Officials wouldn’t speculate on how many firearms they did not stop from reaching the cartels. But the inspector indicated a number of problems in how the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms runs its programs to prevent firearms from the United States from entering Mexico.

Among them:

The report indicated there are major holes in the system, including a lack of ATF resources to fulfill Mexican requests for help.

“For example, ATF has been unable to provide key training and support requested by the government of Mexico,” the report found.

U.S. officials stationed in Mexico told investigators there is a lack of coordination among various Mexican law enforcement agencies, and ATF has no single counterpart that it can interact with in coordinating firearms trafficking investigations.

But the inspector general also found a lack of coordination and information sharing among U.S. agencies. The ATF and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have a particularly difficult time coordinating despite a formal memorandum of understanding between the two agencies, the report said.

These problems aren’t new: U.S. agents in Mexico have reported a lack of progress in the country on prosecuting for weapons trafficking, and say too few Mexican agents know how to use software the United States government shared with Mexico to trace weapons.

The Mexican government claims that 90 percent of firearms in the country came from the United States, where they are far easier to obtain than in Mexico. United States officials dispute that number, but both governments agree that curbing the flow of weapons into Mexico could weaken powerful drug cartels that have wreaked havoc on the country.

The Justice Department report recommends that U.S. firearms officials upgrade intelligence-sharing capabilities and make various improvements to the way they chase down investigative leads. In addition, the report suggested that Mexico be integrated into Southwest Border Initiatives — the collaborative border security efforts of officials in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms reportedly concurred with these recommendations.

But ballots from Curry, Los Alamos, McKinley, Rio Arriba, Sandoval and Taos counties were sent out two to four days late without New Mexico getting an exemption from the federal government. This got the Department of Justice’s attention and resulted in an extension for overseas ballots.

There are 844 military and overseas ballots in New Mexico.

Rove, the former political adviser to President George W. Bush, told the Times that he played a small role in the controversial 2006 firing of nine US Attorneys, but said he passed on to the White House complaints about Iglesias that came from the office of former Sen. Pete Domenici.

From the story:

Mr. Rove’s e-mail messages showed he received a number of messages with reports of political corruption cases and complaints about prosecutors, sometimes through direct contacts with staff members for legislators like Pete V. Domenici, a Republican who was a senator from New Mexico.

Mr. Domenici and his aides complained repeatedly about David C. Iglesias, one of the prosecutors who was dismissed.

“I was the recipient of complaints,” Mr. Rove said, referring to Mr. Iglesias, “I passed them on to Harriet Miers to pass on to the Justice Department.”

Mr. Rove said he did not personally verify the criticism but said if true, “it’s really troublesome.”

Iglesias had been the subject of criticism from New Mexico Republicans who believed he did not aggressively pursue allegations of voter fraud.

As Rove told the Times:

He also said he had expressed an interest in the issue of voter fraud as a policy matter but did not ask the Justice Department about specific cases, although he sometimes passed on reports of voting irregularities to the White House counsel’s office.

“I am concerned about voter fraud,” he said, noting that it was “far more of a problem and widespread” than has been acknowledged. “It always mystified me why the issue was not a higher priority for the Justice Department. I never got a satisfactory answer.

The Associated Press reports that Paul Martinez, the New Mexico director of LULAC, sent a letter to the Justice Department office in Houston and the New Mexico attorney general’s office asking them to look into the allegations.

So what is happening in Roswell?

LULAC says the Roswell Police Department requires Hispanics to provide their Social Security numbers and documents proving their immigration status when they are stopped, questioned or when they ask for assistance.

“When you start asking Hispanics for their Social Security numbers because you suspect they don’t have citizenship, you’re creating a second class of citizen and you’re violating their civil rights,” Martinez said.

It sounds suspiciously like what goes on in Maricopa County in Arizona, where the  Department of Justice, after the request of the House Judiciary Committee, is investigating Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s alleged racial profiling operations.

Apraio is the self-styled “America’s toughest sheriff.”

But the allegations in Roswell go beyond just racial profiling from police officers. It goes clear up to the mayor.

