DoJ Purge Figure ResignsNothing like a Friday afternoon resignation to end the week.
A senior Justice Department official who helped carry out the firings of eight U.S. attorneys 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.
The firings have led to congressional investigations, an internal Justice Department inquiry and calls on Capitol Hill for the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
Elston’s resignation is effective at the end of next week. Reached Friday afternoon, he confirmed his plans to leave but would not say why….
Other aides who have resigned in the wake of the firings include former Gonzales chief of staff Kyle Sampson and White House liaison Monica M. Goodling. A fifth official, Mike Battle, who ran the Justice office that oversees the U.S. attorneys, left in March.
Update: Some highlights from Elston’s tenure at DoJ:
— He allegedly called three of the fired U.S. attorneys and made an implicit threat that the Justice Department would detail the reasons for their firings if they didn’t stay quiet.
— He allegedly rejected a large number of applicants to Justice Department positions because they were Democrats.
— When Carol Lam, the former U.S. attorney for San Diego, asked to stay on the job longer in order to deal with some outstanding prosecutions (the expanding Duke Cunningham case among them), Elston told her not to think about her cases, that she should be gone in “weeks, not months” and said “these instructions were ‘coming from the very highest levels of the government.'”
— He called around to the U.S. attorneys whom he had placed on one of the draft firing lists to apologize when he discovered that his list would be turned over to Congress.
