Insider's sudden downfall in prosecutors' case familiar to D.C.

WASHINGTON -- D. Kyle Sampson will stand before Congress this morning and swear to tell the truth about the Bush administration's decision to fire eight US attorneys, adding a new episode to an iconic Washington story: the once-anonymous government insider whose career ends in a dazzling burst of notoriety at a hearing-room table.

Sampson, who abruptly resigned as chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on March 12, will be a star witness in the Senate Judiciary Committee's investigation into whether the Bush administration ousted the US attorneys for political reasons, and into who knew about the plan.

For the 37-year-old father of three young children, the expected hours of grilling before cable-TV cameras -- and the inevitable "Daily Show" spoofs and late-night comedian jokes that will follow -- could be an ignoble end to a once-promising political career.

Not long ago, Sampson was rising fast in conservative circles. With a look that drew comparisons to Karl Rove and a reputation for loyalty in carrying out administration policies, Sampson came close to parlaying his White House connections into an appointment as the US attorney for Utah. Now, he is unemployed, and his prospects of further government service have all but evaporated.

The sudden downfall has angered many of Sampson's former colleagues, who say that he did nothing improper and has been betrayed by higher-level administration officials. Earlier this month, Gonzales placed responsibility for orchestrating the firings on Sampson's shoulders, and said that he himself "was not involved in any discussions of what was going on."

"I think it is absolutely appalling that the senior leadership of the Justice Department decided to scapegoat Kyle Sampson," said Mark Corallo , who was the Justice Department spokesman under former attorney general John Ashcroft . "This is a good guy who didn't do anything wrong."

Sampson's friends say they expect him to defend the propriety of the firings, but his testimony about who else was closely involved in the plan could be explosive.

Internal administration documents have already called into question Gonzales's attempt to distance himself from the firings, and have shown that Rove and former White House counsel Harriet Miers were also involved.

The previously little-known figure at the center of this storm grew up a devout Mormon in a small town 45 minutes south of Salt Lake City. Sampson earned a degree in American studies from Brigham Young University in 1993, then attended the University of Chicago Law School.

At law school, Sampson was known as a "right-of-center Republican," recalled Noel Francisco, a classmate and former Bush administration attorney. But Samspon was not strident and made friends across political divides, Francisco said.

Sampson landed a clerkship with a conservative federal appeals court judge in 1996, then practiced law for two years. In 1999, he moved to Washington to take a position as counsel to then-Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch , Republican of Utah, trading a lucrative private-sector salary for political influence.

In 2001, Sampson joined the Bush administration. He worked at a series of positions in which his duty was to evaluate candidates for executive branch jobs and judgeships. He worked for Gonzales in the White House Counsel's office, was an aide to Ashcroft, and became chief of staff to Gonzales when he took over the Justice Department in 2005.

Sampson once told his former college newspaper that he loved working for the Bush administration. He praised Ashcroft for being "a very right-wing, born-again Christian," said that Bush was a great boss because of the president's strong faith, and disclosed that his entire family regularly prayed for the president.

Bush "really means it when he says he believes that we shouldn't chase religion from the public square," Sampson said. "Bush believes that public virtue and religious values have an appropriate place in public government."

By all accounts, Sampson was zealous in his drive to carry out the administration's policies. And in 2005, documents show, he began evaluating US attorneys -- all Republicans previously appointed by Bush -- for possible replacement. He evaluated them in part on whether they had "exhibited loyalty" to the president's agenda.

Administration defenders have pointed out that US attorneys are political appointees who can be removed by the president at will and insisted that Sampson did nothing improper. But critics have accused the White House of judging US attorneys by their willingness to advance Republicans' electoral prospects via disparate handling of corruption and voter fraud investigations.

At the same time as he was evaluating US attorneys and potential replacements, Sampson was angling to get himself installed as the new US attorney in Utah. But he ultimately lost out to Brett Tolman , who had the backing of key Republican senators.

Sampson's rival has his own connection to the firings. During the 2005 debate over the Patriot Act reauthorization, Tolman was a Senate Judiciary Committee staffer. At the Justice Department's request, Tolman quietly inserted a provision into the bill's text giving the president the power to install anyone he wanted as a replacement US attorney, bypassing Senate confirmation.

Sampson's testimony could provide insight into what role the president's newly enhanced appointment power -- which lawmakers said they knew nothing about, and have vowed to repeal -- played in the motivations behind the firings.

But while Sampson may be able to illuminate what happened in the past, his own future is murky.

A few scandal figures later managed to return to politics. Elliot Abrams , a Reagan administration official whose career was derailed by the Iran-Contra scandal, later returned as a foreign policy aide to Bush.

But most scandal figures never reappear on the Washington scene. Neither Rita Lavelle , the center of a Reagan-era scandal at the Environmental Protection Agency, nor Maggie Williams , a former chief of staff to Hillary Rodham Clinton who testified in the Whitewater scandal probe, returned to public life.

Now, Sampson's friends say they are distressed that his political career may be over.

"He really believes he is doing important work that is in the public interest," said Max Grant, a former administration lawyer who was a law school friend. "I'm disappointed that he won't have the opportunity to do what he wants to do most. "