http://www.cooperativeresearch.org The Center for Grassroots Oversight aims to provide the public with a means to collaborate on investigations at the grassroots level. en-us http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a050605wehiglesias#a050605wehiglesias http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a050605wehiglesias#a050605wehiglesias New Mexico's US Attorney, David Iglesias , meets with state Republican Party chairman Allen Weh after he learns that Weh and the party are unhappy with the results of his 2004 election fraud task force . Iglesias is aware that he cannot ethically respond directly to such complaints, and he cannot provide information about ongoing investigations. However, he wants to reassure his fellow Republicans that he will prosecute "provable" voter fraud cases, but will not bring a case if it does not stand a good chance of winning a conviction. He first passed that message along to New Mexico Republicans through a friend in the party, but when the message produced little positive results, he arranged to meet Weh for coffee near Weh's home. At the meeting, Iglesias attempts to explain to Weh that he can only prosecute voter fraud cases if he has sufficient evidence to do so. Weh is unmoved by Iglesias's explanations. He asks if Iglesias is "in trouble" with the New Mexico Republican Party. He will later claim that Iglesias tries to blame the FBI for the lack of voter fraud prosecutions. And he tells Iglesias that he needs to do something concrete about voter fraud, and should have already done so. Shortly after the meeting, Weh complains about Iglesias to Scott Jennings, a White House official working for White House political chief Karl Rove. A 2008 investigation of the 2006 US Attorney purge will find that Weh has been pressuring Iglesias since at least August 2004 to pursue voter fraud allegations . Weh will tell the investigators that he was not convinced by Iglesias's explanation, that he felt Iglesias was unqualified to be US Attorney, and had deliberately ignored credible evidence of voter fraud in New Mexico. He will say that many New Mexico Republicans feel the same way. These feelings are why he chose to complain to Jennings about Iglesias. He conveys his perceptions to Jennings and recommends that the Bush administration fire Iglesias. He will also send an email to Jennings about Iglesias and voter fraud in August 2005 . Other Republicans in New Mexico will complain to the White House about Iglesias as well, including the chief of staff to Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), Steve Bell. mtuck 2013-06-13T20:35:50+02:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=amid0305griffinlist#amid0305griffinlist http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=amid0305griffinlist#amid0305griffinlist Timothy Griffin, a former Republican National Committee aide and a veteran Republican political operative , learns that Kyle Sampson, deputy chief of staff for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales , has identified the US Attorney for Eastern Arkansas, Bud Cummins, as one of several US Attorneys who should be fired (see and ). Griffin, a lawyer who has twice attempted to secure that position for himself, learns of the news from Sara Taylor, the White House's new director of political affairs (replacing Karl Rove, who still supervises all political issues from his new position as deputy chief of staff--see ). Griffin is considering joining Taylor's staff, but even before his hiring, he attends several "directors" meetings at the White House. After one of these meetings, Taylor shows him the list of US Attorneys slated for dismissal. The list includes Cummins. Taylor says she does not know why Cummins is on the list, but she believes it may be because he lost his sponsor, Senator Tim Hutchinson (R-AR), when Hutchinson lost his bid for re-election in 2002. Griffin joins Taylor's staff, and shortly thereafter meets with White House counsel Harriet Miers, who also tells him that the White House is planning to fire Cummins. She asks Griffin if he is interested in the position, and he says he would like the job after completing a stint in the White House. Miers warns him that it might be difficult to have him approved for the position after having worked for the White House Office of Political Affairs. Miers, Rove, and Taylor discuss Griffin's employment options through the rest of March. Miers tells Rove that she has considered making Griffin a political appointee in one of the two US Attorneys' offices in Arkansas, or perhaps having Griffin replace the deputy director of the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department. Rove responds, "What about him for the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas?" Miers replies that such a move is "definitely a possibility" because the current US Attorney, Cummins, is going to be replaced. Miers tells Rove that Griffin has spoken with her about his desire for the slot, but for now he wants to stay with the White House. Taylor responds to the exchange by saying in part, "My fear is they end up putting him [Griffin] at Justice (which he does not want to do); it's a year before he's made US Attorney, if ever." In another email, Taylor writes to Rove that Griffin "would love to be US Attorney--he'd love to come here in the meantime." Griffin accepts the position