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Darker cloud of suspicion |
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By Josh Marshall
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Posted: 05/10/07 07:43 PM [ET] |
And then there were nine.
For months now, Justice Department officials, both in public statements and formal responses to congressional document requests, have been saying that there were eight fired U.S. attorneys, seven on one day in December of 2006 and another, Arkansas’s H.E. “Bud” Cummins, earlier in the year.
But that wasn’t true. There was a ninth fired U.S. attorney. And he was the first to be fired. Back in January of 2006, Kansas City U.S. Attorney Todd Graves, brother of Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), got a call from Mike Battle, head of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, telling him to resign.
Not one to make trouble, Graves announced his resignation two months later.
News of Graves’s forced resignation shines a light on how little we still know about the attorney firings story and casts a darker cloud of suspicion over a string of as yet unexplained “resignations” of U.S. attorneys.
Graves left office on March 24, 2006, and was replaced by Bradley Schlozman, the first U.S. attorney to be appointed under special powers granted to the attorney General under the Patriot Act. Schlozman has already come under fire for allegedly using political affiliation to screen applicants for lawyer positions at the Department of Justice. He single-handedly worked to turn back the clock on voting rights while serving at the Civil Rights Division earlier in the decade. And after becoming U.S. attorney in Kansas City, he rushed a series of highly controversial vote-fraud indictments timed for the November 2006 election.
Graves’s sudden and unexplained departure has long been a source of suspicion because of who replaced him and the cloud of “vote fraud” allegations that have clung so close to other canned U.S. attorneys.
The first hint of the truth about Graves’s departure surfaced last month when McClatchy News Service revealed that Graves had appeared on the Department of Justice’s U.S. attorney firing list shortly before his resignation.
Then earlier this week reporters for the Kansas City Star provided key new details about the case. Though Graves was still unwilling to confirm he’d been pushed to resign, Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) released a statement in which he revealed that shortly after Graves had been dismissed he’d approached Bond to ask the senator to intercede with the White House to let him stay on in the job to finish up the prosecution of a particularly grisly murder case.
The White House rejected Bond’s request, telling him that Graves had been dismissed for “performance” reasons. But Bond’s statement made clear that Graves hadn’t really “resigned.” He’d been pushed.
And it didn’t take long for Graves himself to come forward. On Wednesday Graves spoke to reporters from several news organizations confirming that he was the first U.S. attorney to be pushed out.
The Department of Justice has repeatedly stated that eight U.S. attorneys were fired. We now know that was clearly false. In his testimony on Thursday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales claimed that Graves’s firing wasn’t part of the same “process” as the eight fired U.S. attorneys. So it didn’t count in the enumeration. But that hardly passes the laugh test.
We now know of several cases in which U.S. attorneys appeared on Justice Department firing lists and then by supposed coincidence just happened to resign. The Graves revelation now puts the weight of evidence strongly in the favor of the conclusion that few if any of these resignations were unforced. No proof yet. But that has to be the assumption.
Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.
His column appears in The Hill each week.
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