By DEBORAH HASTINGS – AP

In the hours before Election Day, as inevitable as winter, comes an onslaught of dirty tricks — confusing e-mails, disturbing phone calls and insinuating fliers left on doorsteps during the night.

The intent, almost always, is to keep folks from voting or to confuse them, usually through intimidation or misinformation. But in this presidential race, in which a black man leads most polls, some of the deceit has a decidedly racist bent.

Complaints have surfaced in predominantly African-American neighborhoods of Philadelphia where fliers have circulated, warning voters they could be arrested at the polls if they had unpaid parking tickets or if they had criminal convictions.

Over the weekend in Virginia, bogus fliers with an authentic-looking commonwealth seal said fears of high voter turnout had prompted election officials to hold two elections — one on Tuesday for Republicans and another on Wednesday for Democrats.

In New Mexico, two Hispanic women filed a lawsuit last week claiming they were harassed by a private investigator working for a Republican lawyer who came to their homes and threatened to call immigration authorities, even though they are U.S. citizens.

“He was questioning her status, saying that he needed to see her papers and documents to show that she was a U.S. citizen and was a legitimate voter,” said Guadalupe Bojorquez, speaking on behalf of her mother, Dora Escobedo, a 67-year-old Albuquerque resident who speaks only Spanish. “He totally, totally scared the heck out of her.”

In Pennsylvania, e-mails appeared linking Democrat Barack Obama to the Holocaust. “Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, Nov. 4,” said the electronic message, paid for by an entity calling itself the Republican Federal Committee. “Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake.”

Laughlin McDonald, who leads the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said he has never seen “an election where there was more interest and more voter turnout, and more efforts to suppress registration and turnout. And that has a real impact on minorities.”

The Obama campaign and civil rights advocacy groups have signed up millions of new voters for this presidential race. In Ohio alone, some 600,000 have submitted new voter registration cards.

Across the country, many of these first-time voters are young and strong Obama supporters. Many are also black and Hispanic.

Activist groups say it is this fresh crop of ballot-minded citizens that makes some Republicans very nervous. And they say they expect the dirty tricks to get dirtier in final hours before Tuesday.

“Oh, there’s plenty of time for things to get ugly,” said Zachary Stalberg, president of The Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based government watchdog group that is nonpartisan.

Other reports of intimidation efforts in the hotly contested state of Pennsylvania include leaflets taped to picnic benches at Drexel University, warning students that police would be at the polls on Tuesday to arrest would-be voters with prior criminal offenses.

In his Jewish neighborhood, Stalberg said, fliers were recently left claiming Obama was more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israel, and showed a photograph of him speaking in Germany.

“It shows up between the screen door and the front door in the middle of the night,” Stalberg said. “Why couldn’t someone knock on the door and hand that to me in the middle of the day? In a sense, it’s very smartly done. The message gets through. It’s done carefully enough that people might read it.”

Such tactics are common, and are often impossible to trace. Robo-calls, in which automated, bogus phone messages are sent over and over, are very hard to trace to their source, say voting advocates. E-mails fall into the same category.

In Nevada, for example, Latino voters said they had received calls from people describing themselves as Obama volunteers, urging them to cast their ballot over the phone.

The calls were reported to Election Protection, a nonprofit advocacy group that runs a hot line for election troubles. The organization does not know who orchestrated them.

“The Voting Rights Act makes it a crime to misled and intimidate voters,” said McDonald. “If you can find out who’s doing it, those people should be prosecuted. But sometimes it’s just difficult to know who’s doing what. Some of it’s just anonymous.”

Trying to mislead voters is nothing new.

“We see this every year,” said Jonah Goldman of the advocacy group Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “It all happens around this time when there’s too much other stuff going on in the campaigns, and it doesn’t get investigated.”

In 2006, automated phone calls in the final days leading to the federal election wrongly warned voters they would not be allowed to vote without a photo ID. In Colorado and Virginia, people reported receiving calls that told them their registrations had expired and they would be arrested if they showed up to vote.

The White House contest of 2004 was marked by similar deceptions. In Milwaukee, fliers went up advising people “if you’ve already voted in any election this year, you can’t vote in the presidential election.” In Pennsylvania, a letter bearing what appeared to be the McCandless Township seal falsely proclaimed that in order to cut long voting lines, Republicans would cast ballots on Nov. 2 and Democrats would vote on Nov. 3.

E-mail assaults have become increasingly popular this year, keeping pace with the proliferation of blogging and Obama’s massive online campaign efforts, according to voting activists.

“It is newer and more furious than it ever has been before,” Goldman said.

