Former Bush White House Senior Advisor Karl Rove will headline a fundraiser for U.S. Senate candidate Heather Wilson on August 11 in Albuquerque.

When Wilson and Rove last appeared together, in early June, Democrats criticized them for their alleged role in the firing of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. Iglesias was fired in December 2006, which critics say was payback for not prosecuting voter fraud cases in Wilson’s 2006 campaign for re-election to the U.S. House. Wilson won in a close race and did not run for re-election in 2008 so she could make an ultimately unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate.

“Karl has one of the best minds in modern politics and he continues to inform and influence American life as an author, columnist and commentator,” Wilson said in a statement.

U.S. Senate candidate Heather Wilson appeared alongside former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove at an event in Colorado this week, prompting Democrats to criticize Wilson once again for her role in the firing of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias.

“Heather Wilson’s decision to campaign with Karl Rove shows that nothing has changed since she was named one of Congress’ most corrupt members by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington in 2007,” Shripal Shah of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee told the Huffington Post.

Wilson and Rove were both involved in the allegations of politically motivated firings of Iglesias. Critics of the firings allege that Iglesias was canned because he didn’t go after alleged voter fraud that would have helped Wilson in her 2006 campaign against Patricia Madrid. Wilson won in a very close race.

There were no criminal charges filed in any of the firings of U.S. attorneys by the Bush administration.

Iglesias and Rove have sparred over his firing in recent years, with reporter David Weigel calling the “score-settling” by Rove against Iglesias “some of the least-convincing.”

Wilson is the early frontrunner for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat. She previously ran for Senate in 2008 when Sen. Pete Domenici opted not to run because of health issues. Wilson lost in the Republican primary to Steve Pearce narrowly.

The news service is quoting an official close to the investigation who says that prosecutor Nora Dannehy has closed her investigation without filing charges.

The U.S. Attorneys firing scandal erupted in early 2007 after the Bush administration fired several U.S. Attorneys, including New Mexico’s then-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, in December 2006. The scandal that resulted from the firings, which appeared to be politically motivated, eventually led to several high-profile resignations at the U.S. Justice Department, including then-U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Iglesias has repeatedly defended his tenure as U.S. Attorney and now is working as a Navy Judge Advocate General at Guantanamo Bay.

David Iglesias, the former U.S. Attorney from New Mexico, today discussed new rules in put in place by the Obama administration military commissions, The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman reported.
According to Ackerman, Iglesias focused on some of the changes made recently and noted that some rules for the commissions have not yet been established.

Iglesias was fired from his post as U.S. Attorney after apparent pressure from New Mexico Republicans, including then-U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson and then-U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici , because they did not feel he was pursuing voter fraud cases with enough urgency.

Before becoming U.S. Attorney, Iglesias was a Navy JAG officer.

The chapters that relate to the CIA leak scandal are yet another attempt to deflect attention from his central role in the betrayal of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity as a covert CIA officer.

His distortions and fabrications are consistent with his approach throughout this sordid and criminal affair. Wasting his opportunity to tell the truth, he offers absolutely nothing new, and his selective use of facts and quotes are a transparent effort to continue his long campaign to confuse people, unfortunately consistent with his past behavior.

Plame Wilson’s identity as a CIA operative was outed in a Washington Post column by Robert Novak.

Yesterday, former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias also disputed portions of Rove’s book, calling one allegation “a complete fabrication.”

The Washington Independent asked Iglesias, who is now part of the special prosecution team for Guantanamo detainees, to respond to the specific allegations Rove makes in the book.

ROVE: [Iglesias] failed to do anything about voter fraud that was so egregious that the Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) clerk, a Democrat, and the sheriff, a Republican, had both called for a federal investigation.

IGLESIAS: [Laughing] Oh, this belief that there was this endemic voter fraud. It’s absolutely true that I didn’t file a case, but that was because I didn’t have any evidence I could use to make the case. And I personally looked at the evidence that was supposed to back up these charges.

ROVE: I also passed on the complaint that Iglesias, in order to get publicity in preparation for a future political campaign, had personally bungled a high-profile corruption case involving the past and current state treasurers by interfering with the career prosecutors who were handling the trial.

IGLESIAS: Bungled? In 2005 I got the biggest fish, former state treasurer Michael Montoya, to plead guilty and cooperate with our investigation. And I got a conviction of the incumbent state treasurer, Robert Vigil, who resigned in lieu of impeachment and was sentenced to 37 months in prison. Now, I didn’t try the case, but I did supervise it. I did get back to back state treasurers to plead guilty or be found guilty at trial.

ROVE: I also forwarded claims that Iglesias had sat for months on an indictment involving charges of corruption by prominent Democrats in the construction of the Bernalillo County Courthouse, refusing to file it until after the 2006 election for fear he would offend prominent Democrats he might need if he ran for the U.S. Senate.

