U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania Tom Marino -- who appeared on two of the later firing lists -- is considering a run for Congress.

The case for Republican voter fraud complaints being at the root of yet another U.S. attorney firing just got a lot stronger.

The U.S. attorney here is Todd Graves, the U.S. attorney for Kansas City who was fired in January of last year. And Murray Waas, reporting for National Journal, reports that Mark "Thor" Hearne, the GOP operative behind the American Center for Voting Rights -- the conservative organization that served to spread allegations of widespread voter fraud and push voter ID laws as the cure -- had complained to the White House and senior officials in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division about Graves' lack of commitment to the cause:

In the case involving ACORN, Hearne had urged the Justice Department long before the election to investigate the activist organization and similar groups that registered Democrats. When Hearne came to believe that the U.S. attorney for western Missouri, Todd Graves, was not taking seriously allegations that ACORN workers were registering people who did not qualify to vote, he took his complaints to senior officials in Justice’s Civil Rights Division and to the White House, according to a former Justice official and a private attorney who worked with Hearne. The private attorney said in an interview that Hearne boasted to him about having discussions with administration officials who wanted Graves replaced. The White House declined to comment on any of its discussions with Hearne.

Waas notes that there's no direct evidence that Hearne's complaints led to Graves' dismissal. But Graves' case is starting to look a lot like two others that have drawn plenty of suspicion: David Iglesias of New Mexico and John McKay of Washington. In both those cases, state Republicans' brought their complaints to the White House and the leadership at the Justice Department. In Iglesias' case, both the president and Karl Rove himself echoed those complaints to the Justice Department.

And a complaint from Hearne would have gotten special attention. Hearne is reportedly close to Rove, and served as national election counsel for the 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential campaign.

There's an additional fact which makes this case even more suspicious. Graves was replaced by Bradley Schlozman, a former senior political appointee at the Civil Rights Division who oversaw the voting rights section. According to Waas, Hearne brought his complaints about Graves to "senior officials in Justice’s Civil Rights Division." These were complaints about voting cases, which means the complaints most likely went to Schlozman himself -- or his right hand Hans Von Spakovsky. After Schlozman was installed in Graves' place, he brought an indictment against four ACORN workers days before the election in 2006. So it looks a lot like Hearne got his wish.

Schlozman, remember, will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee this coming Tuesday. That hearing promises to be very interesting.

Update: Rick Hasen has more over at the Election Law blog.

The gang's all here.

The Los Angeles Times looks into why Thomas Heffelfinger, the former U.S. attorney for Minnesota, was targeted for removal and finds circumstantial evidence that Heffelfinger might have made himself a marked man by raising objection to the implementation of a voter ID law in the state. Some familiar characters crop up -- namely Bradley Schlozman and Hans Von Spakovsky, the two Republican lawyers who reigned over the Civil Rights Division's voting rights section.

Here's the tale, according to The Times: in the fall of 2004, Minnesota's Republican Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer issued a directive that tribal ID cards could not be used for voter identification by Native Americans living off reservations. On October 19, 2004, an assistant U.S. attorney in Heffelinger's office wrote Joe Rich, the then-chief of the voting rights section in the Civil Rights Division, to raise the alarm about Kiffmeyer's move. The directive might disproportionately affect Native Americans' ability to vote, the AUSA wrote, and was a matter of "deep concern" to Heffelfinger.

Rich, a near 40-year veteran of the Civil Rights Division, who retired in 2005 and has been fiercely critical of the division's political leadership, recommended opening an investigation. The division, after all, is charged with protecting minorities against possible discrimination. But things went downhill from there:

In response, he said, Bradley Schlozman, a political appointee in the department, told Rich "not to do anything without his approval" because of the "special sensitivity of this matter."

Rich responded by suggesting that more information be gathered from voting officials in the Twin Cities area, which includes Minnesota's two most populous counties.

A message came back from another Republican official in the department, Hans von Spakovsky, saying Rich should not contact the county officials but should instead deal only with the secretary of state's office.

Von Spakovsky indicated, Rich said, that working with Kiffmeyer's office reduced the likelihood of a leak to the news media.

The orders from Schlozman and Von Spakovsky, who wielded unusual power in the civil rights division, effectively ended any department inquiry, Rich said.

So Schlozman and Von Spakovsky, in their own typically creative way, spiked the investigation. (A suit by the ACLU eventually blocked Kiffmeyer's directive from being implemented.)

Now, this was in October of 2004. And Heffelfinger, along with twelve other U.S. attorneys, appeared on Kyle Sampson's first list of U.S. attorneys in February of 2005 -- that's the one where "strong" U.S.A.s were ones who had "exhibited loyalty" to the president. Heffelfinger appeared again on a January, 2006 list and stepped down the next month. He's said he was not asked to step down.

Heffelfinger's lack of enthusiasm for Kiffmeyer's voter ID measure has long been floated as the real reason for his being placed on the list -- Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) even asked Monica Goodling about it during her hearing last week. Goodling denied knowing anything about that, instead saying she remembered hearing something about how Heffelfinger spent too much time on Native American issues -- Heffelfinger was the chairman of the subcommittee of U.S. attorneys that deals with American Indian issues. Her response didn't seem to convince Rep. Ellison.

The question here is whether, or how, Heffelfinger's disloyalty was communicated to the leadership in the Justice Department or the White House. Voter fraud, we know, is an issue close to Karl Rove's heart. Did Schlozman or Van Spakovsky complain to Rove's shop or someone else? Fortunately, both Schlozman and Von Spakovsky will be put under oath in the near future -- Schlozman this coming Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee (as part of the U.S. attorney firings investigation) and Von Spakovsky before the Senate Rules Committee (a confirmation hearing for his spot as a commissioner at the FEC) on June 13th. Let's hope they get some questions about this.

From The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

At their annual convention here, members of the statewide organization of moderate and center-right Republicans clapped enthusiastically when McKay, the former U.S. attorney for Western Washington, declared that the "enormous power" vested in federal prosecutors "cannot be associated with partisan politics."...

He said he and at least five of the other fired U.S. attorneys compared notes and concluded that "if we did remain silent, we were part of the lie, so that is why I spoke out."

Since then, McKay added, "senior officials at the Department of Justice have compounded early misstatements with lies and with cover-ups."...

McKay said he has no intention of running for political office, as some have speculated, and is troubled by the furor over the firings because "I felt this responsibility as a Republican (that) I did not want to be in the public arena handing spears to the Democrats to throw at the White House."

Nevertheless, McKay, the reluctant warrior, did hand a number of spears to Democrats. And in his speech, McKay singled out state Republicans who tried to get him fired for not bringing indictments in the wake of the 2004 gubernatorial election:

He referred dismissively to "cybercowards," apparently meaning conservative bloggers who have criticized the lack of prosecution, and scorned the purported evidence of election fraud alleged by Tom McCabe, the aggressive, conservative executive vice president of the Building Association of Washington and a Rossi supporter....

McKay said the evidence McCabe presented was "a joke from an evidentiary standpoint that a crime had been committed. ... Every FBI agent who looked at the evidence and every federal prosecutor who looked at the evidence that the BIAW sent in concluded that it was completely, utterly insufficient to move forward in an investigation."

Thanks to TPM Reader SD.

In a letter today, the Justice Department's Inspector General and head counsel for the Office of Professional Responsibility notified the Senate Judiciary Committee that their joint probe into the U.S. attorney firings had expanded to include a broad array of allegations "regarding improper political or other considerations in hiring decisions within the Department of Justice."

The expansion was first reported last week in the wake of Monica Goodling's testimony, but it was unclear just how wide a net investigators had cast. The letter reads:

"Among the issues that we intend to investigate are allegations regarding Monica Goodling's and others' actions in the DoJ hiring and personnel decisions; allegations concerning hiring for the DoJ Honors Program and Summer Law Intern Program; and allegations concerning hiring practices in the DoJ Civil Rights Division."

Goodling admitted last week to improperly taking political considerations into account in the hiring of assistant U.S. attorneys, immigration judges and appointments to the Board of Immigration Appeals. But the IG and OPR's investigation appears to go far beyond Goodling.

Allegations concerning political hiring for the Honors Program -- the Department's historically rigorous program for hiring entry-level lawyers -- have centered on Michael Elston, the chief of staff to the deputy attorney general. A group of anonymous Justice Department employees raised alarms with Congress last month, complaining that Elston rejected hundreds of potential applicants to the program last year seemingly based on their political backgrounds.

And Goodling also hasn't been implicated in allegedly political hiring practices in the Department's Civil Rights Division. Those allegations have centered on Bradley Schlozman, the former #2 at the division, who has been accused of recruiting Republicans for career spots and then asking them to scrub mentions of their GOP bona fides from their resumes. Schlozman subsequently was appointed as an interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City -- and returned to main Justice to work in the Executive Office of United States Attorneys after he was replaced by a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney. He's scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee this coming Tuesday.

So it appears that the DoJ's internal investigation has a lot of ground to cover. The report will be made public upon its completion.

From McClatchy's interview with President Bush:

Q How central a role did Rove play in the U.S. attorney business? That's what everybody wants to know. Was he the main guy drawing up the list?

THE PRESIDENT: Just look at the facts as they've come out.

Q It's unclear.

THE PRESIDENT: There has been plenty of testimony, plenty of hearings, plenty of statements. And one thing is for certain, that there was no wrongdoing done. And --

McClatchy's Ron Hutcheson mercifully moved on to another topic.

The Wall Street Journal reports (sub. req.) that Timothy Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who became one of the most controversial figures in the U.S. attorney firing scandal, is in talks with Fred Thompson's presidential campaign:

Backers look for Fred Thompson to use a June 2 speech to Virginia Republicans to step closer toward the race. Thompson allies have had discussions with Tim Griffin, the Arkansas U.S. attorney and Rove protégé, about taking a top job with the campaign.

Griffin, of course, was installed as the U.S. attorney for Little Rock last year. Emails from Kyle Sampson have shown that the Justice Department and White House were plotting to use a little noticed provision in the USA PATRIOT Act Reauthorization Bill to keep Griffin in place throughout Bush's term without the need for Senate confirmation. Alberto Gonzales has somewhat unconvincingly disavowed the plan.

But when that scheme was revealed, Democrats successfully pushed for the law to be changed back to the way it was -- a final version passed the House last week. As a result of that, Griffin will be forced out of office in four months or so. Apparently Griffin isn't waiting around for that. The Arkansas Times blog cites sources saying that Griffin may leave the job shortly.

Last week, Monica Goodling revealed that she'd routinely placed Republicans in civil service spots, including immigration judge positions. As she was eventually forced to concede under hard questioning, doing that was against the law.

But it also became apparent that the practice was nothing new -- and that it dated at least back to 2004, before Goodling got involved. That's how people like Garry Malphrus, a former Brooks Brother rioter with no immigration experience, became a judge.

Today The Legal Times fills in the blanks. And as Jason McLure and Emma Schwartz plainly put it, "As with the replacement of U.S. attorneys, political appointees at the Justice Department appear to have trod upon department norms — and may have even broken federal law — to reward their own people with plum assignments."

The slide began during John Ashcroft's tenure, they report, when Ashcroft's aides got the idea. They went to the Office of Legal Counsel, the Department's internal legal advisor, for the go-ahead. And they got it.

That process of consultation, however, seems to have been oddly casual for such a shift in policy. According to a statement by Monica Goodling's lawyer, Kyle Sampson got an oral opinion from the then-head of the OLC that it was legal.

Read more »

Congressional Democrats have been wary of dropping the “s” word so far in the simmering Justice Department probe.

Despite indications of possible criminal wrongdoing, Democrats have not called for a special prosecutor (necessary, given the inherent conflict of interest at the Justice Department). It looks like the majority party is holding out for the smoking gun.

That gun will probably lead to peripheral charges, Roll Call reports today:

“Obstruction, perjury, false statements —that’s always how these things get started,” said ethics attorney and former House counsel Stan Brand.

Brand pointed to the Watergate defendants, many of whom were charged with similar crimes.

“There were not many substantial offenses charged in most cases. That was a cover-up,” he said.

The strongest aroma has wafted off the Monica Goodling and Paul McNulty standoff. McNulty has reportedly told Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that, in preparation briefings for his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Goodling withheld information about the White House's roles in the firings from him. And Goodling claimed last week in her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee that McNulty knew more about the U.S. Attorneys firings than he claimed during his testimony. McNulty flatly denies Goodlings accusation.

Three of the fired U.S. attorneys have also testified that they received calls from Michael Elston, chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, with the implicit threat to stay quiet about the firings or risk the reasons for their dismissals being made public.

Prosecutor-turned-politician Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) described the possible criminal violations that have surfaced so far saying:

“It is surprising how often a whiff of obstruction of justice has reared its head in the course of this investigation.”

Let’s see how long just a “whiff” lasts.

From McClatchy Newspapers:

The Bush administration's decision to fire nine U.S. attorneys last year has created a new problem for the White House: The controversy appears to be discouraging applications for some of the 22 prosecutor posts that President Bush needs to fill....

In Florida, the panel that's evaluating candidates and making recommendations to the White House has received only two applicants for the vacancy left by U.S. Attorney Paul Perez in Tampa - even after it extended the May 3 deadline to apply. Perez, who resigned in March, left for a private-sector job. He's said that he wasn't forced out.

"I personally was disappointed we didn't have more," said Michael J. Grindstaff, the chairman of the Florida Federal Judicial Nominating Commission. "I was wondering if there was a way to attract more applicants."

It's been apparent from very early in the U.S. attorney scandal that Tim Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who was appointed the U.S. attorney for Little Rock, was different from the others.

Emails show that White House and Justice Department officials worked together for months to install Griffin, dating back to last summer. Rove's aides in the White House Office of Political Affairs were intimately involved. Up until now, however, there had been no evidence of direct communication between Rove and Griffin about the appointment. But an email contained in documents released earlier this week shows Griffin directly emailing Rove and his deputies in the White House Office of Political Affairs (click to enlarge):

David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was among those fired last year, told me that he thought the direct contact was "really inappropriate and over the line." The only time he ever contacted anyone there, he said, was to return phone calls about job opportunities. He'd twice been considered for positions, he said: once as director for Executive Office of United States Attorneys and another time as the assistant secretary of homeland security for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The White House had called to see if he was interested in the appointments; he told them he was not. He said that he'd never heard of a U.S. attorney speaking to someone in the Office of Political Affairs for any other reason.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

The email, dated February 16, 2007, shows Griffin forwarding a copy of a local news article about his announcement that he would not seek Senate confirmation. Griffin wrote Rove, three of his deputies, and Christopher Oprison of the White House counsel's office that he was "glad" that he "did this" ("this" presumably being his announcement not to seek the nomination), and explaining why he'd taken a "swipe" at Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR).

Griffin had been a controversial figure ever since his December 15th appointment, due not least to his ties to Rove. But Sen. Pryor had been most alarmed by the administration's apparent scheme -- which Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson laid out in a December 19, 2006 email that was later turned over to Congress in March -- to appoint Griffin indefinitely without Senate confirmation, via a little noticed provision in the USA PATRIOT ACT Reauthorization bill. Griffin's appointment drew even more scrutiny after it was revealed in January that at least six other U.S. attorneys besides Griffin's predecessor Bud Cummins had been fired by the administration.

“It’s unfortunate," Griffin is quoted as saying in the article, "that Sen. Pryor is blaming the administration for using a law that he voted for to appoint me, apparently with the excuse that he didn’t know what he was voting for when he voted." After explaining in the email to Rove why he'd said that, Griffin added, "I am going to go back to focusing on my job until I am told otherwise."

Responding to the email, Michael Teague, spokesman for Sen. Pryor, wondered how many other contacts Griffin had with Rove. "This is just an email. Was he calling him every day?"

In fact, the email was only produced by the Justice Department because Oprison of the White House counsel's office had forwarded it on to Monica Goodling at the Justice Department, who forwarded it to Kyle Sampson the same morning. Despite requests from Congress, the White House has not produced any emails related to the firings.

Sampson's and Oprison's appearance in the email raises an additional question.

Read more »

Third time's the charm? They've asked the White House, the Justice Department, and now Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and ranking member Arlen Specter (R-PA) are giving Karl Rove's lawyer a try to see if they can get their hands on his emails.

Monica Goodling says she was given the green light to hire immigration judges based on their political qualifications. So how'd that happen? And who's been getting the gig?

As a story in The Legal Times last year explained, immigration judges are different from other federal judges in that they're civil service employees -- meaning that there's a formal application process with the Justice Department's Executive Office of Immigration Review.

But, Jason McLure reported, "according to an immigration-judge hiring policy released by the Justice Department, the attorney general also has the option to pre-empt the formal vetting process and directly hire a judge of his choosing."

It was apparently this option that allowed Goodling, and others at the department before her, to do their thing.

