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E-mails show evidence of plan to fire U.S. attorneys

Richard B. Schmitt and Richard Simon Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON – Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales acknowledged Tuesday that “mistakes were made” in the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys last year, but he rejected new calls for his resignation from Democrats incensed by fresh evidence that the Bush administration inaccurately informed Congress about its role in the firings.

The increasing pressure on Gonzales coincided with the House Judiciary Committee’s release of e-mails between Justice Department officials and the White House detailing a quiet two-year campaign to oust U.S. attorneys who had fallen out of favor with the administration.

The e-mails undercut the sworn testimony of several Justice Department officials, including Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, the department’s No. 2 official, about the circumstances of the departures.

The e-mails and other documents show that the White House more than two years ago initiated the process that led to dismissals and that the decisions were heavily influenced by assessments of the prosecutors’ political loyalty. President Bush and senior White House adviser Karl Rove also separately passed along complaints to Gonzales that prosecutors were not aggressively pursuing voter fraud cases, officials said.

The matter over the U.S. attorneys comes to a head amid two weeks of repeated blows to the administration. The uproar over conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center triggered multiple investigations and resignations. The perjury trial of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top aide, ended in the conviction of the highest-ranking White House official in two decades. And an internal investigation uncovered an array of FBI abuses of intelligence-gathering powers.

The Senate Judiciary Committee stepped up its investigation into the dismissals of the U.S. attorneys Tuesday, sending letters seeking cooperation from past and present White House officials, including Rove. The panel also sent letters to Gonzales and White House counsel Fred Fielding seeking related documents.

At a hastily called media briefing, Gonzales accepted responsibility for the ouster of the eight prosecutors and acknowledged that the situation had been poorly handled. But he said he would continue in the job and pinned most of the blame on the failure of his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, to keep him and other department officials informed. Sampson resigned Monday.

“I am here not because I give up,” Gonzales said. “I am here because I’ve learned from my mistakes, because I accept responsibility and because I’m committed to doing my job, and that is what I intend to do.”

Gonzales previously had called it an overblown personnel matter, but Democrats ratcheted up their pressure on him Tuesday.

“It appears to me he is over his head in this job,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, of New York, who has led the charge for Gonzales to resign, said, “Either Attorney General Gonzales knew what his chief of staff was doing – that’s a pretty severe indictment – or he didn’t, which means he doesn’t have the foggiest idea of what’s going on in the Justice Department.”

Even some Republicans expressed concern about Gonzales’ leadership but added that they were withholding judgment.

“I want to see if he’s willing to make the changes that are necessary at the Department of Justice because things have been handled poorly up to this point,” said Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. “We’re going to find out what kind of leader he is during this crisis.”

GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a Judiciary Committee member, said the situation could cause Gonzales to “die by a thousand cuts.”

The White House defended the attorney general and the firings. “The decision, the original decision to remove the seven U.S. attorneys who serve at the discretion of the president, was the right decision,” presidential counselor Dan Bartlett said during a briefing in Merida, Mexico.

Bartlett acknowledged that in October, after receiving complaints from members of Congress, Bush discussed with Gonzales the issue of whether U.S. attorneys were adequately enforcing voter-fraud laws. But the conversation was routine and appropriate, Bartlett said, adding that the two men did not discuss any specific prosecutors.

“There was no directive given, as far as telling him to fire anybody or anything like that,” he said.

Bartlett disputed the notion that Sampson had become a scapegoat for misconduct elsewhere in the administration. Sampson, meanwhile, could not be reached for comment.

The president appoints U.S. attorneys in each of the 93 federal court districts, so their selection is inherently political. But Democrats have charged that, with these dismissals, the Bush administration has set a dangerous precedent. None of the eight prosecutors removed last year had been accused of misconduct while in office. Some of those fired have said they felt pressured by Republicans in their home states to investigate Democrats.

Gonzales’ supporters have cited the removal of every U.S. attorney by President Clinton when he took office in 1993 as evidence that political motives always have infused the selection of U.S. attorneys.

On Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., sought to differentiate that situation from the current one.

“When a new president comes in, a new president gets to clean house,” she said in an interview to be broadcast today on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “It’s not done on a case-by-case basis where you didn’t do what some senator or member of Congress told you to do in terms of investigations into your opponents. It is ‘Let’s start afresh’ – and every president has done that.”

The current controversy arose when seven U.S. attorneys were dismissed on one day in December. Last summer, an eighth was replaced by a former aide to Rove.

When reports of the firings surfaced, the Justice Department said they were internal decisions based on performance.

But the e-mails show the White House was involved in the firings from the beginning, and that officials there regularly passed on information to the Justice Department about complaints regarding individual prosecutors and how and when to replace them.

At least two of the e-mails released Tuesday show that White House deputy political director J. Scott Jennings communicated with Justice officials last August about the appointment of Tim Griffin, a former Rove aide, to be the U.S. attorney in Little Rock.

The purge began with a suggestion by then-White House counsel Harriet E. Miers in February 2005 that all 93 U.S. attorneys be replaced, apparently in a gesture to give other Republican lawyers a chance to burnish their resumes.

Gonzales said he rejected that idea and detailed Sampson to evaluate whether individual prosecutors should be dismissed. Eventually, Sampson worked out a five-step “Plan for Replacing Certain United States Attorneys,” complete with instructions and talking points.