White House Involved In Sacking Federal Prosecutors

by Steve

Well, as many of us on the center-left suspected, the White House was directly involved after all in the sacking of the federal prosecutors around the country. This story blows apart the “performance-related” justification that Alberto Gonzales spewed to Congress.

Presidential advisor Karl Rove and at least one other member of the White House political team were urged by the New Mexico Republican party chairman to fire the state's U.S. attorney because of dissatisfaction in part with his failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation in the battleground election state.

In an interview Saturday with McClatchy Newspapers, Allen Weh, the party chairman, said he complained in 2005 about then-U.S. Attorney David Iglesias to a White House liaison who worked for Rove and asked that he be removed. Weh said he followed up with Rove personally in late 2006 during a visit to the White House.

"Is anything ever going to happen to that guy?" Weh said he asked Rove at a White House holiday event that month.

"He's gone," Rove said, according to Weh.

"I probably said something close to 'Hallelujah,'" said Weh.

Weh's account calls into question the Justice Department's stance that the recent decision to fire Iglesias and seven U.S. attorneys in other states was a personnel matter - made without White House intervention. Justice Department officials have said the White House's involvement was limited to approving a list of the U.S. attorneys after the Justice Department made the decision to fire them.

I will repeat what I said last week: how long will it take for Patrick Leahy to subpoena Gonzales and drag his lying ass in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain under oath the lies he has already told?

Of course the White House sacked these prosecutors for purely political reasons, and as Mary noted below, it was simply an act of self-preservation to keep these investigations from coming close to the administration and the corruption between the GOP infrastructure and the defense/intelligence complex that is endangering our national security for the sake of self-enrichment. It's well past time for the Democrats to wipe the sleep from their naive eyes and publicly call this for what it is.