{"id":11147,"date":"2007-06-16T11:20:02","date_gmt":"2007-06-16T15:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/11147.html"},"modified":"2007-06-16T11:20:02","modified_gmt":"2007-06-16T15:20:02","slug":"and-then-there-were-five","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/and-then-there-were-five\/","title":{"rendered":"And then there were five"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was late on a Friday afternoon, so I suppose an key Bush administration resignation<\/a> was pretty much inevitable.<\/p>\n

A fifth senior Justice Department official announced his resignation yesterday in the wake of the controversy over the firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year.<\/p>\n

Michael J. Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, will leave the department at the end of next week to join an unidentified law firm, officials said.<\/p>\n

Elston was closely involved in deliberations over the fate of a group of U.S. attorneys last December. He assembled one of the lists of prosecutors to be considered for removal. Four of the dismissed prosecutors said they later received inappropriate telephone calls from Elston, who allegedly warned some of them that they would suffer retaliation if they spoke publicly about their firings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Elston’s resignation follows those of Alberto Gonzales’ chief of staff Kyle Sampson, Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys chief Mike Battle, Gonzales’ White House liaison Monica Goodling, and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty.<\/p>\n

Given what we know about Gonzales’ hands-off approach to running the Justice Department, one has to wonder who, exactly, is overseeing federal law enforcement right now.
\n
\nAs for Elston, he’s been awfully busy<\/a> when it came to the U.S. Attorneys’ scandal.<\/p>\n

* He allegedly<\/a> called three of the fired U.S. attorneys and made an implicit threat that the Justice Department would detail the reasons for their firings if they didn’t stay quiet. <\/p>\n

* He allegedly<\/a> rejected a large number of applicants to Justice Department positions because they were Democrats. <\/p>\n

* When Carol Lam, the former U.S. attorney for San Diego, asked to stay on the job longer in order to deal with some outstanding prosecutions (the expanding Duke Cunningham case among them), Elston told her<\/a> not to think about her cases, that she should be gone in “weeks, not months” and said “these instructions were ‘coming from the very highest levels of the government.'”<\/p>\n

* He called around<\/a> to the U.S. attorneys whom he had placed on one of the draft firing lists to apologize when he discovered that his list would be turned over to Congress.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d only add that it was also Elston who worked with<\/a> former Missouri U.S. Attorney Bradley Schlozman on bogus voter fraud indictments less than a week before the 2006 election.<\/p>\n

Elston is leaving the Justice Department, but I suspect, as the investigation into the purge continues, we’ll be hearing his name again soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was late on a Friday afternoon, so I suppose an key Bush administration resignation was pretty much inevitable. A fifth senior Justice Department official announced his resignation yesterday in the wake of the controversy over the firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year. Michael J. Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}