David Iglesias stands against the fence at the edge of his backyard worrying about the "ambience" - a rock that's supposed to bubble forth water at the flip of a switch.

It's not bubbling forth.

"I just got it fixed, too," he says, fetching a hose.

But just then, happily, comes the water. When his wife, Cyndy, calls some minutes later, he'll recount the scene in their shared language of Scripture.

"We had some problems with the water feature," he says, "but then it came springing forth like Moses smiting the rock."

Iglesias, wearing jeans and a black pullover as the water gurgles outside his Northeast Heights home, had already eased into his now-familiar role of interviewee - discussing his five-year tenure as New Mexico's U.S. attorney and his controversial firing in December.

Both before then and since, Iglesias has faced criticism - especially from fellow Republicans - that he was too aloof and too often absent. Neither can be said anymore. He seems to be everywhere, honing his message in national newspapers and cable TV news shows.

"My job now is to seek full vindication," he says. "What happened to me and my colleagues was wrong."

After years of cautiousness and understatement in his dealings with the media, Iglesias, the private citizen, seems happy to unburden himself. He says President Bush's top adviser, Karl Rove, should face obstruction of justice charges if certain things Iglesias assumes to be true can be proven. Specifically: Bush's political architect directed Iglesias' firing because he refused to rush the indictment of a former state Democratic powerhouse, Manny Aragon, ahead of last year's elections.

He calls the Bush administration a "major disappointment" and compares it with an airliner in a culture where no one dares question the pilot, who is flying straight into a mountain.

And while he says it's not his place to call for the resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, he says Gonzales failed to protect the eight fired U.S. attorneys from political fallout. Things would have been different, Iglesias says, under Gonzales' predecessor, John Ashcroft.

"He was a tough old bird."

His story, his way

Vindication is a goal Iglesias has pursued with a clear strategy.

When he took the lectern for a news conference on his last day as U.S. attorney in February, Iglesias said he believed his firing was politically motivated. But he claimed not to know who pulled the trigger, calling that the "$64,000 question."

Yet by then, Iglesias had already told a pair of national reporters about calls from two members of Congress. He said the calls centered on an ongoing corruption probe of Democrats, and believed he was fired because he refused the rush indictments in the case ahead of November's elections.

"That was intentional, to give the national media the national story," Iglesias says. "My plan was to hit the local media with numbers of prosecutions and defend my reputation in the local media, but drop the H-bomb nationally."

As those first stories broke, Iglesias refused to identify the members of Congress he said had called him, saying he'd name them only when he testified on Capitol Hill. He agreed to do that only under subpoena - though he'd clearly made his decision to go public by then.

While Congress arranged the subpoenas, U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson and U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici - both Albuquerque Republicans and the only members of the New Mexico delegation not to deny calling Iglesias - were left to squirm. Days later both acknowledged they had made the calls but denied pressuring Iglesias.

As the story widened, Iglesias' allegations became the centerpiece of Democratic claims that the firings of the eight prosecutors - most of whom had received positive job reviews and evaluations - amounted to unprecedented and dangerous political meddling in the U.S. Justice Department.

That story hasn't reached its end, Iglesias predicts. Several of the fired prosecutors, such as himself, were in the midst of public corruption investigations when they were forced out, a similarity Iglesias calls "disturbing."

"I think all roads lead to Rove," Iglesias says. "I think that's why the president is circling some pretty major wagons around him to keep him from testifying under oath, which subjects him to criminal prosecution."

Meanwhile, Domenici faces a preliminary Senate ethics inquiry and has hired an attorney.

Iglesias says Congress is exercising "true oversight for the first time in six years" - and he's come under fire for comments exactly like that, which critics see as essentially a regurgitation of Democratic talking points.

Whitney Cheshire, a former spokeswoman for the New Mexico GOP, has used her blog to call Iglesias a "poster child" for the Democrats and question what kind of reward he'll get for his statements.

Iglesias says he's been approached by envoys for two prominent Democrats - one on the state level and another on the national stage. He won't say who, and says he doesn't know what they wanted because he rebuffed the entreaties.

"I told them I'm not interested," he says. "I'm not a Democratic stooge."

Love for politics

His background reads like a dream résumé of the sort of Republican who rose to power during the Bush presidency.

Iglesias, 49, was born to Baptist missionaries working on a small island off the Caribbean coast of Panama. Besides medical and dental work and building a church, his parents spent 15 years developing a written version of the language of the Kuna people, the island's natives.

