A blistering 392-page report released Monday by federal investigators left the impression that the White House knew of David Iglesias‘ firing as U.S. Attorney for New Mexico before it got official word — a finding for which investigators can thank U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M.

According to the report, Wilson told investigators she attended a White House breakfast meeting Nov. 15, 2006. As the meeting broke up, Wilson said she approached President Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove and said, “Mr. Rove, for what it’s worth, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico is a waste of breath.”

Rove responded, “That decision has already been made. He’s gone.” According to Wilson’s calendar, the meeting occurred from 7:30 to 8:30 a.m., the report says.

Department e-mail records show that the then chief of staff for then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Kyle Sampson, sent a plan that first included Iglesias’ name for firing to then-White House Counsel Harriett Miers two hours later —  at 10:55 a.m. Nov. 16. There is no record of the list being provided to the White House before then.

The report, released Monday and full of such nuggets, severely criticized how the Department of Justice handled the U.S. attorney firings in 2006. Iglesias’ firing alone received its own 50-page chapter, the longest for any U.S. attorney fired. Also coming in for criticism were Wilson and U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., whose calls to Justice officials to complain about Iglesias were cited as the primary reason for Iglesias’ removal in the report.

Domenici’s office declined to comment and referred media inquiries to the senator’s Washington lawyer, Lee Blalack, who disputed the report’s conclusions as “innuendos that pass as findings” and said that Domenici already had been cleared by the Senate Ethics Committee on the allegations dealt with in the report.

Wilson’s office, meanwhile, released a statement in which she called the report “incorrect and incomplete.” She also said in the statement “The report released today confirms that the Justice Department never investigated complaints about Mr. Iglesias’ job performance and badly mishandled his termination.”

The report was compiled by the Justice Department’s Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility.

While the report was lengthy, its authors said they had failed to uncover every bit of information surrounding the scandal and criminal violations might be found to have occurred if more digging were done.

“We believe that the evidence collected in this investigation is not complete, and that serious allegations involving potential criminal conduct have not been fully investigated or resolved,” the authors said.

For that reason, they recommended the appointment of a special prosecutor and suggested that this counsel should consider whether Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Gonzales, or other department officials “made false statements to Congress or to us about the reasons for the removal of Iglesias or other U.S. Attorneys.”

Iglesias, for his part, in an interview with the New Mexico Independent said he felt “completely vindicated” by the report, which was more than a year in the making. He added “I am not surprised at all they have referred it to a criminal prosecutor.”

U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey has appointed a federal prosecutor — acting U.S. Attorney of Connecticut Nora Dannehy — to open a new probe into the firings to determine if criminal charges could be brought against Gonzales, among others.

Iglesias said some of the statutes that might be involved in the criminal inquiry going forward were interfering with ongoing investigation, conspiracy and wire fraud.

Iglesias’ firing occurred after top Republicans in New Mexico complained to the White House and to top Justice Department officials about how the U.S. Attorney’s office was mishandling voter fraud investigations. They also complained about that he was moving too slowly on corruption investigations.

Another more well-publicized chapter in the saga of U.S. attorney firings was revisited in the inquiry. That involved Domenici’s and Wilson’s phone calls to Iglesias weeks before the 2006 mid-term elections in which each asked about the progress of a federal corruption investigation involving Albuquerque’s metro courthouse.

Among the findings in Monday’s report were that Domenici’s three calls to Gonzales, as well as a fourth call to Gonzales’ top aide, to complain about Iglesias’ performance “was the primary factor” in Iglesias’ firing. The report also appeared to suggest Domenici had tried to interfere with an ongoing federal investigation by calling Iglesias.

Blalack said in his letter that “there is no credible basis” to suggest that Sen. Domenici’s phone call to Iglesias in the fall of 2006 to ask about an ongoing courthouse corruption investigation rose to the level of interfering with or obstructing any ongoing investigation. Blalack also disputed the investigators’ contention that Domenici did not cooperate with the inquiry, saying in his letter “the Senator offered on several occasion to answer your questions in writing through counsel.” Blalack added that “you rejected the Senator’s offer of assistance.”

