Gonzales Claims U.S. Attorneys Were Not ‘Fired for Political Reasons,’ DOJ Report Said ‘Quite The Opposite’»
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/02/04/gonzales-campbell-brown/ BROWN: Your office fired nine U.S. attorneys for political reasons. There has been no disagreement about that. I mean, how could you let that happen?
GONZALES: Campbell, Campbell, Campbell. I disagree with that. You said that nine U.S. attorneys were fired for partisan political reasons. That’s not what the report said. Quite the opposite. The report clearly found that there were performance related reasons for the removal of most of these U.S. attorneys and with respect to the remainder, they didn’t have enough information to draw definite conclusions.
Gonzales’ assertion that the report vindicated his office of any political motives for the dismissals, however, is false. The report did draw “definite conclusions” about the firing of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias
The evidence we uncovered in our investigation demonstrated that the real reason for Iglesias’s removal were the complaints from New Mexico Republican politicians and party activists about how Iglesias handled voter fraud and public corruption cases in the state.
As detailed above, many Republicans in New Mexico believed that fraudulent registrations by Democratic Party voters was a widespread problem in New Mexico, an evenly divided state politically that has had very close national elections. Beginning in the summer of 2004, New Mexico Republican Party activists talked to Iglesias about the “party’s . . . efforts” on the voter fraud issue, and sought to involve him in those efforts.
The full interview (about 8 minutes) is here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4ZJZ3ZG5KwJeffrey Toobin is the last 2 minutes "Think about 8 years ago, this guy was a
STAR a former Texas Supreme Court justice, considered a
LOCKto be nominated for the US Supreme Court and now he
can't even find a job in a law firm!. I think the market has worked here"