New details emerge on Todd Graves’ firing. The White House told Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) that Graves was canned for “performance” reasons. But that’s not what DOJ told Graves in his firing call. We’ve got the scoop at TPMmuckraker.
(ed.note: As I mentioned over the weekend, our new reporter-blogger, Laura McGann, started at TPMmuckraker.com on Monday. And in the post linked above, she was, to the best of my knowledge, the first to report on the firing call Graves received back in January 2006. The Times followed a short time later with more details — jmm.)
(ed.note: Sticking up for your reporters on the night shift edition: The Times also has an excellent editorial in Thursday’s paper on the Graves-Schlozman story. The editorialist notes that in addition to the rest of Schlozman’s sundry villainies, “McClatchy Newspapers reported that Mr. Schlozman also has been accused of hiring Justice Department lawyers based on their political party.” I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Paul Kiel first reported this story two weeks prior to McClatchy’s piece. You can see Paul’s original piece here — jmm.)
Late Update: Now there are reports on the story from WaPo and the Post-Dispatch. Beyond the details of Graves’ ouster and replacement by Bradley Schlozman, which we’ve been discussing for several days, there are two key points to focus on here. The first is that the congressional investigation has been going on for some three months. And the Department of Justice has repeatedly stated that eight US Attorneys were fired. That was clearly false. And there’s a second point. We now know of several cases in which US Attorneys appeared on DOJ firing lists and then by supposed coincidence just happened to resign. The Graves revelation now puts the weight of evidence strongly in the favor of the conclusion that few if any of these resignations were unforced. No proof yet. But that has to be the assumption.
And there’s one more point with respect to tomorrow’s testimony by Attorney General Gonzales. There’s been a lot of back and forth and speculation about all the faulty memories, the fact that virtually every senior official at DOJ has denied any role in actually choosing the names on the firing list and all the various claims of privilege. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is all of a piece. For three months the White House and the clique around Attorney General Gonzales have been involved in a concerted effort to cover up what happened here. And the intensity of the effort points to how bad the real story is. This has been obvious to anyone who has been following this story closely since January. But the fact that the DOJ has been collectively lying about the number of fired US Attorneys for all these months just confirms how true it is. Consider this: with all the document dumps, no emails or documents relating to Graves’ firing? How can that be? The truth is that we still know very little about what happened here. Very little.
