The former U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., Todd P. Graves, said yesterday that he was asked to step down from his job by a senior Justice Department official in January 2006, months before eight other federal prosecutors would be fired by the Bush administration.
Graves said he was told simply that he should resign to “give another person a chance.” He said he did not oppose the department’s request, because he had already been planning to return to private practice. He did appeal to Missouri’s senior senator to try to persuade the White House to allow him to remain long enough to prosecute a final, important case—involving the slaying of a pregnant woman and kidnapping of her 8-month fetus. Justice officials rejected the request.
The former prosecutor’s disclosure, in an interview on the eve of a second appearance today by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales before lawmakers investigating the firings, means that the administration began moving to replace U.S. attorneys five months earlier than was previously known. It also means that at least nine prosecutors were asked to resign last year, a deviation from repeated suggestions by Gonzales and other senior Justice officials in congressional testimony and other public statements that the firings did not extend beyond the eight prosecutors already known to have been forced out....
The same month he was asked to step down, Graves’s name was included in a Jan. 9, 2006, list assembled by Gonzales’s then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, of seven U.S. attorneys the administration was considering forcing from their jobs. That April, Sampson sent another e-mail noting that two of the prosecutors on that list had already left. Three names, including Graves’s, were redacted when Justice officials released the January list.
Graves said yesterday that he never knew he was on the list and was not given a specific reason he was asked to leave.
During the spring of 2005, an aide to Bond urged the White House to replace Graves, because the prosecutor’s wife and brother-in-law recently had been given state patronage contracts to run private offices for driver’s licenses and other motor vehicle services. A spokeswoman for Bond confirmed that interaction but said Justice officials later told the senator’s staff that the contracts issue was not why the administration wanted him to leave.
Graves acknowledged that he had twice during the past few years clashed with Justice’s civil rights division over cases, including a federal lawsuit involving Missouri’s voter rolls that Graves said a Washington Justice official signed off on after he refused to do so. That official, Bradley J. Schlozman, was appointed as interim U.S. attorney to succeed Graves, remaining for a year until the Senate this spring confirmed John Wood for the job. Wood was a counselor to the deputy attorney general and is a son of Bond’s first cousin, although the senator’s spokeswoman, Shana Marchio, said Bond did not recommend him for the job.
Schlozman had been a controversial figure in Justice’s civil rights division for stances on voting rights. After he arrived in Kansas City, he came under fire from Democrats for pushing forward with an indictment of voter-registration activists in Missouri just weeks before last November’s elections. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/09/AR2007050902718_pf.html
The Obama administration has abandoned a politically charged 2005 voting rights lawsuit against Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan that was ginned up during the Brad Schlozman era in the Civil Rights Division. The Missouri lawsuit was one of seven filed by the Department of Justice during the Bush years alleging states weren’t doing enough to purge ineligble voters from the voting rolls — a perennial Republican complaint — sparking criticism that the law was being applied in a partisan manner.
A federal judge in Kansas City had ruled that Missouri officials had made a good faith effort to comply with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as “motor voter” because it allows people to register to vote when they apply for drivers licenses. But the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2008 that lack of local compliance of the act could mean that the state did not legally manage its official voter rolls.
After the case returned to the district court, a motion to reopen discovery was denied. http://www.mainjustice.com/2009/03/06/voter-management-suit-against-robin-carnahan-comes-to-an-end/
