By Justin Blum and James Rowley
Aug. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Karl Rove and other aides to former President George W. Bush played a bigger role in the dismissal of federal prosecutors than was previously disclosed, newly released documents show.
E-mails and transcripts of interviews with Rove, Bush’s political adviser, and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers, were made public yesterday by Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
The firings of nine prosecutors in 2006 touched off a political furor in Congress, leading to the resignations of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and other top Justice Department officials. Congress investigated whether partisanship played a role in the ousters.
“White House officials were deeply involved in the U.S. attorney firings and the administration made a concerted effort to hide that fact from the American people,” a statement from Conyers said. Rove “and his cohorts” were “the driving force behind several of these firings,” Conyers said.
Attorneys were fired for improper reasons including patronage, politics and refusing to help Republicans win elections, he said.
Rove Responds
Rove said in an e-mail that the documents released yesterday “show politics played no role in the Bush administration’s removal of U.S. attorneys, that I never sought to influence the conduct of any prosecution and that I played no role in deciding which U.S. attorneys were retained and which replaced.”
George Manning, a lawyer for Miers at Jones Day in Dallas, didn’t return a phone call.
Conyers said he turned over the material gathered by the committee to Nora Dannehy, a federal prosecutor probing possible criminal conduct in the firings. Tom Carson, a spokesman for Dannehy, declined to comment, citing the continuing investigation.
Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the judiciary panel, said in a statement there was no evidence of wrongdoing in the firings.
“Despite all evidence to the contrary, House Democrats continue to falsely accuse former Bush administration official Karl Rove of wrongdoing in the dismissal of several U.S. attorneys,” said Smith.
Missouri Prosecutor
Todd Graves, the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, was removed in a White House agreement with Senator Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican, according to Conyers. In exchange for the firing, Bond agreed to stop blocking the nomination of an appeals court judge. A White House e-mail said “Karl is fine” with the plan.
In an interview with the committee, Miers said Rove became “very agitated” in a conversation with her about David Iglesias, then the U.S. attorney in New Mexico. The Judiciary Committee released a transcript of the Miers interview.
“It was clear to me that he felt like he had a serious problem and that he wanted something done about it,” Miers said, according to the transcript. She said she didn’t recall whether Rove said he wanted Iglesias removed.
One Rove aide e-mailed another in 2005 discussing the firing of Iglesias. The e-mail said: “I would really like to move forward with getting rid of NM USATTY.” Miers later wrote in an e-mail that a decision had been made to replace Iglesias.
Favorable Ranking
The Justice Department “gave Iglesias top rankings, so this decision was clearly not just the result of the White House following the department’s lead as Rove and Miers have maintained,” according to Conyers.
A chain of e-mails in 2006 started by then-Representative Heather Wilson, a New Mexico Republican, criticized Iglesias for failing to bring public corruption cases that could help Republicans.
A Rove aide forwarded Wilson’s e-mail to Rove and complained that Iglesias was “shy about doing his job on” Patricia Madrid, Wilson’s Democratic challenger in 2006 who was the state’s attorney general at the time. Weeks later, Iglesias was placed on a final list to be fired.
Wilson defeated Madrid by less than 1,000 votes in the 2006 election. She didn’t seek re-election in 2008, running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate instead.
In an interview with the committee, Rove said he came to the conclusion that Iglesias should be replaced after Bush’s 2004 re- election. Rove said that “it was not my role” to evaluate the work of a U.S. attorney. That “was the role of the Justice Department,” he said.
Rove E-mails
Even so, e-mails indicate that Rove made his opinions known about U.S. attorneys. Rove told an aide in a 2005 e-mail to “keep pushing for Justice” to consider Tim Griffin, a former Bush campaign aide, as a U.S. attorney in Arkansas. Griffin later replaced H.E. “Bud” Cummins III to be the U.S. attorney in Little Rock following Cummins’ dismissal.
E-mails suggest that in October 2006 Miers sought help from the Justice Department in rebutting reports that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was looking into a land deal involving then-Representative Rick Renzi, an Arizona Republican. Renzi was indicted last year on racketeering charges, and has pleaded not guilty. He didn’t seek re-election in 2008.
Miers wrote in an e-mail that “perhaps” the U.S. attorney in Arizona “can knock down” a newspaper article on Renzi because it “impugns his conduct of his office.” Miers said it “will be interesting to see” what the Justice Department does about the reports.
Little Encouragement
Miers reported on the contact in an e-mail to one of Rove’s aides. “I did not get a lot of encouragement” that the Justice Department “will deviate” from its policy of not discussing pending investigations, the e-mail said.
In her interview with the Judiciary Committee, Miers said she couldn’t specifically recall the episode.
Bush, citing executive privilege, refused to let his aides testify before Congress about the firings or give congressional investigators White House e-mails pertaining to them. After Bush left office, President Barack Obama’s White House lawyers negotiated an agreement to allow Congress to question Rove and Miers and to obtain their e-mails about the firings.