24 Subpoenas Issued in Dornan Probe

Acting on a request by attorneys for former Rep. Robert K. Dornan, a federal judge Tuesday issued 24 subpoenas for record keepers from schools, banks, nonprofit groups, federal agencies and the campaign of the woman who won Dornan’s seat in Congress.

The subpoenas, part of Dornan’s campaign to prove he lost the November election to Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) due to vote fraud, ask for scaled-back versions of the same information he requested a month ago. The original 40 subpoenas were revoked by the same judge, Gary L. Taylor, who said Dornan did not have legal authority under the Contested Elections Act to demand documents alone.

All of the subpoenas are addressed to the “custodian of records” and request appearances at the offices of Dornan’s attorneys over a four-day period next week.

The subpoenas were rewritten to comply with federal law by asking for individuals to come forward with records, rather than asking for only the records themselves. They also ask for less-extensive information, for the most part, seeking documents dating from 1995 rather than 1993.

“A sharp pencil has been taken to them,” said Bill Hart, an attorney for Dornan. “They are very focused as to time, relevance and the connection of records to election fraud.”

Sanchez supporters strongly disagreed and continued to portray Dornan’s subpoenas as part of a “fishing expedition” meant to find enough bad votes to overturn his 984-vote defeat.

“It’s the usual cast of characters [under subpoena]--Catholic Charities, Rancho Santiago College, the registrar of voters, INS,” said Wylie Aitken, an attorney for Sanchez. “These are incredible invasions of privacy and not in any way related to the charges that are being made.”

Aitken said that information sought from Sanchez’s campaign committee includes bank records, names and addresses of all employees and volunteers, and all phone records and messages dating back to January 1995.

He said he expects to lodge a formal objection with the congressional task force that is hearing Dornan’s complaint and that gave him the legal authority to issue the subpoenas.

“You can imagine how dangerous it would be to sit back and let any losing candidate ask an opponent’s campaign who worked for it, names and addresses, bank records, volunteer lists,” he said. “Frankly, it’s none of Mr. Dornan’s business.”

Dornan is basing his fight on a 1969 federal statute that has been invoked nearly 50 times but never before has reached this stage. The territory is so new that Dornan’s attorneys and the judge needed to create a new form for the subpoenas, in which recipients were told to direct any objections to the House Oversight Committee.

It is unclear how many bad votes Dornan needs to show before the committee will recommend that Congress overturn the election. Dornan’s attorneys said they need only 980, but other legal authorities said he would need to come up with at least 2,000. Ultimately, the decision will be in the hands of Congress.

Also unclear is the time frame for gathering information. The act calls for a 30-day information-gathering period for Dornan, and the congressional committee has indicated that the clock started running on March 10. However, Hart said he hopes the task force will grant an extension.

Because they had not yet received the subpoenas, recipients were reluctant to comment late Tuesday about what their response might be. However, Chancellor Vivian Blevins of Rancho Santiago College said the earlier set of subpoenas asked for information about 164,000 students who took citizenship and English-as-a-second-language classes. “It would take at least three eight-hour days to retrieve that information,” she said.

The extent of records requested from the college appears to have been scaled back, but subpoenas were issued for five of its learning centers.

As they did before, many subpoenas target groups that serve Latinos and immigrants. Among them are the One-Stop Immigration and Education Center in Los Angeles, the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project in Montebello, Catholic Charities of Orange County, Rancho Santiago College and several labor unions--the Carpenters Union Local 2361 and Local 803, both in Orange, and the Laborers Union Local 652 in Santa Ana, Hart said.

Bank records are sought for Democratic Assembly candidate Lou Correa, who lost in November to Jim Morrissey (R-Anaheim); the personal and business accounts of political consultant Michael Farber; and Nativo Lopez, executive director of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional in Santa Ana, a Latino rights organization that is under a criminal investigation related to alleged voter fraud. A request was also made for records from a voter education group run by Farber and Lopez called Citizen’s Forum.

In addition, the subpoenas seek voting and citizenship records from county and federal agencies, including the Orange County registrar of voters, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Naturalization Division of U.S. District Court, the Orange County jury commissioner and the Orange County Social Services Agency.

The records requested from the INS would essentially duplicate material requested last week by Secretary of State Bill Jones, who asked the federal agency to check Orange County’s 1.3 million registered voters against its records on immigrants.

“We need to cross-check INS to make sure they aren’t engaging in a whitewash or cover-up,” said Michael Schroeder, an attorney for Dornan and chair of the state Republican Party. He added that because of the timetable for the election challenge, he needs the information much sooner than does the secretary of state’s office.

Omitted from this series of subpoenas are queries to Sanchez’s husband, Stephen Brixey III, and to the State Employment Development Department for records of noncitizens.

Schroeder said he expects that another 24 subpoenas “will be spawned from” information developed from these.

The task force had scheduled a hearing on Dornan’s challenge in Orange County on April 19. However, Schroeder said Tuesday that he may ask that the hearing be postponed until May to give his team more time to review material collected next week.