White House Prompted Firing Of Prosecutors

The White House played a significant role in the firings of eight federal attorneys, relaying complaints by Republican officials to the Justice Department that prosecutors were not adequately pursuing charges of voter fraud.

Democrats in Congress have charged that the eight dismissals announced last December were politically motivated and some of those fired have said they felt pressured by powerful Republicans in their home states to rush investigations of potential voter fraud involving Democrats.

The controversy was further fueled Tuesday as the Justice Department announced the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' chief of staff, Kyle Sampson.

Sampson resigned after acknowledging that he did not tell other Justice officials who testified to Congress about the extent of his communications with the White House about the firings, leading them to provide incomplete information in their testimony, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Because Gonzales has no e-mail account at the Department of Justice, there will be no paper trail with his name on it, CBS News correspondent Stephanie Lambidakis reports.

In one important e-mail exchanged between Sampson and then-White House counsel Harriet Miers last September was a chart dividing all 93 U.S. attorneys into three categories: "good performers," which were printed in bold; "not good performers," which had a strike through there name; and neutral names, which were listed without any comments, reports Lambidakis.

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E-Mails Between DOJ & White House

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"Today's staff resignation does not take the heat off the attorney general, in fact it raises the temperature," Schumer said at a news conference Tuesday. "Kyle Sampson," who Schumer suggested may have obstructed justice, "will not become the next Scooter Libby, the next fall guy."

The White House admitted the president heard complaints about Justice Department attorneys during informal discussions with Gonzales in October 2006, but denied any direct order was made for their dismissals.

"At no time did any White House officials, including the president, direct the Department of Justice to take specific action against any individual U.S. attorney," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Monday.

Weeks after the October conversation, seven of the attorneys were fired.

Perino said that complaints about the job performance of prosecutors occasionally came to the White House and were passed on to the Justice Department, perhaps including some informally from President Bush to Gonzales.

Perino also disclosed that the chief White House lawyer floated the idea of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys at the start of Mr. Bush's second term, but the Justice Department objected and eventually recommended the eight dismissals that have generated a political firestorm two years later.

Perino said Monday that then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers raised with an aide to Gonzales the prospect of asking all chief federal district prosecutors to resign in 2004 as a logical way to start a new term with a new slate of U.S. attorneys.

The U.S. attorneys, the chief federal law enforcement officials in their various districts, typically are appointed to four-year terms by the president on the recommendation of state political leaders, but serve at the pleasure of the president and can be dismissed at any time — like the attorney general and other Cabinet officers.

"The attorney general failed the department in this instance because his job is to seal off all this kind of activity," former Arkansas federal prosecutor Bud Cummins, who was fired last year, told CBS News.

Democrats in Congress have charged that the eight dismissals announced last December were politically motivated and some of those fired have said they felt pressured by powerful Republicans in their home states to rush investigations of potential voter fraud involving Democrats.

Perino said Sampson, the aid Miers contacted, objected that a wholesale change of prosecutors would be disruptive. She also said deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, vaguely recalls telling Miers that he also thought firing all 93 was ill-advised.

The Justice Department, however, was working internally on a shorter list of firings, and submitted that list to the White House in late 2006, she said.

"At no time were names added or subtracted by the White House," Perino said. "We continue to believe that the decision to remove and replace U.S. attorneys who serve at the pleasure of the president was perfectly appropriate and within administration's discretion. We stand by the Department of Justice's assertion that they were removed for performance and managerial reasons."

Dating back to mid-2004, the White House's legislative affairs, political affairs and chief of staff's office had received complaints from a variety of sources about the lack of vigorous prosecution of election fraud cases in various locations, including Philadelphia, Milwaukee and New Mexico, she said

Those complaints were passed on to the Justice Department or Mier's office.

The Washington Post reported initially on the idea of dismissing all the prosecutors, saying it reviewed a number of internal White House e-mails preceding the final dismissals.

In one of his final communications before the firings, Sampson wrote: "Prepare to Withstand Political Upheaval," The New York Times reported.

"U.S Attorneys desiring to save their jobs aided by their allies in the political arena as well as the Justice Department community, likely will make efforts to preserve themselves in office. You should expect these efforts to be strenuous," Sampson wrote.

The new revelations Monday evening came after congressional Democrats earlier in the day singled out Rove for questioning about the firings of the eight prosecutors and whether the dismissals were politically motivated.

Those demands to question Rove signaled anew Democrats' shifting focus beyond the Justice Department and toward the White House in the inquiry.

Last week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., said he would seek to interview Miers and deputy counsel William Kelly for insight on their roles, if any, in the firings.

Rove emerged as the Democrats' newest target after weekend news reports said the New Mexico Republican Party's chairman urged Rove to fire David Iglesias, then the state's U.S. attorney.

In a statement Monday, Conyers said stories about Rove's alleged link to Iglesias' dismissal "raise even more alarm bells for us."

"As a result, we would want to ensure that Karl Rove was one of the White House staff that we interview in connection with our investigation," said Conyers.

Schumer said he also wants to question Rove.

In an interview this weekend with The Associated Press, New Mexico GOP chairman Allen Weh said Iglesias' "termination had already occurred" by the time he spoke with Rove at a holiday party last December. But Weh made no secret of his dissatisfaction with Iglesias, in part from the prosecutor's failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation.

The White House has said previously that Rove wasn't involved in the firings, but did alert Miers to complaints about Iglesias. It was not immediately clear whether Rove also told Gonzales about the complaints.

Last week, Rove called the two-month controversy "a very big attempt by some in the Congress to make a political stink about it."

Schumer called it "almost unheard of" for a federal prosecutor with favorable reviews to be fired after a top presidential adviser like Rove received complaints about his performance.

"The more we learn, the more it seems that people at high levels in the White House have been involved in the U.S. attorney purge," Schumer said Monday.