USA Purge “Messenger” Talks to NPRMichael Battle, the man who ran the Justice Department office that oversees all U.S. attorneys, and who made the actual phone calls to the fired U.S.A.s, gave an interview to NPR today.
As you’d expect, he doesn’t have a whole lot to add. Was he asked before the firings about which U.S.A.s weren’t doing a good job? Yep, but he couldn’t think of any at the time. And he sat down to that infamous November, 2006 meeting with the DoJ leadership not knowing what Kyle Sampson had up his sleeve. As it turned out, they were going to fire a bunch of prosecutors, no one else there seemed to know much about it, and Battle was the one who was going to make the phone calls.
So Battle, following orders, made the calls. And it was “distasteful.” A couple of months later he left, but he wants the world to know that his departure had long been planned and was unrelated. So there: his story is told.