Prosecutor Says She Was Pressured On Case

A career Justice Department lawyer — not a political appointee, but a career prosecutor who had been at the department for two decades — has come forward to say she wasn't fired, she quit a year and a half ago because high-level political appointees at Justice forced her to do what she didn't want to do: Go easy on the tobacco companies in a lawsuit that may yet cost those companies billions of dollars.

"They actually drafted for me for a position to take on a smoking-cessation remedy, which would reduce what the government had been seeking in the case from $130 billion to $10 billion, without any explanation," former federal prosecutor Sharon Eubanks tells CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer in an exclusive interview.

Eubanks was the lead lawyer when the government sued the tobacco companies for covering up the dangers of smoking. The case is currently on appeal, but it was the largest civil suit ever filed, and she says that when high-level political appointees at the Justice Department concluded she was about to win and force the big tobacco companies to lay out billions to help smokers break the habit, they stopped her.

She says they ordered a drastic cutback in the settlement she wanted, dictated her final argument and ordered her to read it, told her to drop her demand that key company officials be removed and ordered her to force key witnesses to change their stories.

"It was more what they didn't want them to say," Eubanks says of the witnesses' testimony.

Eubanks first told part of the story to The Washington Post, and it has already caused a furor at the capital. But what she finds odd is that despite the enormity of the case, she never discussed it with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Why not? "I think perhaps to be able to say, as he has said with the firings of the U.S. Attorneys, 'I didn't know what was going on.' Well, he need look no further than the mirror. He's responsible for that," Eubanks says.

Internal investigators at the Justice Department concluded nothing improper took place during the case. But Congress isn't satisfied — and Eubanks is headed to Capitol Hill to tell her story.