Report Shows White House Engineered U.S. Attorney Firings
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.

Rove Emails Spotlight White House Role in U.S. Attorney Firing
Rove and White House Helped Shape Information Release on U.S. Attorney Firings
White House, DOJ, Domenici Stonewalled IG On Iglesias Firing
Waas: DOJ Probe Has Expanded to the White House
Conyers Tries to Talk Rove Down from Ledge of Contempt Proceedings
House and Senate Dems Claim Victory, Say Miers, Rove Should Testify
For Sampson, Hiring At DOJ Was All Republicans All The Times
President Bush Asserts Exec. Privilege in Plame Leak Investigation
"Breezy" Apology From Fournier
Rove Refuses House Judiciary Subpoena
White House Aides Sought "Fruits" for their Abramoff Labors


