It’s not as if we need additional evidence that former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was fired for failing to politicize his office, but proof keeps piling up anyway.

Weeks before the 2006 midterm election, then-New Mexico U.S. Atty. David C. Iglesias was invited to dine with a well-connected Republican lawyer in Albuquerque who had been after him for years to prosecute allegations of voter fraud.

“I had a bad feeling about that lunch,” said Iglesias, describing his meeting at Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen with Patrick Rogers, a lawyer who provided occasional 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.

What Iglesias did not know was that Rogers and Mickey Barnett, another prominent GOP attorney in New Mexico, had taken their concerns about Iglesias and “voter fraud” directly to DC. Monica Goodling (who else?) helped arrange some meetings for them.

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.

When Iglesias said he believes “all roads lead to Rove,” he wasn’t kidding.

Rick Hasen alerted me to this Houston Chronicle piece from the other day, about legislation in Texas that would — in the interest of preventing non-existent “voter fraud” — require that registered voters present photo IDs proving their citizenship before voting.

The measure is championed by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R) and GOP lawmakers in Austin, who are using the same arguments heard in other states that have considered adding hurdles to participating in elections. Dewhurst has been relying on Mike Baselice, a prominent Republican pollster in Texas, who’s been helping bolster the party’s strategy.

Baselice conducted a poll the first week in April for an anonymous client on another subject. He says he threw the voter ID question in on his own, because it was a hot topic at the time. He provided the results to Republicans, who are now using it to support their cause.

The poll found 95 percent of Republicans, 91 percent of independents and 87 percent of Democrats support using photo IDs.

Royal Masset, the former political director of the Republican Party of Texas, who trained Baselice, says it is easy to elicit that kind of response to a poll question.

Among Republicans it is an “article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections,” Masset said. He doesn’t agree with that, but does believe that requiring photo IDs could cause enough of a dropoff in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote. (emphasis added)

And that, my friends, is what the “voter fraud” game is all about.

Newly-minted conservative Mitt Romney bashed GOP’s Contract With America in 1994. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Saturday Roundup.

Political scientist Pete Moore wrote a fascinating item for Salon about his endeavor digging through the massive archive of Coalition Provisional Authority documents. As Moore acknowledged, he didn’t expect to find too many hidden gems — insightful personal letters may occasionally fall out of dusty old volumes in libraries, but the CPA’s archives are paperless.

But Moore neglected to factor in human error.

It turns out the IT era really is different, after all. It took my 8-year-old son just a few seconds to shake loose some hidden history from within the official transcript of the CPA.

My son made his discovery while impatiently waiting to play a computer game on my laptop. As part of a research project, I had downloaded 45 documents from a section of the CPA Web site known as Consolidated Weekly Reports. All but three of the documents were Microsoft Word. I had one of the Word documents up on my screen when my son starting toying with the computer mouse. Somehow, inadvertently, he managed to pull down the “View” menu at the top of the screen and select the “Mark up” option. If you are in a Word document where “Track changes” has been turned on, hitting “Mark up” will reveal all the deletions and insertions ever made in the document, complete with times, dates and (sometimes) the initials of the editors. When my son did it, all the deleted passages in a document with the innocuous name “Administrator’s Weekly Economic Report” suddenly appeared in blue and purple. It was the electronic equivalent of seeing every draft of an author’s paper manuscript and all the penciled changes made by the editors.

I soon figured out that with a few keystrokes I could see the deleted passages in 20 of the 42 Word documents I’d downloaded.

Let this be a lesson to all of us — keep young children around for computer-related research projects.

Of course, this isn’t just an amusing story about a fruitful accident; Moore (with his son’s help) also found some important CPA-related details in the previously-hidden passages. I don’t want to alarm anyone, but apparently CPA officials were dangerously clueless about the insurgency and why it existed. Take a look.

In March, we started hearing about the panic and paralysis that had taken over the Justice Department in the wake of the prosecutor purge scandal. “You have no idea,” said one Justice official, “how bad it is here.” By one account, top DoJ officials — the ones who haven’t resigned — were turning on each other. “It’s unreal — it’s open warfare over there,” a former Justice official with close ties to Gonzales’ team said.

