Gonzales aid proposed replacements for attorneys

Email showing Kyle Sampson's recommendations for replacing fired U.S. attorneys. From New York Times.

This is off The New York Times:

WASHINGTON, April 13 — A Justice Department e-mail message released on Friday shows that the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales proposed replacement candidates for United States attorneys nearly a year before they were dismissed in December 2006. The department has repeatedly stated that no successors were selected before the dismissals.

The Jan. 9, 2006, e-mail message, written by D. Kyle Sampson, who resigned last month as the top aide to Mr. Gonzales, identified five Bush administration officials, most of them Justice Department employees, whose names were sent to the White House for consideration as possible replacements for prosecutors slated for dismissal.

The e-mail message and several related documents provide the first evidence that Mr. Sampson, the Justice Department official in charge of the dismissals, had focused on who would succeed the ousted prosecutors. Justice officials have repeatedly said that seven of the eight prosecutors were removed without regard to who might succeed them.

Kyle Sampson lied to Congress. He knew who the attorney replacements were before the eight attorneys were fired--that is what this email letter reveals. Furthermore, Sampson was working on this issue for a full year before these eight attorneys were fired. But when Sampson testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that he had no replacements in mind when the eight U.S. attorneys were fired. According to Think Progress:

On March 29, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Kyle Sampson told the Senate Judiciary Committee, under oath, that he had no replacements in mind before the Justice Department fired the U.S. attorneys in Dec. 2006:

SCHUMER: Did you or did you not have in mind specific replacements for the dismissed U.S. Attorneys before they were asked to resign on December 7th, 2006.

SAMPSON: I personally did not. On December 7th, I did not have in mind any replacements for any of the seven who were asked to resign.

But a new e-mail released to the House Judiciary Committee shows that on Jan. 9, 2006 — a year before the prosecutors were fired — Sampson recommended replacements for almost every one of the U.S. attorneys on the administration’s hit list, suggesting that these prosecutors were fired to make way for partisan loyalists.

This was a political hit list of replacing certain U.S. attorneys, that the Bush administration did not approve of for various reasons, with their own Bush loyalists. This entire scandal was conceived a year before the attorneys were fired--more than likely by the Bush White House. And when this scandal was revealed, Sampson lied to Congress as a means to obstruct their own investigations into this latest Bush scandal. Continuing with the NY Times story:

Some of the new documents show the department’s acute awareness of individual United States attorneys’ political and ideological views. An undated spreadsheet attached to a Feb. 12, 2007, e-mail message listed the federal prosecutors who had served under President Bush along with their past work experience.

The chart included a category for Republican Party and campaign work, showing who had been a delegate to a Republican convention or had managed a Republican political campaign. The chart had a separate category indicating who among the prosecutors was a member of the Federalist Society, a Washington-based association that serves as a talent pool for young conservatives seeking appointments in Republican administrations.

Taken together, Democrats asserted, the e-mail supported their contention that the ousted prosecutors were dismissed to make room for favored candidates who were chosen on the basis of their political qualifications as much as prosecutorial experience.

[....]

Because of deletions in the e-mail copies turned over to Congress, the document discloses only the names of four United States attorneys slated for removal and five of their possible successors. The names of the replacement candidates, in most cases, are followed by a question mark, suggesting that Mr. Sampson might have been uncertain about them.

The United States attorneys identified for removal are four who were ultimately dismissed: Ms. Chiara in Michigan, Kevin Ryan in San Francisco, Carol C. Lam in San Diego and Mr. Cummins in Arkansas. Justice Department officials have acknowledged that Mr. Cummins was an able prosecutor who was removed solely to make room for Mr. Griffin, a former aide to Mr. Rove, the White House senior political adviser who was appointed to the job on a temporary basis.

“Please treat this as confidential,” Mr. Sampson wrote in the message. He concluded, “If a decision is made to remove and replace a limited number of U.S. attorneys, then the following might be considered for removal and possible replacement.”

Mr. Sampson testified under oath on March 29 at a hearing of Senate Judiciary Committee that he had no candidates in mind to replace any of the fired prosecutors. In his prepared statement, he said that “none of the U.S. attorneys was asked to resign in favor of a particular individual who had already been identified to take the vacant spot.”

At one point in the hearing, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, asked Mr. Sampson, “Did you or did you not have in mind specific replacements for the dismissed U.S. attorneys before they were asked to resign on Dec. 7, 2006.”

Mr. Sampson, testifying under oath, replied: “I personally did not.”

Mr. Sampson lied to Congress. This is perjury. Kyle Sampson's lawyer, Bradford Berenson, released a statement saying that there was no contradiction:

"Kyle's testimony regarding the consideration of replacements was entirely accurate. In December 2006, when the seven U.S. Attorneys were asked to step down, no specific candidate had been selected to replace any of them, and Kyle had none in mind. Some names had been tentatively suggested for discussion much earlier in the process, but by the time the decision to ask for the resignations was made, none had been chosen to serve as a replacement. Most, if not all, had long since ceased even to be possibilities."

In other words, they were only suggestions for replacements, not actual replacements for these attorneys. You've got to love the parsing of the language here. Even if these were suggestions for replacements, the fact remains that Sampson was considering replacements for these purged attorneys a year before they were fired. Sampson may not have been the final decision maker on these attorney replacements, but he was narrowing down the top choices for these replacements in order to forward these choices for the final decision to either Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, or even Karl Rove.