Last night, we reported that Todd Graves, formerly the U.S. attorney for Kansas City, was asked to resign. Graves says that he refused to sign a Justice Department lawsuit against the state of Missouri to purge its voter rolls of potentially invalid voter names. (The department eventually lost the case.)
That’s been floated as one of the possible reasons for his dismissal, since Graves’ replacement, Bradley Schlozman had pushed the lawsuit from atop the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Schlozman, an anti-voter fraud enthusiast, subsequently replaced Graves as the U.S. attorney there — and did all he could to hype the cause.
But during his testimony today, Gonzales pushed back, saying that, after speaking with the current head of the Civil Rights Division, they hadn’t been aware of “any concerns” from Graves or anyone in his office about the voter roll purge case. Gonzales didn’t say why Graves had been asked to step down, however.
Earlier in the hearing, Gonzales appeared to offer an explanation for why he’s only made reference to eight fired prosecutors, when in reality there were at least nine who were fired. Gonzales explained that those eight were fired “as part of this process.” Graves was a special case, apparently.
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