WASHINGTON – Daniel Bogden, [pictured] the fired U.S. Attorney in Nevada, says he never refused to handle a case that Brent Ward, head of a federal obscenity task force, presented to his office, and calls Ward’s complaints that he did “nonsense.”
Bogden said the case that Ward, former U.S. Attorney for Utah, brought him was weak, and needed more investigation. He said his own attorneys were overwhelmed with a series of high-profile trials, but still told Ward that they may be able to help out after the first of the year.
Bogden didn’t last that long. Last December, he was one of seven U.S. Attorneys fired by the Bush administration.
“When I read the emails it was just really was nonsense,” Bogden said.
In emails the Justice Department turned over to Congress, Ward complained that Bogden was resisting the case a week before they had a scheduled meeting in Las Vegas to discuss it. Ward fretted that the refusal might undermine shaky FBI support for the anti-obscenity initiative.
“For the FBI people to go out to LV and sit and listen to the lame excuses of a defiant U.S. Attorney is only going to move this whole enterprise close to catastrophe,” Ward wrote to a senior official in the department’s criminal division.
“This guy hasn’t even met me and yet he’s criticizing me of having made lousy excuses and being some kind of defiant U.S. attorney” in emails to superiors, Bogden said in an interview with The Tribune.
When Bogden saw the case, it was clear it was lacking.
“The case that was presented to me needed massive investigative work,” he said. The case targeted an individual running his own business. “They had the name of a target. They didn’t have a location for his Web site. They didn’t have information as to other potential defendants” and had not identified assets that could be seized.
Ward continued pressing his case with superiors, emailing Attorney Gonzales’ chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, a Utah native, complaining that “we have two U.S. Attorneys who are unwilling to take good cases we have presented to them.” The other referred to in the email was Paul Charlton of Arizona, who was also fired in December. Charlton eventually assigned a prosecutor to help one from Ward’s office in prosecuting an obscenity distribution case against Five Star Video. It is scheduled for trial in April.
A table prepared by the Justice Department explaining the reasons for the firing noted that Bogden and Charlton had refused to prosecute an obscenity case. But a Justice Department official told a House committee only that the administration wanted new leadership in the office.