Ethics Newsline®

WASHINGTON
U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales last week rejected calls for his resignation as an unfolding scandal centering on the firings of eight U.S. attorneys dominated the week’s news in ethics.

At issue is the claim that several of the fired prosecutors were targeted for political reasons and were replaced with up-and-comers more loyal to the Bush administration, according to UPI.

The controversy heated to a boil late last week when an email document released by the Justice Department showed top Bush adviser Karl Rove asking the White House counsel’s office in 2005 whether it planned to proceed with a proposal for a mass firing of all prosecutors, later scaled back to target only a handful, the Washington Post reports.

While Rove opposed the initial proposal, the emails appear to indicate a deeper level of White House involvement than was originally acknowledged, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Federal law permits the president to hire and fire U.S. attorneys at will, and former president Bill Clinton did exactly that when he replaced all 93 of them when taking office. But Mary Jo White, one of those Clinton appointees, told Newsweek that “replacing political appointees is part of the normal political process when the party of the president changes,” but that it is “quite atypical, absent some misconduct or other quite significant cause” for replacements to be made in the middle of a president’s term.

White says it would be “very, very disturbing” if they were removed for not waging politically advantageous prosecutions or for a lack of perceived loyalty.

The newly released emails appear to show that such considerations were part of the firing process, with Gonzales’s chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, ranking all 93 U.S. attorneys on factors including whether they “exhibited loyalty” to Bush and Gonzales, reports the Washington Post. Sampson resigned last week.

Before the release of the emails, the Justice Department had steadfastly insisted that all of the firings were performance-related, with Alberto Gonzales dismissing the controversy as an “overblown personnel matter,” notes USA Today.

Over the weekend, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that he will push for public testimony under oath from Karl Rove, Kyle Sampson, and Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel.

While most observers expect President Bush to invoke executive privilege to block such testimony, Leahy said the private, no-oath meetings preferred by the White House will no longer suffice, especially after weeks of shifting explanations from the Justice Department about why the attorneys were fired and what role politics played in the matter.

“I do not believe in this ‘We’ll have a private briefing for you where we’ll tell you everything,’ and they don’t. I want testimony under oath. I am sick and tired of getting half-truths on this,” Leahy said on ABC’s “This Week,” reports the New York Times.