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Yang denies departure is linked to that of other U.S. attorneys |
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By Susan Crabtree
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Posted: 03/05/07 08:09 PM [ET] |
A former U.S. attorney for Los Angeles, Debra Wong Yang, dismissed questions about the timing of her departure, which occurred about a month before several other U.S. attorneys were fired late last year.
Wong Yang was heading up the investigation into Rep. Jerry Lewis’s (R-Calif.) ties to a lobbying firm and the millions of dollars in contracts the firm’s clients received from Congress. Wong Yang, the first Asian-American woman to serve as a U.S. attorney, left her post with Justice to become a partner at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, the law firm representing Lewis. She will co-chair the firm’s crisis-management practice group, along with Washington, D.C., partner Theodore B. Olson, a former Bush administration solicitor general.
Wong Yang said her departure was a personal decision based on financial concerns and the fact that she is a single mother, and had nothing to do with the firings of other U.S. attorneys. She also said her departure would not affect the case against Lewis in any way, noting that the Justice Department said it would have allowed her to stay in the position “as long as I wanted to.”
“The investigation [into Lewis] would never be delayed or affected in any way because of my departure,” she said. “We had 260 attorneys in that office.”
She said that she had been looking for a more lucrative position in the private sector for months and that a longtime friend, Nick Hanna in the Orange County office of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher — not Olson or anyone else with close ties to the Bush administration — first contacted her about the position. She said she turned down a more lucrative offer from another firm to take the job at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher.
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