When he was 7, his parents moved to Oklahoma, then to Gallup, where his father was given a pastorship at a small Baptist church.

"I used to think Gallup was like Las Vegas, Nevada," he says. "It had all these neon signs at that time. I really thought it was a big city. And that's where I fell in love with New Mexico."

After graduating from Santa Fe High School, Iglesias enrolled at Wheaton College, a small evangelical school in Illinois. It wasn't his first choice, but Stanford turned him down.

Iglesias played football - he jokes that he split time between "right bench and left out" - and studied political science. He also spent 10 weeks traveling Europe in a program studying international politics, economics and law.

"David was a student with a great deal of intellectual curiosity and maturity," says Robert Bartel, the retired director of Wheaton's international program and chairman of its economics department. "He had a tremendous interest in politics."

Iglesias, who graduated in 1980, has remained close to his alma mater. During one recent visit, he credited Bartel with encouraging him to attend law school.

"I had forgotten that I did that," Bartel says.

After graduating from the University of New Mexico School of Law, Iglesias became a Navy judge advocate general. Early in his career, he was assigned to defend court-martialed sailors at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There, his involvement in a hazing case became the basis for Tom Cruise's character in "A Few Good Men."

An independent throughout his 20s, Iglesias switched to the Republican Party in the late 1980s, a time of growing evangelical interest in politics.

"Evangelical Christians of my parents' generation stayed out of politics. It was viewed as inherently corrupt," Iglesias says. "But around that time, people started to feel that we couldn't afford to cede that part of the culture. You had people like (the Rev. Jerry) Falwell. I don't agree with a lot of his rhetoric, but at least he raised awareness that we needed to be involved in all parts of life."

Iglesias married - he and his wife have four daughters ranging from 10 to 16 - and returned to New Mexico, working as an assistant city attorney in Albuquerque from 1991-94 and later as a lawyer for two state agencies. But it was his participation in the prestigious White House Fellowship Program in 1995, he says, that revived his interest in politics. In 1998, he ran for state attorney general against Democrat Patricia Madrid.

"I loved it," he says. "Of course, I didn't like losing, but I really took to the campaigning, (to) traveling the state."

Iglesias has credited his strong showing against Madrid - he garnered nearly 49 percent of the vote - with giving him the political capital to earn serious consideration for another job. In 2001, with a recommendation from Domenici, Iglesias was appointed U.S. attorney for New Mexico by Bush.

Republican expectations

Iglesias arrived amid high expectations. It had been a decade since New Mexico, where state politics are dominated by Democrats, had seen a Republican U.S. attorney. First on the menu for many in the GOP was voter fraud.

"I think many Republicans believe that there is very widespread voter fraud by Democrats," Iglesias. "They're very passionate about it. It's something I was aware of."

His chance to pursue it came during and after the 2004 presidential election, when complaints surfaced about fraudulent voter registrations by a left-leaning group.

Iglesias held one of his few news conferences as U.S. attorney, setting up a task force on voter fraud and vowing to prosecute lawbreakers.

But no charges were filed, and Iglesias says the task force was partly intended as an elaborate message of deterrence. Still, he says, all the allegations were examined and one investigation stemming from the 2004 race remained open until the summer 2006.

The woman at the center of that investigation was interrogated by the FBI, but in the end, Iglesias says his office couldn't prove that she was part of an organized effort to affect the outcome of an election - the standard for federal voter fraud charges.

"She was a poor lady scamming the system to make some money for herself, and that would have been a great defense," he says. "We wanted to do it. We worked with Justice. But we just didn't have a case we could prosecute."

Iglesias says he knew the political tide within his party was turning against him by mid-2005, when Republican operatives realized there wouldn't be any voter fraud charges.

"I knew there was simmering discontent, but I thought I'd be protected by the Justice Department," he says. "I naively thought I'd be insulated."

The push by New Mexico Republicans for action on voter fraud coincided with a similar national campaign. But according to an investigation by the New York Times, the Bush administration's focus on voter fraud yielded few criminal charges and virtually no evidence of any organized effort to influence elections.

But by mid-2005, Domenici had started complaining to the Justice Department about Iglesias' job performance, according to statements by Justice officials. Also in 2005, state GOP Chairman Allen Weh told a political liaison to Rove that Iglesias needed to go. Weh asked Rove directly about Iglesias in December 2006 and was told Iglesias was "gone," Weh has said.

