Today’s Must ReadLet’s take a look at one of the key lines of questioning that Alberto Gonzales is sure to face during his hearing tomorrow — a line of questioning made all the more damaging by the revelation in today’s papers of a senior Justice Department official’s testimony.
Michael Battle, until recently the director of the Executive Office for United States Attorneys which is the liaison between the U.S. attorneys and main Justice, told congressional investigators earlier this month that he was not aware of any “performance issues” for “several” of the prosecutors. The first he heard of any problems was when the order came down to fire them.
Let’s look at how this reflects on Gonzales.
Let us assume, as Gonzales wants us to assume, that he had nothing to do with the nitty-gritty aspects of the firings. He got the process rolling (placing it in the hands of the 30-something staffer who’d prosecuted a single case in his life), flitted in and out for the occasional and brief conversation with Kyle Sampson about how it was going, and then signed off on the list. Why they were fired? That was a niggling detail best left to subordinates. The big picture was that there were performance related reasons for the firings.
And Gonzales held on to that storyline, even when the very people tasked with managing U.S. attorneys abandoned it.
On February 6th, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He said that seven of the eight fired U.S. attorneys had been terminated for “performance related” reasons — but one of them, U.S. Attorney for Little Rock Bud Cummins, had not. Cummins had been asked to step aside for no other reason than to install Tim Griffin, Karl Rove’s former aide.
Now, McNulty’s testimony — with regard to Cummins, at least — was accurate. But it veered from the story.
And Gonzales was angry, or “extremely upset,” according to a February 7th email from his spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse: “The AG is extremely upset with the stories on the US Attys this morning. He also thought some of the DAG’s statements were inaccurate.”
When this email was released along with thousands of others last month, Roehrkasse explained just what Gonzales had been so upset about — because he believed that “Bud Cummins’ removal involved performance considerations and it was that aspect of the DAG’s testimony that the Attorney General was questioning.”
Now, one of the traditional roles of the deputy attorney general is to be the senior official in charge of the U.S. attorneys. If there had actually been a performance issue with a U.S. attorney, McNulty would have known about it, because it would have been his responsibility to do something. But even though the supposed performance issues with regard to a number of the U.S. attorneys were so shaky as to be something of a mystery even to McNulty (in a December 5th email, he wrote that he’s “skittish” about firing Nevada’s Daniel Bogden and admits to not having seen a performance review), he’d been unwilling to lie about Cummins.
And remember that Gonzales claims to know little or nothing about why these U.S. attorneys were actually fired. But he knew the reason they were supposed to be fired. And McNulty had screwed that story up.
In that February 7th email, Roehrkasse also wrote that Gonzales wanted to know what he could do to strike back, to clear the air. “I suggested a clearly worded op-ed,” Roehrkasse writes.
One month later, the day after another senior Justice official, William Moschella, testifed to Congress and enumerated the supposed performance reasons behind the firings, that op-ed finally appeared in USA Today.
The seven U.S. attorneys fired in December, Gonzales wrote (apparently excluding Cummins), “simply lost my confidence.” The whole scandal was “an overblown personnel matter.”
But why had those U.S. attorneys lost his confidence? Did Gonzales even know?
When Gonzales testifies, you can bet that Battle and McNulty will be as interested to hear what he says as the rest of us.