So who's been getting the gig? The Times last year profiled one of those judges, Garry Malphrus.

A former Republican aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Malphrus also worked on the White House's Domestic Policy Council before becoming a judge. But he really showed his stripes in 2000, when Malphrus joined other Republicans in making a ruckus (chanting, pounding on windows and doors) outside the Miami-Dade Elections Department -- the so-called "Brooks Brothers Riot" -- during the Bush-Gore recount.

Malphrus, of course, had no immigration experience when he got the job, McLure reports. He had that in common with a number of his peers, who had similar backgrounds:

Among the 19 immigration judges hired since 2004: Francis Cramer, the former campaign treasurer for New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg; James Nugent, the former vice chairman of the Louisiana Republican Party; and Chris Brisack, a former Republican Party county chairman from Texas who had served on the state library commission under then-Gov. George W. Bush.

But why bother becoming an immigration judge? Well, the salary isn't bad ($113,904 in 2006) and "unlike his former colleagues at the White House, as a career civil service employee, Malphrus won’t be out of work should Republicans lose the White House in 2008." And as a friend of Malphrus tells McLure, "I think he's just working his way up the totem pole."

Now, here's the thing. Malphrus and all the others cited in McLure's piece were appointed before Goodling became White House liaison in April, 2005.

Read more »

More answers, more questions.

The Justice Department's Inspector General has broadened his investigation of the U.S. attorney firings, The Los Angeles Times and New York Times report this morning, to cover Monica Goodling's and others' political hiring of career employees at the department.

And there would seem to be plenty of material there for investigation. For instance, Goodling admitted on Wednesday that she'd openly taken political factors into account in hiring immigration judges.

For good reason, those are civil service positions, not political positions -- and they're supposed to be governed by civil service laws (meaning people are supposedly hired for their professional qualifications, not their partisan ones). They handle matters like deportation proceedings and political asylum requests. And there are only 226 of them. As the NY Times points out, approximately 75 of those "have been appointed during the Bush administration," 49 of those during Gonzales' tenure. So there can be no doubt that Goodling's political hiring practices have had an impact on the nation's immigration proceedings.

Now, in her testimony, Goodling said that Kyle Sampson had told her that there was no problem with taking politics into account in hiring immigration judges. And the reason, he said, was that the department's Office of Legal Counsel had said it was OK. But...

Justice Department officials said no such opinion existed.

They also denied Goodling's assertion that the hiring of immigration judges had been frozen after the department's civil division raised concerns about using a political litmus test.

"There is no disagreement within the department, including between the civil division and the Office of Legal Counsel, about whether the civil service laws apply to the appointment of immigration judges," said Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman. "They do apply."

As Marty Lederman puts it, "Something is happening here, but we don't know what it is. Goodling obviously knew that her conduct in this regard was dubious, and testified about it even though no one had raised any question about it previously, so as to ensure that her immunity would extend to this episode, as well. (She was very well-advised by John Dowd.)"

To hear Goodling tell it, she was assured by the attorney general's chief of staff that there was a legal basis for stocking the nation's immigration courts with political loyalists -- when no such legal basis existed. And the Justice Department now disavows this activity all together. So how much did Alberto Gonzales know about this? And how much did the White House know? More questions...

Since they weren't subjected to the Justice Department's vigorous Why-Did-We-Fire-Them brainstorming sessions, former U.S. attorneys Thomas Heffelfinger (Minnesota) and Todd Graves (Kansas City) got their first taste of it yesterday during Monica Goodling's testimony. They didn't like it.

Of Heffelfinger, who stepped down in February of last year (he says he resigned voluntarily, though that was just a month after he appeared on one of Kyle Sampson's firing lists), Goodling said that she'd heard he "spent an extraordinary amount of time" working on his work related to his position as chairman of the subcommittee of U.S. attorneys that deals with American Indian issues.

Heffelfinger's response: "I did spent a lot of time on it... That's what I was instructed to do [by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft]". And:

"If it's true that people within the Department of Justice were critical of the amount of time I was spending on Indian issues, I'm outraged... Are they telling me I spent too much time trying to improve public safety for Native Americans, who are victims of violent crime at a rate 2½ times the national population? If they are, then shame on them."

And of Graves -- who was asked to resign in January of last year?

Read more »

In a press conference today, Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) had agreed to bring the no-confidence resolution concerning Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to the Senate floor after the immigration bill -- meaning probably the second week of June. The Senate has a one week recess next week.

The resolution itself is a brief one, simply expressing no confidence in Gonzales. "Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled: It is the sense of the Senate that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales no longer holds the confidence of the Senate and the American people."

In his press conference today, President Bush returned to his favored "political theater" talking point when asked about the continuing scandal at the Justice Department.

The continued drip, drip, drip of revelations has shaken public confidence in the Justice Department, the reporter asked, how can you reassure the American people?

Sounding more than a little beleaguered, Bush responded "I thought it was interesting how you started your question, ‘over the months,’ I think you said, ‘over the last months'... this investigation is taking a long time…. kind of being drug (sic) out, I suspect for political reasons… as I mentioned it the other day, it’s 'grand political theater.'"

You might say that the investigation has taken such an awfully long time because the Justice Department misled Congress when questions were first asked about the U.S. attorney firings (senior Department officials even giving false testimony to Congress), the White House has stonewalled, a key witness invoked the Fifth Amendment, and despite all this, the revelations have just kept on coming steadily over the past three months. That might explain why Bush sounds so tired.

Update: It's worth taking a look at our U.S. Attorney Scandal Timeline to see why the investigation has "drug on" for so long.

So -- the day we'd been waiting for has come and gone. The major points are clear by now:

1) Goodling, as directly as she could, accused the deputy attorney general of perjuring himself in testimony to Congress.

2) She said that, in their last conversation, the attorney general had tried to check his recollection of the firing process with her. This was after Congress had requested to interview her, leading to the conclusion that Gonzales was trying to shape her recollection. For his part, Gonzales, through his spokesman, says he was only trying to "comfort her in a very difficult period of her life."

3) She admitted to breaking the law by applying a political litmus test to non-political career positions at the Justice Department, including assistant U.S. attorneys -- that litmus test even included checking applicants' political contributions. She couldn't say just how many times she'd done this, and it was unclear who, if anyone, had told her to do this.

4) Even though she described herself as having a major role in the firing process, she knew remarkably little about it. In fact, she gave the inescapable impression that those involved in the process avoided talking about the reasons for the firings -- or, at least, with the exception of the now-famous brainstorming sessions that took place after Congress started asking questions, reasons certainly were not volunteered. When Goodling herself asked in a meeting who'd put U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias on the firing list (this was in February), a voice said "that's been addressed." She says she can't remember who said that.

With the exception of the meeting with Gonzales, Goodling unloaded all of this in her first minutes of testimony. And as Dahlia Lithwick points out in her column today, the hearing was largely characterized after that by what was left unsaid:

In that first few hours, Goodling manages to give committee Democrats both too much and too little to wrap their heads around. She testifies that former Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty gave false and misleading testimony to the Senate with regard to the U.S. attorney purge. She took the Fifth, she says, because of McNulty's inaccurate testimony, plus the "ambiguous environment" of the hearings, and not because of any crime of her own. She testifies that her role as White House liaison has been overblown. She had little contact with the White House (or Karl Rove or Harriet Miers) about the names on the list of U.S. attorneys who were fired but concedes that the White House was extensively involved ("several departments signed off") in the process. She talks about the "final decisionmakers" without ever quite naming them. She puts her former bosses Kyle Sampson, McNulty, and Gonzales in the room as the arbiters of the "list." But almost nobody sees fit to ask follow-up questions about how the list was made, what criteria were used, and what exactly the White House did to play along. Nobody asks why she cried when she quit, what she made of those e-mails, or much of anything at all about Alberto Gonzales.

Finally, Goodling takes complete blame for having "crossed the line"—even the legal line, i.e., the civil-service rules—by asking "political questions of applicants for career positions." In response to a question from Bobby Scott, D-Va., she adds, "But I didn't mean to." Oh. Well then, that's OK....

Democrats who might have pursued the leads she floated about the White House role in the firings stop asking these questions once Goodling fails to implicate Rove. They are so blindsided by her admission of injecting politics into her own hiring practices that they forget to ask who else at the DoJ might have directed her to do so, or done so themselves.

The Democrats have five more days to ask follow-up questions of Goodling. There's still plenty of ground to cover.

During her testimony today, Monica Goodling pointed the finger squarely at Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, saying that he had not been "fully candid" in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about his knowledge of White House involvement in the U.S. attorney firings (McNulty had earlier pointed the finger at Sampson and Goodling for not informing him of the White House's role). Goodling laid out four key areas where she said McNulty hadn't told the whole truth in her written statement (pdf) to the committee. Perhaps the most serious allegation she made was that McNulty had told the commmittee that he didn't have any knowledge of how Tim Griffin, Karl Rove's former aide, had come to be appointed the U.S. attorney for Little Rock. In fact, Goodling said, she'd told him that the White House had been involved in Griffin's appointment all along.

Here's Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) questioning Goodling about that. McNulty testified to the committee that he did not know whether Karl Rove had had any role in Griffin's appointment -- but Goodling says that he "had been given some information on that."

But here's a statement just out from McNulty, via the Department of Justice:

“I testified truthfully at the Feb. 6, 2007, hearing based on what I knew at that time. Ms. Goodling's characterization of my testimony is wrong and not supported by the extensive record of documents and testimony already provided to Congress.”

Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) reacts to Goodling's testimony today:

“It is curious that yet another senior Justice Department official claims to have limited involvement in compiling the list that led to the firings of several well-performing federal prosecutors. What we have heard today seems to reinforce the mounting evidence that the White House was pulling the strings on this project to target certain prosecutors in different parts of the country.

“It is deeply troubling that the crisis of leadership at the Department allowed the White House to wield undue political influence over key law enforcement decisions and policies. It is unacceptable that a senior Justice Department official was allowed to screen career employees for political loyalty, and it confirms our worst fears about the unprecedented and improper reach of politics into the Department’s professional ranks.

“As Congress continues its oversight to pull back the curtain on the politicization of the Justice Department, it is abundantly clear that we must do all we can to get to the truth behind this matter and the role White House played in it.”

During her testimony, Monica Goodling testified about a meeting she had with Alberto Gonzales shortly before she left the department -- their last meeting. Goodling dated the conversation as taking place on a Thursday or Friday the week before she went on leave for the department (March 23rd) -- so on March 14th or 15th. That was just a week after Congress requested to interview Goodling about what she knew.

Goodling's testimony is sure to lead to questions about whether Gonzales was trying to tamper with a witness of a congressional investigation.

In this private discussion with Gonzales, Goodling said she asked for a transfer out of her current position because of the scandal. Gonzales said he'd have to think about that, but then started telling Goodling what he remembered about the firing process. He then asked her if she had "any reaction" to his memory. "I didn't know that it was maybe appropriate for us to talk about that," she said, adding that it made her "uncomfortable." When Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) asked if she thought the attorney general had been trying to shape her recollection of the firings, she said no, but then did say again that the conversation had made her feel uncomfortable.

Now, Congress had been openly investigating the firings since January. On March 8, the House Judiciary Committee requested that Goodling testify before the committee. The following week, Gonzales was comparing stories with her. That doesn't sound good.

Update: In a follow-up line of questioning, after Goodling again said that she'd been uncomfortable about her conversation with Gonzales, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) asked, "But the top law enforcement official in country didn’t raise any concern about the propriety of your discussing this issue?" No, she replied.

And Rep. Davis clarified whether Goodling knew then that she might have to testify and that the attorney general knew that she would. "I think he knew it was likely," she said.

Here's Monica Goodling's testimony about the firings process in a nutshell.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) wanted to know if Goodling knew if there were any improper (in the attorney general's narrow sense of the term) reason for the firings. Her answer was less than a ringing endorsement of the firings.

Franks: Did you at any time at your stay at the Justice Department ever seek to prevent or interfere with or affect or influence any particular case or any effort to change the outcome of justice that is the predicate for your agency by hiring or firing or threatening to do so any person or any of these U.S. attorneys that are under discussion?

Goodling: I certainly did not.

Franks: Do you know of anyone in the department or the administration that did?

Goodling: I don’t recall anybody ever saying anything like that. I just don’t. I can’t testify to what other people were thinking and I can’t testify to what other people may have been thinking that they didn’t say. We didn’t talk about what the reasons were, other than Mr. Bogden, at least in conversations I was in, until after it was in progress, and I never heard anybody say anything like that.

Funny: everyone seems to have kept the reasons for the firings to themselves until after they occurred. That's an odd way to have a "consensus based process," as Kyle Sampson insists that it was. What might people have been "thinking that they didn't say?"

Monica Goodling admitted "crossing the line" earlier in her testimony with regard to hiring assistant U.S. attorneys based on their political affiliations. That's against the law. Assistant U.S. attorneys are the prosecutors in the U.S. attorney offices across the country that actually prosecute the cases.

But how many federal prosecutors were submitted to Goodling's litmus test? Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) asked was it fewer than 50, more than 50? Goodling couldn't say. "I can't think that I could have done it more than 50 times, but I don't know."

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) asked Goodling if she looked at the political contributions made by applicants for AUSA positions. Goodling said that she'd done that for other non-political career positions and may have done it for prosecutors, too: she couldn't "rule that out."

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Here's Rep. Steve King (R-IA) noting that Harvard University, like Pat Robertson's Regent University, where Goodling attended law school, was also founded on a religious foundation (albeit more than 300 years ago).

Well, at least it's clear. When Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) asked whether the committee needs to go to the White House to get answers about the White House role in the firings, Goodling conceded, "I can't give you the whole White House story."

How do senior Justice Department officials end up giving false testimony to Congress? Well, it's complicated, Goodling testified. But first you start answering one question, then you get another question, and then you get another and then all of a sudden people were answering questions that they didn't have answers for. "It just snowballed into a not good situation."

Goodling also testified here under questioning from Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) about making sure that Republicans were hired in certain career Justice Department positions, including detail positions in main Justice and immigration judges. But there was nothing nefarious in this, she said, she just wanted to make sure that people on the leadership team were "on the same page in terms of philosophy." She also said that there were other, "bizarre cases." It's not clear what she was talking about.

Let there be no more allegations that there was anything but a thorough and rigorous process to select U.S. attorneys for firing.

Here's Monica Goodling explaining the process behind the firing of U.S. Attorney for Nevada Daniel Bogden. At a November 27, 2006 meeting with the attorney general, the deputy attorney general and others, Goodling said that DAG Paul McNulty raised a concern about Bogden being on the list. Is there a problem with Bogden, McNulty asked, or is there just a general sense that we could do better?

According to Goodling, Kyle Sampson replied, "“I think it’s a general sense, a general kind of sense that we could do better.” After that, everyone looked to the attorney general, she said, and "I think he nodded and said 'OK.'" So there you go.

Monica Goodling had some new information on the firing of Todd Graves of Kansas City (the so-called "9th prosecutor"). Remember that Graves was forced to step aside, making room for Brad Schlozman, who had pushed the voter fraud cause at the Civil Rights Division.

Goodling revealed that Graves had been under investigation by the department's inspector general when he was asked to step down. She did not say what the investigation was about. She also said that she did not remember anything about voter fraud being a reason for his firing.

Here's a question that needs more of an answer. Under questioning from Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Goodling replied, "There were some other times when I was asked to help facilitate the placement of somebody that we knew to be Republican in career positions, and sometimes those were at the request of other people in the department."

There has been some more back and forth on this, but it's still not exactly clear what Goodling was referring to. Under questioning from Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Goodling talked about some "odd cases" or "bizarre cases" where political affiliation was taken into account in hiring certain DoJ employees. What was odd or bizarre about them?

Under questioning from Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), Goodling couldn't say why U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias had been put on the firing list.

Earlier in the hearing, Goodling said that all she could remember was being in a meeting after the firings -- when the question was raised why Iglesias had been put on the list, someone said "that's been addressed." Goodling said she couldn't remember who'd said that.

Why had Iglesias been fired? Goodling told Scott that "Different people made different comments at different times. Other comments that people made based on what they thought or believed.” In other words, she doesn't know.

Unbelievably, she said that DoJ official Bill Mercer had been the one to raise the complaint that Iglesias had been “an absentee landlord,” because Iglesias was sometimes gone from the office (for his Navy reserve duty). Of course, that phrase would apply to no one better than Mercer himself, since Mercer, the U.S. attorney for Montana, has drawn strident complaints from the chief judge in his district about his prolonged absences. Mercer pulls double duty as a senior DoJ official.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) pressed Goodling on how the Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty had not been "not fully candid" in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in February about the level of the White House involvement in the U.S. attorney firings.

