DOJ Office Of The Inspector General

DOJ Honors Department Veteran Who Failed To Object To U.S. Attorney Firings

Zachary Roth | October 29, 2008, 11:33AM

The Department of Justice announced yesterday that, at an annual awards ceremony, it had given an award for "Outstanding Professionalism and Exemplary Integrity" to David Margolis.

Why is that noteworthy?

Margolis, who has been at DOJ since 1965 and now serves as Associate Deputy Attorney General, makes frequent appearances in the report on the US Attorney firings released earlier this month by DOJ's Office of the Inspector General.

By and large, the report depicts Margolis as a respected career DOJ-er, who was largely out of the loop on many of the details of the scheme to fire US Attorneys for political reasons.

But it also shows that right before the firings, Kyle Sampson, the point man on the plan, showed Margolis -- whose informal biography, says the report, listed one of his duties as being a liaison between main DOJ and the US Attorneys -- a list of six of the US Attorneys to be fired. Margolis had earlier recommended to Sampson that two US Attorneys -- Kevin Ryan and Dunn Lampton -- be fired for legitimate performance-based reasons, but neither one appeared on Sampson's list. And yet, says the report, Margolis neither raised any objections, nor asked Sampson about how the list was drawn up.

From the report's conclusion:

In November 2006, when Sampson advised Margolis about the impending removals, he either showed Margolis a list or read from a list of six U.S. Attorneys that Sampson indicated were to be removed. Margolis told us that he was struck more by the names Sampson did not mention than the ones he did. Margolis asked Sampson why Ryan and Lampton were not on the removal list, and Sampson responded that he would look into it. Based on Margolis's and McNulty's suggestion, Ryan was subsequently added to the list.

However, Margolis told us that he did not think to question Sampson about the six U.S. Attorneys who were on Sampson's list. Margolis said he was more focused on the names that were omitted and assumed Sampson had valid reasons for the six slated for removal.

Margolis is the senior career attorney in the Department and someone who had significant knowledge about U.S. Attorneys and their performance. He was involved in panel interviews for the selection of most U.S. Attorneys, and as part of his duties handles misconduct allegations involving U.S. Attorneys. He is highly respected within the Department, and his opinion was valued because of his experience and stature.

Yet, prior to the removals, he never questioned Sampson concerning why the specific U.S. Attorneys slated for removal were chosen or what process was used to select them. We believe that under these circumstances - an unprecedented dismissal of a group of U.S. Attorneys at one time allegedly for performance reasons - Margolis should have raised questions about the list and the process used to identify the names to ensure there were no improper reasons and that the Department was following a defensible process for the removals. But Margolis never raised those issues, and instead focused solely on seeking to ensure that Ryan was added to the removal list.

...

We recognize that the decision to remove the U.S. Attorneys was not Margolis's to make. But given his position, we believe he should have asked Sampson, McNulty, or other senior Department leaders about the removal process. This is particularly true given that this removal of U.S. Attorneys was unprecedented, and it did not appear from the names on Sampson's list that the U.S. Attorneys Margolis thought were weak had been included.

The report also quotes from Margolis' subsequent testimony to Congress, in which he acknowledged he should have done more:

I should say that I am a bit exasperated by my role here because I'm the only one of all the people involved who knows how to fire a United States Attorney or a Marshal based on experience. And I was not aggressive enough or vigilant enough, and I should have done a number of things, I should have inserted myself. I was too passive, and I'd like to, I think--and I hold myself accountable for this--that if I had stepped in and said something, that maybe this would have been - we would have handled this better...

The report further concludes:

We believe that given Margolis's experience, position, and stature he was too deferential to others on this important and unprecedented removal of U.S. Attorneys. Had he raised questions, as he acknowledged he should have, the damage to the Department by the fundamentally flawed removal process might have been mitigated.

Margolis was clearly a long way from being the main villain in the US Attorneys saga. But he didn't exactly cover himself with glory in the affair.

And he certainly didn't demonstrate "Outstanding Professionalism and Exemplary Integrity" -- the qualities for which he's just been honored.

Harriet Miers

Report Shows White House Engineered U.S. Attorney Firings

Zachary Roth | October 1, 2008, 4:28PM

Now that the dust has settled on the U.S. attorney firings report, released Monday morning by the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General, we thought it was worth taking some time to lay out what it tells us.

Almost since the scandal broke early last year, there have been clear signs that the plan to fire U.S. attorneys as a means of advancing the Bush administration's political goals was being driven by the White House. That impression has been strengthened as top current and former White House officials, including Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, have consistently stonewalled efforts to look into the matter.

The OIG investigation was no exception. As the report notes, Miers, Rove and several other Whte House officials refused to talk to investigators, and the White House wouldn't provide internal emails or documents relating to the firings. Perhaps the most crucial of the documents denied to OIG was a memo, written in March 2007, which contained the results of an internal White House investigation into the firings, conducted by associate White House counsel Michael Scudder. Scudder had interviewed top DOJ and White House officials, including Rove, and had compiled a timeline that "appeared to contain information we had not obtained elsewhere in our investigation," according to the OIG report.

