Somehow, this scandal manages to keep getting worse, while Alberto Gonzales’ lies manage to become even more troubling.
The Justice Department considered dismissing many more U.S. attorneys than officials have previously acknowledged, with at least 26 prosecutors suggested for termination between February 2005 and December 2006, according to sources familiar with documents withheld from the public.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales testified last week that the effort was limited to eight U.S. attorneys fired since last June, and other administration officials have said that only a few others were suggested for removal.
In fact, D. Kyle Sampson, then Gonzales’s chief of staff, considered more than two dozen U.S. attorneys for termination, according to lists compiled by him and his colleagues, the sources said.
They amounted to more than a quarter of the nation’s 93 U.S. attorneys. Thirteen of those known to have been targeted are still in their posts.
The WaPo story points to a haphazard, casual process in which U.S. Attorneys who were most frequently considered for replacement weren’t the ones who got fired. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the lists “show how amok this process was.”
“When you start firing people for invalid reasons, just about anyone can end up on a list,” he said. “It looks like the process was out of control, and if it hadn’t been discovered, more would have been fired.”
There are a few interesting angles to this.
First, as Josh Marshall noted, it’d be helpful to get a sense of the Justice Department’s timeline on this.
I’d be curious — if it will ever be possible to do — to get that list of 26 or however many firees there are and get it broken down by time. Who got put on when? Who in 2005 and who in 2006?
If you look over the broad scattering of documents thus far released on the Attorney Purge, there’s at least an argument to be made that it unfolds something like this. Someone gets the bright idea, very early in 2005 to can all of the US Attorneys or a lot of them. But for one reason or another the idea gets rejected or just dies a slow bureaucratic death. However it happens, by the end of 2005 the idea’s basically moribund.
But then in early 2006 some problems come up — a rising wave of Republican corruption scandals and declining Republican political fortunes. And the US Attorney Purge idea gets revived — but now with a much more specific focus, with an eye toward the 2006 and 2008 elections. Certain US Attorneys become more of a problem with expanding corruption investigations.
Second, Gonzales testified under oath, just last week, that this entire endeavor was limited to eight U.S. Attorneys. We know that wasn’t quite right — Graves was the ninth — but now we’re learning that Gonzales was off by a factor of three. Either the Attorney General was lying (again) or he had no idea what was going on around him (again).
And third, not to get too meta, but I’m wondering who leaked all of this to the Washington Post. One gets the sense that the divisions within the DoJ continue to be deep, and top insiders apparently want to help undermine the Attorney General by a) leaking damaging details; and b) keeping the story alive.
Stay tuned.