And Republicans are not exempt. “Part of it is that election campaigns are more online than ever before,” said Goldman. “During the primaries, a lot of Web sites went up that seemed to be for (GOP candidate Rudy) Giuliani, but actually were attack sites.”

New York City’s former mayor and his high-profile colleagues Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney were also targeted in fake Internet sites that featured “quotes” from the candidates espousing support for extreme positions they never endorsed.

Popularity: 16% [?]

By Will Evans, Center for Investigative Reporting

Click here to listen to the anti-Obama ad
Bishop’s Address Spanish.mp3

Retired Texas Bishop Rene Gracida says that Catholics cannot, in good conscience, vote for Obama. Now, in a last-ditch attempt to derail Latino support for Obama, an anti-abortion crusader and anti-illegal immigration activist have teamed up to blast out Gracida’s message by email to nearly three million Latino voters and reaching even more people by radio.

Randall Terry, the aggressive anti-abortion organizer who founded Operation Rescue, says it was his idea. He enlisted Gracida, who made national headlines in 1990 by excommunicating three Catholics for assisting with abortions. In 2004, Gracida gave a special benediction for the Republican National Convention.

In the English-language version of his anti-Obama message, Gracida says, “A Catholic cannot be said to have voted in this election with a good conscience if they have voted for a pro-abortion candidate. Barack Hussein Obama is a pro-abortion candidate.” You can hear the Spanish version here.

Terry called the email blast “a blockbuster because Obama is desperate to take the Hispanic vote.” He told us the emails went to “2.9 million Hispanic voters” as well as “100,000 whites.” He corrected that to “100,000 Americans,” then quickly said that didn’t sound quite right either. He said he hasn’t had much sleep, due to this last-minute effort.

RightMarch.com provided financial and logistical support for the campaign, buying a bit of radio time in Ohio, and procuring the massive email list to reach Latinos.

RightMarch’s president, William Greene, made illegal immigration his top issue last year, when he lost a special election for Congress in Georgia. A fundraising letter of support for Greene from the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps PAC (which we profiled here) described Greene thusly:

* Bill has been a leader in the fight against illegal immigration as a grassroots activist, delivering millions of messages to Capitol Hill from constituents, demanding NO AMNESTY for illegals;
* He has personally mustered with us on the U.S.-Mexican border as a volunteer with the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, standing watch to report the illegals streaming unhindered across our officially undefended Arizona border;
* Bill has helped us to raise tens of thousands of dollars for MCDC operations and projects, such as the Border Fence Project…
* He has pushed hard for congressional bills to de-fund pro-illegal immigration groups like the ACLU and La Raza, to take away their ill-gotten gains stolen from the pockets of unwilling and unsuspecting taxpayers.

Terry said radio hosts are picking up the Bishop Gracida ad and broadcasting it for free. Some individuals are paying for airtime themselves, he said, and one businessman in Ohio paid for a TV version of the ad.

“The glory of this is that it’s free,” Terry said. “It’s viral!”

Here is a translated version of the message sent out:

Dear Friends:

We only have days left before a critical election to elect a new president. In this moment, like no other moment in history, Hispanic votes will decide the future of the United States. That means that we have a great weight of responsibility.

During this election, there are many Catholics who have told the Catholic people that it is ok to vote for Obama for president.

That is simply not true. Unfortunately, it is a lie.

Please, read the words of a beloved Hispanic bishop, Bishop Rene H. Gracida, who has faithfully served the Hispanic Catholics of Florida and Texas.

“I am Bishop Rene A. Gracida, reminding all Catholics that they need to vote in these elections with an informed conscience.

A Catholic cannot say that he/she voted in this election in good conscience if he/she votes for a candidate in favor of abortion.

Barak Hussein Obama is a candidate in favor of abortion.”

This magnificent message of our dear Bishop is available as a radio ad that can be aired on Hispanic radio stations. Click here to listen to this ad. ( http://www.randallterry.com/ ) If you are interested in spreading this message to other Hispanic voters and if you want to give us a donation so that other Catholics can listen to Bishop Gracida, please give what you can as soon as possible. Click here to contribute to our cause.

When we enter the voting booth, we must not forget that Obama supports the killing of unborn babies even until the day they are to be born. This, in the eyes of God, is murder.

We must not help someone who has the intention of killing babies - especially Hispanic babies. It is a fact that Obama has used our tax dollars to place abortion clinics in Hispanic neighborhoods.
Remember that our loyalty to our Lord Jesus Christ is much more important than any political party.
It is your decision for whom you want to vote. There are many candidates that are against the culture of death, who support life and who love the United States and our people, but as Bishop Gracida said - We cannot vote for Obama with a clear conscience.

