BushCo Wanted To Fire ‘Em All

First broken via EZ Writer, now up at the WP:

The White House suggested two years ago that the Justice Department fire all 93 U.S. attorneys, a proposal that eventually resulted in the dismissals of eight prosecutors last year, according to e-mails and internal documents that the administration will provide to Congress today.

The dismissals took place after President Bush told Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales that he had received complaints that some prosecutors had not energetically pursued voter-fraud investigations, according to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.

Gonzales approved the idea of firing a smaller group of U.S. attorneys shortly after taking office in February 2005. The Gonzales aide in charge of the dismissals — his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson — resigned yesterday, officials said, after acknowledging that he did not tell Justice officials about the extent of his communications with the White House, leading them to provide incomplete information to Congress.

Well, well, well. 

But wait!  There’s more:

Administration officials have repeatedly portrayed the firings as a routine personnel matter, designed primarily to rid the department of a handful of poor performers.

But the documents and interviews indicate that the idea for the firings originated at least two years ago, when then-White House counsel Harriet E. Miers suggested to Sampson in February 2005 that all prosecutors be dismissed and replaced. Miers resigned this January.

Gonzales immediately rejected that idea as impractical and disruptive, Justice officials said, but over the next 22 months Sampson orchestrated more limited dismissals.

“I recommend that the Department of Justice and the Office of the Counsel to the President work together to seek the replacement of a limited number of U.S. Attorneys,” Sampson wrote to Miers in January 2006. A “limited number of U.S. attorneys could be targeted for removal and replacement, mitigating the shock to the system that would result from an across the board firing.”

I wish I could say that this surprised me.

UPDATE:  The NYT weighs in with a very similar story.  This is busting wide open, folks.

UPDATE part deux:  The Cons are of course using the bogus “But Clinton did it too!” defense.  Except that a) he didn’t, and b) if he did, he’d had to have got his nominees past a hostile Republican Congress.  Bush, thanks to the Patriot Act, can fire US Attorneys and appoint people to replace them indefinitely.