Yesterday was one of the busiest and most productive days for the prosecutor purge scandal in weeks, with a flurry of developments. Let’s sort ’em out.
First, good ol’ Monica Goodling is now facing a Justice Department investigation for her role in screening career attorneys for party affiliation.
The Justice Department has launched an internal investigation into whether Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales’s former White House liaison illegally took party affiliation into account in hiring career federal prosecutors, officials said yesterday.
The allegations against Monica M. Goodling represent a potential violation of federal law and signal that a joint probe begun in March by the department’s inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility has expanded beyond the controversial dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys last year.
In this matter, Goodling, who we already know was given excessive power in DoJ employment decisions, is accused of trying to determine the political affiliations of job applicants before they were hired as prosecutors. Existing civil service laws explicitly prohibit this, especially when hiring non-partisan career employees.
The good news is Goodling is in hot water over this. The bad news is the investigation might interfere with Congress’ ability to get information from Goodling about the purge scandal. As Josh Marshall explained, “[T]he fact that the DOJ is investigating Goodling could put a roadblock in the way of the investigating committees’ efforts to give her immunity and force her to testify on Capitol Hill. So Goodling’s new alleged wrongdoing could have the perverse effect of preventing her from being forced to go up to Capitol Hill and reveal what she knows about what happened in the Purge.”
But we’re just getting started.
* A top Justice Department official has now been accused of trying to bully fired prosecutors into silence.
In newly released statements, [two dismissed U.S. attorneys] alleged that they were threatened by Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty’s chief of staff immediately before Gonzales testified in the Senate in January.
Paul K. Charlton of Phoenix and John McKay of Seattle said that Michael J. Elston called them on Jan. 17 and offered an implicit agreement of Gonzales’s silence in exchange for their continuing not to publicly discuss their removals. Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee the next day and refused to provide details about the firings.
“My handwritten and dated notes of this call reflect that I believed Mr. Elston’s tone was sinister and that he was prepared to threaten me further if he concluded I did not intend to continue to remain silent about my dismissal,” McKay wrote in response to questions from the House Judiciary Committee.
* The Senate Judiciary Committee’s interest in Karl Rove’s emails remains high.
Also yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena to Gonzales seeking all of Rove’s e-mails in Justice Department custody related to the firings. They include e-mails turned over to Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald as part of his investigation of the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity. The subpoena is the second to be formally served on Gonzales in the probe of the prosecutor dismissals.
The subpoena to Gonzales from Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) demands copies of any e-mails sent by Rove — through either the White House or the Republican National Committee — related to the appointment, performance or replacement of U.S. attorneys and career or political personnel at Justice.
* Alberto Gonzales and Kyle Sampson have already explained that they have no idea why former U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden was fired in Nevada, and yesterday, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty said he doesn’t know either. Who, exactly, was calling the shots?
* Bogden was not fired for “performance reasons,” as the DoJ had previously claimed.
* Bill Mercer is the U.S. Attorney for Montana who pulls double duty as the principal associate deputy attorney general in DC, except he rarely shows up for work in Montana. The law says a U.S. Attorney has to live in the district he serves, so Mercer changed the law. It prompted Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) to call for Mercer’s resignation.
* Gonzales and his top aides have said the DoJ never intended to circumvent the Senate by using the Patriot Act on U.S. Attorneys, but Timothy Griffin, the Karl Rove acolyte who was appointed as the U.S. Attorney for Little Rock, didn’t get the memo and inadvertently told people the truth.
* And Paul Kiel added a new wrinkle to Carol Lam’s firing: “In her written answers to questions from Congress, Lam recounted a conversation with Justice Department official Michael Elston after she was fired in which Elston made it clear to her that she would be gone within ‘weeks’ regardless of the fate of certain cases, and that this order came ‘from the highest levels of the government.'”
Stay tuned.