LULAC also accuses Mayor Sam LaGrone of being “less than cordial” toward Hispanic business leaders. The organization accused him of being behind a cut in city funding to the Hispano Chamber of Commerce in retaliation for advocating for Hispanics and complaining about abuses of power.

Juan Oropesa, executive director of the Hispano Chamber, said the mayor told him that Roswell does not need two chambers of commerce and has not been supportive of the Hispano Chamber.

“In my opinion, he is supposed to be representative of the entire community, but for whatever reason he doesn’t want to be associated with us,” Oropesa said.

“The allegations in that letter are very serious, and we take them very seriously,” Phil Sisneros, spokesman for the attorney general’s office, told the Associated Press.

Photo by WDCpix

WASHINGTON — A heated confrontation is brewing between the Obama administration and the federal judiciary.

Late on Friday, the Justice Department’s lawyers filed a brief with a federal district court in California challenging the court’s power to carry out its own order.

The government lawyers insisted that the court has no right to make available to the opposing lawyers in the case a classified document regarding the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, even though the document is critical to the lawsuit, the lawyers can obtain the necessary top-secret security clearances, and the document would not be released publicly.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

As TWI reported on Friday, the case of Al-Haramain v. Obama presents one of the first direct challenges by a victim of the Bush National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program against government officials. But the government has argued vigorously to have the case dismissed, invoking the so-called “state secrets privilege” to refuse to turn over information about the program, and has refused to provide the organization’s lawyers use of a document that reportedly reveals that Al-Haramain was one of the program’s victims. Although U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker has repeatedly rejected the Justice Department’s argument, DOJ lawyers filed an emergency appeal; on Friday afternoon, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected it.

So on Friday, in a move that Al-Haramain’s lawyer called “mind-boggling”, the Obama administration told the federal court, once again, that it did not have the authority to order the government to make the critical document in the case available to the organization’s lawyers. The decision to reveal the document, wrote the government, “is committed to the discretion of the Executive Branch, and is not subject to judicial review.”

Not only does that defy the court once again, but there’s a catch: The court already has the document, which was filed months ago under seal. What’s more, the lawyers for Al-Haramain have already seen it; it was inadvertently turned over to them back in 2004, when the government was busy trying to prove that Al-Haramain was funneling money to terrorists. Weeks later, the government, realizing its mistake, sent FBI agents to the lawyers’ offices to retrieve the document. But the cat was out of the bag: The lawyers had seen evidence that the foundation, and two of its lawyers, had been wiretapped. And that same document has already been filed, along with several other classified, sealed and secret filings, with the U.S. district court.

Realizing this, the Justice Department lawyers on Friday wrote: “If the Court intends to itself grant access to classified information directly to the plaintiffs’ counsel, the Government requests that the Court again provide advance notice of any such order, as well as an ex parte, in camera description of the information it intends to disclose, to enable the Government to either make its own determination about whether counsel has a need to know, or to withdraw that information from submission to the Court and use in this case. If the Court rejects either action by the Government, the Government again requests that the Court stay proceedings while the Government considers whether to appeal any such order.”

In other words, the government lawyers threatened to physically remove the document from the court files if the Judge insists that he has the right — as he already ruled he has — to allow Al-Haramain’s lawyers to see it.

“It’s a not-so-thinly veiled threat to send executive branch authorities (the FBI? the Army?) to Judge Walker’s chambers to seize the classified material from his files!” wrote Jon Eisenberg, Al-Haramain’s lawyer, in an e-mail on Saturday. “In my view, that would be an unprecedented violation of the constitutional separation of powers. I doubt anything like it has happened in the history of this country.”

The stand-off centers on who has the power to decide whether classified information must be made available to someone outside of the government. The Justice Department insists that only the director of the relevant executive agency has that power; and in this case, the director of the National Security Agency has decided that Al-Haramain and its lawyers should not be allowed to see the classified document, because they don’t have a “need to know” the information it contains.

