Questions raised of prosecutor who cleared Bush officials in purge probe

Before Nora Dannehy was appointed to investigate the Bush U.S. attorney firing scandal, her team of lawyers was found to have illegally suppressed evidence in a major political corruption case. This previously unreported fact calls into question her entire probe. It similarly undercuts the work of her DOJ colleague, John Durham, named first by Bush officials and then continued by the Obama administration, to probe DOJ and CIA decision-making on torture. Read this exclusive report by the Justice Integrity Project via Nieman Watchdog.  

In September 2008, the Bush Justice Department appointed career federal prosecutor Nora Dannehy to investigate allegations that Bush officials in 2006 illegally fired nine U.S. attorneys who wouldn’t politicize official corruption investigations. But just four days before her appointment, a federal appeals court had ruled that a team of prosecutors led by Dannehy illegally suppressed evidence in a major political corruption case in Connecticut.  The prosecutors’ misconduct was so serious that the court vacated seven of the eight convictions in the case. Now, almost two years later, Dannehy has provided arguably the most important blanket exoneration for high-level U.S. criminal targets since President George H.W. Bush pardoned six Iran-Contra criminals after the 1992 Presidential vote. The ruling didn’t cite Dannehy by name, and although it was publicly reported it apparently never came up in the news coverage of her appointment. But it now calls into question the integrity of her probe by raising serious concerns about her credibility -- and about whether she was particularly vulnerable to political pressure from within the Justice Department.

The DOJ announced on July 21 that it has “closed the case” on the nine unprecedented mid-term firings because Dannehy found no criminal wrongdoing by DOJ or White House officials. Yet the official account indicates that she either placed or acceded to constraints on the scope of her probe that restricted it to the firing of just one of the ousted U.S. attorneys, not the others -- and not to the conduct of the U.S. attorneys who weren't ousted because they met whatever tests DOJ and the White House created.

And although reaction to the closing of the inquiry has been muted, some observers are accusing her of a whitewash.

“This is an outrageous act of cowardice and cover-up!” former Alabama governor and political prosecution victim Don Siegelman emailed me regarding DOJ’s decision, and its failure to interview him.  "The Justice Department has all the resources in the world to go after Lance Armstrong [for a multi-year, multi-million dollar investigation of unproven claims of cheating during bike races] but doesn't have the balls to go after Karl Rove."

The Supreme Court vacated much of Siegelman's conviction last month after years of controversy, including charges by Republican whistleblowers that he was prosecuted primarily because he was a Democrat. As a result, House Judiciary Committee leaders and Siegelman’s first trial judge, U.W. Clemon, last year separately urged Attorney Gen. Eric Holder to investigate suspected DOJ prosecution irregularities in what Clemon called “the most unfounded” prosecution he’d witnessed in nearly three decades on Alabama’s federal bench.

The DOJ’s letter said Dannehy found that the evidence “did not demonstrate any prosecutable criminal offense” in the 2006 firing of former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, and stated that there was no basis to broaden the investigation beyond his circumstances. Iglesias, a Bush appointee whose 2008 book In Justice had a chapter entitled, “All Roads Lead to Rove,” wrote me last year that he largely wants to put his ordeal behind him. Now returned to his original field of working in military justice, he told investigative reporter Jason Leopold this week:

I’m glad the matter is finally over. I’m gratified the Justice Department took the matter seriously enough to appoint an experienced corruption prosecutor to investigate. I will not second-guess her findings. I hope this scandal prevents future administrations and political leaders from attempting to politicize U.S. Attorneys.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers issued this comment:

It is clear that Ms. Dannehy’s determination is not an exoneration of Bush officials in the U.S. attorney matter as there is no dispute that these firings were totally improper and that misleading testimony was given to Congress in an effort to cover them up.

One such official, former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, who was forced out over the scandal, commented to CNN, "I feel angry that I had to go through this. That my family had to suffer through and what for?"

But several close observers of the case cried cover-up.

Human rights attorney and Harper’s blogger columnist Scott Horton wrote, in a post titled, “Another Audacious Whitewash at DOJ”:

Rather than look at the entire U.S. attorneys scandal, Dannehy settled on a probe of a single case: that involving New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. This is the one case in which the available evidence showed that the decision was taken by President Bush himself, in the White House….

The probe should have examined the entire pattern of terminations as a common scheme and taken it as a basis for action. Instead, other related cases were – as I am informed by persons involved in them – shunted off to the Justice Department’s “roach motel,” the Office of Professional Responsibility, where they will likely languish without any serious investigation, much less any action.

Nora Dannehy’s decision to take no action, coupled with all the lame rationalizations of inaction that preceded it, is another self-administered bullet wound to the integrity of the Justice Department...How can a Justice Department hold its own personnel to a lower standard under the law than they hold other public officials? This is a formula for disaster.

Investigative reporter Wayne Madsen repeated in a subscription-only post his 2009 report that Dannehy and her family have benefited from career-building decision-making that sometimes conflicts with her “tough” reputation. In charting the Dannehy family’s career progressions during the past decade, Madsen cited, for example, her husband’s appointment in 2007 to become director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center.

In addition, Alabama legal affairs blogger Roger Shuler, who has closely documented what he has described as political prosecutions in the Deep South, published “Shirley Sherrod Is Not the Only One Who Has Been ‘Put Through Hell.’” The article compared the plight of Alabama DOJ whistleblower Tamarah Grimes to that of Sherrod, the Georgia employee of U.S. Department of Agriculture who was fired after false accusations were made against her this month.

Grimes was fired in June 2009 from her job as a paralegal in the Middle District of Alabama, eight days after writing a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder outlining misconduct in the prosecution of former Governor Don Siegelman. Grimes remains without a job and says she has faced significant financial and emotional stress….Tamarah Grimes has an important message for the Obama administration. It did, to its credit, try to get things right in the Shirley Sherrod matter. But its double standard on matters of "injustice" is glaring.

My Justice Integrity Project published a profile of Grimes that includes background on her and DOJ’s reaction, which is to deny all of her allegations of government misconduct. DOJ also claimed that she was fired for once saying she had taped evidence of wrongdoing in the office. She denied describing or making any tapes.

A Republican, Grimes has told me that she has wanted to testify to Congress or any other official body about the waste and unfairness she witnessed, including by the Bush political holdover Middle District U.S. Attorney Leura Canary. Canary's husband is William Canary, leader of the Business Council of Alabama and former campaign manager against Siegelman's opponent, current Republican Gov. Bob Riley. William Canary was allegedly at the center of the plot begun with his wife and his friend Rove in 2002 to frame Siegelman. But even under the Obama administration, Bush-appointee Leura Canary continues to run the office that prosecuted Siegelman. Grimes is now out of work and about to lose her home to foreclosure. What’s next? “Nora Dannehy has not contacted me,” Grimes wrote me of DOJ’s nationwide probe. “If the DOJ is conducting its own ‘inquiry’ history tells us that it is one hundred percent whitewash.”