Justice Department considered firing more US attorneys
WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department considered dismissing many more US attorneys than officials have previously acknowledged, with at least 26 prosecutors suggested for termination between February 2005 and December 2006, according to sources familiar with documents withheld from the public.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified last week that the effort was limited to eight US attorneys fired since June, and other administration officials have said that only a few others were suggested for removal.
In fact, Gonzales's former chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, recommended more than two dozen US attorneys for termination, according to lists compiled by him and his colleagues, the sources said.
They amounted to more than a quarter of the nation's 93 US attorneys. At least 13 of those known to have been targeted are still in their posts.
It is unclear how many knew they had been considered for removal.
"Really? I wasn't aware of that," US Attorney Paula Silsby of Maine said yesterday when asked about her inclusion on the lists. Silsby's name crops up frequently, first in February 2005 and three more times, most recently a month before most of the dismissals were carried out last December.
The number of names on the lists demonstrates the breadth of the search for prosecutors to dismiss. The names also hint at a casual process in which the people who were most consistently considered for replacement were not always those ultimately told to leave.
When shown the lists of firing candidates late yesterday, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, perhaps the most outspoken critic of the way Gonzales handled the prosecutor dismissals, said they "show how amok this process was.
"When you start firing people for invalid reasons, just about anyone can end up on a list," he said. "It looks like the process was out of control, and if it hadn't been discovered more would have been fired."
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the department would not confirm which US attorneys were included on the lists. He said they "reflect Kyle Sampson's thoughts for discussion during the consultation process" and were often compiled long before the bulk of the firings were carried out.
One memo sent to Sampson in November from Michael Elston, chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, suggested firing Mary Beth Buchanan, the US attorney in Pittsburgh, who supervised the nation's prosecutors for a year and now heads the Office of Violence Against Women, sources said. 