While I was off skiing at Killington this weekend, the story about the purge late last year of numerous US Attorneys broke wide open. When Josh Marshall over at TPM first started covering this story back in December, I thought it was going to be yet another example of a Bush administration scandal that never really quite saw the light of day. In fact, even last week when things started to really hear up, I still didn't believe it was going to turn into a major story.
Boy, was I wrong.
Things are moving so quickly on this one that I barely even know where to start writing. Fortunately, Josh Marshall and his TPMMuckraker staff are doing an amazing job of tracking the story, sorting through the documents, and providing analysis.
With apologies to TPM, I'm excerpting a good bit of their timeline here for my own future reference. Here's their timeline:
The idea to replace U.S. attorneys was first floated by White House counsel Harriet Miers in February 2005. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales "rejected that idea as impractical and disruptive." And Karl Rove "vaguely recalls telling Miers that he also thought firing all 93 was ill-advised."
So in March 2005, a counselor to Gonzales, Kyle Sampson (who went on to become Gonzales' chief of staff in September 2005) sent an e-mail to Miers that ranked all 93 U.S. attorneys. Here's how the Post describes the breakdown:Strong performers "exhibited loyalty" to the administration; low performers were "weak U.S. attorneys who have been ineffectual managers and prosecutors, chafed against Administration initiatives, etc." A third group merited no opinion.The Post doesn't mention it, but in December 2005, the administration, via Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter's (R-PA) chief counsel, slipped a provision into the Patriot Act reauthorization bill that made it possible to replace U.S. Attorneys permanently without Senate confirmation.
In January 2006, "Sampson sent to the White House the first list of seven candidates for dismissal, including four who were fired at year's end: [Michigan's Margaret] Chiara, [Arkansas' Bud] Cummins, [San Diego's Carol] Lam and [San Francisco's Kevin] Ryan. The list also recommended Griffin and other replacements, most of whom were edited from documents viewed by The Post."
In March, the Patriot reauthorization bill finally passed Congress and was signed into law.
In June, U.S. Attorney for Arkansas' Eastern District Bud Cummins gets a call asking him to resign.
In August, "Justice officials" discuss "bypassing the two Democratic senators in Arkansas, who normally would have had input into the appointment." The way to bypass them, of course, would be to use the Patriot Act provision.
In September, Sampson put together another list of candidates, totaling nine. Cummins, he said, was "in the process of being pushed out." Six of those nine, including Cummins, were among the eight ultimately fired in December.
Also that month, Sampson wrote to Miers saying that "I am only in favor of executing on a plan to push some USAs out if we really are ready and willing to put in the time necessary to select candidates and get them appointed." He urged using the Patriot Act provision in order to get their "preferred person" appointed.
In October, New Mexico's David Iglesias was added to the list, "based in part on complaints from Sen. Pete V. Domenici and other New Mexico Republicans that he was not prosecuting enough voter-fraud cases."
Also in October, President Bush mentions complaints about voter-fraud investigations to Gonzales in a conversation in October 2006. "Gonzales does not recall the conversation, Justice Department officials said."
In November, Rove learns that the eight prosecutors are being replaced.
On December 4th, Sampson emails "the White House with a copy to Ms. Miers outlining plans to carry out the firings":
“We would like to execute this on Thursday, Dec. 7,” Mr. Sampson wrote. Because some United States attorneys were still in Washington attending a conference, he planned to postpone telling them they were being fired. He wrote, “We want to wait until they are back home and dispersed to reduce chatter.”
On December 7th, the calls to the seven remaining U.S. attorneys went out.
In mid-December, Sampson suggests that Gonzales use the Patriot Act provision to put Karl Rove's former aide Timothy Griffin in place until the end of Bush's term. "[I]f we don't ever exercise it then what's the point of having it?" he wrote to a White House aide.
So that's the story, or at least the story the administration is telling. Now, Sampson resigned yesterday, the Post reports, "after acknowledging that he did not tell key Justice officials about the extent of his communications with the White House, leading them to provide incomplete information to Congress."
In other words, Sampson, Gonzales' chief of staff, unbeknownst to other Justice Department officials, kept all this to himself. A rogue operator within the Justice Department, right under Gonzales' chin!
A little background on Sampson: he had worked earlier with Gonzales as deputy White House counsel from 2001 through 2003. He then moved on to the Justice Department as a counselor to then-AG John Ashcroft, moving up to become chief of staff in September 2005.
Now that's the basic timeline as we know it. Here are a few more details that you should keep in mind:
Under oath, Attorney General Gonzales told the Congress that politics played no role in the purge. As it turns out, politics was the only motivation here. Prior to the 2006 election, many of the US Attorneys in question had all been pressured to investigate democratic candidates in tight races. Others, such as the US Attorney in San Diego, were in the midst of very high profile corruption cases involving Republicans, the Duke Cunningham case being the most significant. Taken together, all of them were creating quite a headache for the president's party. So much for Attorney General Gonzales' testimony under oath. [Testimony here]
Rove claims he did not know about the planned purge until November. But the documents already released prove unequivocally that he is lying. Rove will soon be called to testify under oath.
The Justice Department initially used "performance concerns" as their excuse for the mass firing. That too, it turns out, is a lie. Just one month before the purge, Attorney General Gonzales told one of the outgoing men that he would be happy to serve as a reference.
