About 26 prosecutors considered in firings
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department considered dismissing many more U.S. attorneys than officials have previously acknowledged, with at least 26 prosecutors suggested for termination between February 2005 and December 2006, according to sources familiar with documents withheld from the public.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified last week that the effort was limited to eight U.S. attorneys fired since June, and other administration officials have said that only a few others were suggested for removal.
In fact, Gonzales’ former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, recommended more than two dozen U.S. attorneys for termination, according to lists compiled by him and his colleagues, the sources said.
They amounted to more than a quarter of the nation’s 93 U.S. attorneys, including prosecutors from Colorado to Mississippi and from Oklahoma to Florida. At least 13 of those known to have been targeted are still in their posts.
It is unclear how many knew they had been considered for removal. “Really? I wasn’t aware of that,” U.S. Attorney Paula Silsby of Maine said Wednesday when asked about her inclusion on the lists. Silsby’s name crops up frequently, first in February 2005 and subsequently three more times, most recently a month before most of the dismissals were carried out last December.
The number of names on the lists demonstrates the breadth of the search for prosecutors to dismiss. The names also hint at a casual process in which the people who were most consistently considered for replacement were not always those ultimately told to leave.
When shown the lists of firing candidates late Wednesday, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., perhaps the most outspoken critic of the way Gonzales handled the prosecutor dismissals, said they “show how amok this process was.”
“When you start firing people for invalid reasons, just about anyone can end up on a list,” he said. “It looks like the process was out of control, and if it hadn’t been discovered, more would have been fired.”
Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the department would not confirm which U.S. attorneys were included on the lists. He said they “reflect Kyle Sampson’s thoughts for discussion during the consultation process” and were often compiled long before the bulk of the firings were carried out.
One memo sent to Sampson in November from Michael Elston, chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, suggested firing Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh, who supervised the nation’s prosecutors for a year and now heads the Office of Violence Against Women, sources said.
The same e-mail also listed prosecutor Christopher Christie in New Jersey, a major GOP donor who has undertaken several high-profile public corruption probes – including one into the real estate deals of Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J. – and who announced indictments in a terrorism case last week.
Reached Wednesday night, Christie said Elston contacted him in mid-March. Elston told him that he had put Christie’s name on a Nov. 1, 2006, list along with four other U.S. attorneys and that a redacted copy was being turned over to Congress.
“I was completely shocked. No one had ever told me that my performance had been anything but good,” Christie said. “I specifically asked him why he put my name on the list. He said he couldn’t give me an explanation.”
He added that Elston apologized but that he refused to accept it.
The Justice documents that contain the names of firing candidates have been released in censored form as part of the congressional probe into the U.S. attorney firings. The public versions of those records include only the names of U.S. attorneys that Justice has acknowledged firing last year.
But sources who have examined or been briefed on the full records identified at least 26 names in total, including the nine prosecutors fired last year and another, Karl K. “Kasey” Warner, of Charleston, W.Va., who was dismissed in August 2005. The remaining 16 include three who resigned from their posts after appearing on one or more lists.