Again we ask you to give a gift if you can so that more people can listen to Bishop Gracida’s ad, and we also ask for your prayers for this cause in defense of life.

And we ask you to send this message to your friends and your family.

As Catholics, we understand that we owe everything to our God and our Mother, the Virgin of Guadalupe.

May God bless you and whatever happens, remember the words of Bishop Gracida when you enter the voting booth this Tuesday.

Popularity: 35% [?]

SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — A federal grand jury indicted a former California congressional candidate on an obstruction-of-justice charge Wednesday after an investigation into a letter his campaign sent to Hispanic voters.

Tan Nguyen, who unsuccessfully ran for the 47th Congressional District in Orange County in 2006, is accused of misleading state investigators looking into the mailer. His campaign mailed 14,000 letters to Hispanics before the election saying they could be deported for voting if they were illegally in the country or were an immigrant. He later blamed a campaign volunteer.

Nguyen’s attorney, James Riddet, said his client would plead not guilty.

“He looks forward to a trial where he expects to be fully exonerated,” Riddet said.

Jamie Hais, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said she could not disclose exactly how Nguyen misled authorities because the investigation continued.

Nguyen said at the time that he didn’t authorize or approve the letter and implied that his opponent, Rep. Loretta Sanchez, was behind the investigations.

Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant, said he had bought a database of Hispanic voters from a Burbank company called Political Data Inc. so he could send them Spanish-language campaign literature. He said his campaign sent four fliers using the database before his office manager forwarded the names to an outside party.

His campaign and attorney refused to release the name of the office manager.

Nguyen will receive a summons to appear in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana on Oct. 14, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman with the U.S. attorney’s office. If convicted, he could face a maximum of 10 years in prison.

Popularity: 16% [?]

By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer

Investigators probing the firing of nine U.S. attorneys concluded that top Justice Department officials “abdicated their responsibility” by failing to supervise subordinates who carried out the botched plan, according to a long-awaited report released today.

At their urging, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey selected a veteran federal prosecutor to continue the inquiry, focusing on whether department officials, including former attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales, misled Congress after the firings came to light last year.

The investigation uncovered “significant evidence” that partisan political factors played a role in some of the 2006 dismissals. Particularly “troubling,” according to the report, was the sacking of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias after several Republican elected officials complained about voter fraud and public corruption cases he pursued. That episode raises the possibility that obstruction of justice and wire fraud laws were violated.

Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine and Office of Professional Responsibility Director H. Marshall Jarrett, who had been investigating the basis for the dismissals for 18 months, also cited “inconsistent, misleading or inaccurate” statements by the department’s former leaders.

In the 390-page report, issued this morning, they said Gonzales “bears primary responsibility” for the debacle and asserted that he was “remarkably disengaged” from the process, which stretched on for months. Investigators said that after the mass firings came to light, Gonzales made “misleading” public statements about his involvement, failing to recall his attendance at a critical meeting and documents that landed on his desk.

But investigators stopped short of concluding that a crime had been committed. Instead, they called for further inquiry to determine the facts underlying the removal of Iglesias and whether department officials had issued false or misleading statements to Congress and the public.

Reached by phone, Iglesias said he was cheered by the findings and said he looked forward to the results of the investigation as it proceeds.

In their strongest conclusions, the Justice Department investigators said that D. Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Gonzales, had committed “misconduct” by making a series of questionable public statements and failing to share information with the White House, lawmakers and his own superiors about the extent of the White House involvement in the firings.

Bradford Berenson, a lawyer for Sampson, said it was “mystifying and disappointing that the inspector general chose to impugn Mr. Sampson’s candor and integrity when, virtually alone among significant participants in this matter, Mr. Sampson at all times cooperated fully and voluntarily with any and all investigators, without preconditions, and provided his best, most honest and complete recollection of these events. He has behaved with honor and dignity throughout this difficult episode and has never attempted to shirk his responsibility for problems in the U.S. attorney firings.”

The internal watchdogs asked that the investigation continue under the authority of a prosecutor with the power to compel testimony and production of documents. They said their probe was thwarted in part because they could not interview key witnesses, including former White House officials Karl Rove, Harriet E. Miers and William Kelley. Investigators also pointed out that the White House refused to turn over internal documents related to the dismissal of the prosecutors by citing the “sensitivity” of the issues, saying the move had “hindered” their inquiry.

Mukasey selected Connecticut Acting U.S. Attorney Nora R. Dannehy, a federal prosecutor for 17 years, to answer the lingering questions. Dannehy will report to the department’s second in command. Her investigation likely will extend for months, ensuring that the politically charged issue will extend into the next administration.