Goodling said that she "didn't withhold" any information, but that McNulty "didn't use all of it." When Nadler asked Goodling if McNulty had potentially perjured himself, Goodling said "those are the conclusions for others to draw."

Update: You can read Goodling's prolonged accounting of how the deputy attorney general misled the committee in her lengthy written statement here (pdf).

Both in her opening statement and in further testimony, Goodling admitted to weeding out candidates for assistant U.S. attorney positions because they were not Republicans.

Under questioning from Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), Goodling admitted that she did block the hiring of an assistant U.S. attorney in the D.C. U.S. attorney's office because she judged him too liberal. "I made a snap judgment and I regret it," she said. When Sanchez pressed as to how many times Goodling had done this, Goodling said she couldn't come up with a number, and that she didn't "feel like there were that many cases."

Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) later pressed her on whether she had committed a crime. “I don’t believe that I intended to commit a crime," she said at first. Then, when he pressed, “I know I crossed the line of civil service rules."
Did that mean she crossed the line of breaking the law, he asked? "I believe I crossed the line, but I didn’t mean to," she said. Here's video of that:

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Here's Goodling under the first line of questioning from Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). Does she know who put the U.S. attorneys on the firing list? No. Who could answer the question? Only Kyle Sampson could tell you that.

Goodling dropped a number of bombshells in her opening statement. You can read it here.

First, she threw back the responsibility for the misstatements to Congress to the deputy attorney general, saying that Paul McNulty had not been "fully candid about his knowledge of White House involvement in the replacement decision." She said that McNulty had even prevented Goodling from being in the same room during a closed door briefing to Congress, because her presence might raise questions about the White House.

She also set the tone for her testimony today by saying that she did not know why the eight U.S. attorneys were fired. "I can describe what I and others discussed as the reasons for their removal, but I cannot guarantee that these reasons are the same as those contemplated by the final decision makers," she said. The person she says to ask about all this, she says, is Kyle Sampson.

Starting at 10:15 AM today, Monica Goodling will be testifying before the House Judiciary Committee. You can watch her testimony on C-Span 3 on TV or streaming from the House Judiciary Committee's website. As usual, we'll be updating with regular updates and clips throughout the day.

An ideologue, yes, but an ideologue acting on orders or on her own?

When Monica Goodling goes before the House Judiciary Committee this morning, that will be the central question.

No one can read the two profiles of Goodling in The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post this morning and not come away with the impression that Goodling was a true believer. From her high perch in the Justice Department, Goodling worked to make sure that the Justice Department was staffed with staunch conservatives. For her part, Goodling's conservative ideals were such "that she once refused to go to a Justice Department baby shower because the mother was unwed."
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Goodling's influence at the department was far-flung. As both the Post and Times report this morning, Goodling on at least one occasion blocked the hiring of an assistant U.S. attorney because she feared he was a "liberal Democrat." And when Debra Wong Yang, the U.S. attorney for Los Angeles, stepped down last November, Goodling and Kyle Sampson went around the normal selection process and set to work finding a replacement. Despite the fact that a special commission had been set up in California to select and vet U.S. attorney candidates, Goodling and Sampson selected and began interviewing candidates of their own, a number of whom had been political appointees at the Department. When the commission members found out, they put a stop to it:

"They were caught in the act," said the person familiar with the process. "This was frankly a warning sign that problems existed among a relatively small group … who decided they had power and authority and could do what they wanted."

But had Goodling and Sampson decided this on their own? Or did they do it on orders from the White House? That's the key question for Goodling today. We'll see what she says.

Tomorrow morning at 10:15 AM, Monica Goodling will testify before the House Judiciary Committee.

Goodling, remember, was the Justice Department's liaison to the White House and the last of the Department officials involved in the U.S. attorney firings to talk to Congress. Every other official has told Congressional investigators that they had nothing to do with putting any of the six U.S. attorneys at the center of the controversy on the list. So that leaves Goodling. What will she say?

And why, lawmakers will want to know, was she so upset on March 8th, when it finally became apparent within the Justice Department that Goodling, along with Kyle Sampson, had failed to tell others about the extent of White House involvement in the firings? Here's what David Margolis, a career DoJ official, told Congressional investigators:

"She came down about 8:00 and she started by saying, "Has Kyle talked to you?" And I said, "Yeah, he came by earlier." And then she proceeded for the next, it seemed like forever but it was probably only about 30 or 45 minutes, to bawl her eyes out and say, "All I ever wanted to do was serve this President and this administration and this department," and then cry more, and more, and more, and more, and talk about -- talk about how she came to Washington, you know. Personal stuff...."

Margolis said Goodling never told him why she was so upset: "And I wasn't anxious to hear, so I did not probe." But Congress will want to know why.

You can read more from Margolis' testimony here.

As Newsweek reports, when Justice Department officials got upset over Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card's nighttime visit to John Ashcroft's hospital bed in March of 2004, the White House fell back on their old standby: incompetence.

From Newsweek:

After the incident, there were recriminations over what Comey portrayed as an attempt by Bush's top lawyer and chief of staff to "take advantage" of a very ill man. Comey didn't tell the Senate panel that the bad feelings were stoked even more the next morning when White House officials explained the hospital visit by saying Gonzales and Card were unaware that Comey was acting A.G. (and therefore the only person authorized to sign off on the surveillance program), according to a former senior DOJ official who requested anonymity talking about internal matters. Top DOJ officials were furious, the source said. Just days earlier, Justice's chief spokesman had publicly said Comey would serve as "head of the Justice Department" while Ashcroft was ill. Justice officials had also faxed over a document to the White House informing officials of this. When a Gonzales aide claimed the counsel's office could find no record of it, DOJ officials dug out a receipt showing the fax had been received. "People were disgusted as much as livid," said the DOJ official. "It was just the dishonesty of it." A Gonzales aide at the time (who asked not to be ID'd talking about internal matters) said there was a "miscommunication" and "genuine confusion" over who was in charge.

"Genuine confusion" or disingenuous confusion. You decide.

Via Steve Benen.

There you have it, yet another pile of emails from the Justice Department.

At first viewing, I don't see any significant new information -- just more after-the-fact justifications for the firings, more talking points, more discussions of PR strategy. But I'm just a humble, human muckraker. So if you do see anything new, please let us know in the comments. To identify the document, use the number in the lower right-hand corner of the page.

Happy raking!

Update: Here's a good rundown from Salon's Tim Grieve.

The House Judiciary Committee is prepared to use subpoenas to compel the testimony of Karl Rove and other White House officials, Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and subcomittee Chairwoman Linda Sanchez (D-CA) warned White House counsel Fred Fielding today.

"We are today writing to express our extreme disappointment in the White House's rebuff of efforts by the Judiciary Committee to obtain voluntary cooperation with our investigation concerning the firing of at least nine U.S. Attorneys in 2006 and related matters," they wrote. "We write to make one last appeal for such voluntary cooperation." You can read the letter here.

If this seems like deja vu, it's because Fielding got a very similar letter from Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) last week. As Sen. Leahy did in that letter, Rep. Conyers and Rep. Sanchez note that the negotiation process between Congress and the White House stopped as soon as it started. After Democrats requested interviews and documents from the White House, Fielding replied with an offer to have Rove and others interviewed privately with no oath and no transcript. The Dems rejected the offer. That was two months ago. There hasn't been any progress since then.

As Sen. Leahy did in his letter last week, Rep. Conyers notes that even without the White House's cooperation, it's become increasingly apparent that the U.S. attorney firings were driven by the White House. That role might become even clearer when Monica Goodling, the Justice Department's former liaison to the White House, testifies before the House Judiciary Committee this Wednesday.

Conyers and Sanchez conclude:

"If the White House persists in refusing to provide information to the House Judiciary Committee, or even to discuss providing such information, on a voluntary basis, we will have no alternative but to begin to resort to compulsory process in order to carry out our oversight responsibilities."

From U.S. News:

Soon after Gonzales became attorney general, his then chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, told Comey that Gonzales's "vision" was to merge the deputy's office with Gonzales's own office. That meant that Comey would have lost some of his autonomy, becoming less of a leader and more of a senior staff member. A source close to Sampson says he merely wanted Gonzales and Comey to operate as a "seamless leadership team," with "harmony rather than conflict," and never meant to "degrade the status or authority" of the deputy. Comey didn't buy it. "You may want to try that with the next deputy attorney general," Comey is said to have responded to Sampson. "But it's not going to work with me."

No wonder Comey didn't last long under Gonzales.

From The Los Angeles Times:

Weeks before the 2006 midterm election, then-New Mexico U.S. Atty. David C. Iglesias was invited to dine with a well-connected Republican lawyer in Albuquerque [Pat Rogers] who had been after him for years to prosecute allegations of voter fraud....

Rogers, reached by telephone in Albuquerque, recalled a brief discussion of voter fraud at the lunch, but he challenged much of Iglesias' account.

Rogers said the primary purpose of the gathering was to discuss the U.S. attorney's failure to move on corruption cases, not voter fraud. Rogers also said that it was he who invited the other employee of the office to attend and that he was presenting them with concerns of others in law enforcement, including concerns raised in a newspaper article that described how the FBI had finished its work on a public corruption matter and turned it over to the U.S. attorney.

That's one hell of an alibi.

Remember that the "public corruption matter" Rogers is referring to here is the investigation of a prominent New Mexico Democrat -- the investigation that Republicans hoped would deliver an indictment before the election. And that's the same investigation that Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) had called Iglesias about that same month.

So what Rogers is saying is that he wasn't meeting with Iglesias to pressure him to indict Democrats on voter fraud charges. No! He was meeting with Iglesias to pressure him to indict a Democrat on corruption charges.

It's the whole story of Iglesias' firing. It's not clear if the lack of voter fraud indictments, Republican disappointment at the pace of his public corruption investigations, or both led to his firing. But all the evidence shows that one or both of them did. And it all amounts to the same thing: Iglesias was canned for not indicting Democrats.

When it became apparent in March that the Justice Department would be forced to turn over all the documents relevant to the U.S. attorney firings, Michael Elston, chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, made a round of phone calls.

He wanted to apologize to the five U.S. attorneys whom he had listed on a November 1st email as "other possibilities" for firings (yesterday Elston's lawyer claimed that Elston had never intended for any of those U.S.A.s to be fired). But it sounds like a lot of the calls went like this:

Colm F. Connolly, the chief federal prosecutor in Delaware, said Elston called "to inform me that there was an e-mail that was going to be turned over to Congress and, although it was not to be disclosed publicly, often times Congress would leak things and this could be public at some point."

Connolly said he "expressed disappointment" and asked how the e-mail was prepared. He said Elston told him "that there was this firing process in the works at the time, and he had been asked to find out whether there were any other U.S. attorneys about whom there had been concerns."

Connolly said Elston told him that he collected names by "speaking to people" but that he "could not remember who he spoke with, and he said he could not remember what the concerns were as they related to me."

In other words, 'Sorry for almost getting you fired and sorry I can't remember why I almost got you fired.'

Remember that Elston, as the chief of staff to the DAG, plays a key role in overseeing the U.S. attorneys. I'm guessing this won't help that working relationship.

Having read my share of press gaggle transcripts, my mouth doesn't fall open for just anything. But Tony Fratto's determined efforts this morning deserve appreciation.

"It's important for any public official to have as much confidence as he can garner. And that's going to ebb and flow," Fratto counseled, "but it will not ebb and flow with this President and this Attorney General." So there.

Excerpt below.

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30 and climbing.

In a story this morning, McClatchy ups The Washington Post's toll of 26 U.S. attorneys to 30. So now we're up to one-third of the nation's 93 U.S. attorneys who were once tagged for firing over the course of Kyle Sampson's two-year "process."*

To make all that brainstorming easier to wrap your head around, the Post ran a great graphic that shows which U.S. attorneys appeared on what list and when. We've incorporated the Post's information into a document collection series of the firing lists so you can see how the lists were presented in the various emails.

So now we know who, how, and when. But why? It's clear from local press reports that the vast majority of the U.S. attorneys once targeted for firing never heard any complaints from their superiors about their performance. So the search continues.

*Update: Today's Post also added the four names:

Sources yesterday identified four other current or former U.S. attorneys included on a Jan. 1 list that grouped a dozen prosecutors into three tiers. They include current U.S. Attorneys Matthew Mead of Wyoming and Eric Melgren of Kansas and former prosecutors James K. Vines of Nashville and Michael G. Heavican of Nebraska.

The Washington Post reported this morning that Michael Elston, chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, had suggested five U.S. attorneys to be fired in November of last year, just a month before the firings.

Now Elston's lawyer is saying that you got him all wrong. Elston didn't mean for those U.S. attorneys to be fired. No. He was just passing along some names suggested to him by others. Totally different. From The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

"At no time did Mike ever believe that any of the U.S. attorneys mentioned in the Nov. 1 e-mail should be dismissed," Driscoll said in a statement. "To the contrary, Mike's view is that the five U.S. attorneys mentioned in the e-mail are among the department's best."...

Elston simply passed on the names suggested to him by others after he was asked in October to find out if concerns existed about any U.S. attorneys that top Justice Department officials were not aware of, according to Driscoll.

"Mike did what was requested of him, and forwarded the names that others had suggested," Driscoll stated. "...Mike recommended that they not be added to the list of those whose resignations would be requested, and to his knowledge, they never were."

You can read Elston's email here. Funny, I'm not seeing "Don't Fire These Prosecutors" in the subject line (actually, it's "Other Possibilities").

Note: Elston's suggestions, remember, were the most curious -- including Mary Beth Buchanan, Pittsburgh's U.S. attorney, who's very close to the department leadership and was even consulted on which U.S. attorneys should be fired.

And we're back.

Since our last roll call, Gonzales received some Republican support during his House Judiciary Committee testimony. But the loss of his #2 Paul McNulty and the recent testimony of former Deputy Attorney General Comey have gained Gonzales a few more detractors in the Senate. Here -- as Democrats push for a no-confidence vote in the Senate -- is a complete list of Republicans who are saying (or hinting) that the Attorney General should go.

Update: We've added Sen. Coleman to the list, who joined the club today.
Update: Sen. Kit Bond has joined us.

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In a press conference today, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), following the revelations in James Comey's testimony Tuesday and The Washington Post's story today that as many as 26 U.S. attorneys were considered for removal, called for a no-confidence vote concerning Alberto Gonzales in the Senate.

Here's some video:

It's a U.S. attorney firing extravaganza!

26 of the nation's 93 U.S. attorneys were on the firing list at one time or another, reports The Washington Post. It's a list too long and mixed to even try to make sense of. As Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) puts it, the many lists "show how amok this process was."

Let's start with those names that make some sense, given with what we know about the firings so far, and move on to those that don't.

McClatchy reports that two of those names were Gregory Miller, the U.S. attorney for the northern district of Florida in Tallahassee, and Bill Leone, the former acting U.S. attorney for Colorado. Both are battleground states, McClatchy notes, "where allegations of voter fraud and countercharges of voter intimidation have flown in recent years" -- and both are states that preoccupy Karl Rove. Miller appears to have been on the chopping block from the beginning of the process through the end, but somehow escaped -- he's still there. Silsby's still there, too.

Neither Miller or Leone claim to have much of a clue as to what might have put them on a list of U.S. attorneys to be fired. But from both of their backgrounds -- Miller is a career federal prosecutor and Leone is a career trial lawyer who had five years prosecutorial experience when he became the U.S. attorney -- it's evident that neither comfortably fit the description of "loyal Bushies."

The same goes for Maine's Paula Silsby, who apparently made a number of appearances on the firing lists through November 2006, according to the Post. Silsby is that rare thing -- a court appointed U.S. attorney (appointed in 2001, far before the Justice Department slipped in a provision to take that power away from the courts). And although she enjoys the support of Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-ME), Silsby has never been nominated for the spot by President Bush. You won't be shocked to learn that Silsby's only real qualification is that she's qualified -- she's been an assistant U.S. attorney in that office for 24 years.

But now on to those U.S. attorneys on the list who don't fit the pattern. From the Post:

One memo sent to Sampson last November from Michael J. Elston, chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, suggested firing Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh, who supervised the nation's prosecutors for a year and now heads the Office on Violence Against Women, sources said.

The same e-mail also listed prosecutor Christopher J. Christie in New Jersey, a major GOP donor who has undertaken several high-profile public-corruption probes -- including one into the real estate deals of Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) -- and who announced indictments in a terrorism case last week.

Now, I just find this confusing. Buchanan is an administration favorite -- she's one of those few U.S. attorneys who've pulled double duty with a second job at main Justice and was even consulted as part of the U.S. attorney firing process. And Christie, as the Post points out, has all the right qualifications and has pursued all the right prosecutions. So what gives?

