Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey is scheduled to appear before the House Judiciary Committee at a hearing Thursday next week to testify about his involvement in the plan to fire certain U.S. attorneys. The committee will vote on authorizing a subpoena for Comey’s testimony on Tuesday.
Comey’s expected to shed light on the early part of the purge process — and perhaps explain why his list of U.S. attorneys was so different from Kyle Sampson’s.
Before Comey left the Justice Department in the summer of 2005, he reportedly generated his own list of U.S. attorneys to fire. But as U.S. News has reported, Comey’s list was completely different than the list generated by Sampson — save one name:
…a former Justice official says that Comey’s list bore little resemblance to the list of those fired last year. The only prosecutor on the fired list who also was on Comey’s list was Kevin Ryan, in San Francisco, who, the Washington Post reported Tuesday, had “widespread management and morale problems in his office.”
A former Justice official explained the discrepancy: “Comey’s definition of incompetence turned out to be quite different from Sampson’s and had nothing to do with politics.”