of deputy director of political affairs at the White House, promising Taylor that he will stay in the position at least after the November 2006 election unless the US Attorney position opens up before then. For his part, Cummins, who is toying with the idea of leaving the position, speaks with Griffin periodically throughout the year about Griffin taking the position after Cummins resigns. Cummins will later say that he always assumed the choice as to if and when to resign would be his, and that he always assumed Griffin would get the job because he is so well connected politically. Griffin later says he never pushed Cummins to leave, but will tell Justice Department investigators , "I was laying low." Griffin will say that to his mind, Cummins's removal and his own ascension to the post were two separate things. "I didn't know why he was being fired," Griffin will say, "but I knew that if he was going to be fired, then I wanted to be considered for that job." Griffin, a member of the Army Reserve, will leave his White House position in August 2005 to serve as a Judge Advocate General officer in Iraq, and will stay in close contact with officials in both the White House and the Justice Department throughout his yearlong tour of duty. mtuck 2013-06-06T02:50:23+02:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a0505evergreenmckay#a0505evergreenmckay http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a0505evergreenmckay#a0505evergreenmckay The Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a conservative activist organization in Washington state, sends a three-page letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urging the Justice Department to investigate US Attorney John McKay for misconduct. The foundation charges that McKay "has committed malfeasance by systematically refusing to act on evidence of election fraud delivered to his office." The foundation, along with several Republican leaders in Washington state, say that McKay willfully ignored complaints of election fraud in the hotly contested 2004 governor's race between Christine Gregoire (D-WA) and Dino Rossi (R-WA--see ). McKay opened an investigation, but did not empanel a grand jury to investigate further (see , and ). McKay will later say that his office found no grounds for the voter fraud allegations: "We had lots of instances of incompetent handling of an election. What we didn't find was a criminal act." The director of that group's voter integrity project, Jonathan Bechtle, later says that he believes his group's complaint was forwarded to the Justice Department office that oversees US Attorneys, but will say, "I couldn't get any information out of them as to the conclusion." mtuck 2013-06-03T18:03:21+02:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a042805tronotaperec#a042805tronotaperec http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a042805tronotaperec#a042805tronotaperec Richard Hertling, the acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, writes an email to Richard Trono, an aide in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General (ODAG), concerning a conversation Trono had with US Attorney Paul Charlton of Arizona . Charlton wants to begin tape-recording interrogations by FBI agents of suspected criminals, a policy the FBI resists. Hertling says he has discussed the matter with Charlton, and has advised Charlton to have the Attorney General's Advisory Council (AGAC) form a task force on the issue. Hertling is aware that Trono has expressed an interest in having an ODAG working group address the issue. "I already have a lawyer assigned to the issue," Hertling writes, "and he ca[n] do a fair amount of the leg-work to make this happen." Trono responds with enthusiasm, and indicates that Deputy Attorney General James Comey is also interested in setting up a working group to study the matter. Trono says that after Comey announced it at a recent US Attorneys conference, "I immediately had half a dozen USAs [US Attorneys] approach me with passionate views (interestingly, on either end of the debate)." mtuck 2013-06-03T18:02:12+02:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a042805mckaymorefraud#a042805mckaymorefraud http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a042805mckaymorefraud#a042805mckaymorefraud FBI documents show that an unnamed political group supplies what it considers to be evidence of voter fraud--the forging of signatures on provisional ballots--to the office of US Attorney John McKay of the Western District of Washington. The group may be the Building Industry Association of Washington (BIAW), headed by Republican activist Tom McCabe, who has pressured McKay to pursue previous allegations of voter fraud in the recent gubernatorial election , evidence that was found to be groundless . McCabe has already demanded that the White House fire McKay and replace him with someone friendlier to Republican interests . McKay has received pressure on the voter fraud issue from several state Republicans aside from McCabe (see and ). An Assistant US Attorney in McKay's office will later confirm that even if the affidavits had been forged, the US Attorney's office had no jurisdiction over the matter, as the allegations are about a state election and the US Attorney is a federal entity. The group later supplies the evidence to the Republican petitioners in a state