Iglesias meets with White House investigators

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Fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias held a three-hour meeting this week with the staff of the Office of Special Counsel, which last month launched “a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.” Iglesias also reveals:

Weeks before the 2006 midterm election, …Iglesias was invited to dine with a well-connected Republican lawyer in Albuquerque, N.M., who had been after him for years to prosecute allegations of voter fraud.

“I had a bad feeling about that lunch,” says Iglesias, describing his meeting at Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen with Patrick Rogers, a former counsel to the New Mexico Republican Party.

When the voter-fraud issue came up, Iglesias said, he explained to Rogers that in reviewing more than 100 complaints, he hadn’t found any solid enough to justify criminal charges.

Unbeknownst to Iglesias, a few months before that lunch, Rogers and another Republican attorney from New Mexico, Mickey Barnett, had complained about Iglesias at the Justice Department in Washington. The session was arranged with the assistance of the department’s then-White House liaison, Monica M. Goodling, and an aide to White House political strategist Karl Rove, according to e-mails released recently by congressional investigators.

One of those they met with was Matthew Friedrich, a senior counselor to Gonzales. Friedrich would meet again with Rogers and Barnett in New Mexico, where, he told congressional investigators, the pair complained about Iglesias. They made it clear “that they did not want him to be the U.S. attorney…. They mentioned that they had communicated that with Sen. Domenici, and they also mentioned Karl Rove,” Friedrich said, according to a transcript provided by congressional investigators.

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/05/19/iglesias-meets-with-white-house-investigators/