In fact, it’s clear that in order for Al-Haramain to pursue its case against the government, its lawyers need at the very least the sealed document that indicates they were wiretapped. Indeed, it’s the only known evidence that indicates that the Islamic charity was wiretapped without a warrant; without it, the organization and its lawyers don’t have standing to sue the government.

That’s not a concern of the Justice Department, however, which insisted on Friday: “the Court does not have independent power . . . to order the Government to grant counsel access to classified information when the Executive Branch has denied them such access.”

The Obama administration “seems to be provoking a separation-of-powers confrontation with Judge Walker,” said Eisenberg.

The government’s latest move is just another in an increasingly aggressive set of tactics it’s been using to defend broad executive power to conceal evidence of illegal activity by the Bush administration. In both this case and another case I wrote about earlier, Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, the Obama administration has invoked the “state secrets” privilege to argue that the subject matter of the lawsuits are themselves state secrets, and therefore that the cases must be dismissed.

Civil liberties advocates had hoped that the Obama administration would be more open about the workings of government – and particularly about the illegal activity that occurred in the name of fighting terrorism under the Bush administration. But they’ve been sorely disappointed. In national security cases, the Obama administration has aggressively used the “state secrets privilege” to insist that it can withhold classified evidence even if that’s contrary to congressional law.

“In the Bush administration, the state secrets doctrine was used to buttress the power of the president and make it difficult if not impossible to contest such issues as presidential authority to conduct warrantless wiretapping in the United States,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University, said last week. “We would think that when such disagreements occur, it’s properly before the judiciary to resolve them. But the Bush administration asserted the state secrets doctrine for the purpose of making it effectively impossible for courts to review the matter,” Rotenberg said. The significance of the Al-Haramain case is “the apparent willingness of the Obama administration’’s justice department to carry further that same argument in federal court. It is of great concern.”

Another interesting piece of the government’s filing on Friday – actually, its second filing, at 1 a.m. Eastern time – is that the government, which was supposed to report to the judge about which documents it will declassify, said that it won’t declassify anything. While that’s not a big surprise, the declassification report also says that its previous classified submission to the court contained an error – though it can’t say what that error was, because it’s classified. And, to support all this, the government filed four secret declarations by government officials — which no one but the judge is allowed to see.

“We’ve always suspected that the previous secret filings contained inaccuracies and maybe even outright lies, which is why we have been fighting so hard to see them,” said Eisenberg. “Now it seems we might have been right. Maybe, now that Judge Walker may be about to let us see them, the Government is worried that we’ll spot the lie, so they’re trying to ‘take it back.’ This is extremely weird.”

Contacted over the weekend, the Department of Justice declined to comment, saying the court filings speak for themselves. But David Golove, a professor at New York University School of Law and expert on executive power who’s not involved in the case (and had not seen the latest court filings), said the Obama administration’s latest brief may reflect simply the executive’s usual reluctance to turn over classified information until it absolutely has to. If the government keeps appealing every action by the district court, he speculated, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals may finally give in and rule on whether the government has to comply with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), or whether it can continue to conceal evidence by invoking the state secrets privilege. Although Judge Walker ruled in Al-Haramain’s favor, no court of appeals has ever addressed the issue.

“When a court of appeals tells them they have to hand over the information, will they comply, or will they go to endless ends to prevent it from happening? I don’t think we’ve reached that yet,” said Golove. “It might be fair to view this as just a consquence of fact that they find themselves in the funny position of having to reveal classified information to people they don’t want to before getting a higher court ruling on it,” he added. Then again, he added: “That’s at least one interpretation. We have good reason to be suspicious.”

It looks like Domenici isn’t the main target of the investigation by federal prosecutor Nora R. Dannehy — even if he might be eventually implicated in some sort of wrongdoing.

Dropping a subpoena on Domenici may have at least as much to do with the conduct of Justice Department officials as about Domenici, who retired from the Senate this year.

They are going after people in the George W. Bush administration. Did someone say Karl Rove?

The prosecutor is going to talk to Scott Jennings, the former White House deputy of political affairs. He is a former aide to none other than… Rove. Rove has said, according to the AP, that he will cooperate with the investigation.

