MURRAY WAAS: Well, the most interesting thing about it, or what I thought was the extraordinary, is the report says that they couldn’t get to the bottom of a lot of what happened with the firing of the US attorneys, because there is a wholesale lack of cooperation by senior White House officials. Karl Rove refused to cooperate with the investigation, give them an interview. Harriet Miers, who was the White House counsel at the time and an architect of this, refused to be interviewed. Two of—two deputy White House counsel declined to be interviewed.
The White House refused to give over documents. They refused to give over emails. To show you the absurdity, some of the emails and documents that they’ve refused to give to their own Justice Department, I published them in a story. Somebody in the administration leaked them to me. And so, they’re a matter of public record.
And so, essentially, you have one part of the government, the White House, refusing to cooperate and assist the Justice Department in a very important oversight function. And, you know, I would add that the lack of cooperation, the refusal to talk to investigators, the refusal to turn over documents, is virtually unprecedented.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, the report was scathing. Talk about what they did find.
MURRAY WAAS: Well, the report did find that the firings—no surprises for those who have followed this or most of your listeners, but the firings were politically motivated. The US attorneys were fired to make room for people who were more ideologically or politically attuned to the White House.
A lot of it had apparently to do with the voter fraud agenda, where some Republicans, like Karl Rove, thought that they were losing because of reported voter fraud by constituency groups associated with Democrats. These US attorneys actually investigated these claims by the White House, but just couldn’t bring cases, and they couldn’t find any evidence of this. And so, again and again, Karl Rove, people at the White House pressed for the removal of specific US attorneys.
And the US attorneys who they did remove—one of the things getting lost in the coverage today is that these were the best and the brightest of our public servants. These were considered the cream of the crop and some of the finest US attorneys we’ve had in a generation.
AMY GOODMAN: Among the most troubling allegations in the report was the firing of the US attorney of New Mexico, who has really spoken out since, actually written a book, David Iglesias. And he talked on Democracy Now!, as well as other places, about the pressure he felt, which he felt was inappropriate, on him from both Senator Pete Domenici, as well as Congress member, who is now running for senator, Heather Wilson.
MURRAY WAAS: Well, what we found out in the report today is that after Senator Domenici made these inappropriate phone calls, asked for information about investigations, tried to press Iglesias to bring an indictment before an election to affect—help a Republican get elected, that Domenici was then lobbying and speaking with political appointees and White House folks to get Iglesias fired. In other words, the US attorney wasn’t doing what he wanted, so the senator then went to—then went and simply went to get the guy fired, and nobody questioned the propriety of that or the intrusion of politics into the process.
AMY GOODMAN: The removal of the Missouri US attorney, Todd Graves, went from Senator Kit Bond right through to the White House?
MURRAY WAAS: Right. I mean, interestingly, Todd Graves, who I know and like, is a conservative Republican, was a Bush supporter, an exceptional US attorney, not as well-known as some of the others because he kept quiet about his firing ’til the very end. But a Republican senator of his own party didn’t like him, because he had a feud with his brother or for some other obscure reasons, so the senator—once again, you just have a senator saying, “I want a different US attorney,” and they get rid of Todd Graves.
And I wrote a column about Todd Graves. Todd Graves has done some extraordinary things. When he was in his—wrote a column on the Huffington Post. But when he was in his—when he was in college, he was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma and wasn’t given very long to live. And Todd Graves underwent a course of very toxic and deadly chemotherapy that saved his life. He got better, became a lawyer, became US attorney in Kansas City.
And then, when he was a US attorney in Kansas City, he had a case brought to him by the FBI, which was a pharmacist. It’s a pretty notorious case or an extraordinarily famous case; I bet some listeners have heard about it. But this pharmacist had watered down tens of thousands of prescriptions, including 4,000 prescriptions—chemotherapy prescriptions for cancer patients. So, essentially, he was—this pharmacist was watering down prescriptions, killing people, killing cancer patients. So, Todd Graves, the cancer survivor who almost died of lymphoma, whose life was saved by chemotherapy, grows up to be US attorney, who puts in prison probably the most single person who’s hurt cancer patients. And that’s an extraordinary story.
And these were the type of people who were fired, basically just because of the phone call from a senator or a phone call from a politician, just because they weren’t aligned. And I think what’s left out of this or what gets lost is the human dimension of this, like John McKay of Washington state, Iglesias, Paul Charlton. I got to know some of these US attorneys. But they were the best of the generation. And James Comey, the deputy attorney general of the United States, when he testified on the Hill, he said that these were US attorneys who were the best, who inspired him, and of the ninety-three US attorneys, it’s almost like they went out of their way to fire the best ones. So, you know, the loss to the public is profound by these firings.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, talk about how it went up the chain of command, especially Miers and Rove, now the Fox commentator, also Kyle Sampson, the chief of staff of Gonzales.
MURRAY WAAS: Well, even the President got involved. The President got complaints, I think, about David Iglesias. Karl Rove got complaints, then passed them on, and David Iglesias was fired. But, essentially, this came from the White House. Even though the White House didn’t cooperate with the investigation, even though they didn’t turn over documents, and people like Karl Rove and Harriet Miers thumbed their nose at the investigators, the report was still able to find that pretty much the general outline of this plan originated in the White House. The firings came from the White House. And this was something that happened at the highest level.
AMY GOODMAN: What was it, Murray Waas, that the White House particularly didn’t like, for example, about David Iglesias in New Mexico?
MURRAY WAAS: I think, well, they had an issue with him about voting fraud. That was with a number of these US attorneys. They weren’t supposedly investigating supposed voting fraud by Democrats or by African Americans or the disabled, all these groups that they thought that were getting away with voting fraud.
And that voting fraud issue largely turned out to be a myth. There has been studies. There has been—New York Times did a long piece about it. There really isn’t a lot of this supposed voting fraud. So, whether it’s a myth or an effort by Republicans to suppress votes or to intimidate voters is unclear, but that was one issue.
But the other one was simply that they had pressured Iglesias. The Republican Senator Domenici and Heather Wilson had called him and said, “Why don’t you speed up the indictment of this person so we can win an election?” And then, something like that, as crass as it is and as simple as it is, they fired him.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Murray Waas, what happens now? The Attorney General Michael Mukasey has appointed the acting US attorney in Connecticut, Nora Dannehy, to lead an investigation, a special prosecutor who prosecuted the former governor of Connecticut, John Rowland. What powers does she have that the IG’s office doesn’t have, that the OPR, the Office of Professional Responsibility, didn’t have?
MURRAY WAAS: Well, she has prosecutorial powers. The Office of Professional Responsibility and Inspector General don’t have prosecutorial authority, can’t subpoena witnesses, can’t compel testimony, except if they’re current DOJ employees. And so, she has the power to bring criminal charges. She has the power to impanel a grand jury, compel testimony, and get more to the bottom of this.
It’s unclear, though, what her independence of the Justice Department is or how much authority she has, or whether she’s actually—what we tend to think of it as a special prosecutor. The press might be getting it—you know, getting it wrong. And there’s no press account at the moment of exactly, you know, what her independence or latitudes or powers are.
Commentary 
Justice Dept. Appoints Special Prosecutor After Report Faults Gonzales for US Attorney Firings
