It was back to school time for Eugene Johnson on the campus of American University late last month. In addition to the books and the class work, the 19-year-old student from New Holland had something else waiting for him:

An arrest warrant.

This, Johnson thought, was strange. Yes, he and dozens of other students had participated in a protest when Karl Rove, former top adviser to President George W. Bush, was on campus. But that was back in April. Though the event got slightly unruly and resulted in disciplinary action by the Washington, D.C., school, neither police nor the Secret Service arrested anyone at the time.

That five months later authorities saw fit to charge Johnson and five other AU students struck the 2006 Garden Spot graduate as strange. And maybe dubious.

"Only six of us got arrest warrants," Johnson said. "It's as if they were trying to send a message that protest is no longer accepted."

A spokeswoman for the D.C. Attorney General's office, which filed the misdemeanor charges — since settled — said that "some individual or organization put pressure on the Office of the Attorney General to prosecute this case," though the Secret Service investigated the case and presented it to the office for prosecution.

Attorney Mark Goldstone, who chairs the Demonstration Support Committee of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and represented Johnson and the five other AU students, said the timing of the arrests indeed seemed odd. "I've been doing this for 22 years, and I've represented thousands of protesters," Goldstone said.

"And I've never seen this before."

Rove invited
The date was April 3, and Johnson and his "activist" buddies had just heard that the campus chapter of College Republicans had invited Rove to speak, and that he'd soon be on campus.

They swung into action.

According to an account in the April 5 AU student newspaper, The Eagle, Rove's visit was to be a "candid, intimate discussion" with College Republicans. "We didn't require that you were a Republican to get in," chapter Secretary Seth Johnson told The Eagle. "We wanted to ensure students that came got to enjoy the event, were safe and got to ask a question."

Johnson and other students who opposed Rove's political message weren't about to be aced out. "Lightheartedly," he said, they dressed as detectives, intending to try and make a "citizen's arrest" of Rove for what one student called his "illegal political involvement and the corruption of the judiciary."

Rove was to speak at the Ward Building on campus; Johnson and about a dozen other protesters linked arms and blocked the front entrance but did not block the back entrance because security was stationed there. Rove entered through the rear of the building, and his talk went off without a hitch. But by the time he went to leave, the crowd of protesters had grown to about 100. About 16 of them — including Johnson — rushed to lie down in the road in front of Rove's vehicle.

Campus police and Secret Service members pulled the protesters off the road; campus Director of Public Safety Chief Michael McNair told The Eagle that his officers saw a Secret Service agent pull a gun. Guns are prohibited on campus.

Rove then drove away, and the incident seemed over.

Not quite.

Several students involved in the protest soon received notice that the university would be looking into their actions. University spokeswoman Maralee Csellar said the concern was that students had broken the AU code of conduct. "It was being handled internally," she said.

The school did receive a subpoena for information from the Secret Service — she said she didn't know exactly what was sought — but the school provided the information, and thought that was that.

University officials, she said, were taken aback when on the day of the opening invocation, Aug. 24, they learned that arrest warrants had been issued for six of the students involved in the protest. "At the time, there were no arrests made," she said.

"This was a surprise to us as well."

Goldstone, the attorney, said that while arrests at demonstrations are common, it was "highly suspicious" that the government would wait until the first day of school to issue arrest warrants for the students.

McNair, chief of public safety, told The Washington Post that the reason there were no arrests the night of the protest is that the protesters took security by surprise. At that point, the goal was to get Rove safely off campus.

"Once that happened and the situation was over, there was so much chaos there it would not have been a prudent thing to make arrests there," McNair told the Post. "When we finally regrouped, we agreed to get video and any kind of witness statements and proceed from there."

Campus security planned to handle it internally — but "the Secret Service made the decision" to present the evidence to the attorney general's office, McNair told the Post.

"I can't really comment on the decision to pursue this," said Secret Service spokesman Darrin Blackford. He added that the lag time was because "we were trying to identify the individuals involved in criminal behavior." Secret Service agents who were on the scene, along with campus surveillance tapes, helped them do so.

Melissa Merz, spokeswoman for the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, said the office "prosecutes cases based upon merit and does not consider any outside influences in its decision to go forward or decline warrants."

But Goldstone said he believes the goal was to intimidate the protesters. "I think it was political, that Karl Rove or one off his benefactors felt there needed to be some punishment" beyond internal college discipline for the protesters, Goldstone said.

That punishment, ultimately, was a slap on the wrist. Though the students faced misdemeanor charges for disorderly conduct and crossing a police line, prosecutors offered the students a chance to pay $100 fines to settle the charges; they would have a record of arrest, but no conviction.

Goldstone said the students quickly accepted, though "the concern was, [if they took the deal] they wouldn't get a chance to learn how this happened."

Johnson said the college will likely require the student protesters to do community-service work. But some of the students facing university sanctions weren't arrested; some who were arrested aren't facing university sanctions.

"It's like they picked us out of the blue," he said, "and were trying to send a message."

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Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-8817.