‘Loyalty’ to Bush and Gonzales Was Factor in Prosecutors’ Firings, E-Mail Shows

WASHINGTON, March 13 — Late in the afternoon on Dec. 4, a deputy to Harriet E. Miers, then the White House counsel and one of President Bush’s most trusted aides, sent a two-line e-mail message to a top Justice Department aide. “We’re a go,” it said, approving a long-brewing plan to remove seven federal prosecutors considered weak or not team players.

The message, from William K. Kelley of the White House counsel’s office to D. Kyle Sampson, the chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, put in motion a plan to fire United States attorneys that had been hatched 22 months earlier by Ms. Miers. Three days later, the seven prosecutors were summarily dismissed. An eighth had been forced out in the summer.

The documents provided by the Justice Department add some new details to the chronicle of the fired prosecutors but leave many critical questions unanswered, including the nature of discussions inside the White House and the level of knowledge and involvement by the president and his closest political aide, Karl Rove.

The White House said Monday that Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove had raised concerns about lax voter fraud prosecutions with the Justice Department. And several of the fired attorneys told Congress last week that some lawmakers had questioned them about corruption investigations, inquiries the prosecutors considered inappropriate. The documents do not specifically mention either topic.

While the target list of prosecutors was shaped and shifted, officials at the Justice Department and the White House, members of Congress and even an important Republican lawyer and lobbyist in New Mexico were raising various concerns.

In rating the prosecutors, Mr. Sampson factored in whether they “exhibited loyalty to the president and attorney general,” according to documents released by the Justice Department. In one e-mail message, Mr. Sampson questioned a colleague about the record of the federal prosecutor in San Diego, Carol C. Lam. Referring to the office of the deputy attorney general, Mr. Sampson wrote: “Has ODAG ever called Carol Lam and woodshedded her re immigration enforcement? Has anyone?” Ms. Lam was one of the seven fired prosecutors.

Two others, Paul K. Charlton in Arizona and Daniel K. Bogden in Nevada, were faulted as being “unwilling to take good cases we have presented to them,” according to another e-mail message to Mr. Sampson, referring to pornography prosecutions.

Another United States attorney, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, was added to the hit list in the fall of 2006 after criticism from his home state, including a demand by Senator Pete V. Domenici, a Republican, to meet with the attorney general to discuss the performance of Mr. Iglesias’s office.

The fallout from the firings came swiftly, according to the documents. Within a day, messages were flying between the White House and the Justice Department about reaction to the dismissals. Administration officials were aware that the decisions were likely to be controversial, and the plan for carrying them out included a warning to “prepare to withstand political upheaval.”

An aide to Senator Domenici was said to be “happy as a clam” over the dismissal of Mr. Iglesias. But Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, was said to be “very unhappy” about the decision to dismiss Mr. Bogden, who Mr. Ensign said “has done a great job for Nevada.”

Mr. Sampson, an ambitious young Republican lawyer who was the Justice Department’s point man for the plan, resigned Monday. Mr. Gonzales, who approved the idea of the group firing, has been under fierce criticism from lawmakers of both parties over the dismissals, which have provoked charges that they were politically motivated.

Shortly after Mr. Bush’s second term began in January 2005, Ms. Miers proposed dismissing all 93 serving federal prosecutors, part of a broad review of political appointees. The Justice Department and Mr. Rove rejected that plan as impractical. But her proposal set in motion the series of events that led to December’s smaller-scale housecleaning and a major black eye for the White House.

The extensive consultations between the Justice Department and White House over which United States attorneys should be ousted started as early as March 2005, the e-mail messages show.

That is when Mr. Sampson, Mr. Gonzales’s aide, sent a document to Ms. Miers ranking the nation’s federal prosecutors.

