Yesterday, the report issued by DOJ's Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility has also implicated U.S. Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) in the firing of U.S. Attorney Todd Graves.

Today, CREW filed an ethics complaint against Senator Bond for his role in removing Todd Graves, the former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, from his position.

CREW filed its complaint following the September 29th release by the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General (“OIG”) and Office of Professional Responsibility (“OPR”) of their report, An Investigation into the Removal of Nine U.S. Attorneys in 2006. The report concludes that Sen. Bond’s office inappropriately sought Mr. Graves’s removal.

Former legal counsel for Sen. Bond, Jack Bartling, admitted to asking the White House Counsel’s office to seek Mr. Graves’s removal. Mr. Bartling also talked to Justice official Michael Elston about keeping Sen. Bond’s role a secret. Sen. Bond’s office became dissatisfied with Mr. Graves after he refused to intervene in a dispute between Sen. Bond’s office and that of Mr. Graves’s brother, Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO). Mr. Graves told investigators that a member of Sen. Bond’s staff had called him to insist that he use his influence to force Rep. Graves to fire his chief of staff. When Mr. Graves refused, the Bond staffer told him “they could no longer protect his job.”

The OIG and OPR found it “extremely troubling that the impetus for Graves’s removal as U.S. Attorney appears to have stemmed from U.S. Attorney Graves’s decision not to respond to a Bond staff member’s demand to get involved in personnel decisions in Representative Sam Graves’s congressional office.”

In its complaint, CREW alleges that by seeking Graves’s removal to punish him for refusing to intervene in a dispute between two congressional offices, Sen. Bond and his staff violated Senate rules prohibiting “improper conduct which may reflect upon the Senate.”

CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan said:

When Mr. Graves appropriately refused to tell his brother the congressman to fire one of his staff members, Sen. Bond petulantly demanded Mr. Graves be fired.  What adult acts like this? Senators are not spoiled children who can lash out on the playground – in this case the Department of Justice – when they don’t get their way. U.S. Attorneys are not toadies for their Senate sponsors, they are federal law enforcement officials. The Senate Ethics Committee should immediately investigate this matter and sanction Sen. Bond and his staff.

As noted below, today, Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the firings of nine U.S. Attorneys.  The report issued by DOJ's Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility has also implicated another member of Congress -- Senator Kit Bond (R-MO):

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsiblity and its Inspector General have released their long-awaited report on the firings of nine U.S. Attorneys -- including Todd Graves of the western district of Missouri.

The nearly 400-page report concludes Graves was one of the attorneys forced out -- and it blames Kit Bond's staff for the ouster.  

"Graves faced opposition from the staff of his home-state senator, Kit Bond, which we concluded likely led to his removal."

The scandal surrounding the fired U.S. Attorneys continues to unravel -- and expand.  Today, the Washington Post reported that another Senator's office tried to remove another U.S. Attorney -- not one of the eight who were fired:

An aide to Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) urged the White House to replace the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., months before Todd P. Graves's name was included on a Justice Department list of federal prosecutors the Bush administration was thinking of pushing out of their jobs.

A spokeswoman for Bond said yesterday that the senator's former counsel, Jack Bartling, contacted the White House counsel's office in the spring of 2005, without Bond's permission. According to the spokeswoman, Bartling said that Graves's replacement "would be favored," because the prosecutor's wife and brother-in-law had stirred ethics complaints in Missouri.