Former U.S. Attorney Condemns Bush White House Interference With Renzi Probe

With the 2006 mid-term congressional elections rapidly approaching, a top aide to Karl Rove warned Harriet Miers that Republican Rep. Rick Renzi's re-election was in serious jeopardy because of rumors that Renzi was the target of a federal criminal investigation.
Later the same day, Miers, then the White House counsel, called the Justice Department's second highest ranking official and pressed him to issue a statement that would vindicate the Arizona Republican
As chronicled in a series of White House e-mails that were part of a massive trove of documents Web-published by the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Miers was initially rebuffed in her efforts to get then-deputy attorney general Paul McNulty to issue a statement clearing Renzi. Justice Department policy is ordinarily not to comment on ongoing investigations.
But on the very next day, news stories simultaneously appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press saying that although there was an ongoing probe of Renzi, the investigation was in a preliminary stage and there had been no evidence uncovered to date that Renzi had done anything wrong at all.
In fact, the investigation, which had been ongoing for some time, had already amassed enough evidence of alleged criminal misconduct that the U.S. attorney leading the Renzi probe, Paul Charlton, had just obtained approval from the highest levels of the Justice Department to seek an application from a federal judge to wiretap Renzi's telephone. Over a year later, in Feb. 2008, a federal grand jury indicted Renzi on 38 counts of money laundering, extortion, insurance fraud, and other alleged felonies.
But the disinformation leaked to media outlets had the desired effect: Renzi won reelection by the narrowest of margins. (To read more about that disinformation campaign, see here and here.)
In an interview Tuesday, Charlton, the U.S. attorney who led the Renzi probe told me: "It's a great disappointment that the White House not only would ask that the Justice Department comment about an ongoing investigation but also lie about that investigation. And it is even a greater disappointment that the Gonzales Department of Justice and would comment at all about an ongoing investigation let alone make untruthful comments about an investigation."
Career federal law enforcement officials who worked directly on the Renzi criminal probe told me for this story that I wrote for the Hill in June that they wanted Attorney General Eric Holder to initiate a formal investigation of the matter. LinkHere