Today’s Must Read

Well, it’s finally time to hear from Kyle Sampson. You can read his opening statement for this morning’s hearing here (pdf).

Josh already gave a good introduction to the central aspect of Sampson’s testimony, his assertion that there’s nothing wrong with “political” motivations for the firings. It’s an idea Sampson most succinctly formulates here:

A U.S. Attorney who is unsuccessful from a political perspective, either because he or she has alienated the leadership of the Department in Washington or cannot work constructively with law enforcement or other governmental constituencies in the district important to effective leadership of the office, is unsuccessful.

The key question, of course, is how some of these U.S. attorneys managed to “alienate” Washington. Sampson denies that any of them were removed for “improper” reasons, which he defines in a lawyerly cadence as
to “interfere or influence the investigation or prosecution of a particular case for political or partisan advantage.”

So why were these eight U.S. attorneys removed? How did the department establish which prosecutors were “unsuccessful?” The “process was not scientific,” Sampson admits. “But neither was the process random or aribitrary.” It was a “consensus-based process based on input from senior Justice Department officials.” But how they arrived at that consensus, nobody knows.

For instance, here’s what Sampson is expected to say about U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias, via The Washington Post:

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said Sampson will describe the firing as the culmination of a series of complaints about Iglesias that hinged in part on three phone calls from [Sen. Pete] Domenici (R-NM) to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in 2005 and 2006 and another to Gonzales’s deputy last October. Iglesias was not added to the list of prosecutors to be fired until fall.

How did those complaints lead to that consensus-based decision? And what precisely were the complaints about? It’ll be interesting to hear Sampson tell the “benign story” that he says this is.

But there’s more. Sampson will also give a rather unflattering portrait of his boss, Alberto Gonzales. Here’s how this morning’s New York Times paints that portion of his testimony:

… over time, friends and former colleagues say, Mr. Sampson noticed what three people who worked with the attorney general separately called a pattern of “imprecision” in Mr. Gonzales’s public statements.

…friends said Mr. Sampson could not defend the accuracy of all of Mr. Gonzales’s statements in the case like his insistence that he had no personal involvement in planning the removals or selecting prosecutors.

Justice Department records show that Mr. Gonzales discussed the removals at a meeting on Nov. 27, 2006.

Mr. Gonzales “is not a litigator, and he is not an accomplished public speaker,” said a friend of Mr. Sampson who also worked with Mr. Gonzales, known as Judge Gonzales because he was on the Texas Supreme Court. “When the judge says, ‘I wasn’t involved,’ he means something specific. If you teased it out, you would figure out what it was he meant. But in the political world where you only get one shot, it comes across as misleading.”

Your attorney general: a lawyer who even his closest advisors admit is imprecise with language.