Justice Department Official Resigns

September 6, 2007
Justice Department Official Resigns

WASHINGTON - Assistant Attorney General Peter D. Keisler, who oversaw the Bush administration's lengthy legal fight over the rights of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, announced his resignation Thursday as head of the civil division.

Keisler's departure comes in the wake of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' own resignation. Keisler is the latest senior official to leave at a time when lawmakers have criticized the department for not being politically independent from the White House.

DOJ official resigns over attorney firings

August 22, 2007
DOJ official resigns over attorney firings

Facing multiple investigations, a senior Justice Department appointee has resigned his post.

Bradley Schlozman stepped down from his position as a counsel in the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, a branch of the Department of Justice, last week, a Justice spokesman confirmed Wednesday.

Schlozman, a key figure in several political controversies, is under investigation by the department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility for allegations he was involved in politicizing hiring and firing decisions at the Justice Department. He is also a subject of the congressional probe into the U.S. attorneys firing scandal.

White House letter rejecting subpoena

June 280, 2007
White House letter rejecting subpoena

On June 13, 2007, the White House received two subpoenas from your Committees requesting documents relating to the replacement of United States Attorneys, calling for the documents to be produced by June 28, 2007. I write at the direction of the President to advise and inform you that the President has decided to assert Executive Privilege and therefore the White House will not be making any production in response to these subpoenas for documents. In addition, Chairman Leahy subpoenaed documents from former Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Political Affairs Sara M. Taylor, with the same return date of June 28, 2007. Chairman Conyers has subpoenaed documents from former Counsel to the President Harriet E. Miers, with a return date of July 12, 2007. Counsel for Ms. Taylor and Ms. Miers have been informed of the President‘s decision to assert Executive Privilege and have been asked to relay to Ms. Taylor and Ms. Miers a direction from the President not to produce any documents.

Justice Department Official Resigns

June 29, 2007
Justice Department Official Resigns

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Justice Department official who was eyed as a possible replacement for one of several fired U.S. attorneys announced her resignation Friday.

Rachel Brand, the assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy, will step down July 9, the department said in a statement. The statement did not give a reason for her departure, but Brand is expecting a baby soon.

Brand was a member of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' leadership team. When officials were planning to fire U.S. attorneys in San Diego, San Francisco, Michigan and Arkansas, Brand was named as a possible replacement for Margaret Chiari in Michigan, according to documents released as part of a congressional inquiry.

U.S. attorneys fallout seeps into courts

June 18, 2007
U.S. attorneys fallout seeps into courts

WASHINGTON — For months, the Justice Department and Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales have taken political heat for the purge of eight U.S. attorneys last year.

Now the fallout is starting to hit the department in federal courtrooms around the country.

Defense lawyers in a growing number of cases are raising questions about the motives of government lawyers who have brought charges against their clients. In court papers, they are citing the furor over the U.S. attorney dismissals as evidence that their cases may have been infected by politics.

Justice Department Official Resigsn Over Attorney Firings

June 16, 2007
Justice Department Official Resigsn Over Attorney Firings

WASHINGTON - A senior Justice Department official who helped carry out the dismissals of federal prosecutors said Friday he is resigning. Mike Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, is the fifth Justice official to leave after being linked to the dismissals of the prosecutors.

Elston was accused of threatening at least four of the eight fired U.S. attorneys to keep quiet about their ousters. In a statement Friday, the Justice Department said Elston was leaving voluntarily to take a job with an unnamed Washington-area law firm.

Officials rebuked for disclosing Rove's ties to firings

June 13, 2007
Officials rebuked for disclosing Rove's ties to firings

WASHINGTON — The White House's former political director was furious at Justice Department officials for disclosing to Congress that the administration had forced out the U.S. attorney in Little Rock, Ark., to make way for a protege of Karl Rove, President Bush's political adviser, according to documents released late Tuesday.

Then-White House political affairs director Sara Taylor spelled out her frustrations in a Feb. 16 e-mail to Kyle Sampson, then the chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

DOJ Expands Attorney Firing Investigation

May 31, 2007
DOJ Expands Attorney Firing Investigation

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department said Wednesday it has expanded its internal inquiry on the firing of U.S. attorneys into whether politics played a part in hiring career prosecutors.

