(I tried to wait, but this stuff is too good not to promote. I've had a couple of well-placed folks tell me there's probably nothing to this, but with research like this, it's becoming a bit more difficult to accept.....read on. - promoted by MNCampaignReport)
MNCR: Edited gently to make the images less site-layout-killing.
A week ago, I wrote a diary about Minnesota's new United States Attorney, Rachel Paulose, and her possible connection to the "attorney purge" scandal currently engulfing the White House and the Department of Justice. I speculated that the resignation of the previous U.S.A., Thomas Heffelfinger, was related to the current scandal, and it seemed clear to me that the 33-year-old Paulose was chosen because of her her political connections to the conservative establishment and the Republican Party rather than her being the most qualified candidate for the job.
On Tuesday, Minnesota Public Radio interviewed Tom Heffelfinger, and he claimed that politics played no role in his resignation:
The former U.S. attorney for Minnesota says he never felt political pressure from the White House that allegedly led to the firings last year of eight other U.S. attorneys around the country. On Tuesday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales admitted the firings were mishandled, but rejected calls for him to resign. Tom Heffelfinger stepped down from the Minnesota post a year ago, but he says politics wasn't the reason. [...]
Tom Heffelfinger resigned his post as U.S. attorney in Minneapolis last February. He had served two stints -- the first from September 1991 to April 1993, and then again from September 2001 to February 2006. He says no one ever pressured him to leave his post or asked him to leave. He resigned based on a personal decision, driven by his career and his family finances. Moreover, he says he was not pressured to investigate Democrats. "I got no direction whatsoever at any time during this administration, or my last tour as U.S. attorney, to consider politics," he said. "To the contrary, partisan considerations are irrelevant to a public integrity investigation." Is he telling the truth, or just being a good soldier for the Bush administration and the Republican team? Keep in mind that Heffelfinger is a Republican through and through, and thus has motive not to rock the boat by involving himself in this scandal. The City Pages labeled Heffelfinger a "Republican spin doctor" for his role in an investigation into theft at Metropolitan Council Transit Operations. He was appointed as U.S. Attorney by both Bush I and Bush II, ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for Hennepin County Attorney in 1986, and donates heavily to Republican candidates. Based on my investigation into the internal Justice Department documents released recently by the House Judiciary Committee (available at their website), my investigation reveals that there is a good chance that Heffelfinger was one of the U.S. Attorneys originally targeted for dismissal by officials at the Department of Justice and the White House.
Read below the jump to examine my evidence. |
Exhibit A: excerpt from a January 9th, 2006 e-mail from Kyle Sampson, chief of staff for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who recently "resigned" but for now remains on the job until he "goes job hunting," to Harriet Miers and William Kelley at the White House, showing the seven U.S. Attorneys that were first selected for the "purge." Attorneys that did not end up being a part of the purge (#1, 2, 4) have been redacted from this memo, so we must piece it together based on other evidence.
Another key piece of information in this memo is in the last line: "2) ask EOUSA to begin quietly calling [those selected for the "purge"] to ascertain their intentions for continued service/indicating to them that they might want to consider looking for other employment." Hold on to this; it will come in handy later.
Exhibit B: an excerpt from the same memo, showing Sampson's plan to "work quietly with targeted U.S. Attorneys to encourage them to leave government service voluntarily; this would allow targeted U.S. attorneys to make arrangements for work in the private sector and 'save face' regarding the reason for leaving office, both in the Department of Justice and in their local legal communities."
Exhibit C: An excerpt from an April 14, 2006 memo from Kyle Sampson to a White House official, noting that "two others on my original list [see Exhibit A above] have already left office."
Following the pattern, these names have already been redacted. However, extensive searches of LexisNexis have indicated that only three U.S. Attorneys left their posts between Jan. 1st, 2006 and April 14th, 2006:
*Paul Warner of Utah resigned January 27, 2006 to take a post as a federal magistrate judge in the District Court of Utah. (sources: Salt Lake Tribune, 1/26/06; Deseret Morning News, 1/27/06; Associated Press, 2/25/06)
*Thomas Heffelfinger of Minnesota resigned February 28, 2006 to return to the private sector. At the time, he cited "personal" and "financial" reasons for his resignation. (sources: Pioneer Press, 2/15/06; Star Tribune, 2/15/06)
*Todd Graves of Missouri resigned March 24, 2006 to "return to private practice and become more involved in politics." (source: Associated Press State & Local Wire, 3/10/06)
Again, these are the three resignations I could find, after extensive searching, for that period. It seems that nobody has compiled a comprehensive, publicly-available list of U.S. Attorney resignations, not even the Justice Department. If you can add any to this list, please help.
