Bush ally accused of attempting to politicize US justice

President Bush's attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, is fighting for his political life as a major scandal has erupted over the firing of eight politically-inconvenient federal prosecutors–a move many senior Democrats described as a brazen attempt by the White House to compromise the independence of the US justice system. Gonzales, one of President Bush's oldest and most loyal cohorts, acknowledged in a hastily-convened news conference on Mar. 13 that "mistakes were made" but said he stood by his decision to dismiss the eight prosecutors at the end of last year. Hours earlier, his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, resigned over the affair, and the Democratic leadership of the Senate Judiciary Committee insisted Gonzales, and possibly other senior administration officials, should resign too. "US attorneys have always been above politics, and this administration has blatantly manipulated the US attorney system to serve its political needs," Senator Chuck Schumer of New York said. "The president must clarify his role.... There's a cloud over the White House." Sampson's resignation, Schumer added, "does not take the heat off the attorney general. In fact, it raises the temperature." The Bush White House thus finds itself assailed on yet another front just a week after Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, was convicted on perjury charges. Just as the administration has been accused of playing politics with intelligence on Iraq or on scientific research into global warming, it now faces the charge that it tried to manipulate the federal prosecution system for its own partisan purposes. The Democratic leadership in Congress first became suspicious when it received a tip that the eight prosecutors were dismissed because they refused to follow up alleged voter fraud in electoral races that Republican candidates had narrowly lost. That suspicion took on much greater substance on Mar. 12 with the publication of an email exchange between Sampson at the Justice Department, and Harriet Miers, who served until recently as the Bush administration's top lawyer. Miers originally suggested firing all 93 federal prosecutors and replacing them with political appointees–a suggestion deemed impractical because of the red tape involved in the process. Sampson, for his part, offered her a list of federal prosecutors "we now should consider pushing out." All the names on his list ended up on the chopping block. The email exchange has clearly contradicted earlier assertions by Gonzales and others that the dismissals had been decided by the Justice Department independently. In his news conference, Gonzales sought to blame the contradiction on communication problems at the Justice Department. He claimed not to know about the contacts between Sampson and Miers until after he had testified to a congressional committee that no such contacts had taken place. "Obviously I am concerned about the fact that information–incomplete information–was communicated or may have been communicated to the Congress," he said. "I believe very strongly in our obligation to ensure that when we provide information to the Congress, it is accurate and it is complete. And I am very dismayed that that may not have occurred here." The people involved in the scandal are all very close to President Bush. Miers served as his personal lawyer when he was governor of Texas and earned herself a short-lived nomination to the Supreme Court for her pains. (The nomination was shot down in September 2005.) Gonzales, meanwhile, was elevated by Bush to the Texas Supreme Court, then followed him to Washington as his first White House counsel. Senior Democrats vowed to launch a full investigation. They were particularly suspicious of the role of Karl Rove, President Bush's top political advisor, one of whose protégés replaced a dismissed prosecutor in Arkansas.