| An pick-up from a Utah newspaper indicates yet another connection between departed U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger and the ever-widening political scandal at the Department of Justice.
Sen. Orrin Hatch says officials at the Justice Department or White House - he calls them "snuffies" - tried to push former U.S. Attorney for Utah Paul Warner out of office several years ago, believing he was a "Clinton guy."
...
In more than 3,000 pages of documents that were turned over to Congress by the Justice Department, it is unclear how extensive the effort was to replace Warner, but there is some circumstantial evidence to indicate that he may have been on Sampson's list of attorneys whom the Bush administration should consider replacing.
A January list Sampson sent to White House Counsel Harriet Miers of prosecutors that the administration should consider replacing had three names whited out when it was released by the Justice Department.
In a subsequent e-mail in April, Sampson said that two of those on that list had already resigned. A search of a news database shows that three U.S. attorneys resigned in that time period: Todd Graves in Missouri, Thomas Heffelfinger in Minnesota, and Warner.
The connection was first noted by the blog Minnesota Campaign Report.
Today, Talking Points Memo has more (with a hat-tip to the Strib) on this connection, which becomes less and less tenuous the more we learn from the Department of Justice's increasingly frequent document dumps:
there's plenty of smoke there. For instance, the Star-Tribune noted that her Senate confirmation was almost derailed because, though Paulose had Administration backing, "she and her supporters had neglected to seek the support of both home-state senators," an oversight so unbelievable as to suggest that perhaps the Administration did not originally intend to submit her nomination for Senate approval but rather planned to rely on the attorney general's appointment authority under the Patriot Act.
So what do we know so far?
Heffelfinger resigned in February 2006, strongly denying questions on whether he had been pressured to leave or forced out. Around the same time the Patriot Act provision allowing for non-Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorneys to serve indefinitely, his replacement with a personal colleague of Alberto Gonzales and Federalist Society member, was announced.
Names have been whited out of communications involving Gonzales Chief of Staff Kyle Sampson and White House Counsel Harriet Miers - communications with references to "Sampson's plan to "work quietly with targeted U.S. Attorneys to encourage them to leave government service voluntarily; this would allow targeted U.S. attorneys to make arrangements for work in the private sector and 'save face' regarding the reason for leaving office, both in the Department of Justice and in their local legal communities."
And now we see clearly that Heffelfinger, "the unwritten, No. 1 rule at [the Justice Department] is that once you become a U.S. attorney you have to leave politics at the door," was one of three U.S. Attorneys to resign before Sampson's April email.
Less and less tenuous every day. |
