I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico is out with two new commentaries about the recently released report on the firings of nine U.S. attorneys (himself included). The report found the reasons Bush administration staffers gave Congress last year for firing Iglesias were hogwash.
In the first, an Oct. 1 commentary published in the Los Angeles Times, Iglesias wrote that he was pleased that the report “fully vindicated” what he and his fired colleagues have been saying: “Improper politicization has crippled the (Justice) department, and the Bush administration’s culture of partisanship-loyalty above all has done a terrible disservice to this country.”
“Justice was compromised. Not only were my colleagues and I not insulated from politics — as we should have been in our jobs as prosecutors — but we were fired for the most partisan of reasons,” Iglesias wrote. “In my case, it was because powerful Republicans in Congress and the White House believed that I had not done my duty as a Republican to bring criminal charges against Democrats in the run-up to the 2006 elections.”
Iglesias wrote that the “lack of adult supervision at Justice was breathtaking; no one reined in the young bulls in the constitutional china shop.” He also wrote that the report indicates that the reasons for the firings were based on “rumor and innuendo rather than evidence.”
In a Friday column published on The Huffington Post, Iglesias wrote about the appointment of a federal prosecutor to decide whether criminal charges are warranted.
“No longer just a civil matter to blithely ignore, this ominous development could result in current and high level officials being indicted for crimes,” he wrote. “I suspect the special counsel will ‘follow the emails’ in the way that ‘follow the money’ brought down Nixon’s men during Watergate.”
Iglesias named several New Mexico Republicans who he said “tried to improperly influence me to file cases that were non-provable or not ready to indict,” and said such “reprehensible practice may be acceptable in corrupt third world countries but it has no place in the United States.”
Iglesias pledged to cooperate fully with the special prosecutor.
