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Shifting tone, Issa now critical of DoJ’s handling of attorneys |
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By Susan Crabtree
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Posted: 03/20/07 07:06 PM [ET] |
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), once one of the Department of Justice’s top defenders in the controversial firings of eight U.S. attorneys, is now more confused after filtering through the Justice Department’s Monday night document dump of 3,000 internal e-mails and memos, according to his spokesman.
Issa testified on March 6 before a House Judiciary subcommittee that he believed the dismissal of Carol Lam, the former U.S. Attorney in San Diego, was performance-related. But his vehement defense of Justice’s decision to dismiss Lam has changed, and he is now criticizing the department’s handling of the firings.
Issa still believes Lam was not prosecuting enough human trafficking cases at the border, but after viewing some of the freshly released documents, he continues to question why Justice initially told Congress that all the decisions about the dismissals occurred late last year—even though e-mails and memos released last week show that the plans for their firings began much earlier.
Issa has not specifically mentioned Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. But he has said that anyone who played a role in misleading Congress by claiming that plans for the dismissals started in October 2006 should resign.
Through his spokesman, Frederick Hill, Issa also questioned why assertions made in an e-mail by Justice official Albert Steiglitz to Michael Elston, chief of staff for Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, were not included in Justice’s letter sent to Issa and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). That note expressed concerns about the number of immigration prosecutions that Lam had pursued. Both lawmakers had previously written Justice asking why there was a reported drop in the number of immigration prosecutions by Lam’s office in recent years.
Steiglitz’s e-mail, dated July 18, 2006, states that Lam’s office is the “only [U.S. attorney’s office in the Southwest] that prosecuted fewer immigration cases in 2005 than it did in 2001 and 2002.” Steiglitz also refers to Lam’s explanation that her office was more concerned with achieving longer sentences than seeking a high number of cases for immigration offenders.
Lam’s office had pointed out that 5.1 percent of its immigration-related sentences in 2005 were for more than 60 months, up from 0.8 percent in 2002.
But Steiglitz argued the improvement is hardly dramatic because 2005 was the first year of the 2001-05 period in which the San Diego U.S. attorney’s office was not “dead last” among southwest border districts.
His e-mail is at odds with a subsequent Justice Department letter to Issa and Feinstein, which defended Lam’s record and her strategy of focusing resources on higher sentences for more serious offenders, among other highlights of her tenure. Feinstein has pointed to her letter as evidence that the Justice Department’s claims that Lam was fired for performance reasons are untrue.
“The number of immigration defendants who received sentences between 37-60 months rose from 116 to 246, and the number of immigration defendants who received sentences greater than 60 months rose from 21 to 77,” Assistant Attorney General William Moschella wrote Issa in a letter released Monday.
The 3,000-plus pages of documents also included an e-mail account of a meeting that Lam had with Issa and then-Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) in San Diego at a field hearing last year on immigration. Sensenbrenner shared Issa’s concerns about the decrease in the overall number of immigration prosecutions in the area and discussed the matter with Lam.
Lam then wrote Justice official Rebecca Seidel an e-mail account on Aug. 2, 2006, of the meeting in response to an inquiry about how it had gone.
Wrote Lam: “The tone was civil and at times even friendly.
“Sensenbrenner had a single theme he kept coming back to, which is that we aren’t doing enough coyote prosecutions and that they are the key to controlling the border. (This is obviously the Border Patrol complaint that was channeled though Issa to Sensenbrenner.)”
She said she responded that prosecuting “coyotes” usually produces very short sentences. Accordingly, she wanted to channel her resources to more “serious crimes” involving illegal immigrants such as rape, murder and child molestations, which tend to get sentences of 7-8 years.
Lam later explained, however, that achieving higher immigration sentences has also meant that more cases go to trial—which, in turn, has sent trial costs soaring.
“Issa seemed to grasp this concept quickly; he commented that it is too bad we don’t have statistics that reflect the matrix of felony immigration filings against lengths of sentences.”
Spokesman Hill said Issa may have understood Lam’s point, but he didn’t necessarily agree with it.
“They weren’t expecting to leave the meeting and think the problem had been solved,” he said. “The hope was that by working with [Lam] and trying to get additional appropriations, we could increase the number of [human smuggling prosecutions].”
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