Fired DOJ Attorneys Shocked By Pink Slips
By CBS News Justice Department producer Stephanie Lambidakis
It was December 6th and the Attorney General's invitation-only holiday party was in high gear. Alberto Gonzales was in a festive mood greeting the crowd of legal luminaries over shrimp cocktail, thanking his top lieutenants for their hard work.
But at that very moment, seven of Gonzales' generals, all of them United States Attorneys, were about to get anything but a "job well done" message. Conversely, they were about to get the axe - all of them - the very next day.
The Attorney General didn't summon them to Washington to fire them, though. That unpleasant job fell to an underling who called them up and demanded their resignations while offering no explanation for the terminations.
As the mass firings and the political aftermath bounce around Washington and Capitol Hill, nowhere is the pain felt more acutely than within the Justice Department and especially among its ranks of prosecutors – those fighting the war against terrorists, violent criminals, drug dealers and pedophiles.
Along with shock, there is rage that Gonzales, with the White House's blessing, has tampered with the long-standing tradition of changing US Attorneys only when an administration changes hands, unless a prosecutor engages in misconduct. Case in point: former US Attorney Kendall Coffey, who was fired by former AG Janet Reno after biting a stripper when he had lost a case.
For those who got fired, losing the power and prestige of a US attorney job was only the first indignity. When the firings became public, anonymous officials speaking "on background" blamed the prosecutors for "performance-related problems." Then the Attorney General and his top deputy put it on the record. The ever-cautious prosecutors held their fire until the US Attorney in Little Rock, Arkansas, H.E. "Bud" Cummins III told Dan Eggen of the Washington Post that he was surprised to find out that a Karl Rove protégé had been tapped to take his job.
The Justice Department went ballistic. Even though they'd already fired Cummins, the Justice Department called him up about his interview with the Post. Cummins crafted a worried email to his former colleagues, pleading with them for operational security and warning they were about to be "trashed" if they, too, spoke out.
He wrote of a thinly-veiled warning from Mike Elston from the Deputy Attorney General's office.
According to Cummins' email, "the message was clearly there and you should be aware before you speak to the press again if you choose to do that."
The threat Cummins perceived backfired. More prosecutors went public, and six testified Tuesday before a Senate panel, recounting instances when they felt political interference from Republicans. Elston told CBS News late Tuesday that he did call Cummins after the Post story ran, but never meant the conversation to sound like a threat.
As the hearings played out on C-SPAN, the Attorney General stopped by the small office that CBS News maintains at the Justice Department. He caught a glimpse of the people he fired sitting shoulder-to-shoulder under the hot lights of the Senate hearing room. He admitted the firings "could have been handled better," but said he "stands by the decision 100-percent."
This all begets the question whether Gonzales' own troops still stand behind him 100 percent.