Of course, neither Buchanan or Christie actually got the ax. And with all these names flying back and forth, some of them suggested by Justice Department officials, there are still only six U.S. attorneys who are at the center of this controversy, all of whom were apparently targeted for removal by the White House for reasons that no one has explained. Those names stuck. Why?

Here's Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) on Hardball earlier this afternoon on how long Alberto Gonzales will be able to stick around at the Department Justice.

Democrats are loathe to use the tool of impeachment, Whitehouse said, but added "I think that as we continue to put the pressure on, it may get to the point where even if the president’s highest purpose is to get his administration out of Washington without further indictment, it’s still not worth it to carry the weight of Attorney General Gonzales and his incompetent and very unprincipled administration of the Department of Justice."

With immunity secured, Monica Goodling has been scheduled to testify about the U.S. attorney firings before the House Judiciary Committee next Wednesday, May 23rd at 10:15 AM.

As ex-U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias has said, Goodling, the former White House liaison to the Justice Department, holds the "keys to the kingdom."

Nothing like an angry letter from two senior senators to get results.

Late this afternoon, the Justice Department responded to the Senate Judiciary Committee's subpoena for any of Karl Rove's emails in the Department's possession that might be relevant to the U.S. attorney firings.

And the results? (pdf) Underwhelming. The Department searched the email accounts of sixteen Justice Department officials over the period of November 1, 2004 through May 2, 2007. All they found, according to the letter from Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard Hertling, was a single email sent on February 28, 2007 forwarding a copy of McClatchy's bombshell story on U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias. Attached is an already produced email from Rove's aide Scott Jennings warning that the story was on its way (Jennings notes that Sen. Pete Domenici's (R-NM) strategy is "not to respond [to requests for comment] and hopefully make this a one day story").

Hertling added in the letter that the Department is continuing to search for relevant documents.

Hertling also revealed that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald also didn't have any relevant documents. Fitzgerald, remember, obtained a number of Rove's emails as part of the Valerie Plame investigation. But Hertling said that Fitzgerald had only obtained emails relevant to the Plame investigation -- not all of Rove's emails. And none of what Fitzgerald has, Hertling says, is relevant to the U.S. attorney firings.

Remember that Rove seems to have used an email account provided by the Republican National Committee for virtually all of his email correspondence (and Rove apparently deleted a lot of those). The RNC has said that it will turn over all relevant emails to the White House, which will then make a determination of whether the emails are protected by executive privilege before turning anything over to Congress. In other words, it's going to be hard slog before Congress gets what it's looking for.

In Sen. Pat Leahy's (D-VT) letter to the White House today was a bit of news. A bit of bad news for Alberto Gonzales.

According to Sen. Leahy, Kyle Sampson has told congressional investigators that when Alberto Gonzales finally nixed the plan to permanently install Karl Rove's former aide as a U.S. attorney without Senate confirmation, Rove's senior aide Sara Taylor was "upset." And according to Sampson's testimony, Gonzales didn't say no until late in the game -- when the U.S. attorney firings controversy was already gaining steam. That's not what Gonzales told Congress.

When Gonzales testified before the Senate last month, he claimed that he'd always rejected the idea of using a Patriot Act provision to appoint handpicked U.S. attorneys and keep them in place indefinitely without Senate confirmation as "interim" U.S. attorneys. In a December 19, 2006 email to the White House, Kyle Sampson had specifically advocated using the provision to install Timothy Griffin, Rove's former aide who was installed as the U.S. attorney for Little Rock, over the objections of the state's two Democratic senators. But Gonzales said that he'd never seen that email and he'd never considered Sampson's plan. "I didn't consider it and wouldn't consider it," Gonzales testified.

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Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT), following up an angry letter last night to Alberto Gonzales, wrote White House counsel Fred Fielding today to warn that if the White House did not stop stonewalling the committee's U.S. attorney firings investigation, then "I will have no choice but to issue subpoenas to try to get to the truth in this matter."

Leahy first requested interviews with Karl Rove and other White House staff two months ago. Leahy's request was met with a White House offer to have Rove and others interviewed privately with no oath and no transcript. Efforts by Leahy and others, including ranking member Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), to get the White House to moderate its offer have been unsuccessful.

During those two months, the Senate and House judiciary committees have been steadily accumulating evidence of White House involvement in the firings. And so Leahy's writing again. You can read the letter here.

Some excerpts below the fold.

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Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena for any of Karl Rove's emails in the Department's possession that might be relevant to the U.S. attorney firings. The deadline was 2 PM yesterday. The deadline came and went. And now Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and ranking member Arlen Specter (R-PA) are angry.

“You ignored the subpoena, did not come forward today, did not produce the documents and did not even offer an explanation for your noncompliance,” the senators wrote in a letter to Alberto Gonzales today. “Your action today is in defiance of the Committee’s subpoena without explanation of any legal basis for doing so.” You can read the letter here.

The senators set a new deadline, this Friday at May 18, 10 AM. If the Justice Department does not respond to the subpoena, the senators ask that they at least explain why they're not responding "so that the Chairman and the Committee can assess any objections to the subpoena or privileges claimed by the Department."

"The Committee intends to get to the truth," they conclude.

Looks like James Comey's testimony yesterday has added new momentum to the already crowded Gonzales resignation bandwagon. Here's Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) today:

“The American people deserve an Attorney General, the chief law enforcement officer of our country, whose honesty and capability are beyond question. Attorney General Gonzales can no longer meet this standard. He has failed this country. He has lost the moral authority to lead. Comey’s testimony yesterday brings to light the latest episode in a series of questionable actions by Attorney General Gonzales. It is another part of a pattern of flawed decision making by the Attorney General.

“America is a nation of laws. In the interest of the American people, Alberto Gonzales should resign now."

It took little more than 12 hours after Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty announced that he will resign for Alberto "I accept responsibility" Gonzales to lay the U.S. attorney firings at his feet. As many have pointed out, Gonzales barely gave McNulty any time to turn around before he stabbed him in the back.

Actually, it was a clever double stab by Gonzales -- his resigned chief of staff Kyle Sampson (who's been stabbed before) collected the recommendations and it was McNulty's job to vet those recommendations. What's left for an attorney general to do?

But there is an important point to be made here. Everything that Gonzales said about the duties of the deputy attorney general is true. For instance:

The Deputy Attorney General has a unique position at the DOJ. Most of the operational authority and decisions are made by the Deputy Attorney General. He is the chief operating officer — that’s the way I’ve structured the Department. And so he occupies a very central place in the work of the Department....

Mr. Sampson provided the recommendations. The one person I would care about would be the views of the Deputy Attorney General because the Deputy Attorney General as a direct supervisor of the United States Attorneys...

Gonzales' appalling dereliction of duty has tended to obscure McNulty's appalling dereliction of duty. It shouldn't. There's plenty of blame to go around.

Here, for instance, is how McNulty's predecessor, James Comey, described the duties of the deputy attorney general:

"I was the direct supervisor of all the U.S. attorneys, and so dealt with them quite frequently on a variety of matters: resolving disputes, talking with them about resources, trying to support them in any way that I could."

"Trying to support them in any way that I could."

By contrast, we have a deputy attorney general who allowed himself to be steamrolled by his inferiors to fire eight U.S. attorneys for, in most cases, no apparent reason. And then after that was done, he helped smear their reputations in order to cover for the Department and the administration.

You need look no further than the case of U.S. Attorney for Nevada Daniel Bogden as a vivid example of this.

Here's McNulty meekly writing to Sampson two days before the firings that he was "a little skittish about [firing] Bogden... I'll admit I haven't looked at his district's performance." Later, he would tell congressional investigators that "he had hoped for some explanation for Bogden's inclusion on the list because he saw no apparent reason to fire him." Nevertheless, he testified to Congress that Bogden had been fired for "performance" reasons. He now says that he regrets the firing.

Maybe this was Gonzales' strategy -- to surround himself with such an eminently blameworthy staff?

In his testimony today, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey described an attempt by the White House in 2004 to go behind Comey's back -- even though he was the acting attorney general because Ashcroft was hospitalized -- to get John Ashcroft's signature on the reauthorization order for the administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

Ashcroft at the time was in the intensive care unit of George Washington University Hospital with pancreatitis and was recovering from gall bladder surgery. Comey testified that the late night effort by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andrew Card to get Ashcroft to sign the order was a plan to "take advantage of a sick man."

But Tony Snow doesn't see what the big deal is: "Because he had an appendectomy, his brain didn't work?" (Yes, he got the organ wrong.)

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI), along with subcommittee chair Linda Sanchez (D-CA) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) wrote Alberto Gonzales today to press for details about the firing of U.S. Attorney for Kansas City Todd Graves and the subsequent hiring of Bradley Schlozman. They also took some time to point out that Gonzales' answers about Graves and Schlozman last week didn't hold up to scrutiny.

Gonzales testified, for example, that Gonzales had not mentioned Graves' firing before because his firing had been outside of the "process" -- that's despite the fact, the lawmakers, point out, that Graves was fired in exactly the same manner as the other eight U.S. attorneys (with a phone call from Justice Department official Michael Battle who assured the U.S. attorney that there was no particular reason he/she was being asked to step aside) only weeks after Graves' name appeared on Kyle Sampson's list of prosecutors to be fired.

And Gonzales was simply wrong, they write, when he argued that the Justice Department's lawsuit to purge Missouri's voter rolls, pushed by voter-fraud hawk Bradley Schlozman, was defeated mainly on jurisdictional grounds. On the contrary, they write, quoting portions of the judge's opinion against the Justice Deparment, the judge found that the suit was fundamentally flawed -- pointing out, for instance, that the Department had failed to show that any actual voter fraud had occurred as a result of ineligible voters being on the rolls.

Full text of the letter is below the fold.

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The search for a reason, any reason for U.S. Attorney for Nevada Daniel Bogden's firing continues.

On Monday, The Washington Post reported that a Justice Department official had raised concerns about Bogden's performance on voter fraud. Maybe that was why he was canned?

Well, if so, it wasn't because Nevada Republicans were up in arms about it, reports The Las Vegas Sun. Despite the fact that Karl Rove had "made sure to mention it to state officials during a campaign swing through Las Vegas just months before the contested 2004 election," the Sun reports, there seem to have been no complaints at all:

Secretary of State Ross Miller, a Democrat, said he knew of no cases brought to the U.S. attorney’s office in recent years. Nevada Republicans say the same.

The biggest case Nevada had seen recently were allegations in 2004 that a Republican-financed group had shredded registration cards from Democratic voters. The FBI investigated but it appears the case was not forwarded to Bogden.

But as we've learned in New Mexico, Washington, and Missouri, there doesn't actually have to have been credible allegations of voter fraud in order for the administration to be unhappy with a U.S. attorney's lack of attention to it.

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey detailed the desperate late night efforts by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andrew Card to get the Justice Department to approve a secret program -- the warrantless wiretapping program.

According to Comey's testimony this morning, only when faced with resignations by a number of Justice Department officials including Comey, his chief of staff, Ashcroft's chief of staff, Ashcroft himself and possibly Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI, did the White House agree to make changes to the program that would satisfy the requirements of the Justice Department to sign off on it (Comey refused to name the program, but it's apparent from the context and prior reports that this was the warrantless wiretapping program).

The events took place in March of 2004, when the program was in need of renewal by the Justice Department. When then-Attorney General John Ashcroft fell ill and was hospitalized, Comey became the acting-Attorney General.

The deadline for the Justice Department's providing its sign-off of the program was March 11th (the program required reauthorization every 45 days). On that day, Comey, then the acting AG, informed the White House that he "would not certify the legality" of the program.

According to Comey, he was on his way home when he got a call from Ashcroft's wife that Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card were on their way to the hospital*. Comey then rushed to the hospital (sirens blaring) to beat them there and thwart "an effort to overrule me."

After Comey arrived at the hospital with a group of senior Justice Department officials, Gonzales and Card arrived and walked up to Ashcroft, who was lying barely conscious on his hospital bed. "Gonzales began to explain why he was there, to seek his approval for a matter," Comey testified. But Ashcroft rebuffed Gonzales and told him that Comey was the attorney general now. "The two men turned and walked from the room," said Comey.

A "very upset" Andrew Card then called Comey and demanded that he come to the White House for a meeting at 11 PM that night.

After meeting with Justice Department officials at the Justice Deaprtment, Comey went to the White House with Ted Olson, then the Solicitor General to the White House. He brought Olson along, Comey said, because he wanted a witness for the meeting.

But Card didn't let Olson enter and Comey had a private discussion with Card. This discussion, Comey testified, was much "calmer." According to Comey, Card was concerned about reports that there were to be large numbers of resignations at Justice Department. Gonzales entered with Olson and the four had an apparently not very fruitful discussion.

The program was reauthorized without the signature of the attorney general. Because of that, Comey said, he prepared a letter of resignation. "I believed that I couldn't stay if the administration was going to engage in conduct that Justice Department said had no legal basis."

At this point, according to Comey, a number of senior Justice Department officials, including Ashcroft, were prepared to resign.

When Comey went in on that Friday, March 12th to give the White House its customary morning briefing, Comey said that the president pulled him aside. They had a 15 minute private meeting, the content of which Comey would not divulge. But Comey did suggest at the conclusion of that conversation that the president speak with FBI Director Mueller. And so that meeting followed. Following that meeting, Comey said that Mueller brought word that the Justice Department was to do whatever was "necessary" to make the program into one that the Justice Department could sign off on.

Comey said that it took two to three weeks for the Justice Department to do the analysis necessary to have the program approved. During that time, the program went on without Justice Department approval. But following the Justice Department's suggested changes, the Justice Department (either Ashcroft or Comey) did sign off on the program.

More on this soon.

*Update: A commenter below rightly points out that, according to Comey, the call to Ashcroft's wife that Gonzales and Card were on their way to the hospital came from the president himself.

Update: Here's The New York Times' story last January first reporting word of Gonzales' bedside visit. Comey's, obviously, is a much fuller account.

Update: After hearing Comey's "shocking" account, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that it made him wonder anew how Gonzales could remain as the attorney general, since he evidently had so little respect for the rule of law.

Update: ThinkProgress has a transcript of Comey's testimony.

So Paul McNulty is on his way out, but as The Washington Post points out, his successor's confirmation is likely to be a flash point in the battle between the White House and Congress:

McNulty's pending departure may add to the tumult at the upper reaches of the Justice Department, where only Gonzales and a handful of others involved in the prosecutor dismissals remain. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.) and other top Democrats have indicated that they will not confirm any senior Justice nominees until they receive e-mails they have demanded from the White House and are allowed to conduct interviews about the firings.

Since McNulty has signalled that he'll remain in place until the administration nominates a successor, he could be there for a long while.

Although Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty cites "the financial realities of college-age children and two decades of public service" in his resignation letter as the reasons behind his "long overdue transition," it's apparent to everyone why he's leaving now, and why he's been rumored to be on his way out since late March.

From the AP:

...his ultimate decision to step down, [two senior Department of Justice] aides said, was hastened by anger at being linked to the prosecutors' purge that Congress is investigating to determine if eight U.S. attorneys were fired for political reasons. The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about McNulty's decision.

McNulty also irked his boss, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, by testifying in February that at least one of the fired prosecutors was ordered to make way for a protege of Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser. Gonzales, who has resisted lawmakers' calls to resign, maintains the firings were proper, and rooted in the prosecutors' lackluster performances.

The AP is reporting that Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty will resign according to "two Justice Department officials." We'll have more when it becomes available.

Was U.S. Attorney for Nevada Daniel Bogden fired because he didn't prioritize voter fraud prosecutions? That's the latest theory at least.

Bogden's firing has elicited a number of strained rationales from the Justice Department, but we've heard precious little from Bogden himself.

For his part, Bogden says he doesn't know why he was fired, but since we're engaging in a guessing game, he ought to get a shot too.

There have been a number of "theories" for his dismissal, he wrote (pdf) in answers given to Congress. And "one of the noteworthy articles of interest pertaining to my situation," he wrote, "was an article that recently appeared in the Las Vegas Review Journal...."

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Concerning The Philadelphia Inquirer's story about a "voter alert!" going out to New Jersey voters in a local election, the following statement was just released by Michael Drewniak, Public Affairs Officer of the U.S. Attorney's office in New Jersey:

A story published in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer which said the U.S. Attorney's Office flooded Camden with taped phone messages warning against buying votes in that city's recent election was false. Neither the U.S. Attorney's Office or the Voting Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice had any role in the phone-message blitz.

As U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie noted, the U.S. Attorney's Office would never engage in such a practice, which clearly could have been used as a voter-suppression tactic. The U.S. Attorney's Office was not contacted to authenticate the matter or comment for the story, which implied the office sanctioned or was the source of the recorded phone-message blitz.

