Democrats are questioning the timing of the resignation of a Department of Justice official who called to fire several U.S. attorneys late last year.

Michael Battle, a former U.S. attorney who serves as the director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, will leave his post voluntarily March 16.

The circumstances surrounding Battle’s departure add to questions Democrats plan to ask about whether politics played any role in the firings of seven U.S. attorneys, some of whom were pursuing public-corruption cases against GOP lawmakers. The House and Senate Judiciary committees will hold hearings featuring the testimony of several of the fired U.S. attorneys today to investigate the matter.

A Department of Justice staffer said only that the public-affairs office planned to send out a statement about Battle’s resignation; it did not do so by press time yesterday.
Battle called six federal prosecutors in early December to fire them, and reportedly was unhappy about doing so.

A Justice Department spokesman told the Associated Press that Battle “was not involved in the actual decision-making.”

“This raises another question about a subject where there are already too many unanswered questions,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who will chair today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with U.S. attorneys, said in a statement. “While Mike Battle, a man of integrity, must issue the customary denial, the timing of this resignation asks whether he’s another casualty of the U.S. attorney imbroglio.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law Chairwoman Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.) vowed to “do everything in their power to unearth the facts surrounding Battle’s resignation.”
“The wheels seem to be coming off the Bush administration’s increasingly hollow defense of its decision to fire eight U.S. attorneys,” Sánchez said. “The administration’s explanation of Mr. Battle’s apparent resignation is as murky as everything else they have told us about this case.”

Six ousted U.S. attorneys are slated to tell their stories to a House subcommittee today and four will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, as the flap surrounding their dismissal threatens to engulf two Republican lawmakers.

Democrats have seized on the U.S. attorney departures to bolster their charges of cronyism in the administration. Although replacing U.S. attorneys is a common move by a president at the beginning of a term — Clinton famously reshuffled their ranks when he entered office — it’s unusual for an administration to make such changes midterm.

The Democrats’ net unexpectedly may have snared their GOP colleagues, after New Mexico prosecutor David Iglesias alleged that two lawmakers had called him before his resignation to push for expediting a state corruption probe.

Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) acknowledged over the weekend that he called Iglesias to ask for an update on the progress of a contentious investigation of alleged kickbacks to a local Democratic politician related to a lavish courthouse construction contract. Domenici denied pressuring Iglesias on the case and said he had recommended the prosecutor’s removal before making the call.

The identity of the other congressional caller remains unconfirmed. Iglesias has said both lawmakers were New Mexico Republicans, and Rep. Heather Wilson — often mentioned as a possible replacement for the 74-year-old Domenici, her political mentor — is the only member of the delegation who declines to comment on the allegations.

Iglesias’s testimony today may pose a new dilemma for Democrats, who must decide whether to pursue any potential ethics violations that may arise from the prosecutor’s sworn testimony. The U.S. attorney scandal so far has proven an effective Democratic cudgel against the Bush administration, but formal complaints against sitting Republicans, particularly the well-liked Domenici, could create unanticipated partisanship.

Schumer demurred late last week when asked whether he had discussed Iglesias’s charges with Domenici.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate,” the Democratic Caucus vice chairman said.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) spoke of the U.S. attorneys late last week as part of a pattern of unilateral decision-making by the White House, which used a little-known provision in last year’s Patriot Act reauthorization to install replacement prosecutors without promptly seeking Senate confirmation.

“It’s entirely consistent with the unitary executive … diminishing the power of Congress,” Durbin said. When asked whether he had discussed Domenici’s alleged call to Iglesias with the senior Republican, Durbin added, “I think that’s what you do for a living.”

In the House, however, Republicans already may have started an ethics war of words by pledging last week to block the assignment of Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.), who is under FBI investigation for bribery charges, to the Homeland Security Committee.

“Any time they’re calling attention to Jefferson, they have a problem because they have many members with problems,” a Democratic aide said. “Whether it’s Wilson or other Republican members, they will no doubt get bitten in the behind.”

Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) was one of the first lawmakers to shine a spotlight on the resigned prosecutors’ predicament, after his state’s U.S. attorney, H.E. “Bud” Cummins, was asked to depart to make room for a former aide to senior Bush adviser Karl Rove. That replacement since has agreed to forgo formal Senate confirmation, and Pryor said he has met with Rep. John Boozman (Ark.), the state delegation’s sole Republican, to discuss new recommendations to send to the White House.

Of the New Mexico case, Pryor said, “It would seem inappropriate for a member of Congress to try to intervene in a political investigation, whether to speed it up or slow it down.”

William Canfield, a former Senate Ethics Committee counsel who now practices at Williams & Jensen, said any charges Iglesias may make would be difficult to prove without substantive evidence of the nature of the lawmakers’ calls. Members of Congress are forbidden from making “ex parte” communications with executive-branch employees aimed at influencing investigations.

“I don’t think [rules about] ex parte communications would stop a member of the Senate or House from getting on the phone with a local U.S. attorney and asking, ‘What are you doing?’” Canfield said. “None of that is a request for information, just advice that the U.S. attorney take this case seriously.”

The case on which Iglesias was working at the time of his dismissal centered on Manny Aragon, a former state Senate president pro tem and influential figure in Albuquerque’s Democratic establishment. Aragon was accused of taking payments from a construction company that worked on several city courthouses, and local media reports hinted at imminent indictments several times late last year with none materializing from Iglesias.

Wilson’s reelection challenger last year was state Attorney General Patricia Madrid, whom she ultimately beat by 861 votes. Wilson accused Madrid during the campaign of being soft on crime, a contention state Republicans believed to be bolstered by Madrid’s decision to seek indictments of cooperating witnesses in yet another corruption probe that Iglesias was pursuing.

Illustrating the cosseted circles of New Mexico politics, Iglesias and Madrid first encountered each other in 1998, when the future U.S. attorney lost the attorney general’s race to the future Democratic House candidate.

Watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to the Senate Ethics Committee on Monday calling for an investigation into Domenici’s phone call to Iglesias. Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director, said they would file an ethics complaint against Wilson if Iglesias names her tomorrow as the other caller during his testimony.

Even so, Sloan doubts either ethics panel would address the matter.

“They’re not going to do anything,” she said. “They, like the House committee, are just a fig leaf. I’d be shocked [if they] actually took this up because they never take anything up.”
Gerald Hebert, of the Campaign Legal Center, also said Domenici’s admission raises serious ethical questions.

“Domenici can claim all he wants that he didn’t put any pressure on that prosecutor,” Hebert said. “But there is inherent, implicit pressure whenever a senator calls someone like that.”
Hebert said Domenici’s action warrants an ethics investigation, but he also said he doubts the Senate Ethics Committee will act on it.

“They have a very shaky record of being able to police themselves,” he said. “That’s why we’ve called upon the Senate to establish an [outside] office of public integrity — their track record is not a good one.”