The Daily Background

Kyle Sampson’s seven-hour-long testimony yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee easily raised more questions than answers.

Sampson, who testified under oath, admitted that his former boss, Attorney General Gonzales mislead the public and Congress about his role in the US Attorney firing scandal when he said that he was not involved in it. On March 13th in a press conference, Gonzales said that he “was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on.”

“I don’t think the attorney general’s statement that he was not involved in any discussions about U.S. attorney removals is accurate,” Sampson said.

Sampson told the Committee yesterday that he could personally recall at least five meetings or discussions where the US Attorney firings were discussed prior to their execution in which Gonzales was personally involved in, and suggested that there might be more than that. In fact, his testimony seemed to suggest that his memory was worse than that of Scooter Libby, saying he was unable to remember the answers to Senators’ questions a remarkable 122 times.

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz to quipped today “Does everyone in the Bush administration have amnesia?”

Among the other admissions Sampson made, he said that the US Attorney for New Mexico, David Iglesias should not have been fired, hinting that he was fired wrongly and possibly for the wrong reasons. Iglesias was the subject of pressure from two GOP lawmakers (Senator Pete Domenici and Representative Heather Wilson, both of New Mexico) who called him personally and seemed to urge him to hurry up investigations to prepare indictments by November of local Democrats in order to use corruption as an election issue.

Iglesias was fired along with 7 other US Attorneys and no indictments were ever filed. He has said in interviews that he is bound by Grand Jury secrecy not to even confirm whether or not he was investigating Democrats.

Sampson also said that Karl Rove’s office urged him to arrange the appointment of Tim Griffin, one of Rove’s associates. Sampson claimed that Rove himself had not personally asked him to appoint Griffin, but he assumed that he wanted it done, since Rove’s aides would not have asked him otherwise.

In an email that was released as part of the several thousand pages of document dumps by the Department of Justice, Sampson wrote that appointing Griffin was “very important” to Rove and Harriet Miers, who was the White House General Counsel at the time. Rove also talked to Gonzales about US Attorneys that should be fired, according to Sampson.

Video from Sampson’s testimony can be found here.

Meanwhile, a new poll shows that only 22% of Americans think the US Attorneys who were fired were fired for proper reasons, and a majority believe the White House is trying to “cover up” the true reasons behind the US Attorney purge.

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