It’s certainly easy to get lost in the details of the US Attorney Purge story. I find myself having a hard time keeping all the players straight sometimes. But there are a series of recent developments that are important to understand. So I want to take a moment to describe them.
We’ve known for months now about eight fired US Attorneys. Seven fired on December 7th of last year, and one other, Bud Cummins, dismissed earlier in 2006.
For some time, though, it’s been clear that the administration was making Patriot Act appointments through 2006. There’s Rachel Paulose in Minneapolis, Bradley Schlozman in Kansas City and a few others. What’s been unclear until now is how their predecessors as US Attorney in those jurisdictions came to resign. Were they simply instances of normal turnover? Or were they pushed?
We, and others following this story, have had suspicions for some time that those US Attorneys who’d resigned in these two cases — Thomas Heffelfinger in Minneapolis and Todd Graves in Kansas City — were in fact pushed out by the Department of Justice. But both men had either denied being pushed or declined to discuss the matter.
But late last week McClatchy was able to report that both men appeared on earlier versions of the US Attorney list not long before they chose to resign.
Heffelfinger told McClatchy: “I had no indication whatsoever at any point during my service as U.S. attorney that anybody at Justice was less than fully satisfied with my work.” And he remained somewhat cryptic in a weekend interview with the Star-Tribune …
Heffelfinger said Friday that if his name did appear on a list for possible termination — something he won’t believe until he sees it himself — then it was because he may have displeased “one or two people with the Department of Justice.”
He said he was confident that he had not raised hackles in the White House or the Minnesota congressional delegation.
“This whole thing is bugging me,” Heffelfinger said of the press reports and speculation about whether he was shoved out the door to make room for a more clubby prosecutor.
“It’s been going on now for a couple of months, so I’d just as soon get it out in the open.”
Heffelfinger said he’s been trying to understand why he might have been targeted. “The only thing I can think of is my advocacy on behalf of Native American issues,” Heffelfinger said.
Like Heffelfinger, Graves didn’t really address directly whether there was any pushing behind his resignation but he told the Kansas City Star …
âI value the years I spent at DOJ (Department of Justice) and the friendships I forged there. But the current environment at the Department can only be described as toxic, and I am very thankful I leftâ¦What is going on now in DC is a three-ring circus, and I donât want to have anything to do with it.â
Neither guy seems particularly well-disposed toward the current crew at DOJ. But neither does either want to address specifically or elaborate on what caused their resignation. We’re left with the improbable possibility that both these US Attorneys the Gonzales-Sampson clique wanted to fire just happened to resign and make it easier for them.
Just what happened becomes more important when we see what Graves’ replacement Schlozman was up to in Kansas City — a subject we’re going to be covering in detail this week at TPMmuckraker.
Late Update: Minnesota Public Radio this morning ran an interview this morning in which Heffelfinger seems to say pretty definitively that he wasn’t pushed to resign by the DOJ.
