Justice Department Says Letter on Firings Inaccurate

March 28, 2007
Justice Department Says Letter on Firings Inaccurate

March 28 (Bloomberg) -- The Justice Department said it provided inaccurate information to members of Congress in a February letter about the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

Writing today to lawmakers investigating the terminations, the agency's acting head of legislative affairs, Richard Hertling, said that "certain statements" in the Feb. 23 letter were contradicted by documents that the department provided to Congress this month. Hertling didn't specify what the misstatements were.

The Feb. 23 letter to Democratic lawmakers discussed the appointment of Timothy Griffin, a former aide to White House political adviser Karl Rove, to a U.S. attorney position in Arkansas. The letter said Rove had no role in the decision to appoint Griffin and that nobody "inside or outside of the administration" lobbied for Griffin's appointment.

Justice Department besieged by charges of cronyism

March 5, 2007
Justice Department besieged by charges of cronyism

The administration has said eight prosecutors were told to leave, all but one for performance-related reasons. However, Democrats have suggested ever more pointedly that politics was behind many of the dismissals, and the Domenici revelation fueled that idea.

Six of those fired, meanwhile, issued a stiff defense of their conduct and implied that they had had differences with Justice Department officials in Washington.

The Justice Department, besieged by charges of cronyism, acknowledged that lawmakers — both Republican and Democratic — had complained about several of the eight.

One, David Iglesias of New Mexico, was the subject of four phone calls from Domenici to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his deputy questioning whether the prosecutor was "up to the job," department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said.

Mass Firing Puts Justice on the Hot Seat

March 12, 2007 issue
Mass Firing Puts Justice on the Hot Seat

March 12, 2007 issue - The firings of eight U.S. attorneys has put the heat on top Justice Department officials—and some GOP members of Congress. The unusual mass dismissals took place late last year, but the controversy escalated last week when David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney in New Mexico, went public with a dramatic charge: that he had gotten phone calls from two unidentified GOP lawmakers in D.C. last October, pressing him to bring indictments in a high-profile corruption case involving a prominent local Democrat before the November election.

Former Justice and Interior Officials Targeted

February 15, 2007
Former Justice and Interior Officials Targeted

The inquiry by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was announced hours after The Associated Press reported that the prosecutor, Sue Ellen Wooldridge, bought a $1 million vacation home on Kiawah Island, S.C., with ConocoPhillips Vice President Donald R. Duncan, nine months before agreeing to let the company delay a half-billion-dollar pollution cleanup. It was one of two proposed consent decrees Wooldridge signed with ConocoPhillips just before resigning last month.

The third buyer of the beachshore getaway was former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles, the highest-ranking Bush administration official targeted for criminal prosecution in the Jack Abramoff corruption probe.

Administration employed extraordinary secrecy in defending NSA surveillance

January 26, 2007
Administration employed extraordinary secrecy in defending NSA surveillance

Some cases challenging the program, which monitored international communications of people in the United States without court approval, have also involved atypical maneuvering. Soon after one suit challenging the program was filed last year in Oregon, Justice Department lawyers threatened to seize an exhibit from the court file.

This month, in the same case, the department sought to inspect and delete files from the computers on which lawyers for the plaintiffs had prepared their legal filings.