WASHINGTON - A U.S. attorney in Wisconsin who prosecuted a state Democratic official on corruption charges during last year's heated governor's race was once targeted for firing by the Department of Justice, but given a reprieve for reasons that remain unclear. A federal appeals court last week threw out the conviction of Wisconsin state worker Georgia Thompson, saying the evidence was "beyond thin."
Congressional investigators looking into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys saw Wisconsin prosecutor Steven M. Biskupic's name on a list of lawyers targeted for removal when they were inspecting a Justice Department document not yet made public, according to an attorney for a lawmaker involved in the investigation. The attorney asked for anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the investigation.
It wasn't clear when Biskupic was added to a Justice Department hit list of prosecutors, or when he was taken off, or whether those developments were connected to the just-overturned corruption case.U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic. Federalist Society, Milwaukee Chapter.
Nevertheless, the disclosure aroused investigators' suspicion that Biskupic might have been retained in his job because he agreed to prosecute Democrats, though the evidence was slight. Such politicization of the administration of justice is at the heart of congressional Democrats' concerns over the Bush administration's firings of the U.S. attorneys.
Republicans had cited the June 2006 conviction as evidence that Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's administration was rife with corruption as he ran for re-election last year. He won anyway - the first Democratic governor of the state to win re-election in 32 years.
This revelation about Biskupic is expected to be the subject of questions to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales when he testifies Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
So Biskupic was originally targeted as one of the U.S. attorneys to be purged by Rove and the Bush White House. But in the course of the Bush White House and Department of Justice's deliberations on who to include in the final hit list of the U.S. attorneys, Biskupic's name was removed from that list. The big question here is why was Biskupic's name removed? McClatchy reports one possible explanation with Biskupic's investigation into a corruption case involving Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle. Biskupic was investigating a case involving the state of Wisconsin's bids for travel agencies. In the course of this investigation, Biskupic found allegations that a civil service worker Georgia Thompson may have steered a state travel contract to a firm, whose top officials gave major political campaign contributions to Doyle. Thompson was convicted of fraud regarding this case, but the case was overturned by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, stating that "the charges against Thompson were unfounded," and that the evidence against Thomspon was "beyond thin." Biskupic may have originally been targeted on the hit list, but his involvement in prosecuting this political case against Governor Doyle, just before the 2006 midterm election, may have been enough to show Rove that Biskupic was a loyal Bushie. Biskupic's involvement in this case has attracted congressional Democrats investigating the attorney purge. According to this Senate letter sent to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales by Senators Pat Leahy, Charles Schumer, Russell Feingold, Herb Kohl, Dianne Feinstein, and Sheldon Whitehouse:
As you know, the Senate Judiciary Committee is investigating the circumstances surrounding the replacement of a number of United States Attorneys last year. One of the central issues in our investigation is whether the Department of Justice or the White Hosue has improperly encouraged United States Attorneys to pursue, or to refrain from pursuing, politically sensitive cases.
We are concerned whether or not politics may have played a role in a case brought by Stephen Biskupic, the United States Attorney based in Milwaukee against Gerogia Thompson, formerly an official in the administration of Wisconsin's Democratic governor. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals was reportedly so troubled by the insufficiency of the evidence against Ms. Thomspon that it made the unusual decision to issue an order reversing Ms. Thompson's conviction and releasing her from custody immediately after the oral arguments in her appeal.
So the Senate Democrats want to look into this matter regarding Biskupic's prosecution of Thompson, questioning if Biskupic was politically motivated to push this case for the benefit of the state Republicans, and possibly to smear Democratic Governor Doyle.
But there is a lot more here regarding Biskupic. TPM Muckraker has a long article reporting Biskupic's investigations into voter fraud by the Democratic Party in the 2004 presidential election. According to TPM Muckraker:
In the 2004 election, John Kerry took Wisconsin by a scant 11,813 votes. The Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee (72% for Kerry) was key to that effort. But there were problems with the records in Milwaukee -- large discrepancies between the numbers of voters and votes. Republicans screamed bloody murder, saying that the faulty records provided a prime opportunity for fraud.
