Top aide proposed replacements a year before firings

Top aide proposed replacements a year before firings
By David Johnston and Eric Lipton
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
Published April 14, 2007

WASHINGTON -- A Justice Department e-mail message released on Friday shows that the former chief of staff to Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales proposed replacement candidates for U.S. attorneys nearly a year before they were fired in December 2006, contradicting repeated statements by department officials that no successors had been selected before the dismissals.

The Jan. 9, 2006, message, written by Kyle Sampson, who resigned last month as the top aide to Gonzales, identified five Bush administration officials, most of them Justice Department employees, whose names were sent to the White House for consideration as replacements.

The e-mail and several related documents provide the first evidence that Sampson, the Justice Department official in charge of the dismissals, had focused on who would succeed the ousted prosecutors. Justice Department officials have said repeatedly that seven of the eight prosecutors were removed without regard to their successors.

The e-mails were among more than 2,000 pages of documents released by the Justice Department as part of a continuing outpouring of more than 6,000 pages of e-mails and other internal records produced in the past month in response to requests by House and Senate committees as the furor over the dismissals has grown.

Gonzales is scheduled to appear Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Some of the new documents show the department's acute awareness of individual U.S. attorneys' political and ideological views. A spreadsheet attached to an e-mail message on Feb. 12 listed the federal prosecutors who had served under President Bush along with their past work experience.


List said to be 'initial thoughts'

The chart included a category for Republican Party and campaign work, showing who had been a delegate to a Republican convention or had managed a GOP campaign. The chart had a separate category indicating who among the prosecutors was a member of the Federalist Society, a Washington-based association that serves as a talent pool for young conservatives seeking work in GOP administrations.

Taken together, Democrats asserted, the e-mails supported their contention that the fired attorneys were dismissed to make room for favored candidates who were chosen on the basis of political qualifications.

The Justice Department said that Sampson's e-mail message did not contradict either his sworn testimony or the department's past statements. Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the department, said: "We have consistently stated that, with the exception of [Timothy] Griffin, individuals were not preselected for any of the eight U.S. attorney positions prior to asking the U.S. attorneys to resign. The list made public today had previously been shared privately with Congress, and it in no way contradicts the department's prior statement. The list ... reflects Kyle Sampson's initial thoughts, not preselected candidates by the administration."

Sampson's lawyer, Bradford Berenson, also denied that the e-mail contradicted Sampson's testimony last month.

The electronic messages, some written as recently as March, offer a rare and almost contemporaneous account of the tactics used by a sitting administration attempting to manage a political firestorm.

Rove's e-mail trail

The possible replacements selected by Sampson -- with the exception of Griffin, an aide to Bush adviser Karl Rove -- never materialized, at least in part because the controversy pushed aside consideration of who will fill the vacancies. But it is clear from actions taken over the past two years that agency officials had placed lawyers from department headquarters, who were known to be loyal to Gonzales and the president, into open posts.

Meanwhile, a lawyer said that Rove did not intentionally delete e-mail to avoid creating a paper trail detailing his work. Rather, Rove mistakenly thought that the messages were being preserved by the Republican National Committee.

"Karl has always understood that his RNC e-mails were being archived," Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, said in an interview.

In addition to their government e-mail addresses, Rove and 21 other White House officials maintain e-mail accounts with the national committee that are supposed to be used for political business only.

The White House has said some e-mail messages from the political accounts are missing and it is working to recover them.