Pointing the Finger at the White House

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, September 29, 2008

The Justice Department's new investigative report into the removal of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006 points a steely and incriminating finger over the stone wall -- toward the White House.

Let's be frank here: Not many people in Washington have ever suspected that notoriously weak-willed and suggestible former attorney general Alberto Gonzales came up with the idea of the firings on his own. So it's not big news that the report released this morning contains a series of humiliating conclusions about his abysmal lack of leadership and general cluelessness -- rather than a criminal referral.

The big news is that in response to the report, and its call for the appointment of a criminal prosecutor to pursue the case further than the Justice Department's internal investigations could, Attorney General Michael Mukasey today appointed Nora R. Dannehy, a career prosecutor currently acting as U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to oversee such a probe. And that means further pressing the White House, which repeatedly refused the Justice Department investigation teams' requests for interviews and documents.

From the report's conclusion:

"The most serious allegations that arose were that the U.S. Attorneys were removed based on improper political factors, including to affect the way they handled certain voter fraud or public corruption investigations and prosecutions. Our investigation found significant evidence that political partisan considerations were an important factor in the removal of several of the U.S. Attorneys.

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