DOJ Emails Illustrate Plan to Mislead Congress (Truthout)

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DOJ Emails Illustrate Plan to Mislead Congress
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report

Thursday 29 March 2007

Embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his closest advisers have stated repeatedly over the past two months that the selective firings of eight United States attorneys last year were justified because President Bush has the authority to purge federal prosecutors at will, a fact that is not under dispute.

However, the common thread in the thousands of pages of documents released by the Department of Justice in conjunction with a Congressional probe into the US attorney dismissals is that top officials in the DOJ who worked behind the scenes believed that they were doing something improper in selectively dismissing the attorneys and acted with a clear intent to deceive lawmakers if any questions into reasons for the firings arose.

Instead of pointing to the president's broad discretion to fire the prosecutors, Justice officials conceived a plan that they would execute on a specific date and time, and then cooked up a story that they all agreed upon in the event that their actions were scrutinized. Simply put, some former US attorneys argue, the emails and other documents released last week demonstrate that prior to the day the firings took place, officials in the Justice Department appeared to be acting under a guilty state of mind.

The state of mind of officials involved in the firings is part of the reason the US attorney purge has turned into a full-blown political scandal and has led to Congressional hearings.
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Taken as a whole, Jennings' use of an outside email account to query Sampson on the status of the purge, and the creation of a five-point plan which stated that if pushed by lawmakers to justify the dismissals, DOJ officials should mislead lawmakers and say that each termination "is based on a thorough review of US attorneys' performance," would seem to suggest there were other reasons behind the firings. That is what Congress is trying to determine. .......

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032907J.shtml