Firing of US Attorney may have violated discrimination law

Mike SheehanPublished: Wednesday April 4, 2007

fired U.S. Attorney is "striking back" at the Bush administration for what he feels is his improper dismissal, Newsweek reports.

"The Justice Department called David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, an 'absentee landlord' -- a key reason listed for his firing last December," write Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball for Newsweek. "Just one problem: Iglesias, a captain in the Navy Reserve, was off teaching classes as part of the war on terror."

The explanation used by aides to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for the firing of Iglesias -- that, among other things, he "was spending too much time away from the office" -- may be a further complication in the embattled Gonzales' struggle for self-preservation.

According to Newsweek, Iglesias confirmed "that he was recently questioned by lawyers for the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal watchdog agency, to determine if his dismissal was a violation" of a federal law (USERRA) barring workplace discrimination against U.S. military servicemembers.

Iglesias is filing a formal legal complaint with the agency over his termination by Justice, report Isikoff and Hosenball.

"I want to make sure they didn't fire me because of my military duty,” Iglesias told Newsweek. "When I was away from the office, it wasn't like I was going on vacation in Europe."

Excerpts from the Newsweek article, available in full at this link, follow...
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While it is far from clear that the law can be stretched so far as to apply to U.S. attorneys, the circumstances of Iglesias' dismissal closely parallel the sorts of USERRA cases that are increasingly being brought by Bush administration lawyers, according to Wright and others familiar with the act.
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Iglesias's background as a Navy JAG (Judge Advocate General) Corps lawyer and his membership in the Navy Reserve was well known within the Justice Department. ... (... His performance [in one case] was the inspiration for the Tom Cruise character in the movie, 'A Few Good Men.')
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Of the U.S. attorneys fired, Iglesias's case has arguably created the biggest problem for the Justice Department. As Gonzales's former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, testified last week, Iglesias was not on the original list of U.S. attorneys to be fired last fall — and was only added in November after White House aide Karl Rove complained to Gonzales that Iglesias was not doing enough to prosecute voter-fraud cases — a top GOP campaign priority. Iglesias has testified that he got two phone calls last October from Rep. Heather Wilson and Senator Domenici, both New Mexico Republicans, pressing him to bring indictments in a local corruption case that implicated Democrats — contacts that Iglesias has alleged were improper. Those contacts prompted Iglesias to brand his firing "a political hit."

Iglesias suspects that the Justice complaints about his absences were cooked up as an ex post facto rationale to justify a dismissal that was really made for political reasons. That's why, in filing his complaint with OSC, he is also alleging that his firing may have been a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal officials from using their offices to interfere with an election.

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