“Bold=Recommend retaining; strong U.S. Attorneys who have produced, managed well, and exhibited loyalty to the president and attorney general,” the e-mail message from Mr. Sampson said. “Strikeout=Recommend removing; weak U.S. Attorneys who had been ineffectual managers and prosecutors, chafed against administration initiatives, etc.”

From the start, the “strikeout” list included Ms. Lam, Margaret M. Chiara of Michigan and H. E. Cummins of Arkansas, all of whom ultimately lost their jobs. But the “bold” list of stellar performers included Mr. Iglesias and Kevin V. Ryan of San Francisco, who would also be removed.

As the months passed and the list was refined, a broad range of parties provided comment, either by directly naming prosecutors or raising an issue that touched on them.

J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, then speaker of the House, for example, appeared in one exchange among Bush administration officials inquiring why the United States attorney’s office in Arizona was apparently not prosecuting marijuana possession cases involving less than 500 pounds.

Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, also asked a White House official to explain why prosecutors were pursuing charges against illegal immigrants only if they had been counted entering the country illegally eight or more times.

And Senator Domenici called the Justice Department in January 2006, “because he wants to discuss the ‘criminal docket and caseload’ in New Mexico,” an e-mail message sent among senior Justice Department officials said. As the lawmaker’s inquiry is followed up, a copy of Mr. Iglesias’s generally glowing 2005 performance evaluation was produced, along with a series of critical questions that Justice Department officials wanted answered.

“I assume the senator is hearing from either judges or others back home,” said the e-mail message written by William E. Moschella, who was then an assistant attorney general for legislative affairs. The focus on Mr. Iglesias intensified in June 2006, when Mickey Barnett, a Republican Party activist in New Mexico, requested “a meeting with someone at DOJ to discuss the USATTY situation there.”

The e-mail message alerting Justice Department officials, sent by a senior official in the White House Office of Political Affairs, noted that Mr. Barnett is “the president’s nominee for the US Postal Board of Governors. He was heavily involved in the president’s campaign’s legal team.” The next day, Mr. Barnett and Patrick Rogers, a New Mexico lawyer who has led a campaign against voter fraud, met with Justice Department officials. Conservatives often worry that Democrats will inflate their vote count with fraudulent or illegal immigrant voters.

The plan for firing seven United States attorneys was refined in November and December in consultations between Mr. Sampson and Ms. Miers’s office. The five-step blueprint for the removals was finally approved by the White House counsel’s office on Dec. 4.

Along with detailed instructions on how to carry out the firings, the plan advised officials to tell any of the fired prosecutors who asked “Why me?” to respond, “The administration is grateful for your service, but wants to give someone else the chance to serve in your district.”

In choreographed phone calls on Dec. 7, the head of the liaison office for United States attorneys at the Justice Department informed the seven prosecutors that they were being removed. At the same time, Mr. Gonzales and officials in the White House communications office called senators and other lawmakers in each of the affected states.

In executing the plan, Mr. Sampson wrote that it was “very important” that the calls to prosecutors and courtesy calls to lawmakers in the affected states occur “simultaneously.”

The dismissal of the seven prosecutors was preceded the previous summer by the removal of Mr. Cummins in Arkansas. He was succeeded by J. Timothy Griffin, a former prosecutor who had once worked with Mr. Rove. In a Dec. 19 e-mail message, Mr. Sampson wrote: “Getting him appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, etc.,” a reference to Ms. Miers and Mr. Rove.

Mr. Sampson’s e-mail message, sent to the White House and Justice Department colleagues, suggested he was hoping to stall efforts by the state’s two Democratic senators to pick their own candidates as permanent successors for Mr. Cummins.

“I think we should gum this to death,” Mr. Sampson wrote. “Ask the senators to give Tim a chance, meet with him, give him some time in office to see how he performs, etc. If they ultimately say ‘no never’ (and the longer we can forestall that the better), then we can tell them we’ll look for other candidates, ask them for recommendations, interview their candidates, and otherwise run out the clock. All this should be done in ‘good faith’ of course.”