Senator Kennedy Questions Gonzales On Process Of Firing U.S. Attorneys And His Involvement In It

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Opening Round Of Questions, Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing

April 19, 2007 -- WASHINGTON, DC— Today, at the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing with Attorney General Gonzales, Senator Edward M. Kennedy focused his first round of questions on the process by which the U.S. Attorneys were fired. Below are his remarks, as prepared for delivery.

“Attorney General Gonzales, one of the major concerns that many of us had about confirming you as Attorney General was our doubt that you would be able to distinguish between the role of White House Counsel and the Attorney General. You responded: “With the consent of the Senate, I will no longer represent only the White House; I will represent the United States of America and its people. I understand the differences between the two roles.”

That’s certainly not true of the U.S. Attorney scandal. It’s exposed a Department of Justice disastrously open to partisan influence and violating the fundamental principle of the rule of law. It’s no surprise that the Department is now embroiled in a scandal over the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys.

In your statement, you say you “have no basis to believe that anyone involved in this process sought the removal of a U.S. Attorney for an improper reason.” Yet you go on to describe yourself as having virtually no role in the process except to sign off on the final recommendations from your Chief of Staff, Kyle Sampson. You acknowledge that Mr. Sampson “periodically updated” you on the review of U.S. Attorneys, but you state that “his updates were brief, relatively few in number, and focused primarily on the review process itself.” And you continue: “During those updates, to my knowledge, I did not make decisions about who should or should not be asked to resign.”

Mr. Sampson says he kept in his drawer a list of U.S. Attorneys to be replaced, and he revised it periodically, based on comments by Department officials. There was no systematic analysis, no written assessments, no quantitative information about caseloads or productivity, not even a memo identifying who said what about which U.S. Attorney. Frankly, it strains credibility to think that such important decisions with so many ramifications for the administration of justice were made in such an irresponsible manner.

Did you review any paper in deciding to replace these eight U.S. Attorneys? Did you speak personally with any of the replaced U.S. Attorneys about their performance? Did you perform any systematic review of the effect on ongoing prosecutions of removing these U.S. Attorneys?

Since you apparently knew so little about the performance of any of the replaced U.S. Attorneys, how can you possibly be confident that they were replaced based on performance deficiencies? Kyle Sampson testified that he placed names on the list or removed them based on the requests of others and he admitted that he did not know the reasons that names were put on the list. How could you possibly state with any confidence that none of them was removed for improper reasons? You didn’t know the actual reasons when you approved their removal, did you?

If the process was not based on evidence, how can there be any other conclusion than that it was, as Mr. Iglesias said, “a political hit job?”

Source: Senator Ted Kennedy