Jennings, it appears, was the go-between for Domenici to get his complaints about former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to Rove. Rove, of course, had the ear of President Bush and was among Bush’s most powerful advisers.

Iglesias was eventually fired for reasons that still remain unclear.

Jennings’ lawyer, Mark Paoletta, said, “It is my understanding that Scott is not a target in this investigation.”

Jennings was a footnote in a previous subpoena when Rove was subpoenaed by the Senate Judiciary Committee but failed to appear. Jennings, who was also subpoenaed, did appear, but basically refused to say anything.

Jennings repeatedly answered, “Senator, pursuant to the president’s assertion of executive privilege, I must respectfully decline to answer.”"It sounds to me like the American taxpayers are paying you to stonewall,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told Jennings after his refusal to answer during Leahy’s first round of questions.

Perhaps Dannehy will find Jennings more forthcoming than Leahy did.

Some 800 observers from the department’s Civil Rights Division will be deployed in 23 states, according to a DOJ news release Thursday. That’s several hundred fewer observers than in 2004, but more than twice the number that were watching in 2000, which of course ended up going to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey said in the release that his department “will do all it can to help ensure that elections run as smoothly as possible — and, equally important, that the American people have confidence in our electoral process.”

The department has sent observers to monitor certain New Mexico counties for at least a decade. In 1998, 66 federal observers were used in Bernalillio, Cibola, McKinley, Sandoval and Socorro counties under settlements stemming from Justice Department suits, according to a DOJ news release in June of that year. “The settlements require the counties to provide effective language assistance to Native Americans at the polls,” it said.

Why Cibola and Sandoval counties were selected this year is unclear, although they were also the only two counties monitored in 2006, according to CNN.

A story Thursday in The Washington Post added this:

The department is required to monitor polling places covered by the Voting Rights Act or related court orders. In addition, its Civil Rights Section will send watchers to counties in several battleground states.

Cibola County’s biggest community is Grants, but it also contains most of Laguna and Acoma pueblos and portions of the Navajo Nation. Sandoval is home to New Mexico’s third-largest city, Rio Rancho, as well as the communities of Bernalillo, Cuba and Placitas, and seven pueblos — Sandia, Santa Ana, San Felipe, Santo Domingo, Cochiti, Jemez and Zia.

Before flying back to Washington, D.C., the attorney, who works in the voting section of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, picked up copies of the press packet handed out by state Republicans on Oct. 16.

On Monday, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against Rep. Justine Fox-Young, a Republican state lawmaker who released confidential information while making claims of vote fraud; a private investigator hired by a prominent Republican attorney; and as-yet-unnamed members of the state party. The lawsuit alleges that key members of the Republican Party of New Mexico violated the privacy rights of voters and illegally interfered with their right to vote.

As Talking Points Memo notes in a story just posted, some are concerned that the Department of Justice has been silent on voter intimidation in New Mexico, despite repeated pleas for investigation from various sources, including Common Cause.

“Our election protection coalition is encouraging the Department of Justice to look into allegations of voter intimidation in Bernalillo County,” Steven Robert Allen, executive director of Common Cause of New Mexico told the Independent. “This is an extremely important issue and I would hope that DOJ officials would act quickly to initiate an investigation as we’ve asked.”

There are two cases that stem from the press conference on Oct. 16, at which state Fox-Young said said “We are presenting undeniable proof that there was voter fraud in the June election,” before passing out packets of information that included incompletely redacted copies of voter registration cards.

“I think that what the defendants have done here does expose them to interest from the Department of Justice,” Nina Perales, southwest regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the Independent late Wednesday.

On Monday, MALDEF filed a federal lawsuit against N.M. GOP attorney Pat Rogers and a private investigator who said he worked for Rogers in an attempt to “block threats and intimidation of eligible Latino voters.”

Perales said MALDEF had been in contact with employees in the voting section at the Department of Justice today. “What we’re doing to block this kind of intimidation is similar to what the Department of Justice Voting Rights Section could do, but I’ve never heard of them bringing such a case,” Perales said.