IGLESIAS: That’s a complete fabrication. That indictment didn’t get filed until three weeks after I left office — in March 2007. Look, here’s where Rove’s lack of knowledge of DOJ policy hurts him factually. It’s standing policy that you can’t file an indictment right before an election if you think it will effect the outcome. But I’m sure Rove heard from local Republicans that I was intentionally keeping my powder dry. Even had I been planning a run for the Senate in the 2006 timeframe, I wouldn’t have intentionally withheld an indictment for fear of alienating the Democrats. I’m happy with what I’m doing. I have no plans to run for office.

“We should have abandoned the idea of removing the U. S. attorneys once the Democrats took the Senate,” Gonzales said. “Because at that point we could really not count on Republicans to cut off investigations or help us at all with investigations. We didn’t see that at the Department of Justice. Nor did the White House see that. Karl [Rove] didn’t see it. If we could do something over again, that would be it.”

Gonzales also said, “Of course the White House was consulted about these decisions [on the firings], because these were presidential appointees, and of course Karl [Rove] would have some kind of role in that. But the decision was made on what I believed to be the consensus recommendation of the department leadership.”

One of the fired U.S. Attorneys was David Iglesias of New Mexico. Iglesias has long been critical of Gonzales and the decision to fire U.S. Attorneys including himself.

In the Esquire piece, Gonzales also discusses Abu Ghraib, the infamous Senate hearing where he said “I don’t know” 120 times and other issues from his tenure as U.S. Attorney General.

There are no alternatives to the military commissions, so far as Iglesias is concerned, and that’s why he has faith that he will ultimately get to try his case — that it’s simply “implausible” that civilian prosecutors and civilian courts will be able to rise to the challenge not only of terrorism but of what we’ve done to the terrorists. Sure, it’s a negative faith: We’re going to keep the military commissions because we’re stuck with the military commissions. And it would sound like an admission of defeat if it didn’t also mean we are stuck with David Iglesias.

The writer is clearly impressed by Iglesias, and the piece says those who made the decision to fire Iglesias “didn’t realize that Iglesias’s truest belief was in himself — that he believed in his personal ethics as fervently as he believed in his personal Jesus.”

Overall, one of the better profiles of the former U.S. Attorney that I have seen.

The statement reads in part:

Rather than dignify the reporter and his piece with a lengthy response to assertions made, we will simply respond with a few ‘facts’ of our own.

Their expert interview who insisted that an indictment be sought against Sheriff Arpaio also said that no where in America should Arpaio’s tactics ever be tolerated. His name is David Iglesias. This is the same attorney who was fired in 2006 by the US Attorney General for several different reasons.

Iglesias was criticized for looking the other way in an investigation involving ACORN, an organization that embraces illegal immigration and is currently under intense scrutiny and investigation by the US government for fraudulent schemes.

Iglesias said after testimony by former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and former White House counsel Harriet Miers that he felt “100 percent vindicated” as his firing and that his firing was for improper reasons.

Arpaio is controversial for his tactics on arresting illegal immigrants, drawing numerous complaints from civil rights organizations of racial profiling. Early last month, Arpaio lost some of his ability to make immigration arrests.

This latest controversy, however, is about an abuse of powers in relation to Arpaio’s office investigating political opponents of Arpaio just because they are political opponents. Included are Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, former Mesa police chief George Gascon and others.

“None of the investigations resulted in convictions; however, they cost the targets hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and tarnished reputations,” the KPHO report says.

Perhaps Iglesias should count himself lucky that he doesn’t reside in Maricopa County.

Maddow spoke to Iglesias, a Republican, about Republican attacks in swing states near election time—including in New Mexico, where Iglesias was the U.S. Attorney before being fired by the George W. Bush administration in controversial circumstances.

Iglesias said that many of the low-income people registered by ACORN would be likely to vote for Democrats, so Republicans both locally and nationally worked to stop ACORN from registering people from voting.

“They were looking at numbers [and] didn’t like the demographic tidal wave that was coming their way so they wanted to engage the machinery of the Justice Department to stop that wave,” Iglesias said.

For the first half of the segment embedded below, Maddow lays out the circumstances that came before Iglesias’ firing—allegations that Iglesias was pressured by Republicans to pursue voter fraud cases in election years and when he did not, a White House push to remove the U.S. Attorney.

Iglesias said there was “tremendous local media attention on what [the media] believed to be massive systemic voter fraud.”

Iglesias said the primary allegations from the Republican Party, both local and national, were that ACORN was “registering people who did not have the right to vote including underage people, including foreign nationals—who are not entitled to vote.”

Iglesias told Maddow that after two years of investigation, including setting up “one of two voter fraud task forces in the country,” and working with the FBI and Department of Justice, “I couldn’t fine one case that I could prosecute.”