The Inquirer's story contained a transcript of the call, which cleverly gave the impression of coming from the U.S. attorney's office, while not actually saying that it was:

"Voters alert!" said the taped message. "Please note that it is a federal crime to be paid for a vote. I repeat, it is a crime. If you or your neighbor have been offered payment, please report it immediately to the U.S. Attorney's Office at 856-757-5026."

So now the question is: who paid for the robo calling? And where else have such robo calls been used?

Just how many of the fired U.S. attorneys were canned because they didn't pursue claims of voter fraud fervently enough?

The Washington Post counts 'em up: we know that David Iglesias of New Mexico and John McKay of Washington had angered state Republicans by not bringing indictments after highly publicized investigations of alleged liberal malfeasance. And we know that Todd Graves of Kansas City perhaps disappointed the leadership in D.C. by refusing to sign a Justice Department lawsuit to purge Missouri's voter rolls. And we know that Steven Biskupic of Milwaukee, despite a state full of unhappy Republicans, narrowly avoided being fired because he was lucky enough to have a very powerful political patron.

So that's three firings and one near miss.

And now the Post adds another: Daniel Bogden of Nevada, who was among the seven U.S. attorneys fired last December 7th. Bogden's firing has remained the greatest mystery -- and the efforts by Justice Department officials to justify it the most pathetic (an official told Congress that they wanted "renewed energy" in Bogden's district). But voter fraud prosecutions had not been raised as a possible reason for Bogden's dismissal until now.

Here's what the Post adds: When Justice Department official Matthew Friedrich -- following up on Karl Rove's request last October to investigate voter fraud allegations in three jurisdictions (Philadelphia, Milwaukee, New Mexico) -- called Benton Campbell, chief of staff for the Criminal Division, Campbell told him that Nevada was also "a problem district."

It's not clear from the Post's account whether Friedrich brought this news back to Kyle Sampson or whether word of Nevada's "problem" made it back to the White House. But what we do know now is that there's reason to believe that displeasure with a lack of voter fraud prosecutions was behind at least four of the nine prosecutors fired last year. Somehow, all four were in battleground states.

Put that together with the Justice Department's efforts to install U.S. attorneys who are gung-ho about voter fraud prosecutions and the picture becomes clearer.

Today Richard A. Hertling informed the Senate Judicary Committee that Bradley Schlozman would not be able to testify before the Committee on May 15th because Schlozman will be on a previously scheduled vacation.

Text beneath the fold.

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No more absentee landlords!

It's hard work for Democrats undoing the damage of the Patriot Act Reauthorization bill passed last year, a huge bill that contained a number of provisions that affected U.S. attorneys.

Last month, the Congress passed* a bill reversing one of those provisions -- one that made it possible for the attorney general to indefinitely appoint U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation.

Now Four Democrats are trying to undo another of those little-noticed provisions -- one that made it possible for certain U.S. attorneys to pull double duty in the Justice Department leadership. The provision was shepherded through by William Mercer, the principal associate deputy attorney general, who's also the U.S. Attorney for Montana. When the chief judge in his district, hopping mad that Mercer is gone almost all the time, charged that Mercer was violating the residency requirement for U.S. attorneys, Mercer had the law changed. And he's kept both jobs for two years.

But Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Charles Schumer (D-NY), Max Baucus (D-MT), and Jon Tester (D-MT) will introduce legislation on Monday to change the law back to what it was. “U.S. Attorneys cannot do their jobs adequately from Washington, D.C.," Feinstein said. "The position requires a huge commitment.”

The punchline to all this, remember, is that Justice Department officials have claimed that U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias was fired because he was an "absentee landlord," spending 30 days a year away from the office -- on Navy reserve duty.

*Update: A TPM reader points out to me that although both houses have passed a version of this bill, they have not yet been reconciled in conference. So the Congress hasn't yet passed a final version.

OK, one last clip from yesterday's hearing, one that I didn't get to yesterday out of sheer Gonzales fatigue.

But it encapsulates the absurdity of Gonzales' claim of "full responsibility" for the firings while at the same time hiding behind a review "process" that, as everyone now knows, was a joke.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) asked Gonzales a simple question: was it a mistake to fire the eight prosecutors?

And here we go down the rabbit hole...

Gonzales: ...I stand by the decision.

Sherman: So if you had it do all over again, these eight would be toast?

Gonzales: No, again, because we would have used a different process. And I don’t know if using a different process, the same recommendations would have come to me. I relied upon….

Sherman: I’m asking you whether you made a mistake, not whether you like your process. The conclusion to fire these eight, was that the right, best thing to do for the administration of justice?

Gonzales: I think... I stand by the decision. In hindsight, I’m not happy with the process. I know that… to me, the process was important, too. And I think using a different process, we may have come out with different recommendations to me, which would have made a difference… perhaps.

If I could dare to summarize: Gonzales stands by his decision to fire those eight, but if he had it to do all over again, he would have fired somebody else.

Amazing... Gonzales makes Kyle Sampson look like a model of directness.

It's a done deal. From the AP:

A federal judge approved an immunity deal Friday allowing former Justice Department aide Monica Goodling to testify before Congress about the firing of eight federal prosecutors.

Goodling, who served as the department's White House liaison, has refused to discuss the firings without a guarantee that she will not be prosecuted. Congress agreed to the deal, Justice Department investigators reluctantly agreed not to not oppose it and U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan gave it final approval Friday.

That's a hearing I look forward to.

If at first you don't succeed, investigate again.

That, at least, seems to be Karl Rove's philosophy.

As McClatchy and The Washington Post report this morning, Rove requested last October that the Justice Department investigate allegations of voter fraud in three jurisdictions. Those three were Milwaukee, New Mexico and Philadelphia -- all battleground states.

The White House really put the heat on. McClatchy reports that at least twice in October, Rove or his deputies passed on word of the allegations to Kyle Sampson. In addition, both Rove and President Bush raised the issue with Alberto Gonzales the same month.

Sampson, in turn, passed on the allegations to a Justice Department official named Matthew Friedrich. Friedrich dutifully agreed "to find out whether Justice officials knew of 'rampant' voter fraud or 'lax' enforcement in parts of New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and report back."

Friedrich has told congressional investigators that Sampson also gave him a 30-page report prepared by Wisconsin Republicans about voter fraud in Milwaukee. Sampson apparently expected Friedrich to pass it on to the department's criminal division. Friedrich says he didn't do that because that would "violate strict Justice rules that limit the pursuit of voter-related investigations close to an election." (At least someone in the Justice Department cares about that rule.)

Now, you can see that 30-page report, titled "Fraud in Wisconsin 2004: A Timeline/Summary" here (pdf, see page 10). As the title would indicate, it was nothing but a collection of news clippings related to voter fraud allegations in Milwaukee... in the 2004 election.

Two things about that. First, it appears that Rove wanted the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation of two-year old allegations right before the 2006 election. But second, these allegations had already been investigated -- as part of the most comprehensive effort by a U.S. attorney's office to investigate voter fraud in the entire country. The U.S. attorney there, Steven Biskupic, launched a joint task force with local prosecutors to probe allegations of fraud in the 2004 election. Finally, more than a year after the election, Biskupic announced that the task force hadn't in fact found evidence of a conspiracy to steal the election. But prosecutors nevertheless prosecuted nearly twenty individual cases for a variety of voting-related offenses (Biskupic's office handled 14). No U.S. attorney office in the country can touch those numbers.

But that apparently wasn't good enough for Rove, who thought that Biskupic had been "lax" in his approach to voter fraud.

The only thing that saved Biskupic from being fired, according to the Post, is that "Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty argued against the firing, saying it would 'not be a wise thing to do politically' and could raise 'the ire' of Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), who had recommended Biskupic and was then chairman of the House Judiciary Committee."

David Iglesias of New Mexico, obviously, wasn't so lucky. Nevermind that, together with Biskupic, he was the only other U.S. attorney to have launched a voter fraud task force in the 2004 election -- and that the Justice Department had him and Biskupic teach a seminar on election crimes. He hadn't convinced the person whose opinion matters most at the Justice Department: Karl Rove's.

Note: In case you're wondering about the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia and why he wasn't fired.... Pat Meehan was formerly senior counsel to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), formerly the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- now the ranking member. If they didn't want to risk the ire of Rep. Sensenbrenner, they certainly didn't want an angry Sen. Specter.

Alberto Gonzales walked an absurdly fine line explaining the firing of U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias.

Some quick background: On three different occasions, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM), evidently perturbed at Iglesias' lack of haste in indicting Democrats, called Gonzales to complain about Iglesias' handling of public corruption cases. The calls took place in September of 2005, January of 2006, and again in April of that year. Gonzales has been careful to say that they did not talk about a specific case -- just public corruption cases in general (and, he added for the first time today, "voter fraud cases generally"). Gonzales has said that it was because of these calls that he was "not surprised" to see Iglesias' name on the list of U.S. attorneys to be fired.

But under persistent questioning by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Gonzales admitted that when he visited Iglesias' district in July of 2006, he didn't talk with Iglesias about his handling of public corruption or voter fraud cases at all. So apparently it wasn't such a burning issue.

And Schiff questioned Gonzales about a statement that his spokesman Brian Roehrkasse made back in March, during the media frenzy over Sen. Domenici's October call to Iglesias. The frenzy, you'll remember, was over a call Sen. Domenici had made to Iglesias wanting to know if Iglesias would be indicting a state Democrat on corruption charges before the election.

When addressing Domenici's calls to Gonzales then, Roehrkasse seemed to indicate that the calls hadn't had anything to do with a corruption case. Domenici "expressed general concerns about the performance of U.S. Attorney Iglesias and questioned whether he was up to the job," Roehrkasse said. And "at no time" in those calls to Gonzales had the senator mentioned "this corruption case."

But according to Gonzales' testimony, Domenici had indeed called to complain about Iglesias' handling of corruption cases.

So, don't you think that Roehrkasse's was a misleading statement? Rep. Schiff wanted to know.

Gonzales answered that "there was no mention of a corruption case" during Domenici's calls. They talked generally about corruption cases, not about a particular case. And so: " I don't think that was misleading."

Alberto Gonzales' strategy in a nutshell: to defend the firing of the U.S. attorneys whenever possible, but when confronted with inescapable evidence that the process was a sham, to backpedal and either blame Kyle Sampson or admit that the process could have been more "rigorous."

Here's an example. Under questioning by Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA), Gonzales cited Kyle Sampson's consultation of then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey in early of 2005 as proof that there had been a process of consulting career Justice Department officials on their views of U.S. attorneys. Of course, Comey testified last week that he had not known that there was any sort of effort to target U.S. attorneys for removal when he offered his views to Sampson (views that Sampson totally ignored).

Gonzales admitted as much: "There were people that were being consulted... they may not have known they were providing information that would then form the basis of some kind of list."

So there you have it: Comey was part of a collaborative review process that he didn't know he was a part of.

Later in the hearing, Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA) questioned Gonzales about Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty's comment to a fired U.S. attorney that McNulty had had "limited input" in the process. And here Gonzales said that "it was my understanding or belief" that Sampson was giving McNulty plenty of input. Sampson just let him down.

Well, here's something new. During questioning from House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) about David Iglesias' firing, Alberto Gonzales volunteered that Iglesias was added to the list on "Election Day, November." Up till now, it's been unclear when Iglesias made the list -- though it was known to be sometime in October or November.

It's been reported that Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) called Karl Rove "at some point after the election" to ask that Iglesias be fired. Does that mean that something else had already placed him on the list? We know that Karl Rove and President Bush had already complained to Gonzales about Iglesias' handling of voter fraud cases earlier in October.

Update: Gonzales added later that he didn't know exactly when Iglesias was "selected" to be on the list. But he said that Iglesias first appeared on the firing list on Election Day.

Rep. Mel Watt (D-NC) gets the medal for the best line of questioning of the day so far, pressing Gonzales on the reason for John McKay's firing.

Gonzales has previously pointed to McKay's touting of an information sharing system (a system that former Deputy Attorney General James Comey praised effusively during his hearing last week) and his choice to speak to the press about his office's lack of resources to explain McKay's firing. But as Rep. Watt pointed out, McKay appeared on the firing list far before either of those things became issues.

When Watt pressed Gonzales on whether McKay had been removed because he'd failed to indict Democrats on voter fraud charges. Gonzales said no, but seemed to leave the door open for that possibility:

Yes, I agree that if in fact there was pressure put on McKay to investigate a case, which didn’t warrant an investigation [that would be improper]. But obviously there may be some circumstances where investigation may have been warranted. We’d have to look at the circumstances of the particular case.

He added that there had been "a great deal of concern with his efforts with respect to voter fraud," that he had received letters "from a number of groups and outside parties."

McKay has said that he didn't pursue criminal charges in the probe arising from the 2004 Washington gubernatorial election because there was "no evidence."

Here's Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT) doing his best to dredge up a good reason for U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias' firing, even if it's after the fact.

Iglesias received two calls just weeks before Election Day from two members of Congress asking him about his office's corruption investigation of a state Democrat. Iglesias has described them as pressure calls, but Iglesias did not report the calls to his superiors, as required by Justice Department policy.

Cannon quotes a Justice Department official David Margolis as saying that "giving everything I know today, he would have been number one on my list" -- meaning that Margolis thinks Iglesias' failure to report the calls is a firing offense in Margolis' eyes. But of course no one in the Justice Department knew about this when Iglesias was fired. Nevertheless, Cannon concluded, "So we did have problems with some of these guys, they weren't exactly paradigms (sic) of competence, were they?" [Note: I think Cannon means "paragons," not "paradigms."]

Murray Waas has a new story on the U.S. attorney firings, this one leading to the inescapable conclusion that the administration was complicit in attempts to cover up White House involvement in the firings.

The revelations come from emails that the Justice Department is withholding from Congress.

A "senior executive branch offiical" tells Waas that it's no accident that Congress hasn't gotten their hands on these documents:

"If [Gonzales] didn't know everything that was going on when it went down, that is one thing," this official said. "But he knows and understands chapter and verse. If there was an effort within Justice and the White House to mislead Congress, it is his duty to disclose that to Congress."

A "senior administration official" adds that "Gonzales is doing this to save his own neck."

So what documents are we talking about? The story deals with two separate letters that the Justice Department sent to Congress about the firings.

The first was a January 31 letter to Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AK) assuring him that "not once" had the administration considered using the Patriot Act provision to install Tim Griffin, Karl Rove's former aide, as the U.S. attorney for Little Rock. The provision allowed the attorney general to appoint interim U.S. attorneys indefinitely without Senate confirmation.

Of course, Kyle Sampson had been pushing to use the provision for months -- and had communicated the plan to the White House.

But when it came time to answer questions about it, the White House signed off on a letter saying that they had never contemplated such a thing. And the withheld documents show that Christopher Oprison was the White House official who signed off on the letter -- that's funny because Kyle Sampson had layed out the plan to use the Patriot Act provision to appoint Griffin in an email to Oprison just a month before.

The second letter in the piece is a February 23rd letter to Congress that claimed that Karl Rove hadn't had any role in appointing Griffin. Fittingly, Oprison also signed off on that one -- even though Sampson had written him in an email in December that Griffin's appointment was "important to Karl."

White House spokesman Tony Fratto tells Waas that "Chris did not recall Karl's interest when he reviewed the letter."

But Fratto also says that "We have no record of that letter ever leaving the White House counsel's office." In other words, they never bothered to ask Karl Rove or any one in his office to check whether the statement was true. And they just forgot that Sampson earlier had boasted about Rove's interest. Huh.

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.

Here's a new one. Adam Cohen of The New York Times reported last week that Kyle Sampson had told congressional investigators that Harriet Miers was "intent on removing" Debra Wong Yang, the U.S. Attorney for Los Angeles. Yang, remember, had opened an investigation into Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), the most powerful Republican on the powerful appropriations committee. Yang left just before the firings occurred to join the firm that represented Lewis (the firm says she recused herself from any dealings with the case). Yang received a $1.5 million signing bonus.

Today, Gonzales suggested that Miers had targeted Yang for removal simply because she knew that Yang wanted a more lucrative position. "Ms. Miers may have known about Ms. Yang's concern about being able to remain on the job due to financial reasons," Gonzales testified.

Three top lawyers in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota, who said they demoted themselves in protest of the management style of 34-year-old U.S. Attorney Rachel Paulose, sent their boss an angry letter demanding she plug leaks claiming they quit because they can't handle working for a powerful, young, Indian woman.

You can read the letter here.

Yesterday, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported on the letter sent by the three former managers and an interim human resources officer:

In a letter to Paulose dated April 27, the four employees complained about comments from unidentified Justice Department employees that were included in a story published three weeks earlier in the New York Times. They objected in particular to the suggestion that "older lawyers had difficulty dealing with a young, aggressive woman" who tried to implement the priorities of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, including the prosecution of child exploitation.

Paulose was named interim U.S. attorney last year when she was just 33, making her the youngest person to fill the job in Minnesota.

