|
Sampson in hot seat: Dems want to know who was behind plan to circumvent Senate |
|
By Susan Crabtree
|
|
Posted: 03/28/07 07:35 PM [ET] |
When former Justice Department official Kyle Sampson testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, he will face stern questions about his and his colleagues’ role in trying to circumvent Senate confirmation of U.S. attorneys.
The House and Senate recently passed bills to overturn language allowing the attorney general to appoint U.S. attorneys indefinitely without Senate confirmation, but questions remain as to how and why the provision was inserted in the USA Patriot Act reauthorization bill.
Democratic senators want to know which Justice officials backed the provision, whether White House staffers were involved and why GOP Senate aides readily inserted it into the 2005 Patriot bill.
“We don’t know the origins [of the provision’s inclusion in the bill],” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters Wednesday. “Why was it done? Was it part of this whole plan?”
The change in the law was a key component of Sampson’s plan to remove eight U.S. attorneys last year, e-mails released by the Department of Justice (DoJ) show. The firings initiated a showdown between the administration and congressional Democrats over who should testify before Congress, and accusations that the firings were politically driven have precipitated calls for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s resignation.
Sampson, who is testifying voluntarily after stepping down as Gonzales’s chief of staff two weeks ago, told former White House counsel Harriet Miers, Gonzales counsel and White House liaison Monica Goodling and others in a September 2006 e-mail that the Patriot Act provision would allow the administration to “give far less deference to home-state senators and thereby get (1) our preferred person appointed and (2) do it far faster and more efficiently, at less political cost to the White House.”
That e-mail raises questions about how Sampson was able to convince Senate Republicans to agree to such a change in statute — and whether he was forthcoming about how he planned to use the provision.
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who was chairman of the Judiciary Committee when the provision was inserted, has acknowledged that an aide, Brett Tolman, added the language at the Justice Department’s request and without the lawmaker’s knowledge. He said the first he heard of it was earlier this year when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) brought it to his attention.
During a February hearing, Specter said his chief counsel, Michael O’Neill, had said the Justice Department requested the change due to difficulty with the replacement of a U.S. attorney in South Dakota: The court “made a replacement which was not in accordance with the statute — hadn’t been a prior federal employee and did not qualify.”
Tolman went on to become U.S. attorney for Utah.
In a one-line e-mail dated Nov. 9, 2005, and released Friday, Tolman told DoJ official William Moschella he would “get the comprehensive fix done” but did not ask any questions.
Specter this week said he didn’t have any plans to look into the matter further because “[Tolman] is an honorable fellow and I don’t think he would do anything wrong to curry favor with the DoJ.”
Tolman declined to comment for this story.
E-mail exchanges involving Moschella, who has claimed to have orchestrated the change in law, include no mention of an intent to circumvent the Senate’s confirmation process to Tolman or other Justice officials. Instead, Moschella appears focused solely on eliminating the district courts’ role in selecting interim U.S. attorneys. Before the change, interim U.S. attorneys needed to be confirmed by the Senate within 120 days. If they were not, federal district court judges could select their replacement.
Even among Democrats, there is confusion about how the language became part of the bill.
Feinstein, one of the leading critics of the U.S. attorney firings, has accused Republicans of slipping it into the Patriot Act during private GOP negotiations on the conference report.
“Democrats weren’t allowed to be present,” she said in a brief interview Tuesday. “Nobody knew it was in there.”
Yet Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee contend they knew about the provision and objected to it early on.
“It was part of a list of issues Democrats were opposed to,” committee spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said. Democrats refused to sign the House-Senate conference report because they were excluded from key committee meetings and because their amendments were not given consideration.
Specter has said Schumer was wrong when he claimed the provision was slipped into the bill “in the dead of night.” Specter countered that the language was part of the original conference report that had been available for examination for three months.
One GOP aide said the provision was not hidden in any way, and in fact contained its own section and heading, entitled “Interim Appointment of U.S. Attorneys.” Early in the conference process, the staffer said, Democrats flagged the language as potentially problematic but never formally objected to it.
“If anyone was trying to hide this provision, they wouldn’t have put it in its own section with its own title and the conference sat there for 80-plus days,” the aide said.
The staffer argued there were so many other higher-priority objections to the language in the bill at the time that lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats alike — weren’t focused on the U.S. attorney language, mainly because they didn’t realize that it would enable the DoJ to circumvent the Senate confirmation process.
“If there was any talk about circumventing the Senate confirmation process, we would never have included this.”
Elana Schor contributed to this report.
|
