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(Photo: AP)
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Gonzales found himself at the center of the storm over the firings.
On Aug. 27, 2007, Gonzales resigned, ending the months-long standoff with Republican and Democratic critics who called for his ouster.
Democrats had accused the Justice Department of playing politics with the prosecutors' jobs. Top Justice officials, including Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, had maintained in congressional testimony the dismissals were based on the prosecutors' performance, not politics.
E-mails released between Harriet Miers and Kyle Sampson, then Gonzales' top aide, showed a two-year campaign between the White House and the Justice Department to fire prosecutors. The correspondence also included e-mails from J. Scott Jennings, the White House deputy political director, who used an e-mail address registered to the Republican National Committee.
Gonzales said he had a "general knowledge" of Sampson's conversations with Miers about the prosecutors but said "I was obviously not aware of all communications."
"What Al did, and what the Justice Department did, was appropriate," President Bush said of the firings. " ... What was mishandled was the explanation of the cases to the Congress."
Several Democrats had demanded that Gonzales resign, among them presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards.
"We are going to work with Congress to make sure they know what happened," Gonzales said. "We want to ensure that they have a complete and accurate picture of what happened here."
Sampson has resigned; Miers left the administration early this year.
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