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Voter Supression?
The Bush administration engaged in a three-year effort to suppress likely Democratic votes, a new report from the New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law found.
The liberal-leaning non-profit groups reported that 55 percent of career prosecutors have left the Justice Department’s voting section. They were driven away by a partisan hiring process, altered evaluations and political retaliation on the job, according to their report and interviews with Joseph Rich, the former head of the section.
And the groups state that the so-called “hotbeds” of voter fraud in Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Washington and Wisconsin are non-existent.
The report comes as the House and Senate Judiciary panels are investigating the questionable dismissals of nine U.S. attorneys last year. A central point in the investigation is whether some of the prosecutors were fired for failing to investigate allegations of voter fraud against Democratic-leaning groups.
The administration has strongly denied that the prosecutors were fired for improper reasons.
Bradley J. Schlozman, the U.S. attorney for Kansas City last fall, indicted four workers for a Democratic-leaning voter registration organization, just days before last fall’s historic congressional election that put the Democrats back in charge of Congress.
The action violates the Justice Department’s rules governing election conduct. Schlozman, now a senior department official in Washington, said he did not think it would impact the election.
Schlozman’s actions starkly contrast with how other Justice Department officials handled voter fraud cases right before the election.
Matthew W. Friedrich, a top Justice Department official, told committee investigators that he declined to pursue allegations of voter fraud just before the election because it would be in violation of the department’s rules.
Friedrich gave a sworn statement to the committee that Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ former chief of staff, hand-delivered a packet of information about voter fraud cases around the country. The packet, he said in the statement, came from either presidential adviser Karl Rove or his office.
“They wanted us to take a look at it,” Friedrich told the committee investigators. Committee staff asked Friedrich what he did with the packet.
“Not a darn thing,” Friedrich told the committee investigators. “I did not copy it or communicate it down the chain of command in substance or in form.”
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