Entries for March 19, 2007

U.S. News's Chitra Ragavan has learned that one day after Justice Department Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty testified on Capitol Hill about the reasons eight U.S. attorneys were summarily fired, a Justice Department spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse--who was traveling abroad with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in Argentina -- sent an E-mail to Gonzales' chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, and spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos saying Gonzales was unhappy with McNulty's testimony regarding why U.S. attorney Bud Cummins of Arkansas had been let go. That E-mail is what is causing the most concern at the Justice Department among the 2000 pages of documents about to be released on Capitol Hill in the next hour.

On February 6, McNulty acknowledged during contentious testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Cummins had been fired because the administration wanted to name Timothy Griffin, a former aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove, who had also worked for the Republican National Committee. But McNulty said the firings of the other prosecutors were related to their poor performance.

During the hearings, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York posed the following question to McNulty: "First, Bud Cummins has said that he was told he had done nothing wrong and he was simply being asked to resign to let someone else have the job. Does he have it right?"

McNulty: "I'll accept that as being accurate, as best I know the facts."

Schumer: "So, in other words, Bud Cummins was fired for no reason. There was no cause."

McNulty: "No cause provided in his case, as I am aware of it.

Schumer: "None at all. And was there anything materially negative in his evaluations, in his EARS reports or anything like that? From the reports that everyone has received, he had done an outstanding job and had gotten good evaluations. Do you believe that to be true?"

McNulty: "I don't know of anything that's negative, and I haven't seen his reports, or probably only one that was done during his tenure, but I haven't seen it. But I'm not aware of anything."

McNulty's responses earned Gonzales's displeasure and Roehrkasse communicated that fact to McNulty.

In the E-mail, Roehrkasse said the attorney general disagreed with his characterization of Cummins's firing, because Gonzales believed that it was at least in part performance related.

The E-mail shows an internal rift between top leadership over how to portray the firings, and indeed the reasons for the firings.

Update: Roehrkasse has issued a statement saying that he had emailed Sampson very early in the morning on February 7, the day after McNulty's testimony, to convey the attorney general's "concerns" about news stories relating to McNulty's congressional hearing. "Many of the stories early that morning focused on the fact that Bud Cummins was removed as U.S. attorney," said Roehrkasse, "solely to make room for another candidate." The attorney general was "upset," Roehrkasse said, 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 questing."

Among the 2,000 pages, there were a handful of other documents that are causing concern at the Justice Department, sources said, because they "may not put things in a great light" and could be seen as Justice officials' "potentially misleading" Congress, sources said, which is the key concern among members of Congress.

Note: An earlier edition of this story indicated that the email was sent to McNulty, when in fact it was sent to Sampson and Scolinos.

More from chief legal affairs correspondent Chitra Ragavan:

The Justice Department is expected to release more than 400 pages of E-mails and documents by close of business today to comply with a demand from Democrats in Congress over the growing crisis regarding the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year. The crisis has engulfed the department and threatens to cut short Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's tenure.

Update: The Justice Department now says the document dump will contain closer to 2000 documents.

"You have no idea," said one Justice official, "how bad it is here."

The fear that virtually any piece of communication will have to be turned over has paralyzed department officials' ability to communicate effectively and respond in unison to the crisis, as has the fact that senior Justice officials themselves say they still don't know the entire story about what happened that led to the crisis. So they are afraid that anything they put down on paper could be viewed as lies or obfuscation, when in fact, the story is changing daily as new documents are found and as the Office of Legal Counsel conducts its own internal probe into the matter.

Susan Peebles in New York asks, "Who put that provision in the Patriot Act [that circumvented Senate confirmation for U.S. attorney appointments]?"

Congressional sources tell Chief Legal Affairs Correspondent Chitra Ragavan that the provision was put into the Senate bill at the administration's request, during the ongoing discussions on the bill involving Sen. Arlen Specter's office and others, including the White House and the House of Representatives.

The convergence of two unrelated events in Southern California last May has left a lot of unanswered questions in the investigation of why U.S. Attorney Carol Lam ultimately lost her job seven months later.

In an E-mail from Kyle Sampson, then the chief of staff to the attorney general, to White House deputy counsel William Kelley on May 11, 2006, Sampson cryptically referred to "the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam that leads me to conclude that we should have someone ready to be nominated on 11/18, the day her 4-year term expires."

The day before, Lam had contacted the Justice Department to inform it of search warrants issued for Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who had just resigned as No. 3 official at the CIA and was eventually indicted in connection with a bribery scandal that put former Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham behind bars. Two days later, the FBI raided Foggo's home and former office.

A report out today from Nielsen Media Research says that the average U.S. home received 104.2 channels in 2006. And we're watching them; the average household tuned in to 15 percent of those channels for at least 10 minutes a week.

The number of channels each household receives has jumped by over 40 since 2000, when U.S. homes averaged 61.4 channels.

In news that is perhaps even more indicative of the collapse of western civilization, the typical "TV home" now averages more television sets than it does people (2.8 TVs and 2.5 people).

In other news out of Nielsen today, advertising spending rose 4.6 percent last year.

Etc.: Got Bad Approval Ratings? Go on TV, on USNews.com

With the Washington establishment increasingly singing the eulogy of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, chief legal affairs correspondent Chitra Ragavan takes a close look at where he came from and where he has erred.

"Over the past three months, Gonzales's explanations and those of his top politicos as to why eight U.S. attorneys were fired in the middle of Bush's second term have changed, and changed, and changed," Ragavan writes. "The first lone-wolf iteration, as it were, was that Gonzales's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, had come up with the plan without Gonzales's say-so, after nixing an idea for a broader purge from then White House counsel Harriet Miers to fire all 93 U.S. attorneys."

Meanwhile, the odds of Gonzales resigning before the end of the month at the online betting house Intrade.com are sitting at 47 percent as we write. Could today's document dump significantly raise or lower the odds?

Stay tuned for a closer look at ousted Southern California U.S. Attorney Carol Lam as well.

Video: The U.S. Attorneys Scandal

Etc.: Why Did Clinton Fire All the U.S. Attorneys? at the News Desk on USNews.com

On the Campaign Trail today:

Sam Brownback is in Manchester, N.H., for a meeting with supporters and religious leaders.

John Edwards tours Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., and then hops the border to Charlotte, N.C., for a concert with Boyd Tinsley of the Dave Matthews Band.

John McCain visits an apartment complex for homeless veterans in Nashua, N.H., called "Buckingham Place" and then heads to Philadelphia for a fundraiser.

Barack Obama officially opens his New Hampshire office in Manchester today, celebrating with former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Then he's off to Oklahoma for a fundraiser.

From the U.S. News Political Bulletin: A possible presidential bid by former Tennesse Sen. Fred Thompson is making other candidates nervous. Meanwhile, John McCain tries to defuse concerns over his age with humor.