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Spinningin a wider web in firings scandal |
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By Josh Marshall
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Posted: 04/25/07 07:32 PM [ET] |
You won’t win any bets betting against the U.S. attorney purge scandal and its ability to keep pulling more and more members of Congress and the Bush administration into its grasp.
On Tuesday evening we learned that not only is Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) on the line for alleged corruption. He’s tangled up in the U.S. attorney story too.
For a little background, one of the eight purged U.S. attorneys is a fellow named Paul Charlton. He was U.S. attorney for the District of Arizona, and one of the seven attorneys who got the call on Dec. 7, 2006. And his ouster quickly raised eyebrows because, according to press reports, he was midway through an investigation of a sitting member of Congress, Renzi, when he got canned.
In fact, only two weeks after his ouster, Charlton e-mailed his superiors at the Department of Justice to ask them how to handle questions over whether his firing was tied to the Renzi investigation.
As Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor early on in this scandal, where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire. And it seems like there’s some fire here, too.
On Tuesday, House Judiciary Committee investigators spoke to Charlton. He revealed that shortly after the pre-election press reports of the Renzi investigation, Renzi’s top aide, Brian Murray, contacted Charlton’s office about the investigation.
Murray spoke to Charlton spokesman Wyn Hornbuckle.
Department of Justice (DoJ) regulations dictate that U.S. attorneys’ offices must report such contacts to Main Justice. When David Iglesias was contacted by Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) and Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), he failed to report the contacts to the Department, a lapse for which he’s subsequently apologized. Unlike Iglesias, though, Hornbuckle did report the contacts to DoJ.
And that’s what Charlton told the House Judiciary panel yesterday.
Shortly after the information was revealed, Murray released the following statement: “Reports that I called Wyn Hornbuckle, press secretary to Paul Charlton, are true. I called Mr. Hornbuckle seeking information about press accounts which appeared just weeks before election-day, alleging a pending indictment. I left him a message asking for information about these allegations, but I was called back and told they would not comment.”
And it seems likely that these further revelations played at least some role in Renzi’s hasty decision to step down from his remaining committee assignments.
Now, here’s the key: After all Congress’s document and information requests to DoJ, the Justice Department had not revealed the Renzi-Charlton contact. In fact, it only came up in follow-ups to Charlton’s written answers to questions from the House Judiciary Committee. For some reason, the DoJ held back this key information. If you go back and review Kyle Sampson’s testimony, you’ll see that while not asked directly about the Murray-Hornbuckle contact, he had numerous opportunities to reveal these highly relevant facts. And he failed to do so.
Now, here’s where this gets interesting. Charlton’s dismissal has always been highly suspicious. DoJ’s proffered explanations for his ouster are dubious at best. And even Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), who’s generally been supportive of the administration in the purge scandal, asked DoJ to reconsider Charlton’s firing after he first heard about it. Given all we now know about the U.S. attorneys story — especially what we know about the Iglesias case in the state next door — the fact that he was conducting a criminal investigation of a Republican lawmaker in a swing district makes his dismissal highly suspicious.
What we need to know now is: Who was notified about the Murray-Hornbuckle contact at the time? Did Kyle Sampson know? Alberto Gonzales? Monica Goodling? And how did knowledge of the investigation or the call play into Charlton’s dismissal?
On top of that, whatever the connection, if any, between the Murray-Hornbuckle contact and Charlton’s dismissal, why did House Judiciary have to learn about it from Charlton rather than DoJ, which should have provided this information to investigators on the Hill weeks or even months ago?
We’ve already seen Sampson and Gonzales come up to the Hill with remarkably poor memories of what happened in the attorney purge or who exactly put together the list of U.S. attorneys to be fired. The documents the DoJ has thus far released also contain many suspicious gaps. At this point, with all the lies, misstatements and evidence of bad acts, the burden of proof rests with the Justice Department to show some credible reason why Charlton was fired, other than the apparent one — that he got too close to a vulnerable Republican incumbent.
The House and Senate judiciary committees need to keep demanding answers. And they shouldn’t sit still for the runaround they’re now getting.
Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail:
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