The defense that "all presidents do it, just look at Clinton"? Wrong. I'll let Josh explain:
The issue here is why these US Attorneys were fired and the fact that the White House intended to replace them with US Attorneys not confirmed by the senate. We now have abundant evidence that they were fired for not sufficiently politicizing their offices, for not indicting enough Democrats on bogus charges or for too aggressively going after Republicans. (Remember, Carol Lam is still the big story here.) We also now know that the top leadership of the Justice Department lied both to the public and to Congress about why the firing took place. As an added bonus we know the whole plan was hatched at the White House with the direct involvement of the president.
And Clinton? Every new president appoints new US Attorneys. That always happens. Always. In early 1993, since the Republicans had held the White House for 12 years a few US Attorneys signalled that they might not be tendering their resignations and the new Clinton Justice Department asked for and received the resignations of all 93 US Attorneys. Eager to whip up scandal, Republicans at the time tried to make this into something untoward. Claiming this is a big deal is like grandstanding with the claim that President Bush 'fired' Clinton's cabinet secretaries when he came into office in 2001. At worst, it's the difference between giving them all several weeks to resign and just asking for their resignations on day one.The whole thing is silly. But a lot of reporters on the news are already falling for it. The issue here is why these US Attorneys were fired -- a) because they weren't pursuing a GOP agenda of indicting Democrats, that's a miscarriage of justice, and b) because they lied to Congress about why it happened.
CarpetBagger has more, including plenty of relevant quotes.
Throughout all of this, remember one thing: the Attorney General is the top law enforcement officer in the United States. He is, in essence, our nation's top lawyer. What he is not, however, is the White House's top lawyer. He is our nation's counsel, not the president's. That distinction, one Alberto Gonzales has never understood, is why the DoJ has always exercised a much greater degree of independence than the rest of the executive branch.
One of the key moments in the Watergate story, for example, was what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. nixon ordered his Attorney General to drop his subpoena of the White house tapes. Richardson refused, prompting Nixon to demand his resignation. Eventually Nixon found someone in the DoJ willing to do his bidding (Robert Bork, for those playing team trivia this week), a hollow victory that created far more problems than it solved. Nixon demanded the DoJ put politics before justice. The Attorney General refused because he understood that although he served at the pleasure of the president, it was the rule of law that was his ultimate master.
From day one, Gonzales has made it abundantly clear that he serves the president, not the rule of law. His memos in defense of torture of warantless wiretapping are just two of the most egregious examples in a long history of serving the president and not the people. [Glenn Greenwald reminds of a very significant third example: Gonzales' lies about the use of National Security letters to target a wide swath of innocent Americans in terror-related probes.]
UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan + C&L makes quite the find. This story has a direct connection to the Jack Abramoff episode in Guam. It's almost as if this administration has a grand unified theory of scandal that they are trying to prove.
UPDATE II: And that's not all. As the timeline above indicates, a key moment in this whole episode was when a provision was inserted into the Patriot Act reauthorization allowing the White House to hire and fire US Attorneys at will and without Senate confirmation. The provision was added at the White House's behest by a staffer in Sen. Specter's office without the Senator's knowledge. And you'll never guess what happened next. That staffer? He is now serving as a US Attorney.
Karen Tumulty has more here and here.
UPDATE III: For those looking for more on the role played by the President of the United States, I recommend this article from the NYT.
UPDATE IV: Schumer and Feinstein are out for blood:
From Schumer:
“Make no mistake about it: This has become as serious as it gets. Just when we thought our faith could not be shaken any further, it has been.
“At the very beginning, I was clear that something didn’t smell right, but I had no idea how high it went. The latest revelations prove beyond any reasonable doubt that there has been unprecedented breach of trust, abuse of power and misuse of the Justice Department. And that is very serious and very important.“The U.S. attorneys are in their own districts the lead enforcer of the rule of law, without fear or favor.
“When you see the picture, the symbol of the eagle holding the arrows above every Justice Department office throughout the land, it stands for fair, unbiased, nonpolitical justice being rendered.
“And yet that has been called into question by a series of blunders, missteps and abuse of power in the Justice Department.
“This weekend I called for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to step down. Today’s staff resignation does not take heat off the attorney general. In fact, it raises the temperature. Kyle Sampson will not become the next Scooter Libby, the next fall guy.
From Feinstein:
“As I began to look into it, we got a great deal of push back from the attorney general: that I didn’t know my facts, I didn’t know what we were doing, that this was all being done for performance reasons.
“And then, as we got the performance reports, I was told, Well — and the performance reports were all good. I was told, ‘Well, it was done for policy reasons;’ they didn’t follow policy of the main Justice in one way or another.“And then finally, in an op-ed done by the attorney general in USA Today, the rationale was given, ‘Well, we lost confidence in them.’
“We now know that it is very likely that the amendment to the Patriot Act, which was made in March of 2006, might well have been done to facilitate a wholesale replacement of all or part of U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation.
“On Wednesday we will vote on a motion to give cloture to the bill that would return the Patriot Act back to where it was before this all happened. I very much hope that passed.
“We really need to know whether this amendment in March of ‘06 was orchestrated by the White House. Who asked for the change?
UPDATE V: Another point worth remembering. Homestate Senators usually play a very significant advisory role in the appointment of US Attorneys. Its one of those political privileges that they take very, very seriously. The fact that the White House wanted to avoid consulting even with Senators of their own party is likely to make even their supporters unhappy.
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