Another thread to follow in the U.S. attorney scandal:
The U.S. attorney position in Alaska opened Jan. 23, 2006, when Timothy Burgess left to become a U.S. district judge. His first assistant, Deborah Smith, was named acting U.S. attorney that day. U.S. attorneys are typically nominated by the president and approved by the Senate. Traditionally, Alaskaâs two U.S. senators send the names of one or more Alaskans to the White House for consideration. Sen. Murkowski said her clear choice was Smith, a career prosecutor who started out in the federal prosecutorâs office in Anchorage in 1982 and worked in Boston and Washington.
Sen. Stevens wouldnât reveal his choices.
After submitting Smithâs name, Murkowski said in a telephone interview, her legislative director periodically called the White House during the first part of 2006 to check the status of the nomination.
âWeâd get these vague, ‘Oh, weâre still working on it, still working on it,â â Murkowski said. âSo it gets to the point where youâre thinking, ‘Wait a minute, this has been a heck of a long time. What is happening?â And so the response to my inquiry is, ‘We still havenât, thereâs some issues,â and ultimately what we got back was, ‘The picks were not acceptable by the White House,â and yet no explanation as to why theyâre not acceptable.â
When she was in Alaska for the August 2006 recess, Murkowskiâs Blackberry vibrated with a message. It was her chief aide in Alaska, Mary Hughes, citing a media report that Nelson Cohen had been named interim U.S. attorney.
âYou just think, ‘It canât be, wait.â There was no consulting, no process, no nothing. Thatâs where I was certainly caught blindsided,â Murkowski said.
Stevens, himself a former federal prosecutor in Alaska, was enraged. âI am just furious at the way the attorney general handled this,â he said at the time.
In an interview at his office in the Federal Building last week, Cohen said he was unaware of all the political forces that resulted in his appointment. But he knew his boss, [Mary Beth] Buchanan, was well-connected, and it was she who told him about the opening in Alaska.
Mary Beth Buchanan is the U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh and preceded Michael Battle as head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys. She is on the list of folks that Rep. John Conyers is seeking to interview as part of his committee’s ongoing investigation.
So here’s a question for Conyers’ crew to ask: Why was Cohen’s appointment so important to the White House that it bypassed both of Alaska’s Republican senators?
