Overlooked in the news: Justice Dept confirms evidence of White House political meddling in firing of US state attorneys
The Justice Department conducted as thorough an investigation as it could, and it concluded that there was evidence of White House political meddling in “at least three of the removals.”
As far as the team of investigators could determine from the limited evidence they were allowed to uncover, what we suspected and feared seems to have been true. The Bush administration seems to have removed at least three federal prosecutors — who are supposed to be even-handed and apolitical in the way they do their jobs — for partisan political reasons.
Missouri U.S. attorney Todd Graves “was told to resign because of a political dispute among Missouri politicians, not because of an objective assessment of his performance.” Specifically the dispute was between Republican Sen. Christopher S. “Kit” Bond and Graves’s brother, a Republican congressman.
Arkansas U.S. attorney Bud Cummins was removed “to provide a position for former White House official Tim Griffin.”
New Mexico U.S. attorney David Iglesias was removed because of complaints from Republican Sen. Pete Domenici and other GOP officials and party activists who believed he was not being aggressive enough in pursuing certain voter fraud and public corruption cases — by happenstance, cases against Democrats. Gonzales and his deputies at Justice never looked into Iglesias’s handling of those cases or asked him about them. They just fired him.
The sheer contempt and arrogance of this administration is just appalling. January 20 can’t come soon enough.
