The prosecutor purge scandal is now cooking with gas. There’s no way around it: these guys are busted. Given what we’ve learned this morning, the house of cards White House and Justice Department officials built is crumbling.
The White House was deeply involved in the decision late last year to dismiss federal prosecutors, including some who had been criticized by Republican lawmakers, administration officials said Monday.
Last October, President Bush spoke with Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to pass along concerns by Republicans that some prosecutors were not aggressively addressing voter fraud, the White House said Monday. Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, was among the politicians who complained directly to the president, according to an administration official.
Up until now, administration officials had said, repeatedly, that the White House had a tangential connection to the purged prosecutors, having “signed off” on a Justice Department list that was based solely on “job performance” issues. Every rationalization was bogus — officials have been lying, blatantly, in some instances under oath.
Indeed, as far as the White House was concerned, there was talk of firing all the federal prosecutors.
The White House suggested two years ago that the Justice Department fire all 93 U.S. attorneys, a proposal that eventually resulted in the dismissals of eight prosecutors last year, according to e-mails and internal documents that the administration will provide to Congress today.
The dismissals took place after President Bush told Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in October that he had received complaints that some prosecutors had not energetically pursued voter-fraud investigations, according to a White House spokeswoman.
Just to clarify, White House concerns about the prosecutors failing to purse voter fraud enough are referring, of course, to prosecuting Democrats. Several of the purged U.S. Attorneys were definitely “energetically pursuing” voter-fraud investigations, but because the targets were often Republicans, the White House was displeased.
The resignations have already begun.
Last week, Michael Battle, the Director of the Executive Office of the United States Attorney, and the person who personally contacted all of the purged U.S. Attorneys to tell them they’d been fired, resigned. Yesterday, D. Kyle Sampson, Gonzales’ chief of staff, and the man who helped narrow down the list of prosecutors to be fired, also resigned.
I guarantee they won’t be the last.
Take a few minutes to read the whole WaPo article on this, because it’s filled with documented evidence that obliterates every defense the Bush gang and congressional Republicans have offered to date. We learned, for example, that:
* The change to the Patriot Act was crucial.
Sampson also strongly urged bypassing Congress in naming replacements, using a little-known power slipped into the renewal of the USA Patriot Act in March 2006 that allows the attorney general to name interim replacements without Senate confirmation.
“I am only in favor of executing on a plan to push some USAs out if we really are ready and willing to put in the time necessary to select candidates and get them appointed,” Sampson wrote in a Sept. 17 memo to Miers. “It will be counterproductive to DOJ operations if we push USAs out and then don’t have replacements ready to roll immediately.
“I strongly recommend that as a matter of administration, we utilize the new statutory provisions that authorize the AG to make USA appointments,” he wrote.
By avoiding Senate confirmation, Sampson added, “we can give far less deference to home state senators and thereby get 1.) our preferred person appointed and 2.) do it far faster and more efficiently at less political costs to the White House.”
* Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) better have a damn good lawyer.
On the day of the Dec. 7 firings, Miers’s deputy, William Kelley, wrote that Domenici’s chief of staff “is happy as a clam” about Iglesias.
A week later, Sampson wrote: “Domenici is going to send over names tomorrow (not even waiting for Iglesias’s body to cool).”
* Rove was directly involved with replacing Bud Cummins with one of his acolytes.
The e-mails show that Rove was interested in the appointment of a former aide, Tim Griffin, as an Arkansas prosecutor. Sampson wrote in one that “getting him appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, etc.”
* Bush officials lied to Congress, which the last time I checked, was illegal.
Administration officials say they are braced for a new round of criticism today from lawmakers who may feel misled by recent testimony from Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and William E. Moschella, principal associate deputy attorney general.
Josh Marshall summarizes:
As has happened so many times in the last six years, the maximal version of this story — which seemed logical six weeks ago but which I couldn’t get myself to believe — turns out to be true. Indeed, it’s worse. We now know that Gonzales, McNulty and Moschella each lied to Congress. We know that the purge was a plan that began at the White House — and it was overseen by two of President Bush’s closest lieutenants in Washington — Miers and Gonzales.
Watergate was a third-rate burglary. This has just as much potential.