There was no 9th firing, Gonzales says

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Thursday denied that former U.S. Attorney Todd Graves’s resignation early last year was part of a larger move to fire several federal prosecutors.

Gonzales previously testified before Congress that just eight U.S. attorneys were fired and repeated the assertion under questioning during a House Judiciary Committee hearing.

{mosads}Graves, who served as U.S. attorney for Kansas City, Mo., was asked to resign in January, 2006, the Washington Post reported Thursday. He said he refused to sign onto a Department of Justice (DoJ) lawsuit against the state of Missouri aimed at ridding its voter rolls of potentially invalid names. The department lost the case, but Democrats have asked whether
Graves’s refusal to support the lawsuit had anything to do with his stepping down, especially considering that Graves’s replacement, Bradley Schlozman, had promoted the suit while at DoJ’s Civil Rights division.

At the hearing, Gonzales said he had spoken to the head of the Civil Rights Division, who said no one at DoJ was aware of any complaints from Graves on the voter-fraud issue.

In addition, under questioning from House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) regarding the firing of former New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, Gonzales said Iglesias was added to the firing list on Election Day last year.

At the end of the six-hour hearing, Conyers said he still was dissatisfied by Gonzales’s responses and asked the attorney general to produce more answers and documents about the White House’s involvement in the firings.

“I am disappointed that you still cannot answer the basic questions of who put the U.S. attorneys on the firing list and why … we have a serious duty to press forward with our investigation … the breadcrumbs that we referred to earlier seem to be leading to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave,” Conyers said.