And it’s under these conditions that the Justice Department needs to find a new Deputy Attorney General for a lame-duck administration, under a scandal-plagued Attorney General. How’s the search going? (via TP)

Few in Washington have envied Paul McNulty over the past three months. But with the deputy attorney general’s resignation last week amid the scandal over the firings of at least eight U.S. attorneys, there’s one person whose position might be even less desirable: McNulty’s yet-to-be-named successor.

“I’d rather trade places with Jose Padilla,” jokes Viet Dinh, a former senior Justice official under then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Ouch.

I can’t imagine what’s holding potential applicants back. The last DAG was blamed for the purge scandal despite having been “largely left out of the loop,” and his predecessor was James Comey, who had a rather unique experience with Gonzales and the Bush White House during his tenure.

And now no one wants the gig? Who would’ve guessed?

Sure, I realize that some Supreme Court justices are going to be less curious than others, and some prefer delving into briefs to quizzing counsel, but Clarence Thomas’ reticence is unnerving.

Justice Clarence Thomas sat through 68 hours of oral arguments in the Supreme Court’s current term without uttering a word.

In nearly 16 years on the court, Thomas typically has asked questions a couple of times a term.

But the last time Thomas asked a question in court was Feb. 22, 2006, in a death penalty case out of South Carolina. A unanimous court eventually broadened the ability of death-penalty defendants to blame someone else for the crime.

Since October 2004, when high court transcripts began identifying justices by name, Thomas has said 281 words total. Justice Stephen Breyer, who sits next to Thomas, has uttered nearly 35,000 words since January.

My guess is he speaks far more often behind the scenes. After all, he and Scalia have to chat about how best to vote together on all the major cases, right?

The AP had an interesting item today, highlighting Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ perspective on being close friends with the president. As the embattled Gonzales sees it, his close relationship with Bush, which spans decades, is inherently “a good thing” for everyone.

“Being able to go and having a very candid conversation and telling the president: ‘Mr. President, this cannot be done. You can’t do this,’ — I think you want that,” Gonzales told reporters this week. “And I think having a personal relationship makes that, quite frankly, much easier always to deliver bad news.”

“Do you recall a time when you (were) in there and said, ‘Mr. President, we can’t do this’?” Gonzales was asked.

“Oh, yeah,” the attorney general responded.

“Can you share it with us?” a reporter asked.

“No,” Gonzales said.

Now, I think there are two ways to look at this.

1. Gonzales is lying about this little story, and there’s never been a time in which he’s had to keep the president from going too far. He’s the quintessential “yes man,” who does as he’s told.

2. Gonzales is telling the truth, and the Attorney General/WH Counsel — the one who’s approved of abandoning the Geneva Conventions and the rule of law — believes some of the president’s other requests are beyond the pale.

I’m struggling to decide which is worse.

James Comey’s startling testimony earlier this week stunned much of the political world, but for many of us on the left, there was one point that was particularly hard to digest: in this dramatic tale, John Ashcroft was (gulp) something of a hero.

Peter Baker and Susan Schmidt report today that the revelations are leading some observers to reconsider the former Attorney General in a new light.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) praised his “fidelity to the rule of law.” The Wonkette Web site posted the headline: “Ashcroft Takes Heroic Stand.” Under a similar headline, “John Ashcroft, American Hero,” Andrew Sullivan expressed astonishment on his Atlantic magazine blog that “John Ashcroft was way too moderate for these people. John Ashcroft.”

Ralph G. Neas, president of the liberal group People for the American Way and one of Ashcroft’s strongest critics over the years, said the incident told more about his successor, Gonzales, who was one of the two Bush aides at the hospital that night.

“I did not think it was even possible to make John Ashcroft into a civil libertarian,” Neas said in an interview. “But somehow Alberto Gonzales for at least one moment managed to make John Ashcroft into a defender of the Constitution.”

Indeed, Baker and Schmidt point to a variety of instances in which Ashcroft took on the Cheney/Rumsfeld axis, including opposition to indefinite detentions at Guantanamo Bay and the administration’s model for military commissions.