Still, a close examination of the report makes clear that, although on a day-to-day basis the plan was put into effect by mid-level DOJ political appointees -- enabled by a shocking lack of oversight from top department officials, principally former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales -- the impetus for the move came straight from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Many of the individual pieces of information have been previously reported, as DOJ provided emails and internal documents to Congress for its 2007 investigation. But the OIG report provides a far clearer sense of the longer-term trajectory of the plan, and the consistent interest in it from Miers and Rove, than we've yet been offered.

Read more »

Alberto Gonzales

The OIG Report: Tying Up Loose Ends

Kate Klonick | October 1, 2008, 3:00PM

In the almost two years that TPMmuckraker has been covering the scandal over the removal of the U.S. attorneys, there have been many questions raised over the reasons behind the firings. On Monday, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General's report answered some of those, but raised others. While it concluded that only three of the firings were carried out for political reasons or to interfere with active prosecutions, it could not gather sufficient evidence to conclude the rest of the firings were politically based. Regardless, the report strongly condemned the DOJs overall mishandling of the firings, calling the process "fundamentally flawed . . unsystematic and arbitrary."

As we wrote earlier this week, the report reveals that Todd Graves, David Iglesias and Bud Cummins were fired for reasons of politics, not performance.

The report lays out the investigations into each of the remaining U.S. attorney firings, but repeatedly states that its analysis and investigation were "hindered" due to many witnesses' "lack of recall"; the refusal of many witnesses to cooperate with the investigation or give testimony; and the administration's stonewalling in disclosing documents. Citing these obstacles, the report hedges its findings, requesting a prosecutor to continue the investigation with the power to compel testimony.

In the case of Margaret Chiara, the former Western Michigan U.S. attorney, the report could find no evidence that the rumors that Chiara was in a lesbian relationship with one of her subordinates were behind her removal.

Chiara has stated publicly that she believes the rumors -- which she called "false and malicious" in a statement yesterday from her attorney -- were the reason for the loss of her position.

Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of California, was believed to have been asked to resign over her prosecution of former Executive Director of the CIA, Dusty Foggo and Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor who bribed former Republican Rep. Duke Cunningham and Foggo. But the report "found no evidence" to support those claims, stating that "the investigation and prosecution of Cunningham and Foggo were aggressively pursued by career prosecutors in Lam's office, both during and after her tenure."

Instead, the report supports the Department's previous claims that Lam was removed because of her poor statistics on gun and immigration prosecution statistics -- but blames the DOJ for poor handling of her removal.

In the case of Daniel Bogden of Nevada, little was known about his removal, except that he had not been diligent in prosecution of obscenity cases. The report found the claim to be behind Bogden's removal, but added some color to the removal. Interestingly, the report found that the complaints of Bodgen's dalliance in obscenity prosecutions were made by Brent Ward, the head of the DOJ Obscenity Prosecution Task Force -- who was friends with Attorney General Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson's brother and had direct conversations with Sampson regularly.

When questioned by the DOJ, Sampson stated he "did not recall whether those complaints played a role in the decision to remove Bogden," a response the report found "particularly suspect, given his role in the removal process."

In Arizona, Paul Charlton's termination was believed to be connected to his investigation of Republican Rep. Rick Renzi, but the report states that it could find no evidence to support that claim. Charlton had previously clashed with Main Justice on a decision he made to not seek the death penalty on a case involving a murder that transpired during a drug deal. Charlton believed it was this death penalty case as well as his policy of tape recording interrogations that led to his removal -- theories the IG report confirmed as the primary reasons for his dismissal.

Lastly, there is Seattle's John McKay who was believed to have been fired over his failure to prosecute voter fraud related to the 2004 Washington governor's election.

McKay famously received a call from Ed Cassidy, chief of staff to Washington Rep. Richard Hastings (R) asking about his prosecution, to which McKay responded, "Ed, I'm sure you're not about to start talking to me about the future direction of this case," after which Cassidy quickly ended the call.

Hastings claimed ignorance and told investigators that "he could not remember telling Cassidy to call McKay. . . or whether Cassidy had told him he had done so."

The report also mentions a meeting in Washington between McKay and White House Counsel Harriet Miers in which Miers reportedly asked McKay "why Republicans in the state of Washington were angry with him."

The report concludes that the "evidence suggests" that the primary reason for McKay's removal was an argument with Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty over an information sharing program -- not because of failure to prosecute voter fraud as McKay conjectured.

The OIG report, though nearly 400 pages long, is far from comprehensive. The investigation lacked the power to compel testimony or documents outside of the Justice Department and were consequently limited in their investigation. As a result, the report is forced to reserve judgment on whether many of the firings were inappropriately political, though it recommends that a prosecutor be appointed to look into whether crimes were committed.

Nora Dannehy, appointed on Monday by Attorney General Michael Mukasey will take up that mantle. It remains to be seen if that will be enough to ferret the truth out of unwilling witnesses and departments.