Salazar steps down from probe into Domenici’s role in firing

Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) has recused himself from the ethics inquiry into Sen. Pete Domenici’s (R-N.M.) contacts with fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, raising new questions about the circumstances behind the New Mexico prosecutor’s ouster.

Salazar bowed out of the Senate Ethics Committee’s preliminary probe of Domenici because of his friendship with New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid, his spokesman said yesterday.

{mosads} “As a result of this relationship, he may have knowledge of matters that may be investigated by the committee,” Salazar spokesman Cody Wertz said. He added that Salazar, a former Colorado

The Senate passed a resolution late Tuesday designating Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to serve in Salazar’s place. Wertz declined to elaborate on what specific knowledge Salazar, who is also close to Domenici, may possess that would affect his ability to evaluate the charges.

Salazar has lent a hand to Madrid’s campaigns, hosting a Denver fundraiser last spring for her ultimately unsuccessful bid against Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.). Madrid is a central figure in Iglesias’s narrative of his dismissal, which points a finger at Domenici and Wilson for calling the attorney before last year’s election to discuss indictments in a courthouse corruption case against prominent state-level Democrats.

Last fall, Madrid challenged Wilson in a hyper-partisan campaign, with Wilson accusing Madrid of being soft on crime for failing to prosecute local Democrats in the courthouse case as well as another probe involving the state treasurer.

Salazar’s friendship with Madrid, a fellow Democrat, may have had more impact on his judgment of Iglesias’s credibility than his judgment of Domenici.

Madrid and Iglesias were political rivals, facing off in the 1998 attorney general’s race. After Madrid emerged victorious, Salazar hosted an April 2000 fundraiser to help her retire her campaign debt. Moreover, Madrid told a New Mexico political blog last month that she believes Iglesias and the Justice Department worked to keep her on the sidelines of both the courthouse and the state treasurer investigations.

Domenici’s office referred questions on the recusal to his lawyer in the ethics inquiry, Lee Blalack, who declined to comment pending the outcome of the committee’s work.

Meanwhile, another subject of unanswered questions about Iglesias’s firing attracted attention from Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) in the run-up to the 2004 election, according to e-mails released late last week by the Justice Department.

The New Mexico GOP had complained that Iglesias had failed to pursue voter-fraud cases sufficiently. But Bingaman Chief of Staff Stephen Ward called Justice in October 2004 to express concerns about the voter-fraud task force that Iglesias had established as part of a nationwide initiative launched by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. New Mexico’s secretary of state had questioned whether Iglesias’s initiative would deter minority voters from the polls in a race that President Bush won by a razor-thin margin.

“My call was in respect to reports of the establishment of the task force and public quotes from our top election official, who expressed concern that it might be intended to keep people away from the polls,” Ward said in an interview yesterday. He said Justice informed him of the task force’s members, its mission and its specific guidelines to avert any voter suppression.
Asked whether the task force’s existence would belie Republican complaints that Iglesias made little progress on voter fraud, Ward demurred.

“We never sought nor were provided with any information about specific cases,” Ward said. “The only information we would have is what was in the papers recently.”

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), previewing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s hotly anticipated testimony this morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee, confirmed reports that Gonzales’s former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, told senators that he heard Iglesias had come up in conversations between Gonzales and President Bush.

The Gonzales-Bush conversation recalled by Sampson during private interviews with senators took place in October 2006, Schumer said. He could not confirm whether the conversation occurred before or after Domenici and Wilson made their calls to Iglesias during that month. Iglesias also appeared on Justice’s list of prosecutors slated for axing sometime in October.

“It would be pretty interesting [to know] whether it was the beginning of the month or the end of the month,” Schumer said yesterday.