All of this is true, of course, but let’s not go overboard. Ashcroft starts to look sensible and reasonable in large part because his successor is such a joke.

This is, after all, the same Ashcroft who relentlessly pushed some of the most dangerous provisions of the Patriot Act, endorsed torture, made poor choices, showed bizarre priorities, suffered crushing defeats at the Supreme Court, issued highly dubious terrorist threat warnings, fought with Congress over documents to which lawmakers were legally entitled, and may have even fibbed in his testimony to the 9/11 Commission. And that’s not even including the “Spirit of Justice” incident.

Confronted by Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales over warrantless surveillance, Ashcroft did the right thing and defended the rule of law. But I’d probably hold off on sending him an ACLU membership application.

It’s kind of amusing to think that literally just 10 days ago, it seemed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was, facts be damned, going to keep his job. He believed he had “weathered the storm.” He was caught in the midst of a massive scandal he still can’t explain, his Justice Department is divided and dysfunctional, and he’d lost the trust of pretty much everyone who has objectively considered the facts, but Bush is satisfied — so Gonzales is “confident” that he’s going to stay right where he is.

For that matter, it seemed, for unclear reasons, that there was nothing Congress would do about it. Since James Comey’s Senate testimony on Tuesday, however, it’s become clear that Gonzales hadn’t weathered the storm, he was just in the storm’s eye.

After Sens. Schumer and Feinstein unveiled their no-confidence resolution, all eyes were on Senate Republicans to see how much, if any, GOP push-back there’d be. The White House dismissed the measure as a “stunt,” but the Senate minority has barely lifted a finger to oppose the resolution. Indeed, the afternoon it was introduced, more GOP lawmakers abandoned Gonzales. (For those keeping score at home, there are 10 Republican senators who’ve said, publicly, they think it’s time for Gonzales to go, one way or another.)

This morning, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Gonzales’ days as AG are numbered.

[O]n CBS’s Face the Nation, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) underlined the importance and seriousness of the vote, calling it a “rare” and “very forceful, historical statement.” He predicted that “before the vote is taken that Attorney General Gonzales may step down.”

Maybe. But reading over the transcript of Friday’s White House gaggle, a Bush spokesperson made it sound as if Congress may have to impeach Gonzales, because losing the confidence of lawmakers just isn’t enough.

Sudarsan Raghavan has an important front-page piece in the Washington Post today on what appears to be a major overhaul of Moqtada al-Sadr’s political tactics. Sadr seems to be making a new play: giving up on Maliki’s government and “moderating” the Mahdi image. Raghavan calls it one of the most “dramatic tactical shifts since the beginning of the war” for Sadr’s movement.

The 33-year-old populist is reaching out to a broad array of Sunni leaders, from politicians to insurgents, and purging extremist members of his Mahdi Army militia who target Sunnis. Sadr’s political followers are distancing themselves from the fragile Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which is widely criticized as corrupt, inefficient and biased in favor of Iraq’s majority Shiites. And moderates are taking up key roles in Sadr’s movement, professing to be less anti-American and more nationalist as they seek to improve Sadr’s image and position him in the middle of Iraq’s ideological spectrum.

“We want to aim the guns against the occupation and al-Qaeda, not between Iraqis,” Ahmed Shaibani, 37, a cleric who leads Sadr’s newly formed reconciliation committee, said as he sat inside Sadr’s heavily guarded compound here.

The whole piece is definitely worth reading. As Juan Cole noted, Sadr may very well be “maneuvering to have a Sadrist PM succeed al-Maliki if the latter’s government fall.”

Naturally, given the circumstances, Sadr’s “reform” efforts and outreach to Sunnis are viewed with skepticism. Raghavan spoke with a Sunni seamstress who lives in Baghdad’s Risala neighborhood, who was recently forced to flee from her home by the Mahdi Army, which broke her young son’s leg during a home invasion.

“Moqtada is saying something, but on the ground they are doing something else,” she said. Sadr’s call to reconcile with Sunnis is “all nonsense,” she added. “They want to know who the Sunnis are, so they can start butchering people at their own pace.”