The aggrieved employees also cite remarks in C.J's gossip column published April 24 in the Star Tribune. C.J. had interviewed Paulose, and C.J. wrote: "Isn't it possible that an office dominated by people who don't look the way Paulose does could be filled with threatened, resentful types who are jealous of someone so young climbing where they probably never will?"

Paulose is of Indian descent.

Apparently deaf to the improper tone of the request in the context of a hearing on the firings of the U.S. attorneys, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) encouraged Alberto Gonzales to hurry up and indict Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA). The Jefferson case has dragged on for nearly two years and is awaiting the decision of an appeals court on the FBI's seizure of evidence from Jefferson's congressional office.

"I hope that you will tell your prosecutors to wrap this thing up," said Sensenbrenner.

Alberto Gonzales in a nutshell: "I think I may be aware of that."

During the first line of questioning today, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) tried to get Alberto Gonzales to answer the simply of question of who put the U.S. attorneys on the firing list and why they were put there. Gonzales replied as he has in the past, by saying that he'd initiated a "process" and that he trusted the process. Conyers summarized this response, "So you don't know?"

Conyers also cited the testimony of a Justice Department official Matthew Friedrich, who told congressional investigators that he'd met with two New Mexico Republicans who had complaints about U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias' handling of voter fraud cases (i.e. Iglesias' failure to indict Democrats). The two Republicans told Friedrich that they'd brought their complaints to Karl Rove and Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM). Iglesias, of course, was subsequently fired.

When Conyers asked if Gonzales was aware of that conversation, he replied, "I am certainly aware of it now."

The hearing before the House Judiciary Committee is beginning now. It's airing on C-Span 3 and streaming from the House Judiciary website. We'll provide you running updates throughout the day.

Here's a little preview of what you'll be hearing from the Republican side. From Roll Call (sub. req.):

In what may be the most spirited public defense of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to date, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee today will demand an end to what one called an “endless piscine expedition” in the U.S. attorneys scandal....

“If there are no fish in this lake, we should reel in our lines of question, dock our empty boat and turn to more pressing issues,” [Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the ranking member on Judiciary said].

Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah), the ranking member of the Judiciary subcommittee on commercial and administrative law, which is in charge of the probe, also sounded fed up.

“I hope he’s clear, direct and unapologetic,” Cannon said of Gonzales’ testimony.

“I’m really tired of innuendo and repeated use of the word corruption,” Cannon added. “If [Democrats] can’t produce tomorrow, the story ought to disappear.”

You can look at it two different ways:

1) Alberto Gonzales has been revealed to be at best an incompetent amnesiac and at worst an apparatchik determined to cover up the White House's total control of the Justice Department. He's lost even the confidence of administration loyalists on Capitol Hill and is nothing but a ghost with the title attorney general.

2) Alberto Gonzales has run the gauntlet. And he won! He doesn't have any credibility left to lose.

You can guess what the Gonzales way of seeing the world is. "[Gonzales] has told aides he believes he has weathered the storm," reports The New York Times.

Of course, the Justice Department is in a shambles, but President Bush just won't waver. The expressions of support keep coming, getting even fuller, wholler. The latest from Tony Snow: the president “still supports the attorney general fully and wholly.”

Meanwhile, the Times reports, a division has occurred in the Justice Department "between Gonzales loyalists and backers of Paul J. McNulty, the deputy attorney general." The AG's backers fault McNulty for blowing their cover; McNulty's backers "have faulted Mr. Sampson for misleading Mr. McNulty and other officials about the origin of the dismissals and the extent of White House involvement." McNulty is reportedly considering whether to step down "soon," says the Times. But Gonzales is staying put.

Perhaps the most amusing bit in the piece is the assertion that Karl Rove is pushing for Gonzales' removal:

A Republican strategist familiar with Mr. Rove’s thinking said that Mr. Rove, the president’s chief political adviser, “believes it’s in the best interest of the president for Gonzales on his own to resign.” But, this person said, Mr. Rove and other like-minded aides have concluded that “there’s nothing they can do — it’s about the relationship between Gonzales and the president.”

Right.

Maybe this might explain Rove's feeling of helplessness:

Yet there are reasons White House aides are content to see Mr. Gonzales stay put. First, they say they believe that if Mr. Gonzales were to step down under pressure, it would empower Congressional Democrats to set their sights on others, including Mr. Rove, who has acknowledged complaining to Mr. Gonzales and the president about several prosecutors.

And removing Mr. Gonzales would pose another set of complications: finding a candidate who could be confirmed by the Senate and risking replacement of a loyalist with someone who might be more independent.

Eleven months before seven US Attorneys were fired on December 7th, 2006, former Kansas City US Attorney Todd Graves received a call from an official at the Executive Office for the U.S. Attorney telling him he was fired. Graves announced his resignation less than two months later on March 10.

Justice Department officials would later tell Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) that Graves had been dismissed for "performance" issues, according to Wednesday article in the Kansas City Star. But that's not what Graves was told at the time. According to a source with detailed knowledge of the conversation, Graves was told that his removal was not based on his performance as a prosecutor, but that it was simply time to let someone else have a chance at the job.

That someone, of course, turned out to be Bradley Schlozman, Graves' successor as US Attorney and the first US Attorney to be appointed using the special powers granted the Attorney General in the revised version of the USA Patriot Act signed into law in March 2006.

Contacted today by TPMMuckraker.com, a Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on Graves' dismissal, but Graves' case resembles those of at least two other fired prosecutors whose dismissals have been tied to complaints from Republican party officials that they did not press vote fraud indictments against Democrats.

According to the same knowledgeable source, over the last four years, Graves, a Republican himself, had two flaps with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

The first, dating back to 2002, was not voting-rights related, but involved a cross-burning case where Graves helped negotiate a civil mediation. Graves hung up on the head of the Civil Rights Division at the time over a disagreement about the terms of the settlement.

In 2005, Graves again clashed with the Civil Rights Division when he declined to sign a letter outlining a voter-registration lawsuit against the State of Missouri pushed by Bradley Schlozman, then an assistant attorney general in charge of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division.

The suit alleged that Missouri was not being sufficiently aggressive in purging its vote rolls of out of date or ineligible registrations. Graves allegedly dragged his feet during the lead-up to the lawsuit’s filing and was openly dubious about whether the case would ultimately prove successful.

After the firing, at Graves' request, Missouri's senior Senator Kit Bond placed a call to the White House to briefly extend Graves’ time in office, a Bond spokeswoman said in a statement yesterday. But Bond’s request was denied.

Purged U.S. attorneys John McKay of Seattle and David Iglesias of New Mexico sat down with The Seattle Times today and had a lot to say.

First, they were clear that they think the various investigations -- by Congress and the Justice Department's internal watchdogs -- will result in criminal charges, whether for trying to influence criminal investigations or for lying to Congress:

"I think there will be a criminal case that will come out of this," McKay said during his meeting with Times journalists. "This is going to get worse, not better."...

McKay said he believes obstruction-of-justice charges will be filed if investigators conclude that the dismissal of any of the eight prosecutors was motivated by an attempt to influence ongoing public-corruption or voter-fraud investigations....

Additionally, McKay and Iglesias said they believe Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty lied under oath when they testified before Congress that the eight prosecutors were fired for performance-related reasons and because of policy disputes with Justice Department headquarters.

But McKay also told an anecdote that shows what has recently become painfully apparent -- that Alberto Gonzales never stopped being White House counsel when he became attorney general. He never stopped thinking of himself as the president's lawyer. From the Times:

McKay said he began to have concerns about politics entering the Justice Department in early 2005, when Gonzales addressed all of the country's U.S. attorneys in Scottsdale, Ariz., shortly after he took over as attorney general.

"His first speech to us was a 'you work for the White House' speech," McKay recalled. " 'I work for the White House, you work for the White House.' "

McKay said he thought at the time, "He couldn't have meant that speech," given the traditional independence of U.S. Attorneys. "It turns out he did."

He looked around the meeting room and caught the eyes of his colleagues, who gave him looks of surprise at Gonzales' remarks. "We were stunned at what he was saying."

Well, here it is, so you can read it yourself, the secret order signed by Alberto Gonzales in March of last year that gave Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling, two young aides with close ties to the White House, the power to hire and fire junior political appointees at the Justice Department (click to enlarge):

You can expect to hear a number of questions about the order tomorrow.

Update: Marty Lederman has a helpful dissection of the order's meaning and motivation over at Balkinization.

Another red flag in the ongoing U.S. Attorney scandal is waiving over at The Kansas City Star.

It looks like former U.S. Attorney Todd Graves was fired and quickly replaced by frequent TPMmuckraker subject Bradley Schlozman. Schlozman is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee this coming Tuesday.

Graves himself hasn’t said definitively whether he got the ax, but, in a statement released last night, he did say it was better to leave his post and “take a graceful exit than to do something that you should be ashamed of.” It's not immediately clear what shameful act he's referring to.

Read on below for his full statement.

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The House Judiciary Committee has released Alberto Gonzales' written statement in preparation for tomorrow's hearing. The story won't surprise anyone, but it's clear at least that Gonzales has honed it down to a streamlined tale of his chief of staff Kyle Sampson's failure to fulfill Gonzales' expectations.

Sampson and Gonzales had agreed, Gonzales writes, on how the U.S. attorneys to be fired should be selected. Sampson was to make the rounds among senior Justice Department officials " to collect insight and opinions" on U.S. attorneys. And he was to "provide, based on that collective judgment, a consensus recommendation of the Department’s senior leadership on districts that could benefit from a change."

Nevermind that none of those DoJ officials take responsibility for having pushed for the firing of the six U.S. attorneys at the heart of the scandal. That's Gonzales' story and he's sticking to it. Gonzales will only admit that " it is clear to me that I should have done more personally to ensure that the review process was more rigorous."

An excerpt of his testimony is below the fold.

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House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), a member of the committee, wrote Alberto Gonzales today to ask about U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Rachel Paulose, the Federalist Society member and former senior aide in the Justice Department who was installed there last year. Paulose attracted attention last month when four members of her senior staff voluntarily stepped down to protest her apparently dictatorial managerial approach.

One of the mysteries of the U.S. attorney scandal has been whether Paulose's predecessor, Thomas Heffelfinger, who abruptly resigned in February of last year, left voluntarily. He says he did. If so, it's a hell of a coincidence -- just the month before, he'd appeared on a draft of Kyle Sampson's list of U.S. attorneys to be fired.

Conyers and Ellison want answers on whether Heffelfinger was asked to leave and why Paulose was put in his place. They've also asked for any documents relevant to Heffelfinger's removal, Paulose's selection, or the turmoil there. You can read the letter here.

So it would appear that Gonzales can expect some questions about Paulose when he appears before the committee on Thursday.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has invited Bradley Schlozman to testify before the committee in a hearing next Tuesday, May 15.

As laid out in a letter by Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and ranking member Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) yesterday, the committee wants to question Schlozman about his efforts to push allegations of voter fraud while a political appointee overseeing the Civil Rights Division and later as a U.S. attorney in Kansas City.

Click the tag below to read all our reporting on Schlozman, or check out today's episode of TPMtv.

Monica Goodling did what she could, allegedly, to make sure that certain U.S. attorneys didn't hire left-leaning prosecutors. And meanwhile, senior Justice Department officials apparently made sure friendly prosecutors got hired -- not matter what blemishes they might have had on their record:

When he was counsel to a House subcommittee in 2005, Jay Apperson resigned after writing a letter to a federal judge in his boss's name, demanding a tougher sentence for a drug courier. As an assistant U.S. attorney in Virginia in the 1990s, he infuriated fellow prosecutors when he facetiously suggested a White History Month to complement Black History Month.

Yet when Apperson was looking for a job recently, four senior Justice Department officials urged Jeffrey A. Taylor, the top federal prosecutor for the District of Columbia, to hire him. Taylor did, and allowed him to skip the rigorous vetting process that the vast majority of career federal prosecutors face.

As Congress and the administration spar over whether Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales allowed politics to unduly influence the work of the Justice Department, Apperson's hiring has been cited by government lawyers and others as an example of how a system that relies on apolitical prosecutors should not function.

Today Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and ranking member Arlen Specter (R-PA) wrote Bradley Schlozman, asking that he cooperate with the committee's investigation into U.S. attorney firings. You can read the letter here.

There are a number of reasons why congressional investigators would want to talk to Schlozman: his politicization of the hiring process when he was the deputy head of the Civil Rights Division, his efforts to squash career attorneys in the division who disagreed with him, and his rush to bring a group of voter fraud indictments just before the election when he was the U.S. Attorney for Kansas City. The committee, at least for now, appears mainly interested in Schlozman's efforts to push voter fraud allegations. From the letter:

Recent news accounts have suggested that Todd Graves, the former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri and the person you succeeded as an interim United States Attorney, may have been on a list for replacement because of his refusal to endorse a lawsuit against the State of Missouri alleging voter fraud before the 2006 election. This is a lawsuit you approved while Acting Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division and then filed soon after you were interim appointed as Mr. Graves’ successor by Attorney General Gonzales. Several weeks ago, a federal judge ruled in favor of Missouri in that case, finding “no evidence” of major voter fraud in the state.

We believe the Committee would benefit from hearing directly from you in order to gain a better understanding of the role voter fraud may have played in the Administration’s decisions to retain or remove certain U.S. Attorneys.

Huh. Just out from House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI):

Today the Department of Justice gave notice that it would not object to the House Judiciary Committee's grant of use immunity for Monica Goodling. I believe obtaining her testimony will be a critical step in our efforts to get to the truth about the circumstances surrounding the US Attorney firings and possible politicization in the Department's prosecutorial function. The Committee will be moving expeditiously to apply for the court order so that we can schedule a hearing promptly.

So despite the Justice Department's Inspector General's investigation into whether Goodling may have broken the law by considering the political affiliation of entry-level U.S. attorneys, the immunity will move forward. All that excitement for nothing.

Update: Here is the letter from the Justice Department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility informing Congress that they will not object. A quote:

"...after balancing the significant congressional and public interest against the impact of the Committee's actions on our ongoing investigation, we will not raise an objection or seek a deferral..."

Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe has a nice rundown this morning on Bradley Schlozman's role in the overall U.S. attorney firings' scandal.

We knew that when Schlozman was second in command of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division ('03-'06), he made a practice of hiring strong conservatives. As I reported a couple of weeks ago, a former attorney in the division says that Schlozman asked him whether a potential applicant was a Republican before considering interviewing him. And Savage comes up with numbers to demonstrate Schlozman's politicization of the Division's voting rights section:

Under Schlozman, the profile of the career attorneys hired by the section underwent a dramatic transformation.

Half of the 14 career lawyers hired under Schlozman were members of the conservative Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, up from none among the eight career hires in the previous two years, according to a review of resumes. The average US News & World Report ranking of the law school attended by new career lawyers plunged from 15 to 65.

(Bob Kengle, the former deputy chief of the voting section, gave TPM readers an in-depth account of what life was like in the section this past week.)

And of course no piece on Schlozman would be complete without a mention of his precious ACORN indictments when he was the U.S. Attorney for Kansas City. Schlozman, you'll remember, rushed the indictments of four ACORN voter registration workers to land five days before the 2006 election.

The Justice Department is still desperately trying to portray the indictments as uncontroversial. As I reported Friday, the Justice Department's election crimes manual is crystal clear: "most, if not all, investigation of an alleged election crime must await the end of the election to which the allegation relates." And that's investigations -- an indictment, obviously, would be an even greater departure from policy.

But here's what the Justice Department told Savage:

The department said Schlozman's office got permission from headquarters for the election-eve indictments. It added that the department interprets the policy as having an unwritten exception for voter registration fraud, because investigators need not interview voters for such cases.

An "unwritten exception." How nice.

Because Schlozman didn't have FBI agents interrogating voters, his indictments had no possible chilling effect, apparently.

Just consider: On November 2, 2006, the indictments were widely reported, many of them featuring a quote from Schlozman that "this national investigation is very much ongoing." That same day, Schlozman released a statement that his office would have a prosecutor on duty on Election Day, ready to pounce at allegations of voter fraud. This was in a climate of trumped-up hysteria about ACORN's efforts to register poor voters both in Kansas City and in St. Louis, where Republicans were charging that tens of thousands of voter registration forms were "questionable."

Schlozman, in other words, knew just what he was doing. And now the Justice Department is inventing "unwritten exceptions" to its policies to cover for him.

Note: You can see TPMmuckraker's past reporting on Schlozman (from his reign of terror at the Civil Rights Division to his triumphant return to Washington) here.

Bit by bit, word has leaked out from congressional investigators' interviews with the Justice Department officials involved in the firings. And one by one, they've denied responsibility for putting certain U.S. attorneys' names on the list.

