By Staff
Seeing her mug shot paraded across Fox News Channel like she's part of a perp walk isn't how anyone in Cass County expected former prosecutor Margaret Chiara to end her illustrious career.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, under pressure to resign for the Justice Department's handling of the matter, acknowledged Friday there remains confusion about his role in dismissing Chiara and seven other U.S. attorneys.
Gonzales says he doesn't "recall being involved in deliberations" over who would be purged.
Documents released March 23 conflict with Gonzalez's earlier assertions he was not intimately involved in the dismissals.
It came out that Gonzales actually approved plans to fire them at an hour-long meeting in his conference room on the morning of Nov. 27, 2006.
At least five top Justice Department officials participated in the meeting at which Gonzales signed off on a five-step plan crafted by his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, who resigned March 12 early on in the political firestorm surrounding the sackings.
It got worse March 29 when Sampson testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"I don't think the attorney general's statement that he was not involved in any discussions of U.S. attorney removals was accurate. I remember discussing with him this process of asking certain U.S. attorneys to resign," Sampson testified.
Sampson attributed the final decision on the firings directly to Gonzalez and former White House counsel Harriet Myers, who floated the idea of brooming all 93.
The White House, including Karl Rove, had been looking at the firings since President Bush won his second term in 2004.
So much for the ideal of a Justice Department independently pursuing wrongdoing.
"I knew my chief of staff was involved in the process of determining who were the weak performers – where were the districts around the country where we could do better for the people in that district, and that's what I knew," Gonzales said March 13. "But that is in essence what I knew about the process; was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on."
Chiara told the New York Times she was informed last November that she was being forced out to make way for another lawyer the Bush administration wanted to groom – not because of management problems. Her 2005 evaluation praised her management skills, yet other Justice Department officials attributed her firing to poor performance as a manager.
"To say it was about politics may not be pleasant, but at least it is truthful," Chiara told the Times. "Poor performance was not a truthful explanation."
Once the firings created a backlash, the Justice Department prepared a statement justifying her dismissal. It said Chiara's "office has become fractured, morale has fallen," with "problems (that have) required an outside visit by management experts."
Chiara intended to remain silent about her departure, but became distressed by the department's comments about her, the Times reported March 22.
Robert Holmes Bell, chief federal judge for the Western District of Michigan, praised Chiara as one of the most competent U.S. attorneys he had encountered on the federal bench and said the charges of poor management were unjustified. "I feel a certain loss that someone of her caliber is leaving prematurely," Bell told the Times. Bell told the Post, "She hired very competent people. She's a person of high integrity. She has this strong moral sense about her."
The Washington Post reported March 25 that West Michigan's legal community still does not know what to make of Chiara's "surprise" firing.
Some defense lawyers speculated that Chiara, who once trained to become a nun, fell out of favor with the Bush administration over her personal opposition to the death penalty.
The administration has pursued capital punishment in several states, including Michigan, that have no state death penalty or rarely use it. The Post concluded that most everyone seems to agree that her forced resignation after five years, in the middle of a presidential term, was "puzzling."
"It was handled poorly, this whole debacle," John Smietanka, a former U.S. attorney and former Berrien County prosecutor, told the Post.
As Chiara herself wrote in an e-mail since released, the Justice Department should have "simply state(d) that a presidential-appointed position is not an entitlement" and "no other explanation is needed," because the more Gonzales talks, the worse he makes the situation.