Ex-Aide Tightens Gonzales' Ties to Dismissals

Mar 30, 08:37 PM

Current Headlines: By Lara Jakes Jordan

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales was briefed regularly over two years on the firings of federal prosecutors, his former top aide said Thursday, disputing Gonzales' claims he was not closely involved in the dismissals.

The testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by D. Kyle Sampson, the attorney general's former chief of staff, further undercut Gonzales' already shaky credibility.

Gonzales and former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers made the final decision on whether to fire the U.S. attorneys last year, Sampson said.

"I don't think the attorney general's statement that he was not involved in any discussions of U.S. attorney removals was accurate," Sampson told the committee inquiring into whether the dismissals were politically motivated.

"I remember discussing with him this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign," he said.

Sampson's testimony put Gonzales at the heart of the firings amid ever-changing Justice Department accounts of how they were planned.

Gonzales has said repeatedly he was not closely involved in the dismissals and depended on Sampson to arrange them. The Justice Department maintains Gonzales was not involved in selecting which prosecutors would be asked to resign.

Sampson resigned March 12. A day later, Gonzales said he "never saw documents" and "never had a discussion about where things stood" in the firings.

The White House stepped back from defending Gonzales even before Sampson finished testifying.

"I'm going to have to let the attorney general speak for himself," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said as Sampson began his third hour before the senators. Noting that Gonzales is not scheduled to appear before the same Senate panel until April 17, she added, "I agree; three weeks is a long time."

Even so, President Bush "is confident that the attorney general can overcome these challenges, and he continues to have the president's support," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto.

The Justice Department said Gonzales has no plans to resign.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said Gonzales has described his involvement as "never focused on specific concerns about United States attorneys as to whether or not they should be asked to resign."

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., committee chairman, indicated Gonzales' credibility had suffered from repeated attempts to explain the contradictions.

After someone changes a story several times, Leahy said, "people tend not to believe it."

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said Gonzales "has many questions to answer." Sampson's conflicting account with Gonzales' poses "a real question as to whether he's acting in a competent way as attorney general."

A growing number of Democrats and Republicans has called for Gonzales to resign.

Sampson, a longtime, loyal aide to Gonzales, said other senior Justice Department officials helped to plan the firings, which the White House first suggested shortly after Bush won a second term in 2004.

Sampson said he never was aware of any case where prosecutors were told to step down because they refused to help Republicans in local election or corruption investigations. He also said he saw little difference between dismissing prosecutors for political reasons versus performance-related ones.

"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, is unsuccessful," Sampson said.

But Sampson admitted he should have been more careful to prevent Paul J. McNulty, the deputy attorney general, and William Moschella, the principal associate deputy attorney general, from giving incomplete or misleading information to Congress about the dismissals.

At one point, Sampson recalled considering whether U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald in Chicago should be among those fired. "Immediately after I did it, I regretted it," Sampson said of the idea. "I knew that it was the wrong thing to do. I knew that it was inappropriate."

Fitzgerald, widely regarded as one of the nation's top prosecutors, won convictions this month against former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in the CIA leak case.

Sampson also confirmed a large White House role in planning the firings.

He said White House political staffers working for presidential aide Karl Rove were closely involved in the plans to replace prosecutors. He said Miers initially floated the idea of firing all 93 federal prosecutors and ultimately joined Gonzales in approving the eight to be fired.

Congress and the White House are wrangling over whether Rove, Miers and other administration officials will testify in public on Capitol Hill about their roles in the firings.

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