However, if we accept that these are the only three U.S. Attorneys who resigned during the period of January 1 - April 14, then it follows that two of these prosecutors were the ones that Kyle Sampson referenced as the "two others on my original list [who] have already left office," and thus two of these three were targeted for elimination by Sampson/Gonzales and the White House.
In my estimation, we could also exclude Warner of Utah from being on that list, due to the fact that he resigned to take a position as a federal magistrate, which must have been in the works for some time. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, at the time of his resignation, Warner "joked that it's 'the worst kept secret in America' that he [was] the finalist for a newly created position on the bench" (1/26/07). If plans to install Warner as a magistrate had circulated widely in the Department of Justice, which seems likely, then Sampson doubtless would have known about it. Further, if Warner had fallen out of favor with the DOJ or the White House, would anyone expect that he would be rewarded with a "newly created" federal judgeship? Thus, I believe, it is reasonable to conclude that Warner had not been targeted for dismissal.
So this leaves Graves and Heffelfinger as the two prosecutors who, I believe, were most likely among those redacted from Sampson's original list. Based on my own investigation, I believe that they were contacted by the Department of Justice and, in Sampson's words, "encourage[d]... to leave government service voluntarily" (Exhibit B). Informed of the Justice Department's intentions to fire them, perhaps, they resigned to "save face," as Sampson suggested.
I can't speak to why Todd Graves would have been on the list, though a Missouri blog, Fired Up! Missouri, has unraveled a web of connections involving Graves; one of the "Gonzales Eight," Bud Cummins; and officials in Missouri Governor Matt Blunt's administration that warrants further investigation. As far as I'm aware, no reporter has asked Graves for comment on the ongoing purge scandal, and if he was pressured to resign.
Possible motives for why the Justice Department would want to get rid of Heffelfinger are hard to come by, too. Of course, the ongoing attorney purge story has shown that Sampson et. al. did not feel the need to justify their actions at all, dismissing well-respected, effective attorneys who had been given positive performance reviews and then claiming that they were dismissed for "performance-related" reasons.
One possible motive I came up with is Heffelfinger's refusal to pursue Mary Kiffmeyer's crusade against Hennepin and Ramsey counties in what seemed like a clear attempt to depress voter turnout in those two overwhelmingly Democratic counties by invalidating voter registration forms. The City Pages has a detailed explanation of the situation, which a Macalester newspaper editorial described succinctly:
Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer, a Republican up for reelection this year, wants to make it harder to vote. By saying that, I'm oversimplifying reality in order to grab your attention. The reality is that she really doesn't want anyone who is not of her party to vote. That's why the Secretary of State's office produced a new, more complicated and confusing voter registration card before the 2004 elections. Hennepin County (Minneapolis) and Ramsey County (St. Paul) wouldn't bite though, and kept using the simpler federal election form. Kiffmeyer tried to get the US Attorney to take them to court, saying the counties were in violation of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). The US Attorney investigated, and discovered that not only were the counties safe within federal laws-they were doing exactly what HAVA prescribed.
Actually, it was Joseph D. Rich, Chief of the Voting Section of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, who delivered the smackdown to Kiffmeyer's hare-brained scheme. Presumably, Heffelfinger could have ordered his own investigation and perhaps helped the Republican team in the '04 elections, but declined. We have learned that many of the fired U.S. Attorneys were faulted for not aggressively pursuing trumped-up "voter fraud" allegations that would have helped Republicans in the 2004 and 2006 elections. Is it possible that someone complained about Heffelfinger in this regard, too?
Additionally, a diarist at EPluribusMedia has discovered a possible link between Heffelfinger and Margaret Chiara of Michigan, one of the recently-fired attorneys: when Heffelfinger resigned, Chiara took his position as chair of the U.S. Attorney General's Native American Issues Subcommittee, and notes, "only a very small number of USAs have ever been identified publicly as NAIS members under this administration - and three of them in addition to Chiara have stepped down or been dismissed." Could there be a link between these dismissals / resignations? Is this related at all to this Sampson memo discussing the "termination" of a subcommittee, whose name is redacted?
So, what do you think? Is this just a crazy conspiracy theory, or is there something to my argument that Heffelfinger was a target of the attorney purge?
Additional research help on this topic would be appreciated. The discovery of other resignations between January 1st and April 14th, 2006 might invalidate conclusions I have drawn in this diary. Discovery of possible DOJ/WH motives for wanting Heffelfinger or Graves gone would also be essential, and further exploration of the NAIS subcommittee connection may prove interesting. |
