Gonzales in Loop Early, Says Ex-Aide; He Tells Senators Firings Were Bungled but Not Improper

Mar 30, 02:07 PM

Current Headlines: By CRAIG GILBERT

Washington - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales took part in numerous discussions about the fate of eight U.S. attorneys before signing off on their firing, his former chief of staff testified Thursday, describing a more significant role in the controversy than Gonzales has acknowledged.

"The attorney general was aware of this process from the beginning," Kyle Sampson told Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl during a lengthy Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. "Ultimately, he approved both the list and the notion of going forward and asking for these resignations."

Asked about the role of relatively young staffers such as himself in the firings, Sampson told senators: "The decision-makers in this case were the attorney general and the counsel to the president (Harriet Miers)."

Thursday's packed hearing, with a soft-spoken and at times regretful Sampson facing a battery of cameras and questions, underscored the mounting credibility problems that Gonzales is facing on Capitol Hill.

As much as anything, the political storm over the purge of prosecutors last year has been fueled by shifting and conflicting accounts from the Bush administration over the involvement of the attorney general and White House officials such as Karl Rove.

Lawmakers in both parties have condemned Gonzales' stewardship as the story has mushroomed.

"They've given a lot of people in Congress and out the impression there's nobody in charge over at the Justice Department," Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, the former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in an interview this week.

"Gonzales let this issue explode in his face," said Sensenbrenner, who when asked if Gonzales should step down, said only: "That's between the president and him."

Handling criticized

At Thursday's Senate hearing, Gonzales' former top aide argued repeatedly that there was nothing improper about the firings themselves, just the way that they were handled.

"The decisions to seek the resignation of a handful of U.S. attorneys were properly made but poorly explained. This is a benign rather than sinister story," Sampson said.

The former aide said prosecutors were fired for not sharing the president's priorities about which kinds of crimes to target - a rationale that he said was entirely proper.

"The distinction between 'political' and 'performance-related' reasons for removing a United States attorney is, in my view, largely artificial," Sampson said. "A U.S. attorney who is unsuccessful from a political perspective, either because he or she has alienated the leadership of the department in Washington or cannot work constructively with law enforcement or other governmental constituencies in the district (that are) important to effective leadership of the office, is unsuccessful."

Sampson repeatedly denied that any prosecutors were fired in order to influence the course of a particular case.

But his testimony continued to raise questions about the way that the administration has handled the matter. Gonzales and other officials already have had to correct earlier statements about the decision-making process.

Gonzales had earlier denied being involved in internal discussions about where things stood in regard to the proposed firings. Sampson called that statement by the attorney general inaccurate.

Sampson said he did not recall Gonzales adding or removing names from a list of prosecutors to be fired.

But he said he discussed the matter with Gonzales several times from early 2005 to late 2006, when the firings occurred. He said the firings grew out of the "considered collective judgment of senior Justice Department officials," a process that Sampson coordinated.

Sampson said he was partly to blame for not anticipating the political reaction to the firings and for bungling the department's public explanations, which cast the fired prosecutors in a negative light and were incomplete and contradictory. He offered his apologies Thursday for his part in allowing the firings to "become an ugly, undignified spectacle."

Perception problematic

Senators from both parties joined in those sentiments.

Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Arlen Specter said the department was "in a state of disrepair, if not dysfunction."

But Democrats on the committee were much more pointed in questioning the propriety of the firings themselves, acknowledging that U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president but questioning whether the motive for replacing the prosecutors was more narrowly partisan and political.

"Maybe no one has anything to hide, and everyone acted honorably. But it is sure hard to come to that conclusion based on the events of the past seven weeks," said New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer.

"What is the public's perception to be when somebody who is - like Karl Rove - who is the ultimate political operative, the ultimate political insider, whose function is political almost by definition, is so involved in this process?" Kohl asked Sampson.

But Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn said some criticisms of the firings were "politically motivated" and that "from everything that this committee has heard so far . . . there is no evidence that any of this replacement of U.S. attorneys was designed to or actually did impede a criminal investigation or prosecution."

Gonzales himself is scheduled to testify before the committee next month.

One very tangible result of the controversy is that both the House and Senate have voted overwhelmingly to strip a recent Patriot Act provision that allowed the attorney general to appoint interim U.S. attorneys indefinitely without Senate approval.

Among Wisconsin lawmakers, only Sensenbrenner and fellow House Republican Paul Ryan opposed stripping that provision.

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