a new U.S. attorney. This guy is hopeless,’ Weh said.
And that's just what the Bush Administration did: fired Mr. Iglesias.
Frankly, I don't know the facts underlying the 2008 accusations against ACORN, so I cannot comment on them.
I do, however, find it more than a little odd that the Justice Department is -- once again -- publicly branding ACORN with accusations of criminal activity so close to another federal election.
Memeorandum has commentary.
Other Buck Naked Politics Posts:
* Schlozman Alters Testimony & Looks for Loopholes
* Overview: Fired U.S. Attorney Scandal
* Fall-out for the Axis of Diesel, Falling Oil Prices...
* Meanwhile, Economy Continues to Sicken
* Lehman Execs Re-Distributed in Shareholder Wealth (to Themselves)
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The GOP has got nothing, except a boat anchor called GW's record. So they go with smears.
What they're doing is really, really bad, even worse than trying to steal an election. They are turning American against American. They are setting up decades of bitterness and division. To paraphrase Pogo, America has met the enemy and it is the GOP.
Posted by: Charles | October 18, 2008 at 05:17 PM