"I think the tipping point began in 2005, and the absolute tipping point came when I wouldn't indict (former Democratic state Sen.) Manny Aragon before the case was ready," Iglesias says.

"The theme is basically the same," he continues. "There was a belief that, because I'd run for office, because I knew Heather and Pete personally, that somehow I'd be a much more politically savvy U.S. attorney. When I just looked at the evidence and went by the book, there was this anger that I was acting too much like a career prosecutor and not like a political appointee."

Positive reviews

Republican complaints about Iglesias predated the phone calls about the Aragon case, which alleges a kickback scheme in the construction of the Metro Courthouse in Downtown Albuquerque. However, claims Iglesias was generally incompetent have been disputed.

Iglesias had received positive job evaluations and performance reviews from the Justice Department and had once been considered for a post in Washington. His name wasn't included in the initial list of U.S. attorneys targeted for removal, appearing there only after the 2006 elections, according to government e-mails.

Last week, a former deputy attorney general told a House subcommittee that he saw Iglesias as a "very able" prosecutor who shouldn't have been removed.

Chief U.S. District Judge Martha Vasquez in Albuquerque says Iglesias was sometimes out of state on Navy Reserve duty - he's required to serve 40 days a year - but was never out of reach.

"I could always call him on his cell phone, and he'd call me right back," she says. "We worked closely on a lot of initiatives."

She says claims that Iglesias focused on propping up his stats by pushing low-level drug and immigration cases at the expense of more complex investigations aren't true.

"This is a very busy jurisdiction, and we don't see many low-level cases," she says. "We're talking about semi-truckloads of drugs, people who've re-entered the United States illegally multiple times and committed serious crimes while here."

When the Border Patrol proposed temporarily jailing virtually every immigrant caught in the country illegally in an effort to send a message, Vasquez said she grew concerned the plan would quickly fill every jail bed in the state and leave no room for violent offenders. She took her concerns to Iglesias, and they set up a meeting with the director of the Border Patrol. The jail plan was dropped.

"I guess if someone just wanted to pad their numbers, that program would have been a great opportunity," Vasquez says. "But he listened."

`We are all redeemable'

Nowadays, Iglesias has less weighty concerns than border security and the federal caseload, let alone the fate of Manny Aragon.

Considering himself on extended unplanned sabbatical, Iglesias says he's playing "Mr. Mom," shuttling his daughters to and from school and their various activities. Three take ballet classes.

Besides that, he goes jogging in the Foothills, fields calls from reporters, reads a few blogs and tries to spend a little time each day by the bubbling rock.

His family attends Calvary Chapel, a good compromise between his Baptist theology and his wife's more charismatic Pentecostal background, he says.

During a 2005 speech at Wheaton, Iglesias talked about his failures in life, seeing them as both learning experiences and a guidepost toward God's will.

He quoted Proverbs: "Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails."

Then he added his own thoughts: "In the eternal scheme of things, we are all losers. But we are all redeemable!"

Getting fired has already led to some good, Iglesias says. Several figures behind the firings have resigned, and Gonzales remains under pressure from both parties to do the same. A portion of the USA Patriot Act that allowed the president to indefinitely appoint interim U.S. attorneys has been repealed.

"It was supposed to be terrorism legislation, not the `full-time crony employment act,' " Iglesias says.

Thrust now into the embrace of the media, Iglesias says he's serious about wanting to stay there. He could see himself working as a part-time legal analyst for one of the cable news stations. He says he has also interviewed for a job with a major multinational corporation and is thinking about writing a book.

In any case, he says it's time to enter the private sector and make some money. In a single-income household, he has college tuitions and weddings to think about. Barring a change of heart, a miracle and a complete overhaul of the state's Republican leadership, Iglesias says he doubts he'll ever return to politics.

But for the time being, he's still in the middle of it. He takes calls from reporters most days and was in Seattle this week for a forum on the U.S. attorney firings.

Reached Wednesday afternoon, he says he just returned from a jog with John McKay of Seattle, another U.S. attorney who was fired, reportedly amid Republican complaints about his handling of voter fraud claims.

Coming up, Iglesias' Navy Reserve duty takes him to Rhode Island for a forum titled "Media Coverage and Public Corruption Cases."

He laughed about that one.

"I agreed to it," he said, "before all this happened."