So in response, Biskupic formed his Joint Election Fraud Task Force in January of 2005. The U.S. attorney's office, the FBI, the District Attorney, and the metropolitan police department teamed up to investigate. Over the following two years, they'd identify individual cases for prosecution and determine whether there had indeed been a broad-based conspiracy by Democrats to stuff the ballot.
Even as Biskupic was investigating, Republicans kept the pressure on. In August of 2005, the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Republicans Rick Wiley sent a letter to Biskupic outlining nine voter fraud cases that demanded prosecution. Biskupic replied with a letter (pdf) knocking down all nine of Wiley's pet cases.
At about the same time, in the middle of 2005, Wiley had one of his staff members prepare a lengthy memo (see page 10) called "Fraud in Wisconsin 2004: A Timeline/Summary." According to Daniel Bice of The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the report was prepared for Karl Rove.White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, seen here 4 April 2007 file photo. AFP/File/Mandel Ngan.
But Rove was already interested. We know this because one of the documents released by the Justice Department last month appears to be a printout from his computer of a February 2, 2005 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article about the city's voter records. A study by the paper had found sizeable discrepancies between the number of votes and voters in the records for more than a dozen wards.
[....]
So as early as February of 2005, Rove was paying close attention to Milwaukee.
But Biskupic would disappoint him. In December of 2005, Biskupic announced in a press conference that his investigation had yielded no evidence of a broad conspiracy. He said that his office would pursue isolated cases of suspected fraud (see the note below for those results) -- ultimately, eighteen cases.
All that didn't stop Rove from harping on voter fraud in Milwaukee. In April of 2006, during a speech before the Republican National Lawyers Association, Rove touched on voter fraud, and the case of Milwaukee in particular. When an audience member, saying that the Democratic Party "rests on the base of election fraud," asked about the issue, Rove said, "yes, this is a real problem. What is it -- five wards in the city of Milwaukee have more voters than adults?" (Actually the article he'd printed out showed that seventeen wards had had more votes than voters.)
Come October, the issue was still burning in Rove's mind. And so that month, both President Bush and Karl Rove passed along complaints about Biskupic's pursuit of voter fraud. Those complaints might very well have put Biskupic on the list of U.S. attorneys to be fired.
The problem for Biskupic actually starts with this 2004 voter fraud issue. The Republicans complain of voter fraud in the 2004 presidential election. Biskupic investigates the allegations, but finds no evidence of voter fraud by the Democrats. Biskupic's investigation does not satisfy Wiley or even Karl Rove--who orders Wiley to prepare a report on voter fraud in Wisconsin. Rove then uses the report to sell his theory that there is widespread Democratic voter fraud in Wisconsin to Republicans--even though Biskupic's investigation reveals no evidence of such voter fraud. And since Biskupic had failed to please either Rove or Wiley in uncovering and prosecuting cases of Democratic voter fraud in Wisconsin, of which Rove believes is true because of the report Wiley created for him, Rove passes on the complaints that Biskupic in not a loyal Bushie attorney and must be fired.
This brings up a very interesting question. Did Biskupic learn that he was on Karl Rove's attorney hit list before he embarked on the prosecution of Thompson? The TPM Muckraker story really doesn't say whether Biskupic learned of this hit list, or why Rove took Biskupic's name off the list. All we are left with here is that Biskupic's name was on the attorney hit list. Biskupic targets Thompson on a fraud case, smearing Democratic governor Doyle just before the 2006 elections. Biskupic's name is removed from the final hit list of U.S. attorneys.
And Senators Leahy, Schumer, Feingold, Kohl, Feinstein, and Whitehouse are especially interested in learning more about the connection between Biskupic, his prosecution of the fraud case against Thompson, and Wiley's voter fraud report that was created for Karl Rove. In the letter sent to Gonzales, the four senators are interested in learning more about this issue, and how it may relate to the entire attorney purge scandal.
This is going to become another major issue in the attorney purge scandal.
No comments:
Post a Comment