In a rare note updating lawmakers on its investigation, the department said it also was looking into hiring practices within its Civil Rights Division. Lawmakers have questioned whether the division has hired prosecutors with strong political resumes but little civil rights experience.

The fired U.S. attorney says he was targeted for not pressing charges that could have helped the GOP

May 19, 2007
Fired U.S. attorney says he was targeted for not pressing charges that could have helped the GOP

Iglesias recounted the episode in an interview with The Times after meeting behind closed doors with federal investigators this week to provide new details of the events leading up to his termination as U.S. attorney. He said he now believed he was targeted because he was seen as slow to bring criminal charges that would have helped GOP election prospects.

Federal investigators are examining whether electoral considerations — such as a broader Republican initiative to enforce anti-fraud rules and cull questionable voters from rolls nationwide — played a part in the termination of Iglesias and other U.S. attorneys last year.

Voter-Fraud Complaints by GOP Drove Dismissals

May 14, 2007
Voter-Fraud Complaints by GOP Drove Dismissals

Nearly half the U.S. attorneys slated for removal by the administration last year were targets of Republican complaints that they were lax on voter fraud, including efforts by presidential adviser Karl Rove to encourage more prosecutions of election- law violations, according to new documents and interviews.

Democrats counter that such fraud is rare and that GOP efforts are designed to suppress legitimate votes by minorities, the elderly and recent immigrants, who are likely to support Democratic candidates. A draft report last year by the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan government panel that conducts election research, said that "there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud."

Gonzales blames his deputy for firings

May 15, 2007
Gonzales blames his deputy for firings

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday he relied on his outgoing deputy to determine which federal prosecutors should be fired last year.

Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, the No. 2 official at the Justice Department, submitted his resignation to Gonzales on Monday, the department announced.

"The recommendations reflected the views of the deputy attorney general. He signed off on the names," Gonzales said while responding to questions at a forum on the Justice Department's Safer Communities Initiative.

New Documents Show Republican Involvement in U.S. Attorney Firings

May 2, 2007
New Documents Show Republican Involvement in U.S. Attorney Firings

WASHINGTON There's a new development in the aftermath of the firing of several U-S attorneys, including Nevada's Daniel Bogden.

The Associated Press has learned that the Justice Department is investigating whether its former White House liaison used political affiliations in deciding whom to hire as entry-level prosecutors in some U-S attorney offices around the country.

Such consideration would be a violation of federal law.

The inquiry involves Monica Goodling, a conservative Republican who recently quit as counsel and White House liaison for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. It raises new concerns that politics have cast a shadow over the independence of trial prosecutors who enforce U-S laws.

Administration considered firing at least a dozen U.S. attorneys

April 27, 2007
Administration considered firing at least a dozen U.S. attorneys

WASHINGTON - Congressional sources who have seen unedited internal documents say the Bush administration considered firing at least a dozen U.S. attorneys before paring down its list to eight late last year. The four who escaped dismissal came from states considered political battlegrounds in the last presidential election: Missouri, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The latest revelation could provide new evidence to critics who contend that politics, not performance, played the determining role in the firings. The White House and the Justice Department have repeatedly denied that politics played any role.

WH Lie: Firings caused by failure to pursue voter fraud

April 15, 2007
WH Lie: Firings caused by failure to pursue voter fraud

When the public first learned about the firing of eight United States attorneys, administration officials piously declared that many of the prosecutors had ill served the public by failing to aggressively pursue voter fraud cases (against Democrats, naturally). But the more we examine this issue, the more ludicrous those claims seem.

Last week, we learned that the administration edited a government-ordered report on voter fraud to support its fantasy. The original version concluded that among experts "there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling place fraud." But the publicly released version said, "There is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud." It's hard to see that as anything but a deliberate effort to mislead the public.

Sound familiar? In President Bush's first term, a White House official, who had been the oil industry's front man in trying to discredit the science of global warming, repeatedly edited government reports to play down links between climate change and greenhouse gases. And then there was the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which turned reports on old, dubious and false tales about weapons of mass destruction into warnings of clear, present and supposedly mortal dangers.

