"America's Toughest Dictator"? FBI Investigating Joe Arpaio for Using Office to Bully Opponents

Fox News' show-boating Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a thuggish right-wing clown with aspirations to higher office and a police force of his own (he's reportedly weighing a run to become Arizona governor next year). His use of the latter to advance the former may just prove to be his undoing.

According to local CBS affiliate KBHO (via TPM):

The FBI is looking into accusations that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is using his position to settle political vendettas.

Over the past year, 5 Investigates examined more than two dozen complaints against the sheriff from business owners, government workers, mayors and law-enforcement officials.

They claim they spoke out against Arpaio, and shortly after, deputies paid them unwelcome visits.

Arpaio has gotten into hot water before as a result of his harsh, publicity-grabbing campaign against undocumented immigrants. There was a very public fracas with then-Governor Janet Napolitano in 2007, and his office lost a chunk of funding as a result. Earlier this year, in a high-profile spat with the DHS, he lost some of his federal immigration enforcement powers.

But this is different -- here he's charged not only with abusing the powers of his office to go after marginal groups like unauthorized immigrants, but citizens who dare criticize his actions, including political opponents and the media -- influential members of the community. As such, this might not end as well for the sheriff as his earlier controversies.

Consider a few of the people on whom he's reportedly sicced his deputies ...

The list of people subjected to the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office investigations reads like a Who's Who of the Valley, and it includes people who have authority over the sheriff and people who challenged his authority:

• Dan Saban, who ran against the sheriff in 2004 and 2008

• Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard

• Maricopa County Manager David Smith

• The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors

• Superior Court Presiding Judge Barbara Mundell

• ACLU attorney Daniel Pochoda

None of the investigations resulted in convictions; however, they cost the targets hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and tarnished reputations.Many of the targets were never charged with a crime."He knows he never has to prove anything," said Gordon. "He just raises the issue, and then he hides behind the badge -- and the damage is done."

In 2004, former Phoenix New Times reporter Dougherty found himself under criminal investigation after he had been working on a story about the sheriff's hidden land investments -- a story that was potentially embarrassing for Arpaio.

At one point, deputies told the journalist that he had approached Arpaio "in a threatening manner with a silver, metallic object," Dougherty said."They know that I was a reporter for the New Times, and they knew for sure that I was just showing him a tape recorder," he said. "I think it was clearly retaliation because they wanted to stop us from pursuing our investigation into his offices."

Despite the investigation, the New Times continued to report on the land story, and on the night of Oct. 18, 2007, the paper's publisher and executive editor were arrested and jailed.

County Attorney Andrew Thomas dropped all charges the next day, saying the investigation had spun out of control.

[...]

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon said he's found himself in the sheriff's crosshairs on multiple occasions.

In April 2008, Gordon wrote to the Justice Department, asking it to investigate complaints of racial profiling against the sheriff's office stemming from Arpaio's well-publicized crime-suppression sweeps.

Less than a month later, sheriff's deputies demanded copies of all the mayor's e-mail, phone logs and appointment calendars.

It "definitely was" retaliation, Gordon said. "It was multiple inquiries and investigations acknowledged by some of the sheriff's own people."

TPM adds to the damning profile:

...[O]ne prominent [case] is that of Don Stapley, the county supervisor who, after pushing for audits of Arpaio's office, found himself arrested by sheriff's deputies in September. The sheriff's office has alleged violations of campaign-finance laws, but no prosecutor has taken the case. And last week, county officials short-circuited an effort to turn it over to Washington GOP power couple Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing.

In an interview with TPMmuckraker, Stapley's lawyer, Paul Charlton, compared Arpaio's modus operandi , as laid out by KPHO, to that of an eastern European dictator who deals with dissent by having outspoken citizens shot, so as to warn others not to speak up. "If it were one or two events, you could say this was an aberration," Charlton said. "But when it's repeated over time ... this was an attempt to intimidate them."

Charlton knows something about missteps in the administration of justice. He was one of the U.S. attorneys who was improperly fired by the Bush administration, after irritating DOJ officials by arguing against the death penalty in one case.

And remarkably, another of those fired U.S. attorneys also now finds himself tangled up in the case -- as a target of Arpaio's retaliatory tactics. As an independent expert who could assess KPHO's research on Arpaio, the news station had turned to David Iglesias, who famously was dismissed as the top federal prosecutor in New Mexico by declining to bring politically motivated prosecutions sought by the state's GOP.

Iglesias, who has never met Arpaio, told KPHO that if he were handling the case, he would "seek an indictment."

Saying he had never seen anything like it in his long career in law enforcement, Iglesias called Arpaio's actions "absolutely unacceptable," adding, "we don't do this kind of thing in America ... without some kind of consequences."

We may soon see if that last part proves true. Again, we're not talking about going after marginal brown people looking for day-work outside the Home Depot. Arpaio may have enjoyed a certain degree of impunity in bullying them in recent years, but that may not be so with journalists, elected officials and fellow members of law enforcement.