Let's go down the list. Michael Battle, the former Director of the Executive Office of United States Attorneys, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, Kyle Sampson, and William E. Moschella, the principal associate deputy attorney general, all have told Congress that they did not put any names on the list. And today The Washington Post reports that David Margolis, the senior career official at the department, claims responsibility for adding a single name: Kevin Ryan. Ryan, you might remember, is the only U.S. attorney who everyone agrees had actual performance issues. Margolis also says he fingered U.S. Attorney from western Michigan Margaret Chiara as having managerial issues in her office, but it's unclear if he's responsible for her name being on the list.

For all six of the U.S. attorneys at the center of the controversy -- Carol Lam, Daniel Bogden, Bud Cummins, John McKay, Paul Charlton, and David Iglesias -- no one has taken responsibility.

Only three Justice Department officials who were supposedly consulted to construct the firing list remain unaccounted for. Two of them -- Michael Elston, Paul McNulty's chief of staff, and acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer, the absentee U.S. Attorney for Montana -- have already been interviewed by congressional investigators. The strong impression given by public comments by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) since those interviews is that neither have taken responsibility for adding any names.

*Update: House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) was even more explicit in his opening statement yesterday: "We have interviewed numerous senior officials in the Department, and all deny making the actual decision to place these names on the list."

The third and sole remaining Justice Department offiical is Monica Goodling, the liaison to the White House. She, of course, is yet to be interviewed.

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Adam Cohen, writing in a The New York Times op-ed,breaks news:

There is yet another United States attorney whose abrupt departure from office is raising questions: Debra Wong Yang of Los Angeles. Ms. Yang was not fired, as eight other prosecutors were, but she resigned under circumstances that raise serious questions, starting with whether she was pushed out to disrupt her investigation of one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress....

Ms. Yang was investigating Jerry Lewis, who was chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Ms. Lam and most of the other purged prosecutors were fired on Dec. 7. Ms. Yang, in a fortuitously timed exit, resigned in mid-October.

Ms. Yang says she left for personal reasons, but there is growing evidence that the White House was intent on removing her. Kyle Sampson, the Justice Department staff member in charge of the firings, told investigators last month in still-secret testimony that Harriet Miers, the White House counsel at the time, had asked him more than once about Ms. Yang. He testified, according to Congressional sources, that as late as mid-September, Ms. Miers wanted to know whether Ms. Yang could be made to resign. Mr. Sampson reportedly recalled that Ms. Miers was focused on just two United States attorneys: Ms. Yang and Bud Cummins, the Arkansas prosecutor who was later fired to make room for Tim Griffin, a Republican political operative and Karl Rove protégé.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who has been very interested in Yang's case, had previously revealed publicly that Miers had discussed firing Yang. But the details provided here make it all the more suspicious. Not only did Miers discuss firing Yang, but she was apparently fixated on Yang -- and only one month before Yang stepped down.

Now, Yang left to become a partner at the white shoe firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher -- the firm that, it just so happens, is the one defending Lewis. It should be said that Yang has recused herself from the case. But the timing of her departure, or the offer (a $1.5 million signing bonus), can only bring suspicion. Gibson, Dunn, Cohen notes, has "strong Republican ties."

It's already been a rough week for Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. Now this:

The chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty has told congressional investigators that phone calls he placed to four fired U.S. attorneys -- calls that three of the prosecutors say involved threats about testifying before Congress -- were made at McNulty's direction.

Michael Elston, the chief of staff, told congressional investigators in a closed-door session on March 30 that McNulty specifically instructed him to make the phone calls after the Justice Department's No. 2 official learned that the fired prosecutors might testify before Congress about their dismissals.

Elston also, according to Murray Waas, told congressional investigators what he's been saying all along -- that none of those calls were meant to threaten the U.S. attorneys.

But somehow, three of the U.S. attorneys all got the same message: stay quiet or get smeared.

Many were suspicious of the timing yesterday of the Justice Department's announcement that Monica Goodling was under investigation for possible criminal wrongdoing. So, apparently, is Goodling's lawyer, John Dowd.

In a letter today to the heads of the two internal Justice Department offices that are reportedly investigating Goodling, Dowd let it be known that he didn't appreciate learning that his client was under investigation from a press release. There was "no justification for publicizing this information in a press release before notifying us," Dowd wrote, calling it a "lack of professional courtesy."

The timing of the release, Dowd also wrote, was suspicious:

What disturbs us most is that the Department chose to make its announcement about Ms. Goodling in the midst of Congress's ongoing investigation into the Department's affairs, and less than two weeks after the House Judiciary Committee passed a resolution authorizing the House General Counsel to apply for an order of immunity for Ms. Goodling. The timing of your release smacks of retribution and intimidation.

But that intimidation isn't likely to work, Dowd wanted them to know: Congress's approval of Goodling's immunity is "in no way subject to approval by the Department," he wrote, adding that "the Department may not delay the issuance of an order of immunity by instituting a parallel investigation."

You can read the entirety of Dowd's letter to Glenn Fine, the Justice Department's inspector general, and H. Marshall Jarrett, Counsel at the Office of Professional Responsibilty, here.

Note: It seems worth noting that Dowd has a history of inflammatory rhetoric. When he was battling with the House and Senate judiciary committees, he compared Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) to Sen. Joe McCarthy.

The Justice Department's inspector general is reportedly investigating whether Monica Goodling inappropriately considered political affiliation when hiring entry-level assistant U.S. attorneys.

So now seems like a good time to recall a story I ran two weeks ago about Bradley Schlozman, who was then the second in command at the department's Civil Rights Division. A former Justice Department lawyer, Ty Clevenger, says that Schlozman asked him whether a potential applicant was a Republican before deciding whether to interview him.

And where does Schlozman work now? After a controversial stint as U.S. Attorney for Kansas City, he now works in the Executive Office of United States Attorneys. Salon has quoted a former senior Justice Department official as saying that Schlozman was "one of Gonzales' guys."

What Schlozman allegedly did is against the law. So is anyone investigating that?

Apropos of Josh's post on U.S. Attorney for Milwaukee Steven Biskupic today, it seems like a good time to reiterate a correction I appended to a post last week.

The post asserted that a Wisconsin state appeals court decision had reversed a voter fraud case pushed by Biskupic's office. The case had been prosecuted by the Racine County D.A. In fact, Biskupic's office -- which had formed a joint task force with the Milwaukee County D.A., not Racine County -- had nothing to do with the case. Again, I regret the error.

Alberto Gonzales and others at the DoJ keep claiming that the department has pursued public corruption investigations regardless of the subject's political affiliation. Now we'll see if that's borne out by the numbers.

Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) have requested an analysis from the Justice Department's inspector general breaking down public corruption investigations by the party affiliation of their targets. You can read their letter requesting the investigation below.

In February, we reported on a study by two professors that found the Justice Department investigates Democrats far more than Republicans. The study found that 79 percent of elected officials and candidates who’ve faced a federal investigation (a total of 379) between 2001 and 2006 were Democrats. You can see the study here.

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Writing in an email to former U.S. Attorney for Little Rock Bud Cummins, James Comey explained why he'd felt compelled to defend David Iglesias and other of the fired U.S. attorneys. Comey had given quotes to The Washington Post and other papers praising them.

"I will not sit by and watch good people smeared," Comey wrote in early March. "What's that quotation about all that's necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to remain silent?" You can read their email exchange here.

So that's where we are now. The former deputy attorney general tacitly calling the administration's actions "evil."

Here's video of Comey being questioned about the email from this morning's hearing:

If there was one major revelation during the hearing today, it was that James Comey had been involved in the firing of two U.S. attorneys when he was deputy attorney general.

But these firings were worlds away from the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys last December. First, they were individual cases -- and in each case, Comey said, there was "serious misconduct... these were not close calls, as soon as you read about it, you said, 'this guy's got to go.'" Second, Comey said that there was extensive discussion with the U.S. attorneys about what the problem was. And third, Comey had discussions with senior staff and the attorney general about the problem before asking the U.S. attorneys to resign.

Comey didn't identify either of the U.S. attorneys, and only said that one of the firings was during John Ashcroft's tenure as attorney general, and the other was during Gonzales'. One of the U.S. attorneys voluntarily resigned, and the other refused to resign and was fired by the president "by letter," Comey said.

Asked what Kyle Sampson and others in the administration might have meant when they referred to the "loyalty" of U.S. attorneys, James Comey replied "I don't know what they meant."

He then went on to explain that it was essential that the Justice Department be seen as "the other in American life," that the DoJ had to be "seen as the good guys -- not as this administration or that administration." If the Justice Department didn't have that "special trust," then it was impossible to effectively do its job.

You might call this a contrast to the views of the current leadership in the Justice Department.

This one we're just noting for your entertainment.

Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT) jumped in to declare that James Comey was only the deputy attorney general during the very beginning of the process of firing U.S. attorneys. The real, hard decision making obviously happened after Comey left.

This was a process, Cannon said, that after "thousands and thousands of documents" have been turned over to Congress and "over more than half a dozen interviews" has been shown to be "a fairly thoughtful, competent process." So what's all the hullabaloo about? Cannon just wants us to "get beyond this."

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey just shot down one of the Justice Department's talking points for why U.S. Atttorney for San Diego Carol Lam was fired.

The department has repeatedly touted Lam's relatively low gun prosecution numbers as one of the reasons for her firing. DoJ official William Moschella told the House Judiciary Committee last month that Lam "only beat out Guam and the Virgin Islands" in terms of gun prosecutons -- leaving the impression that Lam had fallen down on the job.

But as Comey testified today, such numbers "tell you nothing" about how the U.S. attorney is doing. Comey cited his own experience as U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, where his own office's numbers had dipped due to the fact that the local prosecutor was handling a large number of gun prosecutions, making it unnecessary for his own office to do so -- which was Lam's case with the district attorney in San Diego.

As Lam has pointed out, the violent crime rate in San Diego fell to its lowest point in 25 years while she was U.S. attorney there.

When Kyle Sampson asked former Deputy Attorney General James Comey in late February of 2005 which U.S. attorneys he thought were "weak" and should be replaced, Comey replied with a list of names. But Comey testified today that his list was completely different from those who were ultimately fired -- save one name. That was Kevin Ryan, the former U.S. Attorney for San Francisco, who was the only of the fired U.S. attorneys to have indisputably had real performance issues.

There were a couple of other telling details in Comey's early remarks. Although Sampson told congressional investigators that he'd informed Comey that the idea to identify "weak" U.S. attorneys came from the White House, Comey testified today that he was "quite certain that [Sampson] didn't mention the White House."

Comey added that he didn't even know that this was a process -- he just thought that Sampson had made an offhand remark. And Comey was completely ignorant of Kyle Sampson's list of U.S. attorneys to be removed that Sampson drafted at around the same time. On Sampson's list, drafted in late February or very early March of that year, Kevin Ryan was rated as a "strong" U.S. attorney.

In other words, Sampson seems to have intentionally ignored all of Comey's recommendations as to who were the weak U.S. attorneys -- and kept Comey, the #2 at the DoJ, ignorant that Sampson and the White House were targeting certain U.S. attorneys with the goal of firing them.

A House Judiciary subcommittee is holding a hearing with James Comey, the former deputy attorney general, right now.

We'll you bringing you updates on what Comey says, but if you'd like to watch, you can catch it on C-Span 3 or on the committee's website.

Comey is likely to shed light on the early stages of the U.S. attorney firing process -- and provide a striking contrast with the current DoJ leadership's appraisal of U.S. attorney performance.

The morning papers provide a host of further detail on the Justice Department's investigation of Monica Goodling.

First, we'll start with the new facts about the investigation, and then turn to the burning question of whether this might compromise Congress' offer of immunity to Goodling.

The department's inspector general launched an investigation into the U.S. attorney firings back in March. Not long after that, Chuck Rosenberg, the U.S. Attorney for eastern Virginia and Kyle Sampson's replacement as Gonzales' chief of staff, requested that the inspector general look into Goodling's hiring of entry-level assistant U.S. attorneys. Rosenberg has since gone back to being a full-time U.S.A.

The accusation focuses on Goodling's meddling in a particular group of hires: entry-level attorneys working for acting or interim U.S. attorneys -- in other words, U.S.A.s who had not been confirmed by the Senate. The New York Times explains:

...when an interim United States attorney is in place, one who has not been confirmed by the Senate, he or she must seek the approval of officials at department headquarters [to hire attorneys], a rule that perhaps allowed Ms. Goodling to investigate the political backgrounds of the applicants.

As the Justice Department has underlined, if Goodling was checking to see if these applicants were Republicans before hiring them, that would be against the law.

Now, there's an important point that needs to be made here. And that is that Gonzales had signed an order in March of last year that gave Goodling and Sampson the power to hire and fire interim U.S. attorneys. And it's already been conclusively shown that Goodling played a major hand in the firing of the eight Senate-confirmed U.S. attorneys last December. So if these allegations about Goodling's involvement in the hiring of entry-level prosecutors are correct, it looks like Goodling was working to completely overhaul certain U.S. attorney offices -- replacing the U.S. attorney with an administration loyalist and staffing it with entry-level loyalists. Top to bottom.

On to immunity. The Los Angeles Times puts it most simply:

...the Justice Department is unlikely to support immunity while its own probe is pending. The issue of immunity is ultimately decided by a federal judge. Justice Department officials are supposed to weigh in with a recommendation next week.

Here's how Congress' offer of immunity works: the Justice Department has a period of time, ten days, to decide whether the immunity might compromise a potential criminal investigation (that deadline is Monday, but could be extended). The DoJ makes a recommendation -- if the DoJ decides that it will, then Congress has to reconsider its offer. Congress could still go forward at that point, but the federal court in D.C. makes the final determination. It would seem to be highly unlikely that Goodling would still get her immunity with this probe ongoing.

Goodling's attorney told The Washington Post that she would testify if given immunity. But that would seem to be a big "if" now.

Suspicion of the timing of this revelation is understandable. As the Justice Department's liaison to the White House, Goodling likely has a lot to tell -- and Congress may never hear it.

Note: The Wall Street Journal adds some insight into what the Justice Department deems newsworthy:

In mid-March, The Wall Street Journal sought information from the Justice Department on Ms. Goodling's role in the selection of [entry-level assistant U.S. attorneys]. The department turned down a request for expedited handling of the Journal's query, citing that it "does not believe the specific topic of your request is the subject of widespread and exceptional media interest."

Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty is supposedly the #2 at the Department of Justice, acting essentially as the COO to Alberto Gonzales' CEO. He's supposed to be the career guy who gets his hands dirty, who's really running the department.

But listen to the way he has reportedly described his role in the U.S. Attorney firings. From The Las Vegas Sun:

A Justice Department official who had been uncomfortable about firing U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden now regrets he could not save the Nevadan's job when Justice purged eight prosecutors last year.

In a closed-door interview with congressional investigators last week, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty said the firing weighs on him heavily, according to an aide familiar with the transcript of McNulty's comments. McNulty said he succeeded in sparing another U.S. attorney whose identity has not been revealed....

McNulty told investigators he did not see the list [of U.S. attorneys to be fired] until October, two months before the attorneys were fired....

McNulty asked during the interview last week to speak to the whole Bogden affair. McNulty told investigators he had hoped for some explanation for Bogden's inclusion on the list because he saw no apparent reason to fire him.

He said he was told that Justice wanted to bring in someone with more energy for Nevada, a fast-growing district.

He "was told that Justice wanted to bring in someone with more energy?" Well, we know that Alberto Gonzales didn't know anything about why Bogden was fired. And Kyle Sampson, the keeper of the list, claims not to know why Bogden made the list either. So who, in this equation, is "Justice?" Who was calling the shots? It certainly wasn't McNulty.

How deep, how wide did the politicization at the Justice Department go?

From the AP:

The Justice Department is investigating whether its former White House liaison used political affiliation in deciding who to hire as entry-level prosecutors in U.S. attorneys' offices around the country, The Associated Press has learned.

Doing so is a violation of federal law.

The inquiry involving Monica Goodling, the former counsel and White House liaison for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, raises new concerns that politics might have cast a shadow over the independence of trial prosecutors who enforce U.S. laws.

Justice spokesman Dean Boyd confirmed Wednesday that the department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility were investigating Goodling's role in hiring career attorneys — an unusual responsibility for her to take.

Goodling "may have taken prohibited considerations into account during such review," Boyd told the AP. "Whether or not the allegation is true is currently the subject of the OIG/OPR investigation."

Will this affect Congress' offer of immunity to Goodling?

Update: More details from an AP update:

The investigation of Goodling appears to focus on her role in reviewing applications for trial prosecutors for offices headed by temporary or acting U.S. attorneys who had not been confirmed by the Senate. That responsibility is usually handled by the Justice Department's executive office of U.S. attorneys.

