Fired attorney finds new calling

SEATTLE – U.S. Reps. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., and Jay Inslee, D-Wash., were angered enough by the Justice Department’s firing of Seattle U.S. Attorney John McKay that they suggested he be given his job back.

McKay’s response? Thanks, but no thanks.

“I appreciate the idea, but I don’t think that’s a reasonable outcome here,” McKay said after teaching his Seattle University Law School class this week. “It would not be right for me to go back.”

McKay said that right now he’s more interested in focusing on his students, as tough as that has been given the distractions of media requests and congressional inquiries.

McKay was fired along with seven other U.S. attorneys around the country, and the Justice Department’s shifting rationale for the cuts – as well as the perception that they may have been politically motivated – have drastically eroded support for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales among both parties.

Gonzales’ former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, was scheduled to testify before a U.S. Senate panel today. About a month before putting McKay on the list of U.S. attorneys to be pushed out, Sampson tried to help him win a federal judgeship in Seattle, writing to the White House, “It’s highly unlikely that we could do better.”

McKay began teaching the constitutional law and terrorism class in January, relying in part on his experience in cases against “millennium bomber” Ahmed Ressam and James Ujaama, a Seattle native convicted of providing material support to the Taliban. His guest speakers have included U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour, who ruled on Ressam’s case.

Last week, McKay devoted 25 minutes of class to discussing the U.S. attorney controversy with his students.

“I told them that I consider it a distraction, but that maybe there was some learning for them in my misery,” he said.

Several students said he shouldn’t be worried.

“It hasn’t detracted from the class at all,” said second-year law student Donny Miller. “We wade through a lot of tedious stuff in law school, so to have a professor who’s involved on a national level, it spices things up a bit.”

Another student, Orion Inskip, agreed that hearing about the U.S. attorney firings “from the horse’s mouth” enhances the class, which focuses largely on the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror.

“This administration has spent its whole time testing the limits of what the president can do,” Inskip said. “The firings of the U.S. attorneys adds to that.”