A call to the Voting Section Chief of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice was not immediately returned late Wednesday.

UPDATE: More context from Zach Roth at Talking Points Memo:

On Friday… Gerry Hebert — a former top voting-rights official at the Department of Justice, who now runs the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center (and is a frequent TPMmuckraker source) — forwarded the story, via email, to four current members of DOJ’s civil-rights division, which enforces voting laws.

Hebert, who served 21 years at DOJ’s criminal division, including a stint as acting head of the voting-rights section, wrote in his email, which was copied to TPMmuckraker: “I believe this conduct, if true, violates both the criminal and civil statutes your offices enforce, and thus warrants investigation by DOJ.” He asked the four recipients to acknowledge receipt of his email.

But this afternoon, five days later, Hebert told TPMmuckraker that he had received no response whatsoever.

However, after that story was posted, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice did tell TPM that ”The department is aware of the allegations and we’re looking into them.”

But we already knew that!

In a press release, Steve Allen, executive director of Common Cause New Mexico, had this to say:

“… We are very concerned about reports that partisan political operatives are trying to scare off legitimately registered voters, and we are calling on the Department of Justice to investigate allegations that an attorney from the New Mexico Republican party hired a private investigator to intimidate minority voters at their homes. Election officials and state law enforcement needs to remain vigilant in their efforts to protect voters and to ensure that every legitimate voter who wants to vote can do so, and that every vote is counted.”

In its item, TPM reminded its readers that Rogers had figured in the federal Department of Justice report released in September that gave a blistering critique on the department’s handling of the U.S. Attorney firings.

But Rogers was adamant on Monday when he told the Independent that voter fraud likely is occurring in New Mexico. And he referred to last week’s GOP press conference that produced evidence he called convincing.

State Republicans last week said their search of public records for 92 newly registered Albuquerque voters who cast ballots in the June primary uncovered “highly suspect” voter registrations on file in 28 of those cases. They called it “bombshell” evidence of voting fraud. The party provided names for 10 of the 28 suspect registrations and said five of those 10 were registrations submitted by ACORN.

One of them has a social security number that is being used by three other people, GOP officials said. And another has a Social Security number that was issued before the voter in question was born.

“These are highly suspect forms,” Rogers said. “We have evidence that demands immediate and thorough investigation.”

Claims of “voter suppression and racism are being used to avoid responsibility for the dishonest activities of ACORN,” Rogers said.

ACORN, for its part, on Saturday brought forward two of the five voters the GOP said ACORN had registered and who had highly suspicious registration forms.  ACORN officials said they contacted two of the other registered voters and said they were real as well.

But call TPM skeptical of Rogers’ contention. Rogers’ involvement in the Iglesias scandal prompted TPM to write:

In other words, one of the very same New Mexico GOP activists who was found in the OIG report to have tried to pressure David Iglesias to bring bogus voter-fraud prosecutions is still on the case, and has now helped to get a new federal investigation launched just weeks before the election.
And remember: the OIG report definitively concluded that Iglesias was fired as New Mexico’s US attorney for his reluctance to follow up on politically motivated voter-fraud claims, made by local Republicans including Rogers.

 
The federal investigation TPM refers to is the 1,400 registration forms the FBI is reviewing. Meanwhile, the DOJ report TPM references was produced by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) and dedicates an entire chapter to former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, who was fired for, among other reasons, not pursuing voter fraud claims with enough gusto. Rogers figures prominently in that chapter as the authors of the DOJ report revisit his involvement in pushing voter registration fraud claims, which included ACORN, leading up to the 2004 general election and his pressure on then-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. The DOJ report goes on to report that Rogers, among other New Mexico Republicans, continued to complain about voter fraud in New Mexico and complained to DOJ officials about what they perceived as Iglesias’s lack of movement on prosecuting such cases. At one point, the report says, Rogers and another prominent Republican, Mickey Barnett, met with the Department of Justice’s White House liaison Monica Goodling in Washington in June 2006 to complain about Iglesias’ record on voter fraud.

Several months later, Iglesias found himself out of a job as U.S. Attorney.