Lawyer: Rove Didn't Mean to Delete Email

April 13, 2007
Lawyer: Rove Didn't Mean to Delete Email

Karl Rove's lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush's chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican-sponsored server, saying Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law.

The issue arose because the White House and Republican National Committee have said they may have lost e-mails from Rove and other administration officials. Democratically chaired congressional committees want those e-mails for their probe of the firings of eight federal prosecutors.

"His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived," Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said.

WITHOUT A TRACE: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records Act

April 12, 2007
WITHOUT A TRACE: The Missing White House Emails and the Violations of the Presidential Records Act

In a startling new revelation, CREW has also learned through two confidential sources that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) has lost over five million emails generated between March 2003 and October 2005. The White House counsel's office was advised of these problems in 2005 and CREW has been told that the White House was given a plan of action to recover these emails, but to date nothing has been done to rectify this significant loss of records.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said today, "It's clear that the White House has been willfully violating the law, the only question now is to what extent? The ever changing excuses offered by the administration – that they didn't want to violate the Hatch Act, that staff wasn't clear on the law – are patently ridiculous. Very convenient that embarrassing – and potentially incriminating – emails have gone missing. It's the Nixon White House all over again."

Gonzales Aide Goodling Resigns

April 6, 2007
Gonzales Aide Goodling Resigns

(CBS) WASHINGTON A top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales abruptly quit Friday, almost two weeks after telling Congress she would not testify about her role in the firings of federal prosecutors.

Monica M. Goodling, the Justice Department's liaison to the White House, gave no reason for her resignation. Since she was at the center of the firings, Goodling's refusal to testify has intensified questions about whether the U.S. attorney dismissals were proper and heightened the furor that threatens Gonzales' own job.

Monica Goodling, One of 150 Pat Robertson Cadres in the Bush Administration

March 30, 2007
Monica Goodling, One of 150 Pat Robertson Cadres in the Bush Administration

Monica Goodling, a previously unknown Justice Department official who served as liaison to the White House, has become a key figure in the Attorneygate scandal. When newly released emails revealed the prominent role Goodling played in engineering the firing of seven US Attorneys, Goodling pled the Fifth Amendment, refusing to testify under oath.

Josh Marshall writes that Goodling may be "afraid of indictment for perjury because she has to go up to Congress and testify under oath before the White House has decided what its story is."

Goodling's involvement in Attorneygate is not the only aspect of her role in the Bush administration that bears examination. Her membership in a cadre of 150 graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University currently serving in the administration is another, equally revealing component of the White House's political program.

Testimony that got so embarrassing for the White House that the Republicans tried to cut it off

March 30, 2007
Testimony that got so embarrassing for the White House that the Republicans tried to cut it off

In his Senate testimony yesterday, Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, tried to be a "loyal Bushie," a term Mr. Sampson used in his infamous e-mail message to describe what he was looking for in United States attorneys. But if Mr. Sampson was trying to fall on his sword, he had horrible aim. In testimony that got so embarrassing for the White House that the Republicans tried to cut it off, Mr. Sampson simply ended up making it clearer than ever that the eight prosecutors were fired for political reasons.

He provided more evidence, also, that the attorney general and other top Justice Department officials were dishonest in their initial statements about the firings.

Mr. Sampson flatly contradicted the attorney general's claim that he did not participate in the selection of the prosecutors to be fired and never had a conversation about "where things stood." Mr. Sampson testified that Mr. Gonzales was "aware of this process from the beginning," and that the two men regularly discussed where things stood. Mr. Sampson also confirmed that Mr. Gonzales was at the Nov. 27 meeting where the selected prosecutors' fates were sealed.

Sampson Says Gonzales Made False Statement

March 29, 2007
Sampson Says Gonzales Made False Statement

Specter asked about Gonzales' "candor" in saying earlier this month that he was not a part of any discussions on the firings. He asked about the November 27, 2006 meeting "where there were discussions" and Gonzales allegedly attended. Was Gonzales' statement about taking part in no discussions accurate?

"I don't think it's accurate," Sampson replied. "I think he's recently clarified it. But I remember discussing with him this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign, and I believe that he was present at the meeting on Nov. 27."

"So he was involved in discussions in contrast to his statement" this month? Specter asked.

"Yes," Sampson replied.