While Domenici ultimately did not speak to  investigators, Wilson cooperated, agreeing to three interviews. Other prominent Republicans were approached by investigators, including New Mexico Republican Party Chairman Allen Wehand prominent GOP lawyer Micky Barnett. Weh spoke with investigators, while Barnett supplied documents. Another prominent Republican lawyer, Pat Rogers, however, notified investigators through his attorney that he would not cooperate, according to the report. The report also says Domenici’s chief of staff, Steve Bell, declined to be interviewed.

The report did not let off Iglesias without a chastisement for not reporting the phone calls from Domenici and Wilson in the fall of 2006. But the vast majority of the report lambasted the Justice Department, and its top officials, for how they handled the U.S. attorney firings. In addition to Iglesias, eight other U.S. Attorneys were let go in 2006, a historic act by a president. But it was Iglesias who became the poster boy for the scandal. Since his name became identified with the scandal, he has appeared on TV, in magazines and newspapers repeatedly to tell his story. He even regaled locals at an Albuquerque bookstore this May with bits of his story.

The Justice Department report revisited many facts that are already well known publicly, such as Iglesias’ hiring, his two positive job reviews in 2002 and 2005, and the steady erosion of confidence top New Mexico Republicans had in him as a prosecutor.

Ultimately, the report concluded that Iglesias was removed because of complaints to the Department and the White House by Senator Domenici and other New Mexico Republican political officials, not for reasons given publicly. All other reasons offered after Iglesias’s removal “– that he was an ‘absentee landlord,’ that he delegated too much authority to his First Assistant, and that he was an underperformer – were after-the-fact rationalizations that did not actually contribute to his removal.”

The report’s authors also found that the Department never investigated the complaints lodged against Iglesias’ handling of “voter fraud or public corruption cases, or even asked Iglesias about them.” And in not investigating those complaints, the authors wrote, “Department leaders abdicated their responsibility to ensure that prosecutorial decisions would be based on the law, the evidence, and Department policy, rather than political pressure.”

The report appeared to knock down several reasons given for Iglesias’ firing.

One reason given in a back-door meeting for Iglesias’ firing was that he was considered an “absentee landlord,” meaning he wasn’t a strong manager and tended to over-delegate. But the report shows that DOJ executives either didn’t know where the allegation came from or they pinned it on someone who later refuted it.

David Margolis, the highest career attorney at the Justice Department, told then-White House liaison Monica Goodling after hearing the allegation that Iglesias was an absentee landlord that it had been “corroborated” by New Mexico First Assistant U.S. Attorney Larry Gomez. That had occurred, Margolis said, when Gomez interviewed with Margolis and Goodling for Iglesias’ vacant U.S. Attorney position,” but after Iglesias had been removed.

The report lays out the timeline:

According to Margolis, when he interviewed Gomez for the vacant U.S. Attorney position, Gomez explained his qualifications for the U.S. Attorney position by noting that he ran the day-to-day operations of the office. Margolis told investigators that he thought that Gomez’s statement that he ran the day-to-day operations of the office “corroborated” the allegation that Iglesias was an absentee landlord. However, Margolis also told investigators that Gomez said nothing negative about Iglesias during his interview.

Yet, Gomez told congressional investigators that he did not think that Iglesias over-delegated authority or was an absentee landlord.

The investigators concluded “that the allegation that Iglesias was an absentee manager who had delegated too much authority to his First Assistant was an after-the-fact justification for Iglesias’s termination and was not in fact a reason he was placed on the removal list.”

The report also goes into depth regarding Republican complaints about Iglesias’ handling of voter fraud cases. While some New Mexican Republicans blasted Iglesias for his handling of voter fraud investigations, Iglesias apparently was singled out for praise in the Department of Justice for the way he handled those investigations.

The  report says:

Although criticized by some New Mexico Republicans, Iglesias’ task force approach received recognition within the department. For example, in October 2005 Iglesias was asked to speak at a department-sponsored symposium on voting integrity. In addition, according to an attorney in the Public Integrity Section, Iglesias’s approach to the problem in New Mexico was held up by the department as an example of how to handle voter fraud investigations.

The report also said that complaints by Wilson of voter fraud  were dismissed. She had complained of voter fraud among newly registered voters because forms had been returned as undeliverable. The “FBI ultimately determined that the correspondence from her office to newly registered voters had been returned as undeliverable because of incomplete addresses on voter registration cards, errors made by Wilson’s office in addressing the envelopes, or because the voters, many of whom were college students, had changed addresses since registering…. ,” the report said.