U.S. Attorneys Scandal—Las Vegas

By Scott Horton

Today’s Washington Post offers a story reviewing the central role that the Republican Party’s voter suppression project played in the decision to cashier a dozen or more U.S. attorneys. Not much really new ground covered in this story, which is largely a rehash of things broken by McClatchy and local papers, but it does get a bit deeper into the firing of Dan E. Bogden:

That aide, senior counselor Matthew Friedrich, turned over notes to Congress that detailed a telephone conversation about voter fraud with another Justice official, Benton Campbell, chief of staff for the Criminal Division. Friedrich had asked Campbell for his assessment of Rove’s complaints about problems in New Mexico, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, according to a congressional aide familiar with Friedrich’s remarks. The notes show that Campbell also identified Nevada as a problem district. Daniel G. Bogden of Las Vegas was among the nine U.S. attorneys known to have been removed from their jobs last year.

The great irony of this—not covered by the WaPo piece (which indeed generally fails to discuss the 800-pound gorilla in the room, namely that the “voter fraud” complaints were fraudulent) is that Nevada did have a large-scale and broadly documented voter fraud problem. It was a phony registration drive funded by the Republican Party which was shredding or destroying the registration forms prepared by voters who indicated a preference for voting in the Democratic primary.