case about the election, and its lawyers choose not to pursue the evidence, as the handwriting analysis "proving" the forgeries will be found to be unreliable. mtuck 2013-06-03T18:01:12+02:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a032305friedrichhold#a032305friedrichhold http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a032305friedrichhold#a032305friedrichhold Associate White House counsel Dabney Friedrich, acting at the behest of her superior, White House counsel Harriet Miers, sends Kyle Sampson, deputy chief of staff for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales , an email asking him to confirm Miers's understanding that the "plan" to fire and replace selected US Attorneys is "to wait until each has served a four-year term. She was operating under the assumption that we would act to remove/replace right away." Sampson replies that he, Friedrich, Miers, and Gonzales should discuss the matter, but he has recommended that the attorneys should be replaced "selectively" after their four-year terms expire. Sampson writes that to do otherwise might cause consternation among home-state politicians and "internal management trouble" within the Justice Department. Sampson emphasizes that he is expressing his views and not those of Gonzales. Friedrich replies with her agreement, and says she would be surprised to hear differently from either Miers or Gonzales. Little is said among the principals in the attorney-firing process for several months. The first expirations will not begin until November 2005, and according to a later Justice Department investigation , Sampson will decide to "back-burner" the issue until later in the year. mtuck 2013-06-03T18:00:39+02:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a101804statonvoterreg#a101804statonvoterreg http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a101804statonvoterreg#a101804statonvoterreg Chad Staton of Defiance County, Ohio, is charged with filling out 124 fictitious voter registration forms, some using the names of celebrities and fictitious characters, including Michael Jackson (the pop singer), Jeffrey Dahmer (the famous serial killer), and Disney character Mary Poppins. Staton was hired by Toledo resident Georgianne Pitts to collect legitimate voter registration forms from unregistered voters. Instead, he filled the forms out himself, according to Sheriff David Westrick. Deputies also allege that Staton was paid in crack cocaine instead of in cash, after a search of his house turned up drug paraphernalia and blank voter registration forms; Westrick says Pitts admitted paying Staton in crack cocaine. Staton is charged with a felony, false registration. Pitts says she was recruited by Thaddeus Jackson, the assistant Ohio director of the NAACP National Voter Fund (NVF). Greg Moore, the executive director of the NVF, says the organization is "shocked" by the allegations and welcomes the investigation. "We believe anyone violating the law hurts the credibility of NVF and more importantly the thousands of hard-working men and women who are legally registering people to vote," he says, adding that he hopes the allegations do not damage the reputation of other "volunteers and canvassers who have worked tirelessly to enfranchise the disenfranchised throughout the year." Jackson says Pitts is a volunteer for the NVF, and that he knew nothing of the allegations until he was told of them by a reporter from the Toledo Blade. Westrick says his office was alerted to the problematic forms after a complaint was filed by the Defiance County Board of Elections. The handwriting on the forms was too similar, officials thought, and some of the addresses did not seem legitimate. The names were the giveaway, Westrick says. "Mary Poppins hasn't voted here in a long time. Michael Jackson hasn't. Those were some of the fictitious names," he says. Within hours of Staton's arrest, the Ohio Republican Party issues a statement claiming "the effort to steal Ohio's election is under way, and it's being driven exclusively by interest groups working to register Democrat voters." The NVF has submitted over 80,000 legitimate voter registration forms. Staton's fraudulent forms are around 0.15 percent of the total number of NVF forms submitted. The Ohio Democratic Party states that it does not condone registration fraud; a spokesperson says that of the 500,000 forms submitted for newly registered voters, "the vast, vast majority are clearly eligible voters who did the right thing." The NVF has been accused of submitting fraudulent registration forms in the past. The Blade notes that a Republican organization, Voters Outreach of America, destroyed voter registration forms its volunteers collected from Democratic voters in Nevada and Oregon. mtuck 2013-06-03T17:59:53+02:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a052301whitedepartusa#a052301whitedepartusa http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a052301whitedepartusa#a052301whitedepartusa Mary Jo White, the US Attorney for Southern New York, announces that she will be leaving her position by the end of the year. According to a media report, this will impact how a number of ongoing investigations continue, including White's probe into the last-minute pardons issued by President Clinton. Other investigations by White's office involve allegations against Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Senator