The investigators said the prosecutor should consider whether Sampson, the department official who played the greatest role in developing the dismissal list, made false statements to Congress or investigators for the inspector general and the Office of Professional Responsibility. They also urged the prosecutor to examine the statements of other former department leaders and to scrutinize whether federal criminal statutes were violated.

In a joint statement, the investigators said “it is important to note that our report did not conclude that the evidence we have uncovered thus far establishes that a violation of any criminal statute has occurred. However, we believe that the evidence collected in this investigation is not complete and that serious allegations have not been fully investigated or resolved.”

In the report, they said they could not reach a conclusion about whether Gonzales deliberately issued misleading statements about his role in the firings at a March 2007 news conference. That issue could come under review by Dannehy.

Current and former lawyers in the department, however, said criminal charges against Gonzales, who stepped aside in August 2007, were unlikely without the emergence of new e-mails or witness accounts that directly contradict his statements about the firings.

Sources familiar with the case said they could not foreclose other avenues for the investigation, especially if Dannehy receives long sought documents from the White House.

Mukasey called the firing process “haphazard, arbitrary and unprofessional” in a statement released this morning.

“The leaders of the department owed it to the American people they served to conduct the public’s business in a deliberate and professional manner,” Mukasey said. “The department failed on both scores.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said that “perhaps a prosecutor can break down walls that others cannot. The threads of secrecy of this administration - from the White House to the executive agencies - will continue to unravel for years to come.”

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, immediately announced he would hold a hearing Friday to address the report’s findings.

“This scheme, which the report makes clear was hatched in the White House, was a fundamental betrayal of the American people and the men and women of the Department of Justice and it will be a long time before we can fully repair the damage,” Conyers said.

In their 18-month review, investigators sifted through thousands of documents and interviewed scores of people to test the reasons department leaders offered for the prosecutors’ dismissals. They also set out to determine whether the prosecutors were sacked in an improper attempt to influence particular cases.

The basis for the dismissals is the subject of a tug of war between Congress and the executive branch. This year, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee sued to seek documents and testimony from former White House counsel Miers and from President Bush’s chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten. A federal appeals court in Washington is deliberating the case. Meanwhile, the House panel recently voted to hold Rove in contempt for refusing to answer questions about the firings.

The political heat intensified last year amid more than half a dozen congressional hearings into the issue. Ultimately, 19 Justice Department officials in Washington resigned.

Paul J. McNulty, the former deputy attorney general, failed to object to the plan when it came to his attention in the fall of 2006 and failed to oversee subordinates who launched the effort, investigators concluded.

Monica M. Goodling, who served as the department’s White House liaison, told Congress last year that she felt “uncomfortable” during a March 2007 conversation with Gonzales that focused on her recollections of the circumstances surrounding the dismissals. Her account of the meeting prompted lawmakers to accuse Gonzales of improperly trying to influence her testimony.

Gonzales denied the allegations, saying he was only trying to comfort a distraught employee. Goodling is one of several former aides who declined to be interviewed by investigators, who lacked the power to issue subpoenas.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers challenged Gonzales’s truthfulness in a series of hostile hearings in the summer of 2007. The sessions highlighted his inability to remember key meetings, e-mails and memos laying out plans for the dismissals. Gonzales, who has not landed full-time legal work since his resignation, told Congress that he delegated many decisions to his subordinates and should have exercised more oversight.

In a statement, George J. Terwilliger III, a lawyer for Gonzales, said his client “engaged in no wrongful or improper conduct” and acknowledged “that the process for evaluating U.S. attorney performance in this instance was flawed.”

Terwilliger added: “It seems rather odd, then, that rather than bring the investigation to a close, the Department would escalate the matter to the attention of a prosecutor when its own policies require preliminary evidence” before opening an investigation.

U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and can be fired for any reason. But contradictory explanations for the dismissals, and the steady release of internal e-mails suggesting the plan had evolved over two years in consultation with White House officials, damaged the department’s reputation and credibility.

Among the most closely watched of the cases is the one involving former New Mexico U.S. attorney Iglesias, who says he received troubling phone calls from GOP Sen. Pete V. Domenici and Republican Rep. Heather A. Wilson about the status of a criminal corruption probe against a prominent local Democrat shortly before the 2006 elections. In April, the Senate Ethics Committee admonished Domenici, who is retiring, saying he should have known the call would create “an appearance of impropriety.”

Investigators failed in their attempts to interview Domenici and his chief of staff, Steve Bell.

Any documents and interviews gathered by Dannehy presumably would be covered under federal grand jury and investigative protections, keeping them under wraps for months, until after Bush leaves office.

Popularity: 13% [?]