New U.S. attorneys seem to have partisan records

WASHINGTON — Under President Bush, the Justice Department has backed laws that narrow voting rights and pressed U.S. attorneys to investigate voter fraud — policies that critics say have been intended to suppress Democratic votes.

Bush, his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, and other Republican political advisers have highlighted voting-rights issues and what Rove has called the "growing problem" of election fraud by Democrats since Bush took power in 2000.

Since 2005, Bush has appointed at least three U.S. attorneys who had worked in the Justice Department's civil-rights division when it was rolling back longstanding voting-rights policies aimed at protecting predominantly poor, minority voters.

Another newly installed U.S. attorney, Tim Griffin in Little Rock, Ark., was accused of participating in efforts to suppress Democratic votes in Florida during the 2004 presidential election while he was a research director for the Republican National Committee. He has denied wrongdoing.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the four U.S. attorneys weren't chosen only because of their backgrounds in election issues, but "we would expect any U.S. attorney to prosecute voting fraud."

The Bush administration's emphasis on voter fraud is drawing scrutiny from the Democratic Congress, which has begun investigating the firings of eight U.S. attorneys — two of whom say their ousters may have been prompted by the Bush administration's dissatisfaction with their probes of alleged Democratic voter fraud.

Administration e-mails have indicated Rove and other White House officials were involved in the dismissals and in selecting a Rove aide to replace a U.S. attorney. Bush has refused to permit Congress to question Rove and others under oath.

Several former Justice lawyers, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of antagonizing the administration, said the division's political appointees reversed the recommendations of career lawyers in key voting-rights cases and transferred or drove out most of the unit's veteran attorneys.

Bradley Schlozman, who was the civil-rights division's deputy chief, agreed in 2005 to reverse the career staff's recommendations to challenge a Georgia law because it was likely to discriminate against black voters. The law would have required voters to pay $20 for photo IDs and in some cases travel as far as 30 miles to obtain the ID card.

A federal judge threw out the law, calling it an unconstitutional, Jim Crow-era poll tax that discriminated against poor, minority voters.

Schlozman, named interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City in November 2005, said he merely affirmed a subordinate's decision to overturn the career staff's recommendations.

He said it was "absolutely not true" that he drove out career lawyers. "What I tried to do was to depoliticize the hiring process," he said. "We hired people across the political spectrum."

Former voting-rights section chief Joseph Rich, however, said longtime career lawyers whose views differed from those of political appointees routinely were "reassigned or stripped of major responsibilities."

In testimony to a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing this week, Rich said 20 of the 35 attorneys in the voting-rights section have been transferred or have left their jobs since April 2005 and a staff of 26 civil-rights analysts who reviewed state laws for discrimination has been slashed to 10.

He said he has yet to see evidence of voter fraud on a scale that warrants voter ID laws, which he said are "without exception ... supported and pushed by Republicans and objected to by Democrats."

Other former voting-rights section lawyers said that during the tenure of Alex Acosta, the division chief from the fall of 2003 until he was named interim U.S. attorney in Miami in the summer of 2005, the department didn't file a single suit alleging that local or state laws or election rules diluted the votes of African Americans. The Clinton administration filed six such cases in a similar time period.

Those kinds of cases, Rich said, are "the guts of the Voting Rights Act."

During this week's House judiciary subcommittee hearing, critics recounted lapses in the division's enforcement. A Citizens Commission on Civil Rights study found that "the enforcement record of the voting section during the Bush administration indicates this traditional priority has been downgraded significantly, if not effectively ignored."

Acosta, the first Hispanic to head the civil-rights division, said he emphasized helping non-English speaking voters cast ballots. In 2005, he told a House panel that he made an unprecedented effort to monitor balloting in 2004 to watch for discrimination against minorities.

A third former civil-rights division employee, Matt Dummermuth, 33, was nominated to be U.S. attorney in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last December. Previously, he was counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights. A Harvard Law School graduate, he was a special assistant to the civil-rights chief from 2002 to 2004. Details of his involvement in reviewing voter rights couldn't be determined.

Bush administration officials have said no single reason led to the firings of the eight U.S. attorneys. But two who were forced to resign said they thought they might have been punished for failing to prosecute Democrats before the 2006 congressional elections or for not vigorously pursuing Republican allegations of voter irregularities in Washington state and New Mexico.

John McKay looked into allegations of voter fraud against Democrats during the hotly contested Washington state governor's race in 2004. He said that later, when top Bush aides interviewed him for a federal judgeship, he was asked to respond to criticism of his inquiry in which no charges were brought. He didn't get the judgeship.

Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico has said he thought "the voter-fraud issue was the foundation" for his firing and that complaints about his failure to pursue corruption matters involving Democrats were "the icing on the cake."

Bud Cummins, the Republican-appointed U.S. attorney in Arkansas who was fired, said he had "serious doubts" that any U.S. attorney was failing to pursue voter fraud aggressively.

"What they're responding to is party chairmen and activists who from the beginning of time go around paranoid that the other party is stealing the election," he said.