Ousted USA: DoJ Smeared USAs with “Fabricated Assertions”

Speaking by phone today, former U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins made his view of the Justice Department’s firing of seven other U.S. attorneys perfectly clear: not only did the DoJ not fire them for performance-related reasons, but they fabricated such issues to cover that up.

Cummins is a unique case of the eight prosecutors, since the Justice Department has admitted that he was dismissed for no other reason than to give former aide to Karl Rove, Timothy Griffin, a job.

“I’ve heard every one of the [Justice Department’s “performance related” issues with the other dismissed US attorneys], and I’m completely convinced at this point that they are fabricated assertions, and that they were in no way on the table when the decisions to dismiss those seven USAs were made,” he told me, continuing:

“I gave them the benefit of the doubt at the beginning of this. They told me directly that my case was completely different from the others, that there were significant performance issues involved in the other decisions, and if I saw, I’d agree that they’d have to go.

Now that I’ve seen the decisions, not only don’t I see why they had to go, I see that [the charges of performance issues] are really not true.”

Cummins, who is a lifelong Republican, even running for the House once in the nineties, says that this was a “”reluctant conclusion,” but one he was forced to reach, and one he felt compelled to speak out about.

“When they made the decision to lie about these seven people to Congress, that’s when the trouble started,” he said.. Cummins added that if the Justice Department were to retract the statements that the others were fired for deficiencies in performance, “I’ll disappear.”