Calls for attorney general to resign miss real target 8 minutes ago
The case of the fired federal prosecutors keeps getting curiouser and curiouser, not to mention more odoriferous, with each passing day.
Let's see if we've got this straight.
Two years ago, the White House counsel suggested firing all 93 top federal prosecutors around the nation, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales quashed that as "a bad idea." Good move. The prosecutors are supposed to be kept free from political pressure.
But Gonzales' chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, then spent all those months orchestrating an elaborate plan to dump some of the prosecutors and circumvent Congress in naming replacements. On Dec. 7, seven U.S. attorneys in districts from Michigan to California were fired, an unprecedented move in the middle of a presidential term. An eighth had been sacked earlier.
Justice officials have offered an array of shifting and evasive explanations, and a gaggle of e-mails forced out by congressional demands reveal how they misled Congress about the purge.
Gonzales now says mistakes were made but he was clueless about the details. Sampson has already quit and, not surprisingly, several congressional Democrats and one GOP senator are calling on Gonzales to follow him out the door.
The cries for Gonzales' head, however, are premature and miss the point. The emerging evidence is that the plan was hatched and approved inside the White House. The Gonzales hubbub just diverts attention from the still murky White House role in these firings.
more:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20070316/cm_usatoday/callsforattorneygeneraltoresignmissrealtargetThe White House declined to provide an opposing view to this editorial. More from the Chicago Tribune about the emails:
~snip~
The moves came at a time when the Bush White House, and Rove in particular, were talking about the president's re-election as marking a major conservative realignment in the country, presenting the administration with the opportunity to remake much of the government. The revelation that Rove may have known more about the plan is likely to further embolden Democrats who are demanding that he testify in congressional hearings.
The White House maintains that Harriet Miers, who succeeded Gonzales as counsel early that year, had recommended dismissing all 93 federal prosecutors after the president's re-election in 2004, but that Rove and the Justice Department alike had rejected the idea.
An e-mail exchange obtained Thursday by the Tribune indicates that Rove knew of the discussion in early 2005.
On Jan. 6, 2005, an assistant White House counsel forwarded an e-mail with the subject line "Question from Karl Rove" to Kyle Sampson, then chief of staff at the Justice Department. The e-mail noted that earlier that day, Rove stopped by the counsel's office to ask "how we planned to proceed regarding US Attorneys, whether we were going to allow all to stay, request resignations from all and accept only some of them, or selectively replace them, etc."
White House spokesman Tony Fratto noted Thursday that the e-mail makes no mention of Rove expressing an opinion.
more:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0703160154mar16,1,5460132.story?track=rss
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