Thousands of pages of documents were released by the Justice Department last night, and no one has yet been able to read them all. [tag]Purge[/tag]-related revelations of varying significance will probably come to public light throughout the day, if not the week.
But at the outset, there’s one message that seems to stand out.
[tag]Attorney General[/tag] [tag]Alberto R. Gonzales[/tag] was “extremely upset” that his deputy told Congress last month that a federal [tag]prosecutor[/tag] had been fired for no reason, according to e-mail released Monday by the Justice Department.
Mr. Gonzales believed that the prosecutor, H. E. Cummins III, the United States attorney for Arkansas, was dismissed for performance reasons, the e-mail suggested. But his deputy, Paul J. McNulty, testified that Mr. Cummins had been replaced to create a vacancy for J. Timothy Griffin, a political ally of the White House political adviser Karl Rove.
More specifically, U.S. News reported that the email came from [tag]Justice Department[/tag] spokesman Brian Roehrkasse who was traveling abroad with Alberto Gonzales when McNulty testified, to Kyle Sampson. It’s this correspondence that “is causing the most concern at the Justice Department.”
That’s understandable. McNulty testified, under oath, that Bud Cummins was replaced, not for on-the-job performance, but because the Justice Department wanted “the opportunity to provide a fresh start with a new person in that position.” (The “new person” happened to be a Karl Rove protege.) This made Gonzales “extremely upset.”
Why? Because the Deputy AG told the Judiciary Committee the truth?
Like I said, there will plenty of additional revelations in the coming hours, but here are a few more purge-related news items from the last 12 hours:
* A top Justice Department official who oversaw the dismissals said he had never even reviewed the performance of a prosecutor who was summarily removed, Daniel K. Bogden of Nevada.
* A sense of panic seems pervasive in the Justice Department right now, because agency officials are afraid to put on paper information that could be viewed as mendacious or obfuscation. “You have no idea,” said one Justice official, “how bad it is here.”
* When the Bush gang started ranking U.S. Attorneys on qualities including loyalty to the president, Patrick Fitzgerald was ranked among prosecutors who had “not distinguished themselves.” The ranking placed Fitzgerald below “strong U.S. Attorneys . . . who exhibited loyalty” to the administration but above “weak U.S. Attorneys who . . . chafed against Administration initiatives, etc.,” according to Justice documents. Fitzgerald won the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service in 2002. That, apparently, is not “distinguished” enough.
* One of the fired U.S. Attorneys we haven’t heard much about, Michigan’s Margaret Chiara, pleaded to keep her job because her family needed her income. Chiara wrote in emails that “she was being removed to make way for a member of Congress who was expected to lose his seat in the November election.”
Stay tuned.