Last week, the prosecutor purge scandal picked up considerably when we learned that Michael Elston, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, told one of the fired U.S. attorneys that if the purged prosecutors “continued to criticize the administration for their ousters, previously undisclosed details about the reasons they were fired might be released.” Bud Cummins, the Arkansas U.S. Attorney fired to make room for a Karl Rove acolyte, was the prosecutor who spoke directly to Elston, and perceived the remarks as an implicit threat, which Cummins was supposed to pass along, so that all the fired U.S. Attorneys received the same message.
It may not have been the only Justice Department attempt at intimidation.
Another fired prosecutor, John McKay, of Seattle, tells NEWSWEEK that local Republicans pressured him to launch a criminal probe of voting fraud that would tilt a deadlocked Washington governor’s race. “They wanted me to go out and start arresting people,” he says, adding that he refused to do so because there was “no evidence.” After McKay was fired in December, he says he also got a phone call from a “clearly nervous” Elston asking if he intended to go public: “He was offering me a deal: you stay silent and the attorney general won’t say anything bad about you.” (Elston says he “can’t imagine” how McKay got that impression. The call was meant to reassure McKay that the A.G. would not detail the reasons for the firings.)
Since Elston’s credibility is a little shaky at this point, and McKay has no reason to lie, it’s a fairly big deal if a top Justice Department officials tried to not only pressure federal prosecutors to politicize their offices, but tried to cut “deals” in order to keep the fired U.S. Attorneys quiet.
Indeed, while this scandal includes several individual controversies surrounding each of the purged prosecutors, the circumstances surrounding McKay’s ouster have to be one of the more scandalous of the bunch.
The LAT included this summary yesterday:
McKay, the U.S. attorney in Seattle, found himself in the midst of the contested 2004 governor’s race between Republican Dino Rossi and Democrat Chris Gregoire.
While the voting dispute was still in progress, McKay took a phone call from Ed Cassidy, chief of staff for Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), then the head of the House Ethics Committee.
McKay said Cassidy started to ask about what federal prosecutors were doing in the election dispute, but McKay cut him off, saying that going further could constitute obstruction of justice. Later, when McKay was interviewed by then-White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers and her deputy, William Kelly, for a possible judgeship, he said they criticized him for “mishandling” things during the recount.
He never got the judicial robes, and he lost his job as prosecutor as well.
On a related note, a reader asked me over the weekend where all this was going, or more accurately, where all of this could go. The White House, the Justice Department, and several Republican lawmakers tried to politicize U.S. Attorneys’ offices, and force partisan prosecutions for campaign purposes. Is any of this illegal? Given the worst case scenario, what are the possible consequences?
Josh Marshall put it this way:
Hypothetically, if the AG says to the US Atty in Boise: I want a Democrat indicted by November. What law does that violate? Clearly it would be an impeachable offense. It’s almost the definition of what impeachment is truly intended for: wrongdoing that transcends ordinary statute law.
But what would the statute laws be? Are there any?
I don’t know the answer to this, but it’s something to ponder as the scandal continues to unfold.