Robert Torricelli (D-NJ), as well as an investigation into Osama bin Laden's role in the September 11, 2001 attacks. It is uncertain how those probes will fare. But, says White's former deputy, Matthew Fishbein, White "may want some resolution before her term ends." Regardless, Fishbein adds, "[T]his is an office where US Attorneys come and go and the work continues." White is almost the only US Attorney to retain her seat after President Bush took office in January 2001 . Attorney General John Ashcroft put an assistant in charge of the 9/11 investigation, and that investigation seems to be producing little new information. mtuck 2013-06-03T17:57:42+02:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=92OsamaChechnya#92OsamaChechnya http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=92OsamaChechnya#92OsamaChechnya Osama bin Laden visits the city of Grozny, Chechnya, according to a claim made 19 years later by Berkan Yashar, who will be identified in the media as "a Turkish politician and a former US intelligence agent." Bin Laden resides downtown, on the first floor of a two-story building, with the second floor being occupied by the deposed president of Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, and his family. Yashar, whose operational name is "Abubakar," will claim that in the early 1990s he is employed by the CIA for subversive operations against Russia in the Northern Caucasus. He is currently the deputy minister of foreign affairs under Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudaev. voskresensk 2013-05-29T00:17:01+02:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a052912senatecu#a052912senatecu http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a052912senatecu#a052912senatecu Senate races are seeing the impact of huge "independent" expenditures that resulted from the 2010 ''Citizens United'' decision , and as in so many other instances, Republicans are reaping most of the benefits of these expenditures . Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and former Governor Tim Kaine (D-VA) are being outspent by more than a 3-1 ratio by their Republican opponents and the third-party groups that support those opponents. Brown and his allies have spent some $2.5 million on television advertising, but are being challenged by an $8 million expenditure by such groups as American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS. Brown says: "These individuals, these billionaires, realize that small numbers of people can have a huge impact. It's very one-sided. This outside money is bad for the system." Kaine and his supporters have spent $385,000, but face a $1.9 million expenditure by such groups as the US Chamber of Commerce. Crossroads GPS is airing a series of ads accusing Kaine of having a "reckless" spending record as governor, including turning a $1 billion surplus into an almost-$4 billion shortfall, an assertion fact-checking organizations have declared to be false. In turn, Crossroads GPS spokesperson Jonathan Collegio upped the claim, telling a reporter that Kaine had left office with a $3 trillion shortfall. The Virginia Constitution requires the state to maintain a balanced budget, and factcheckers have said that Kaine balanced budgets during his term. Missouri Republicans are enjoying a $7 million-$2 million disparity in their challenge to Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO). In Florida, US Representative Connie Mack (R-FL) and his supporters have run almost 6,500 television ads against Senate incumbent Bill Nelson (D-FL) with no response from Nelson's campaign. One Mack ad accused Nelson of supporting a tax-funded program to research the effects of cocaine on monkeys, a claim factcheckers have found to be false. Another Mack ad attempts to link Nelson to the Obama administration's health care reform legislation, which Republicans have dubbed "Obamacare," and says 20 million people will lose medical coverage because of the reform, a claim factcheckers have found to be false. The re-election campaign of President Obama is hoarding resources, expecting to have to combat an onslaught of spending by Republican contender Mitt Romney (R-MA) and his supporters , and is thusly contributing little to Congressional races. Advertising executive Ken Goldstein says: "There's so much oxygen being sucked up by the Obama campaign. Democrats are also not going to have the same kind of money that Republican outside groups are going to have." Obama campaign manager Jim Messina confirms that the Obama campaign is not prepared to contribute large sums to Congressional contenders, saying: "Our top priority and focus is to secure the electoral votes necessary to re-elect the president. There's no doubt that Democratic campaigns face a challenging new political landscape with special interests giving unlimited amounts to super PACs." Scott Reed, a US Chamber of Commerce official who worked on the 1996 Bob Dole presidential campaign, says the sharp disparity in spending will not matter at the end of the campaigns: "It comes out in the wash at the end of the day in the sense that Obama is a ferocious fundraiser-in-chief. There's no question the pro-business and pro-growth groups are spending early and more aggressively than ever because they recognize the stakes of the election are so high." mtuck 2013-05-28T02:13:39+02:00