DoJ Official: “I Am Shocked and Baffled”

One of the more damning pieces of testimony yesterday came from Bud Cummins, who received a call from a Justice Department official on February 20th wtih a clear message: if the fired proscutors continued speaking out, then the department would be forced to hit back and dish dirt on them.

Now that official, Michael Elston, the chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, has sent a letter to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to give his side of the story (you can read his letter here). In it, Elston claims that he’s “shocked and baffled” at Cummins’ interpretation of the call: “I do not understand how anything that I said to him in our last conversation in mid-February could be construed as a threat of any kind.”

Let’s review what happened. In a February 19th article in The Washington Post, Cummins was quoted on the firings:

“They’re [the Justice Department] entitled to make these changes for any reason or no reason or even for an idiotic reason,… But if they are trying to suggest that people have inferior performance to hide whatever their true agenda is, that is wrong. They should retract those statements.”

The next day, Cummins got a call from Elston. And very unfortunately for the Justice Department, Cummins sent out an email no more than an hour after the call to the other fired prosecutors (you can see it here):

The essence of his message was that they feel like they are taking unnecessary flak to avoid trashing each of us specificially or further, but if they feel like any of us intend to continue to offer quotes to the press, or organize behind the scenes congressional pressure, then they would feel forced to somehow pull their gloves off and offer public criticisms to defend their actions more fully…. I was tempted to challenge him and say something movie-like such as “are you threatening ME???”, but instead I kind of shrugged it off…

Cummins, a lifelong Republican, continues in the email to refer to Elston’s “threat of retaliation” and the “threatening undercurrent in the call.” So it was abundantly clear to him that he was being threatened.

The most inflammatory part of the email is Cummins’ description of Elston’s reaction to the idea of the fired prosecutors testifying before Congress:

“He reacted quite a bit to the idea of anyone voluntarily testifying and it seemed clear that they would see that as a major escalation of the conflict meriting some kind of unspecified form of retaliation.”

It was based on this that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in his questioning yesterday, drew an analogy between Elston’s call and obstruction of justice in a criminal investigation — an analogy which all four prosecutors agreed to.

But Elston, in his letter, denies that he’s ever discouraged anyone from testifying before Congress:

I respect the role of Congress in our constitutional system, and I have never suggested to anyone that it would be appropriate to withhold information or testimony from Congress.

He says he’d told Cumins that “the Department had no position on whether he should testify, and that he should testify if he wanted to testify or decline to testify if he did not want to testify.”

That’s some kind of misunderstanding.