Goodling had served in the executive U.S. attorney's office until she was transferred to serve as Gonzales' counsel and primary White House contact. The internal Justice investigation concerns Goodling's review of job applicants only after she joined the attorney general's office, the government officials said.

A bipartisan group of senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote to Alberto Gonzales today, demanding a copy of the secret order Gonzales signed in March of 2006. The order, the existence of which was first reported by Murray Waas, gave authority over the hiring and firing of most political employees of the Justice Department to Gonzales' chief of staff Kyle Sampson and White House liaison Monica Goodling.

The senators also wondered why the order was not among the thousands of pages turned over to Congress over the past months -- documents that were relevant to the U.S. attorney firings. Since the order would seem to affect the appointment of interim U.S. attorneys, it should have been among them, they write.

You can read the letter here.

Tired of waiting for a response, Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT) issued a subpoena for any of Karl Rove's emails in the Justice Department's possession that might be relevant to the U.S. attorney firings. That includes emails sent from Rove's White House account (which apparently doesn't get much use) and emails from his account issued by the Republican National Committee.

You can see the subpoena here.

Note: Since the subpoena is to the Justice Department and not to the White House, it sidesteps any executive privilege concerns. And it seems possible that it could even claim internal White House emails since the subpoena specifically includes emails that were obtained by Patrick Fitzgerald as part of the Plame investigation.

Those who are suspicious of U.S. Attorney for San Diego Carol Lam's firing just got a lot more cause for suspicion.

In her written answers to questions from Congress, Lam recounted a conversation with Justice Department official Michael Elston after she was fired in which Elston made it clear to her that she would be gone within "weeks" regardless of the fate of certain cases, and that this order came "from the highest levels of the government." Elston also told her that someone from outside her office would most likely to come in to take over.

Lam had good reason to be preoccupied about certain cases, of course. Her office was close to indicting Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor who allegedly bribed Duke Cunningham and possibly other Republican congressmen, and Dusty Foggo, the former executive director of the CIA.

But according to Lam, Elston told her that her appeals to stay on in order to deal with certain cases was "'not being received positively.'" She was to depart in "weeks, not months" and "these instructions were 'coming from the very highest levels of the government.'"

Lam also adds that Elston told her he "suspected" that the administration would be installing someone from outside her office as her successor, that there would be "no overlap" between Lam's departure and her successor's start date, and that her successor wouldn't have to be vetted by the committee of Republicans in California who had before been responsible for vetting U.S. attorneys in the state.

All of this will do much to increase suspicion that the administration intended to replace Lam with a "loyal Bushie" of their choice.

Lam also describes an odd conversation she had with Deputy Atttorney General Paul McNulty. After being told that she was being fired, Lam called McNulty for an explanation. McNulty declined to tell Lam why she was being fired:

He responded that he wanted some time to think about how to answer that question because he didn’t want to give me an answer “that would lead” me down the wrong route. He added that he knew I had personally taken on a long trial and he had great respect for me. Mr. McNulty never responded to my question.

Lam's account of these conversations is below. You can read all of her answers here.

Read more »

Alberto Gonzales and others at the Justice Department have been desperately claiming for months that they'd never intended to circumvent the Senate in the confirmation of U.S. attorneys.

But apparently Timothy Griffin, the former aide to Karl Rove who was appointed as the U.S. Attorney for Little Rock, didn't know it was so taboo.

In written response to questions from Congress made public today, Griffin's predecessor Bud Cummins says that Griffin had been telling a number of people in Arkansas that he would remain as the U.S. attorney there for the remainder of Bush's term whether he was confirmed by the Senate or not. An obscure provision in the Patriot Act reauthorization bill, of course, had made just such a thing possible.

Cummins writes of a conversation he had with Michael Elston, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, in late January, the day after Alberto Gonzales had testified to the Senate. Gonzales had said, among other things, that the Justice Department would seek a presidential nomination for the U.S. attorneys in every district. Cummins had called Elston to contest this idea, because "it appeared to [him] that there was no intention to put Tim Griffin through a nomination." Elston disagreed...

Elston rejected that notion and assured me that every replacement would have to be confirmed by the Senate. I told him if that was the case, then he had better gag Tim Griffin because Griffin was telling many people, including me, that officials in Washington had assured him he could stay in as USA pursuant to an interim appointment whether he was ever nominated or not. Elston denied knowing anything about anyone’s intention to circumvent Senate confirmation in Griffin’s case. He said that might have been the White House’s plan, but they “never read DOJ into that plan” and DOJ would never go along with it. This indicated to me that my removal had been dictated entirely by the White House. He said Griffin would be confirmed or have to resign. I remember that part of the conversation well because I then said to Elston that it looked to me that if Tim Griffin couldn’t get confirmed and had to then resign, then I would have resigned for nothing, and to that, after a brief pause Elston replied, “yes, that’s right.” [emphasis mine]

Remember that emails show that Kyle Sampson didn't want Bud Cummins testifying to Congress because he worried that Cummins would testify that Griffin had been blabbing about the Patriot Act provision.

The entirety of Cummins' account of this phone call with Elston is below.

You can see all of the U.S. attorneys questions and answers here.

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U.S. Attorney for Arizona Paul Charlton told Congress that Michael Elston, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, called him and warned him to remain silent. "I believe that Elston was offering me a quid pro quo agreement: my silence in exchange for the Attorney General's," Charlton wrote in answer to questions from the House Judiciary Committee.

Charlton did not expound on the conversation in his answer, only saying that the call occurred after the firing on December 7th, but before the attorney general testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 18th of this year.

It's not the first time that Elston has been accused by one of the fired U.S. attorneys of trying to intimidate them into silence. Two others have said the same thing.

U.S. Attorney for Little Rock Bud Cummins testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Elston had made a similar call to him in mid-February. Cummins produced an email written the day of the call that clearly laid out the threatening undercurrent to Elston's message.

And U.S. Attorney for Seattle John McKay has said that he got a call from Elston in December. Newsweek reported that McKay says "he also got a phone call from a 'clearly nervous' Elston asking if he intended to go public: 'He was offering me a deal: you stay silent and the attorney general won't say anything bad about you.'"

So it would seem that there's a pattern here. Elston, for his part, has said that he's "shocked and baffled" by Cummins' accusation and that he "can't imagine" how McKay took the call that way. No doubt he'll be similarly flabbergasted by Charlton's accusation.

In a phone conversation last December, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty told then-U.S. Attorney for Nevada Daniel Bogden that Bogden's performance "did not enter into the equation" as a reason for his firing.

That's at odds with what McNulty told the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath in February -- that Bogden and others had been fired for "performance related" reasons.

The account of the phone conversation comes from Bogden himself, in written answers to questions from the House Judiciary Committee. The committee will release correspondence with Bogden and others today.

Remember that McNulty had written in an email two days before the firings that he was "skittish" about firing Bogden -- a concern that was apparently allayed by a 90 second meeting during which McNulty and others decided that it wasn't so bad to fire him since Bogden is a bachelor and has only himself to feed.

Monica Goodling and other Justice Department officials subsequently joined in a brainstorming session to figure out just what performance related issues had led to Bogden's firing.

There are some other telling details in Bogden's account of his conversation with McNulty (posted in its entirety below). McNulty told Bogden that he'd had only "limited input" in the firing process. That further confirms McNulty's minimal role in the firings -- even though the deputy attorney general is traditionally the senior official to oversee the U.S. attorneys at the Justice Department. McNulty reportedly told congressional investigators last week that he wasn't responsible for adding a single name to the firing list.

McNulty also told Bogden that the decision for the firing came from "higher up." If that's a reference to the attorney general, well, we know that's at best partly true. If it's a reference to the White House, then it's a shame that McNulty didn't say more.

More soon.

Update: You can read Bogden's full Q&A here (pdf).

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And it gets even better.

The Justice Department has long argued that it fired the eight U.S. attorneys because of performance concerns -- a contention that's been so thoroughly discredited that it's a punchline now.

But it appears that we've reached a new level of DoJ ridiculousness.

One of the senior Justice Department officials involved in the firings is Bill Mercer, the U.S. Attorney for Montana who pulls double duty as the principal associate deputy attorney general in Washington, D.C. Well, I say double duty, but he really doesn't seem to spend much time as U.S. attorney: just three days per month, according to congressional testimony.

The chief judge in Mercer's district has been complaining about his absence for years, at one point berating him during a court hearing: "You have no credibility -- none.... Your office is a mess." And that judge did what he could to get Mercer thrown out, even writing to Alberto Gonzales in 2005 that Mercer was violating federal law by not living in the district of which he was supposedly U.S. attorney.

So what did Mercer do? He changed the law. From The Washington Post:

[In November of 2005] Mercer had a GOP Senate staffer insert into a bill a provision that would change the rules so that federal prosecutors could live outside their districts to serve in other jobs, according to documents and interviews

Congress passed the provision several months later as part of the USA Patriot Act reauthorization bill, retroactively benefiting Mercer and a handful of other senior Justice officials who pull double duty as U.S. attorneys and headquarters officials....

...[T]he new legislation was added to the Patriot bill at the request of Mercer, who had been assigned the task of shepherding the provision through Congress, according to congressional aides and new statements from one of Mercer's colleagues.

(TPM reported on this provision last month, but we didn't know Mercer was responsible for it.)

This is, of course, the same Patriot Act that contained the provision that allowed the administration to indefinitely appoint interim U.S. attorneys. So it was full of treats for the administration.

The punchline here, of course, is that the Justice Department officials have straight-facedly claimed that U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias was fired because he was absent from the office one month out of the year (for his Navy reserve duty). He was, they claimed, an "absentee landlord." And yet one of the officials responsible for the firings had the law changed so that he could still be the U.S. attorney while being all but completely absent from his district. Funny, huh?

Note: For those of you who are suspicious that Mercer and others are drawing two salaries -- a Justice Department spokesman told The Washington Post that the U.S. attorneys continue to draw their U.S. attorney salary and are not paid extra for the executive positions.

Update: A TPM Reader jumps in on the salary question:

Of course they're not getting two salaries -- they're each working a single full-time job, just with a wide array of distinct responsibilities that regularly require travel. The question is whether they're getting their housing and other expenses subsidized. DOJ has two different set-ups for employees on "detail" from one position to another: some have their housing, etc., paid for in the secondary location on the condition that they continue to maintain a primary residence ( i.e., they pay for a house/apartment as usual in their home city, and the government pays for housing in Washington, along with a generous per diem allowance for food that assumes the person is eating every meal in a restaurant); others don't get that treatment, on the assumption that they spend such a large majority of time in one city or the other that they don't need to maintain two residences. The first is a much sweeter deal, for obvious reasons -- it would be interesting to know which kind Mercer and the others are getting. Saying that they're not getting double salary may be a dodge to hide the fact that their total compensation is in fact much higher than it would be if they were staying at home and attending to their duties as US Attorneys on a full-time basis.

The House Judiciary Committee has approved a subpoena for former Deputy Attorney General James Comey. Comey was the number two figure at the Justice Department during the decision-making "process" regarding the firings; his list ranking then-US Attorneys stands in sharp contrast to the one prepared by Kyle Sampson.

Comey is set to testify in an open hearing this Thursday at 9:30 AM.

For those of you eager to relive Alberto Gonzales' hearing from two weeks ago, you're in luck. Gonzales is scheduled to appear before the House Judiciary Committee next Thursday, May 10.

Along with the expected questions about the U.S. attorney firings (does he remember anything more now?), it will be a chance for members of Congress to ask Gonzales why he approved an order last year that gave 30-something aides Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling, both of whom were very close to the White House, the power to hire and fire junior political appointees (135 positions total) in the department. As Murray Waas reported yesterday, "The existence of the order suggests that a broad effort was under way by the White House to place politically and ideologically loyal appointees throughout the Justice Department, not just at the U.S.-attorney level."

There are a host of unanswered questions about the order, besides the obvious "why?"

1) Did the order cover interim U.S. attorney appointments? U.S. attorney nominations require Senate confirmation, but a change in the law had made it possible for the adminstration to appoint interim U.S. attorneys indefinitely. No one seems to know the answer to this question.

2) Why were details of the order kept from the deputy attorney general and other members of the department leadership?

3) Why did Gonzales try to cut himself out of the loop? The Justice Department has defended the order by saying that the attorney general was still required to sign off on Goodling and Sampson's decisions. But as Waas reported, the original order had no such requirement -- and it was only added after concerns were raised that giving Sampson and Goodling that sort of power was unconstitutional.

But, of course, we all know now that just because lawmakers might come armed with good questions doesn't mean that Gonzales will have any answers.

Former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman writing today in The Los Angeles Times:

No matter how many members of Congress lose confidence in Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush is unlikely to let him go. If Gonzales resigns, the vacancy must be filled by a new presidential nominee, and the last thing the White House wants is a confirmation hearing.

Already, the Senate is outlining conditions for confirming a Gonzales successor. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has said that his panel would not hold confirmation hearings unless Karl Rove and other White House aides testify about the firing of U.S. attorneys to clarify whether "the White House has interfered with prosecution."...

Moreover, the Senate might use such hearings to do more than secure testimony from White House aides about the firings, as Leahy indicated. It also might use the opportunity to probe the Justice Department's role in mistreatment of detainees, four years of flouting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other serious matters.

Rather than face such scrutiny, the White House may prefer keeping a drastically weakened Gonzales in place.

Via Scott Horton.

The Justice Department has a longstanding policy regarding the prosecution of election law or voter fraud cases: the closer to the election it gets, the more cautious prosecutors should be about bringing indictments. The reason is simple. Bringing an indictment close to the election can intimidate minority voters, affect voter turnout and potentially even influence the result of the election.

But Bradley Schlozman -- the former U.S. Attorney for Kansas City and controversial deputy head at the Civil Rights Division -- broke with the policy. Not only that, but there's evidence that he rushed four indictments to land just before last November's election.

Indeed, timing aside, even Schlozman's decision to pursue the cases at all is questionable in light of established Justice Department practice. Although trumpeted as cases of voter fraud, the cases alleged only registration fraud, and there's no evidence that those registrations were intended to result in actual fraudulent votes. For that reason, other U.S. attorneys have passed on pursuing similar prosecutions. But Schlozman, who'd worked to push voter I.D. laws while in the Civil Rights Division, leapt at the opportunity.

The more you learn about Schlozman's decision to indict four voter registration recruiters for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) five days before last year's election -- Missouri's Jim Talent was battling Claire McCaskill in one of the closest Senate races in the country --, the worse it looks.

News coverage of the indictments tended to buttress the notion that liberal groups like ACORN were conspiring to steal the election. The indictments were covered by Fox News (where a Kansas City election official was quoted as saying that it was "the worst case of registration abuse in the last quarter century"), as well as the AP, CNN, and other nationwide outlets. Schlozman announced in a statement that "This national investigation is very much ongoing."

It had been the longstanding practice of the Justice Department not to bring such indictments so close before an election. That's according to Joe Rich, the former head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Section, and a Justice Department manual written by Craig Donsanto, head of the Election Crimes Branch at Justice, which advised that “Federal prosecutors and investigators should be extremely careful to not conduct overt investigations during the pre-election period or while the election is underway.”

Even Alberto Gonzales himself said just two weeks ago that "We have guidance about that, doing those kind of investigations near an election," to be "sensitive about the effect it has on particularly minority participation."

But if Schozman was trying to be sensitive, he didn't show it. In addition to issuing the statement that the "national investigation" into ACORN's registration of mostly poor, minority voters was "very much ongoing," Schlozman also announced the next day that his office would be monitoring the election for fraud. An assistant U.S. attorney would be on duty all day to "ensure public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process."

And there is evidence that the indictments were rushed to come down before Election Day.

Read more »

I think we've identified a rule of Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department: the more senior you are in the leadership, the less of a clue you have of what's going on there.

We were all treated to Gonzales' historical display of bumbling amnesia before the Senate Judiciary Committee a couple of weeks ago. Now we learn that the second in command, Paul McNulty, wasn't really in the loop, either. From The Washington Post:

Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty told congressional investigators that he had limited involvement in the firing last year of eight U.S. attorneys and that he did not choose any to be removed, congressional aides familiar with his statements said yesterday.

McNulty said he provided erroneous testimony to Congress in February because he had not been informed that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and his aides had been working with the White House on the firings for nearly two years, the congressional aides said.

Put this together with the news yesterday that McNulty, along with other members of the senior leadership in the department, had been cut out of the hiring and firing process for junior political appointees, and it's clear that he really didn't have much to do with running the place. From all evidence, that responsibility fell to Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling, two young aides who acted as little more than proxies for the White House.

As Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) puts it: "If the top folks at DOJ weren't the key decision-makers, it's less likely that lower-down people at DOJ were, and much more likely that people in the White House were making the major decisions."