It’s been a rough week for Patricia Madrid.
The New Mexico attorney general is working hard in her bid to unseat U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M. this year. It’s one of the most hotly contested races in the nation, so it’s inevitably a nasty contest. Madrid, a Democrat, has been plagued during the campaign by allegations that she failed to investigate the state treasurer’s office and stop the corruption there several years ago.
Wilson unveiled the inevitable television commercial last week accusing Madrid of doing nothing to stop the problems in the treasurer’s office that eventually led to the federal indictments of the past two state treasurers and others.
One issue has been whether a draft letter prepared by the Johnson administration in 2002 asking Madrid to investigate the treasurer’s office was actually sent. Madrid says her office never received the letter, and the finance department can’t prove it was ever signed or mailed.
But former Gov. Gary Johnson, in a letter released over the weekend by the Wilson campaign, said it was “an irrefutable fact that representatives from Patricia Madrid’s office were involved in multiple meetings where clear questions about impropriety in the state Treasurer’s Office were raised,” according to the Albuquerque Journal. Johnson says concerns were discussed at three meetings of the state Board of Finance at which he and a representative of the attorney general’s office were present.
Madrid struck back on Wednesday. In a statement released by the attorney general’s office, she said she “cooperated with the FBI in 2000 to allow the federal investigation into corruption in the New Mexico Treasurer’s Office to move forward. … Later, the FBI asked my office to allow them to pursue the case alone. At that time, I had full confidence in the FBI’s ability to handle the investigation and returned to my work keeping child sexual predators off the Internet and putting murderers on death row.”
We should be asking why this statement wasn’t released sooner, but we should be asking the same about Johnson’s statement.
Madrid answered that question: “With a new Republican partisan coming forward every day trying to cast doubt on my history of being tough on crime and corruption, I knew it was time to speak up.”
But her defense didn’t have the impact she intended.
Instead of focusing on Madrid’s statement, the Santa Fe New Mexican focused on why the state office, instead of Madrid’s campaign, issued a politically defensive news release. State law prohibits state employees from engaging in “partisan political activity while on duty.”
Paul Nixon, the employee who issued the news release, defended his actions by saying his office, rather than the campaign, “knows all the facts (and) is also the subject matter of the issue.”
But this had to hurt most: Madrid’s statement came out the same day State Auditor Domingo Martinez became the first Democrat to publicly criticize Madrid for doing nothing about the treasurer’s office. He said she should have done something following a 2000 audit that revealed problems.
“I think she should have looked into it,” Martinez told the Albuquerque Journal.
Martinez cited a letter from a Republican state House leader to Madrid in 2000, telling her that some findings in the audit “were disturbing to say the least,” according to the Journal.
The newspaper also pointed out that the federal investigation that led to the indictments last year did not involve the attorney general’s office.
Though some Democrats will spin it as such, it was not a political attack by Martinez. He has expressed frustration throughout his time as auditor that prosecutors – both Democrat and Republican – did little to seriously investigate issues raised by his office’s audits.
Madrid did, however, prosecute members of the Las Cruces school board several years ago after an audit revealed multiple violations of the state’s open meetings act. The school board gave almost $1 million in incentives to the superintendent in secret to try to convince him to stay in Las Cruces.
But that won’t likely be remembered during her campaign. That central-New Mexico congressional district does not include Las Cruces.
It’s been a rough week for Patricia Madrid.