CREW wants the immediate appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate potential criminal violations related to the recent dismissals of eight U.S. Attorneys. Recent revelations indicate that a top-ranking Department of Justice official knew that statements made by top Department officials were not true. Clearly, the Department of Justice cannot investigate itself and prosecute the misconduct of DOJ officials. CREW also asked the Department of Justice’s Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate the situation.

CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan expressed our position:

Given the murky nature of this situation and the unresolved questions of what top level Justice officials knew, when they knew it and whether they deliberately withheld information from Congress, Attorney General Gonzales should immediately appoint a Special Prosecutor. Both Congress and the American people deserve a full accounting of the truth behind the firings of the U.S. Attorneys. If the attorney general doesn’t want to see the truth come out, perhaps the Inspector General will.

In an attempt to move this process forward, CREW sent a letter today to Attorney General Gonzales asking for the immediate appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate the potential criminal violations.

The firing of the U.S. Attorneys now appears to have implicated wrongdoing in the Executive Branch. Three members of Congress have already become enmeshed in the scandal for improperly contacting sitting U.S. Attorneys about pending cases. CREW has already sought ethics investigations of Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), Representative Heather Wilson (R-NM) and Representative Doc Hasting (R-WA) in this same matter.

The letter to Attorney General Gonzales and our news release, which lays out the recent developments in this scandal, can be found here:

In the past few months, Department of Justice (DOJ) officials have testified before Congress that the U.S. Attorneys were asked to resign for performance related reasons, that the White House was minimally involved in the firings and that the Department was in no way attempting to evade the confirmation process for new U.S. Attorneys.

Documents provided by the DOJ to Congress suggest that at least one high-ranking official, D. Kyle Sampson, knew that the statements made to Congress were untrue. If, as it appears, a Department of Justice official allowed other officials to provide inaccurate information to Congress, federal crimes may have been committed. Because DOJ obviously cannot investigate and prosecute the misconduct of its own officials, CREW has called on the attorney general to appoint a Special Prosecutor to handle this matter.

It is clear that at least two officials, former White House Legal Counsel Harriet Miers and Sampson, schemed to fire prosecutors for political reasons. According to press reports, Sampson has acknowledged that he did not tell DOJ officials about the extent of his communications with the White House regarding the firings. Justice officials who testified before Congress, including the attorney general, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and Principal Associate Attorney General William Moschella, all told Congress that the White House, though consulted, was not deeply involved in the firing decisions.

Federal law provides that if Sampson knew that he was causing DOJ officials to make inaccurate statements to Congress, he can be prosecuted for the federal crime of lying to Congress even though he did not personally make any statements to Congress. The Special Prosecutor should investigate not only Mr. Sampson’s conduct but whether anyone else was involved in formulating the incomplete and erroneous congressional testimony or whether the officials who testified were aware that they were providing imperfect information to Congress.

This scandal is not going away. Instead, it keeps getting worse. Crimes may have been committed and the U.S. Attorney General has an obligation to get to the bottom of this. The only way that will happen is with a Special Prosecutor.