McNulty Gets Knife in the Back By Dan Froomkin / WaPo

[Demeter]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/05/15/BL2007051501226.html?referrer=email&referrer=email&referrer=email

McNulty Gets Knife in the Back

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, May 15, 2007; 3:16 PM



The orders from the White House to any number of embattled senior administration officials appear to be the same: Hunker down, admit nothing, offer no appearance of panic and whatever you do, don't resign.....The penalty for violating those orders came more clearly into focus this morning. Just hours after Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty announced his resignation, his boss publicly stabbed him in the back.

McNulty, widely considered to have played only a supporting role in the controversial firings of U.S. attorneys last year, did his bosses the kindness yesterday of citing "financial pressures" as his reason for abruptly ending his long career in public service in the midst of a scandal....
But Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wasted no time in planting the knife. Although Gonzales has previously been vague to the point of cluelessness about the genesis of the firings, suddenly this morning the ambiguity was gone. "The deputy attorney general has unique position at the Department of Justice. Most of the operational authority and decisions are made by the deputy attorney general. He is the chief operating officer," Gonzales said in a question-and-answer session at the National Press Club.

Why Did He Resign?

McNulty's citing of "financial realities" brought on by his "college-age children and two decades of public service" was a classic Washington white lie, of course. The real reason for his resignation? Probably a combination of some or all of the following:

* He realized he had dishonored himself and the department;

* He realized there was no way he could personally be effective any longer;

* He realized the entire current leadership of the department was no longer effective;

* He could no longer tolerate working for Gonzales;

* His public-service career goals -- the attorney generalship or a federal appeals court appointment -- were no longer attainable;

* He knew the next attorney general would fire him.

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ANOTHER VIEW OF THE ISSUE:

Dan Eggen writes in The Washington Post: "McNulty became a central figure in the furor after he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in February that the White House played only a marginal role in the dismissals -- a characterization that conflicted with documents later released by Justice and with subsequent testimony.

"He also said most of the prosecutors were fired for 'performance-related' reasons. That statement angered many of the former U.S. attorneys, most of whom had sterling evaluations and had remained largely silent about their departures. . . .

"McNulty has told congressional investigators that D. Kyle Sampson, then Gonzales's chief of staff, and Monica M. Goodling, then the department's White House liaison, did not brief him fully before his testimony....

"'Mr. McNulty's resignation is a sign that top-level administration at the Justice Department may be crumbling under the pressure of ongoing revelations, and what is yet to be disclosed,' said House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.). 'With this news and as we press on with our investigation, we look forward to his cooperation.'"
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Some McNulty Background

Massimo Calabresi wrote for Time last week about the real reason administration officials were mad at McNulty dating back to his Feb. 6 congressional testimony. In an e-mail sent Feb. 7, 2007, by Gonzales' spokesman Brian Roehrkasse, Roehrkasse "told two top Gonzales aides that the Attorney General was 'extremely upset' that his deputy, Paul McNulty, had told the Senate Judiciary committee the day before that one of the attorneys, Bud Cummins of Arkansas, had been fired to make room for an aide to Karl Rove.

"'When the Roehrkasse e-mail came to light, he told the press that Gonzales had been upset because he believed that 'Bud Cummins' removal involved performance considerations.' But on April 15, Congressional sources tell Time, Gonzales' former chief of staff Kyle Sampson told a different story. During a private interview with Judiciary Committee staffers Sampson said three times in as many minutes that Gonzales was angry with McNulty because he had exposed the White House's involvement in the firings -- had put it's role 'in the public sphere,' as Sampson phrased it, according to Congressional sources familiar with the interview.'"

And in today's Times, Johnston writes that it wasn't just Gonzales who was angry on that count: "White House aides complained privately that Mr. McNulty's testimony gave Democrats a significant opening to demand more testimony from the Justice Department and presidential aides. Several aides said he should have been combative in defending the dismissals."

But after his initial testimony, McNulty didn't exactly go out of his way to set the record straight. Quite the contrary.


Opinion Watch

Josh Marshall blogs for Talking Points Memo: "If I were Gonzales and the White House, I'd see McNulty's departure as a very unwelcome development. Behind the scenes, supporters of McNulty and Gonzales have been increasingly at odds as the scandal has progressed -- with McNulty's supporters saying he wasn't kept in the loop and that that the Gonzales clique is made of crooks and the Gonzales supporters (read: Sampson, Goodling, Elston, et al.) saying McNulty let the cat out of the bag in his testimony earlier in the year. . . .

"A lot of this is tea leaf reading, trying to figure out who's spilling and who's not. But it's hard to figure where McNulty gets less forthcoming once he's no longer part of the administration."

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Andrew Cohen blogs for washingtonpost.com: "Like his boss the Attorney General of the United States, McNulty knew or should have known that the White House-inspired plan to politicize the Justice Department was wrong; knew or should have known that good, honest, smart federal prosecutors all across the country were unconscionably being sacked in favor of partisan cronies; knew or should have known that the Justice Department is not supposed to be a political fiefdom to be manipulated at the whim of party loyalists or bureaucratic hacks. Even more so than Alberto Gonzales, McNulty, a former federal prosecutor himself, should have stood up for the independence and authority of the prosecutors who were fired. . . .

"The relatively quick derailment of the McNulty Express -- which had been on a fast track to a federal judgeship or more -- is another sign that this U.S. Attorney scandal is bigger and deeper than Administration apologists would try to have you believe. It strips away another layer of protection from the Attorney General himself and reveals even more than before deep and intense fault lines at the Justice Department. And if McNulty truly is upset with the way Gonzales and Company treated him after the controversy broke, then it is possible that we will soon see McNulty come back to Capitol Hill for another round of testimony, this time as a private citizen given (I believe) a grant of immunity. If that happens, watch out."

[Me.]

1. File Under You've Got To Be Kidding Me

Mr. Gonzales had realized that the furor over the prosecutors had probably ended his hope to be named to a seat on a federal appeals court.

[Demeter]

2. I Believe It Was McNulty Pining for a Court Appointment

Gonzo was a judge already before.